Gifted Belonging at 60: Bigger Adventures Still Ahead

Lily Jedynak, Ph.D., Author, Musician, Business Owner, Creative Dreamer

“I’m uncomfortable if I’m not aiming for the mastery. I become dissatisfied very quickly with myself if I’m not heading for the mastery.”

Where do you belong and where is your community when you are an extraordinarily talented adult, professional, and communicator? Is it worth the quest, and if you ever find that community, what then? Have you arrived, or is this another starting point for something even bigger and always transformational ahead?

Meet Lily Jedynak, an active, engaged, bold-questions member of our GPC Community. She has six university degrees, including a Ph.D. in creative writing. She loves to learn and her listening skills make her a master communicator. Her Substack, started a year ago (May 2024) goes deep into giftedness topics, experiences, and big questions, seeking conversations—maybe an answer or clue- from her subscribers.

Also in 2024, Lil completed Jennifer Harvey Sallin’s Gifted Psychology 101 coaching course. She studied gifted advocacy and writing with Jan Provoost. She engaged Lotte Van Lith as a mentor to develop her autoethnography, centred on the gifted experience.

Before all of that, she poured her gifts, energy, enthusiasm, and flow states into multiple professional paths, jobs, career shifts, then finally her calling. Any one of those decades of learning and mastery would be plenty for most people.

That’s the catch for the GPC community member—one life is not enough. Lil is a Creative Dreamer. She is also an EPG, INFJ-T, HSP, multipotentialite, Enneagram 4w5, and star gazer. When not travelling, she is based in Adelaide, South Australia.

All along the way in her first 60 years, Lil knew she was supposed to write, draw, and become a best-selling author, bringing her mastery to the world. She knew it in grade school. She chased the vision of what she was supposed to be doing while taking on layer after layer of what she thought she must do, such as start businesses, earn money, attract customers, start and sustain relationships which includes marriage, professional networks, and learning from all who had wisdom and lived experience.

So where is that best-selling book? It’s coming out in 2026, but it’s not the first attempt. Oh no. Lil has gone through the fire of writing books, rejection, burnout, finding another way forward, more rejections, and then learning from all of her previous writing.

The working title for the book she always wanted to bring to the world is, Quiet Brilliance: A gentle exploration of the inner world of sensitive, bright, creative adults. It aims to unearth the hidden stories beneath the visible one, offering wisdom along the way. It’s for those who have always felt different, thought deeply, and longed for authenticity. Her book will offer gifted adults an invitation to feel fully seen and validated in all their complexity and multifacetedness. She wrote it for everyone who is new to giftedness or still looking for ways to deepen a holistic understanding of giftedness.

Credit Lily Jedynak, Ph.D.

Most of All We Want to Belong, Be Seen, and Connect With Amazing

Lily said, “Finding somewhere to belong can be a lifelong challenge, especially for neurodivergent adults. For most of my life, I longed to find a community where I truly felt a sense of belonging. Yet, I was an outlier—either unaware of it or unwilling to accept it. What I lacked from the start was a deeper understanding of myself and my own needs.

“I never thought I’d say that I’ve found my community. It took more than 60 years, but it was worth the wait. It has changed my life for the better in countless ways.”

As the first step into our GPC Community, Lily completed our tiny toe-in-the-water assessment, before plunging off the high board into the deep end of massive amounts of knowledge available about gifted adults, professions, and communication. It’s a free, fun, online assessment we ask all members to take, because it’s better than a bio blub. It’s the real you.

Credit Lily Jedynak, Ph.D.

Gifted Awareness

Q: Is this true for you? Because you are a deep thinker, highly intuitive, creative, analytical, and curious, you bring a particularly complex dimension to professional relationships.

Lily: Yes, I do bring a complex dimension to professional relationships. It’s not always welcome. While I generally need more time at the beginning of a project to think things through from multiple angles, I  save time in the long run. My questions and perspectives have made others rethink the trajectory of a project and even to rethink it altogether, scrubbing it off the drawing board.

Sometimes I don’t even need the time to think something through – my intuition has been finely honed over the decades and it rarely leads me astray. While others may inwardly groan when I ask them to refine or reconsider aspects of a creative project, it usually engenders better quality work.

When I’m writing I’m usually thinking things through as I go, so the approach is completely different. I write to ascertain what I’m thinking about and to tease out as many nuances as I can. These days I prefer complete autonomy, working on my own.

Professionalism Emphasis

Q: Did you become a professional on purpose or did your career path open a door into the profession you identify with today?

Lily: I became a professional on purpose, but there was nothing deliberate about the pathway. I decided in my early teens that having economic independence was important, and yet I had next to no idea as to how to go about it. At the age of 16, I started as a paid piano teacher in a Catholic school, and then founded a private music school with 186+ students (children and adults), employing three part-time music teachers. After 10 years, I closed the school despite its popularity, due to a rancid combination of burnout and boreout that was impacting my health.

This wasn’t the end of the story. I returned to university to pursue my passion for writing – my true calling – and completed a Ph.D. in creative writing while working full-time in my husband’s healthcare business. While I had my sites set on writing as a career, my husband’s business grew, nationally and internationally.

My writing skills were absorbed into creating marketing materials, educational workshops, courses, training manuals for our growing team as well as systems manuals, including scripts, for all aspects of the business. Then came the physical involvement of training and managing the team, delivering workshops around the world to health professionals, and working behind the scenes with my husband on the strategic development of our business.

We went online in 2015 and turned what was skill development for health professionals into an added service of business development coaching.

I stepped back from our business in 2023 to focus on my passions for writing, art, and music.

Communication Emphasis

Q: Which of your communication skills do you seem to work on constantly, always learning, always evolving?

Lily: I have a deep love of all forms of communication. This was crucial during the decades of directing and managing healthcare clinics, the team, and the clientele. In marketing and educating internationally, communication became a key focus as we traversed countries and addressed how to be as effective, whether we had translators or were navigating a completely different English-speaking culture.

I haven’t stopped on that learning curve – self-taught in all aspects of business as well as marketing. I continue to read books about communication and always look for ways my writing could improve.

Credit Lily Jedynak,Ph.D.

Words to live and laugh by

The power of quotes and rhetoric is part of a GPC member’s thinking. These are words Lily lives by and use with clients to make clear what she teaches them.

This quote from an Australian movie called, Strictly Ballroom (1992) strongly resonates, “A life lived in fear is a life half-lived.”

While some believe this is an old Spanish proverb, the phrase gained popularity after its use in the movie. I continue to aim to fully experience life’s potential and opportunities, noticing if fear is holding me back from this quest of truly connecting with myself and the world around me. I play with fear as an energy and channel it into the attainment of heartfelt dreams. I’ve taken risks and experienced much richness and fulfilment as a result.

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We’re on a mission to feature stories about professionals who are initiating meaningful conversations with other gifted minds and storytellers—and who they serve.

If you’re curious about how sensitive, creative, intense, multi-potential, professional, ethical, expressive, and clear you are about your intentions, wants, and needs, check your GPC score.

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