The house painter

My opinion is that the knowledge we, as psychologists have acquired, should be become more available to those people who can not afford expensive talent assessments. We are obliged to use these skills also in a none commercial way.
After having managing my own company, specialized in talent- en competence management, for ten years, and having mainly worked for organizations, who could easily afford these assessments, I started, beside my own company, a new service. Helping people with discovering and developing their talents for a very low price. I just felt the need to do this. I called it the “talent shop”.
There were so many people who came to me with all kind of problems about their capacities, choices in their careers, not knowing how to use their skills, that I was sure there was a huge need for this kind of advice.
Several people made a deep impression and one of them was a young adult, about the age of 21, who was a house painter. He came from a family, where education was not a big issue. He told me that he was becoming more and more depressed, because he felt he did not belong to the world of house painters. He was reading Sartre, Nietzsche and other philosophical books and he was laughed at. He had this urgent need to develop himself but did not get much support from friends or his family.
I tested him and he seemed to be very intelligent, what I already deducted from the way he spoke about himself and the world around him. When I told him that he had the cognitive skills to enter the university, he fell almost from his chair. He thought that this was a world for the “happy few”. I told him it would take a long way to get there, but that is was possible. The way he reacted, his eyes were shining, he was so astonished and so delighted. He grasped this chance and made it. He got over his own boundaries and followed his own path, driven by the urge to get the education he wanted.
After a while I heard from him that he was now studying psychology, which he had never dreamt that this could be possible. I helped him, but he did it. I made a difference and I felt that I made a contribution to this young boy’s life. I will never forget him nor the feeling I had for just giving him this push.

Liesbeth van Weert