When people ask me what it’s like working with Jen, I tell them it’s like having someone understand you without you having to explain anything to them. Jen seems to know and be able to articulate my complex thoughts, motivations and needs in a way no one ever has in my life; and because of this, I understand myself and can, in turn, communicate my inner world much more effectively than I could ever before. Working with Jen has helped me make it through an extreme positive disintegration, develop healthy relational boundaries, and hone in on a career path that, for the first time, makes sense for me and my unusual brain. In the midst of all of that, I was able to sort out and heal from patterns of intergenerational trauma that I hadn’t even known I was being affected by. All in all, Jen is an unusual human and I mean that in the best sense. Thank you Jen.

I’ve been blessed and guided to meet my coach, Jen, which has started a new journey for me that I never thought was an option: finding out that all this time, what I thought, felt and experienced was not madness but a gift that wasn’t recognized and nurtured. Looking back, my Soul was like a child in a corner tethered by whirlwinds of rejection, defeat, fear, confusion and an overwhelming mix of emotions, in a room full of kids, and not understanding why I couldn’t I be like them.  It only took one hand of another gifted mentor to help me feel safe enough to start getting in touch and love my Being. What a beautiful thing we get by coming together to love, live, learn and support one another!!!  I can now play with the kids!  Thank you with all my heart!

With Merlin as my coach, I am able to create changes in my life for the better, and learn about aspects of myself that I have never fully understood or thought plausible. For anyone considering InterGifted, I had some initial hesitation to accept my giftedness and was definitely nervous before and during my first coaching session, but I can’t fathom any other opportunity or service that could’ve supported me better with my new found (to my adult self) emphatic sensitivities, non-existent boundaries, giftedness and autism. It is unbelievable that InterGifted has the expertise to finesse out the details of a tangled web of various conditions and comprehend a person as a whole. I can finally make sense of the past ten years of my deteriorating mental state and functioning, and more importantly, learn how to cease the negative patterns, stabilize my wacked out and hypersensitive nervous system, and ward off unhealthy relationships. I admit that I most likely be a little nervous during the rest of my coaching sessions, but that is heavily counter balanced by the warmth of being genuinely heard and understood through conversations with Merlin.

Even though I have only had a handful of sessions with Karin, I can already feel the shift in my self perception. I have had numerous interactions with different types of helping professionals but none has come close to knowing the real me like Karin has done in such a few sessions. She sees me, she hears me and she has remained totally unfazed by me. For the first time I have found someone whose brain and heart are working as one. Her intuition is spot on. I don’t feel judged and I don’t feel that I’m too much for her. I don’t have to dumb myself down and act like I don’t know stuff in order to not offend the ‘professional’. She is helping me reframe the way that I see myself. I  am slowly beginning to accept my giftedness. Karin is acting as the bridge that I am using to cross to the other side. I am in the throes of a positive disintegration but with her holding my hand, I am no longer terrified. Our work is not yet done but I do know that I will make it across …. and more.

I have had two inspiring coaching sessions with Jen. I chose to be coached by her because of the click and her specific expertise. Being able to talk with someone with the same level and thinking speed as well as with the same humor, is important as a highly gifted individual. During the deep discussion we had about personality types, I felt understood, challenged and supported to take my possibilities to the next level. I got valuable information to help me understand how things work in my head, based on my personality type. Since talking with Jen, I understand better why I fare better in some situations than others, and where my focus should be. I am ready to explore different opportunities for myself work and study wise. Jen also helped me explore where my existential depression stems from and how to prevent or deal with it, when it arises again. Thank you Jen, for your great insights and support!

Karin works with me in the form of an informal conversation in a safe atmosphere. She picks me up from where I’m in my actual developmental state. I feel encouraged to try new steps, gain other point of views – expansion of consciousness. I learned to realize and acknowledge that I’m really gifted. She helps me to develop my authentic self. I learn about myself, how I’m functioning, about healthy boundaries that help me, as an empathic, overexcitable person to be in the outer world, without self-betrayal. I feel answered, legitimized and alive. Thank you Karin for your loving support.

Thank you InterGifted for providing such a unique and well suited coaching setup for your target audience. Being able to mix and match from the group of coaches has in itself been inspiring and has provided me with renewed hope and energy. I have been searching for an appropriate coach for quite some time and had never found someone that I felt would understand all of the aspects that I wanted to discuss. When Jennifer offered the opportunity to meet with more than one coach, the profound relief of finding a solution better suited to my needs washed over me and filled my soul. Such a fantastic program of ‘custom plans’ being created for the coaching process goes a long way towards instilling a sense of being understood and anchors in the feeling of finding a community wherein I can express myself freely. With appreciation and gratitude to Jennifer and all involved with InterGifted.

