People who have a great ability to do many things and study various topics often ask themselves questions like: “What is my purpose?” “What is my career?” Faced with the difficulty of finding a concrete answer to these questions, they often feel helpless as they are not able to find their place in the world. This fact is characteristic of multipotential people.
In this Psychology-Online article we will discover What is it to be a multipotential person and how to identify it.
What does it mean to be multipotential?
What does it mean to be multipotential? Multipotentiality (from English multipotentiality) identifies the quality and capacity of the people who have more interests and activities, they excel in more sectors and have greater creativity and intellectual curiosity. These types of people are defined as multipotential.
Multipotentiality has been talked about since the seventies, mainly in psychology and educational psychology. It is precisely in 1972 when Frederickson defined the multipotential individual as a person who, in appropriate contexts, can select and develop a set of skills high level.
Since the 1990s, attention has increasingly focused on the following contributions to multipotentiality:
Barbara Kerr
Barbara Kerr (educational psychologist and professor of counseling psychology) helped further delve into some issues related to multipotentiality and defines it as “the ability to select and develop multiple careers (career options) due to a wide variety of interests.” , attitudes, talents and abilities”. In turn, Kerr analyzed the problems related to the planning and development of careers. One of the difficulties for multipotential people is choosing which training and professional paths to undertake. This difficulty is very present in this type of people, especially at school age, but it can also have consequences in later phases of life.
Tamara fischer
Tamara Fischer (gifted education): In 2010, Tamara Fischer talks about multipotentiality in an in-depth article and defines it as “the condition of someone who has many exceptional talents, each or most of which can constitute a good career for that person”. Despite the positive aspects of this condition, it is also worth highlighting the great difficulty that multipotential individuals may have in making important decisions related to their training and career.
Emilie Wapnick
Emilie Wapnick’s speech at Ted 2015 titled “why some of us don’t have a single true vocation” has been one of the events that has contributed the most to the dissemination of the concept of multipotentiality. According to him coach, a multipotentialite is “a person who has many interests and creative activities in life. Multipotentialites do not have a true calling like specialists do.” Another word that Wapnick uses to define multipotentialites is puttylike.
Skills of a multipotential person
Among the characteristics and abilities that multipotential people show we can find the curiosity, interest and vocation for different areas, flexibility and resilience. Below we leave you some ideas to know if you are a multipotential person:
- You are enthusiastic by nature.
- Sometimes you find it difficult to find time for all your passions.
- You are about to enroll in another course or training opportunity.
- You’ve had such different jobs that your resume looks like a concept map.
- You love learning new things.
- You always feel in the research phase.
- When they explain something to you about a topic you always try to inform yourself to know more about it.
Advantages and disadvantages of being a multipotential person
Being a multipotential person can have a series of advantages for the person. Below we leave you some:
- Ability to adapt and reinvent oneself.
- Love for change.
- Open mind and capable of being transversal.
- Wealth at a cultural level.
However, it can also present drawbacks such as:
If you have trouble concentrating, you may also be interested in the article “”.
How to identify a multipotential person
What does it mean to be multipotential? Wapnick identified three main characteristics of a multipotential person:
- The ability to synthesize ideas: allows multiple fields of knowledge to come together to create something new.
- Quick learning: Multipotential people tend to learn new activities quickly.
- The adaptability: allows the person to easily move from one area to another.
Types of mutipotential person
It should be noted that there is no single type of multipotential person. We can classify them into the following:
- Hug approach: characteristic of a person who works in the same disciplinary field but experiments with different roles within it.
- Slash approach: refers to individuals who divide themselves during the day between different activities, often very different from each other, which they carry out in the same way.
- Einstein approaches: characteristic of those people who exploit one of their passions, turning it into their main profession to finance the rest of their activities. The name comes from Albert Einstein, probably the most famous scientist of all time for his scientific discoveries.
- Phoenix approach: is the most recognizable of the four and includes those people who jump from one activity to another the moment they lose interest in any of them.
What can you do if you are a multipotential person?
Being multipotential is an attitude of life and a way of facing things that has many virtues. Being passionate about many different areas broadens our vision and approaches. In a hyper-specialized world like the one that has developed in the last 50 years, having lateral and transversal thinking outside the schemes is becoming increasingly important. Therefore, being multipotential can be an advantage and make us stand out in work contexts and not historically hyperspecialized.
The other side of the coin is success in managing multipotentiality. “Multipotentials” have a more difficult life than “specialists”, since, by wanting to carry out several projects and interests at the same time, they run the risk of suffering from impostor syndrome and feeling ill-prepared. In this case, we must learn to live with this feeling, identifying what each experience has brought usregardless of the time we decide to dedicate (or not dedicate) to it in the future.
What can you do if you are a multipotential person?
First of all, we have to be aware of what it means to be a multipotential person and know the disadvantages that come with being one, but without forgetting the great advantages mentioned above.
A resource that helps assess multipotentiality is rely on hyper-specialized people. In this way, the multipotential person will have someone at their side who will teach them to remain focused, while the hyper-specialized individual will be able to enrich themselves with the broad vision and outside of the multipotential’s schemes.
Sometimes it is difficult to find a specialist who sees the volatile aspect of multipotentialites as a quality and not as an obstacle, but once this detail is resolved, it is done!
This article is merely informative, at Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
If you want to read more articles similar to What is it to be a multipotential person and how to identify itwe recommend that you enter our category.
Bibliography
- Mercanti, F. (2018). Multipotenziali. Chi sono e como Cambionno il mondo del lavoro. Rome: Lit Edizioni Srl.
- Wapnick, E. (2018). Twenty chi sei. A guided practice for creative people who have many passions and interests. MGMT Edizioni.