YES to meetings going at the speed of the slowest person in the room. Not just meetings but entire projects. And not just projects but the entire organizational change process. I feel like I'm swimming in molasses most days, or revving my engine in neutral. I suppose that's why I hate group work so much. It's not that I don't like working with people, it's just that I always seem to end up stifled and underutilized, never "working at the top of my license," as they say, because I'm constantly holding myself back.
In my office, I also frequently get tapped to consult with or mentor colleagues, including my direct supervisors, and yet there's no quid pro quo. I'm always left wondering, when do I get to develop MY skills? Who is going to mentor me?
It's like I'm still in the second grade, where, after my mom declined a grade skip for all the wrong reasons, my teacher paired me up with the slowest person in the room, so I could help her with her work after I had finished mine. That was literally decades ago, and yet I find myself reliving the same scenario on a daily basis to this day!
I think the parallels between being a gifted child in a "no child left behind" classroom and a gifted adult in a lowest-common-denominator office setting are sorely unappreciated. I also believe that how a child experiences and deals with these issues in a classroom setting is highly predictive of how they're going to function in the work world (not especially well in my case).