Jen is truly compassionate, understanding, generous and accommodating – and seems to ‘get’ exactly what you are thinking, feeling and fearing. She’s very accessible and approachable, in spite of being busy and is so authentic that you feel, continually, that she is on your side and identifies with and shares your challenges. I strongly recommend that you contact Jen directly if you feel the need for a consummately professional and highly competent advice and support: she’ll direct you to the best coach to work with, if she isn’t the best option or if she can’t fit you in.

Sandra was a wonderful guide throughout my introduction to learning about my giftedness. Sandra and I clicked because she is also gifted and because I am finally experienced what’s known as “mirroring”. Genuine mirroring is crucial to a gifted person’s development and is rare. The mirroring I experienced with Sandra cannot be manufactured despite what many experts teach. Genuine mirroring is natural, reliable and authentic. Sandra taught me everyday guiding principles that were customized to me. Most frequently, I apply that I can slow down and stop any time I choose. I remind myself of this principle not only when I go into perfectionist mode, but also when others expect me to be perfect; to do and be it all. I also use it when I’m going down a new path and something doesn’t feel quite right or isn’t flowing. People have told me to slow down my whole life, but Sandra’s words were the first to hit home for me. She showed me that it’s my choice. Sandra helped me to realize that I have a tendency to “fill in” where I’m needed and wanted, which is a passive way of living life for others and not myself. I promptly resigned as President for an organization that no longer resonated with me. People have asked me if I was living the life I wanted, but Sandra’s words of “filling in” were the first to hit home for me. I believe that I can learn anything and that, in areas where I struggle, it would only require someone explaining it to me in a way that no one else had before. Sandra’s quick and simple explanations just click and have improved my life in a very short, painless, period of time. It has been a wonderful experience working with Sandra.

Jen has it down to a fine art form. The quality of her mind-to-mind interactions is so brilliantly resonant and fluid that she gets to the ‘magic point’ in a way that is fast, congruent, and rings true. I have found her work effective because she embodies it as a living process.

I’m twice-exceptional – gifted and autistic. I spent most of my life feeling ashamed of the way my mind worked and trying so hard to make it fit into the mould of what people expected of me. At the age of forty, I found InterGifted and started coaching with Jen. She understood me more in just a couple conversations than anyone had in my whole life, even my closest friends and family. In coaching with Jen, I finally understood that I am a meta-thinker, and that this makes my mental process very different than the norm (even more different than I already thought, considering my autism). I have known about my autism much longer than I have known about my giftedness, so now I have a lot of knowledge to integrate. But I feel very hopeful for the first time in a long time, as now I can evaluate my true potential and build upon it, rather than continuing to try to be something I’m not or fulfill others’ ideas of my potential. I am reaching a level of self-acceptance and hope through coaching that I never thought was possible for me. Thank you Jen!

Last year I was ill for a couple of months, but from that period emerged ideas about giftedness. I found the InterGifted site and soon after my journey with Merlin began. I have to say that for me Merlin was really an excellent coach and fit. What I liked about working with him was that he managed to be very personable, and also shared some of his own experiences while having a professional overview of our process. He is very knowledgeable in the area of giftedness and related areas. He was also able to signpost me to reading and other media to discover more about giftedness and myself. Working with Merlin is a conversation and a collaboration. He opened my mind to thinking of myself in an expanded way. Overall he is very skillful and singular in his work.

For quite a few years, I felt like a crazy, nervous wreck. There was an almost constant struggle with almost everything in my life. I saw therapists and counsellors and talked about my feelings and my childhood, and I learnt some useful tools. I knew, of course, that I was different. That I was extra everything. That I needed extra care, so to speak. I used to tell myself that I was too sensitive for my brain, or too intelligent for my sensitivity. I was definitely too much for most, including myself a lot of the time. Then I heard about HSP some five years ago and got a lot out of studying that. I started exercising and minding what I ate – that also really improved the general state of things. And then one day, in a conversation about bored children at school, a friend tipped me off about an organisation called “Supporting the Emotional Needs of the Gifted.” That’s when I understood that giftedness is an actual thing; an actual research field. Going through the SENG website, I cried. Then I started reading everything I could get my hands on. And then, googling around about a year later, I found InterGifted and Jennifer Harvey Sallin.

Now, I think it’s wise to live as though you’re destined to do something very good. To strive to leave this world a little better than we found it – you know. I figured the time had come for me to step up and finally do something real. Took some shaky steps. Sure I can manage on my own, I thought. But the thing is, doing everything on your own isn’t the way to go. At some point in the coaching process, it felt a little remarkable to me that I hadn’t already done this work on my own. Studied Jung’s ‘cognitive functions,’ for instance. Or even just found out my personality type according to the Myers Briggs Type Indicator. I guess that a part of this pretty wonderful and long overdue affair has, well, shown me how lonely I’ve been. I knew I could do a lot of things. And I have, and I do. The difference is, now I’m doing them with such grounded purpose. With more love, perhaps. It’s like I’m able to inhabit … my spot. I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but the way I live my life has changed.