Hi, I'm Melanie.

I'm glad you're here.

The typical “about me” page would give you a brief overview, so here is the TL;DR about me.

Following that is a more detailed personal welcome and statement about what I’m doing here.

You can stay in touch by signing up for free Tales of the Outlier Brain.

THE TL;DR:

I’m a writer, a nature lover, a mother, a backcountry guide to the wilderness that is your highly gifted self, a wizard at generating and launching new business ideas, a music lover, a multi-passionate, “all the things” style of gifted brain, a former CEO for other people’s companies and visions, a mystic, a science nerd, poetry lover, tea aficionado, kitchen witch… as the song goes, these are a few of my favorite things 🤣.

My professional career, before I started my own solo business in mid 2017, spanned decades dedicated to real-world applications of neuroscience, psychology, business, and other key research areas with a focus on improving human experience and quality of life. 

I worked across several sectors. I got an MBA. I managed 8 figure funds.

I know virtually all of the research, have even worked intimately with researchers in these fields and others, and I can tell you that as interesting as it is and as useful to most as it is, much of it simply isn’t useful for us and some of it is directly harmful.

I was also raised by a neurosurgeon who loved what he did and spoke animatedly about it at the dinner table. The brain has been at the center of my awareness since I had human awareness.

There is a particular form of joy available to the person with a highly gifted brain IF THEY FIGURE OUT HOW TO HARNESS IT.

Here at The Outlier Brain is where I help you connect with your special and unique joy and learn how to corral it accurately and joyfully, like the firehose that it is when flowing fully through you and out into the world.

The Longer Version of Me:

You’re reading this here because of your interest in the highly gifted brain, what I call the Outlier Brain. 

And you feel, to at least some degree, called by my primary assertion that there is a wondrous and rare form of joy available only to the outlier gifted brain. 

You’ve felt that at least once, hopefully more, during your life and want to feel it more reliably and more consistently going forward.

In my personal journey, I was identified as gifted in childhood and had my education steered by my father accordingly. 

Back then, there weren’t gifted programs so much as private school options. I’m an older Gen Xer for reference, which in my case means I was raised more by maples and moss in the 70’s than I was by humans, if you know, you know!  

I was skipped in primary grades, as was common then, and experienced some of the social difficulties as a result. 

I was sent to an elite East Coast boarding school at 13 and didn’t live at home after that. It all contained a classic stew of trauma and privilege which I share simply to assist you in orienting to me, not to claim any particular specialness or lack thereof due to childhood circumstance. I also am not that story just because I lived through it.

Most systems that address giftedness, such as schools (in the US at least), will define it as the top 2% of various intelligence testing. The education field has done some wonderful work on research and academic environments for gifted children in the past 30 years. 

Having raised a gifted daughter in the 99.7% category who is now in her mid 20s, I know this system intimately. It gets some things right, but misses the mark entirely on emotional and social supports unless one is lucky enough to have a particularly talented teacher in the mix. We must look beyond IQ as a comprehensive metric of the outlier gifted brain.

I didn’t have any teaching or tools to get here during my own life, outside of a couple of specific momentary mentors who had a huge impact but didn’t provide me the pathway instructions, just got me past certain hurdles.

I’ve seen the same trend be the case in my tens of thousands of hours of private sessions with other outliers like us.

We are certainly wired to go our own way and walk our own path, but there are times when having a knowledgeable and intuitive guide would have made the journey far easier and more efficient.

This is one reason why I have dedicated much of my time and creational effort in recent years to sharing the pathway that I researched and developed throughout my life and studies on the outlier brain type we have.

The place to start with that is Fundamentals of the Highly Gifted Brain which is the operating manual for your brain that I wish I had had. It distills down everything I’ve learned into one beautiful diamond.

There is a particular form of joy available to the person with a highly gifted brain IF THEY FIGURE OUT HOW TO HARNESS IT.

Our drive for meaning and purpose is everything.

What we crave most deeply is to fully experience clarity about our own true potential in this life and then witness ourselves contributing that potential to the whole, to the world.

The human brain generally is built for pattern recognition and the harnessing of patterns into action. This superpower has previously propelled the evolution of the species.

The gifted human brain runs pattern recognition on steroids.

In fact, as a highly gifted brain human, to be in the experience of rapid pattern recognition and constant massive data input is required for simple baseline enjoyment.

By data, I mean all forms of input, via the 5 senses and beyond, not a simplified computational or merely intellectual sense of the word.

Humanity currently sits in a time of deep turmoil with radical and abrupt changes coming fast and furious.

Human society is largely shaped by those with a highly gifted brain. This may be hard for some to swallow but it’s true.

For good or bad, key individuals leverage their gifted brain to not just get ahead of the curve but to actually create and shape the curve itself.

Sadly, we live in a time in which our brightest minds are removed of joy.

They therefore are creating from sources other than joy, resulting in contributions unable to enhance humanity’s positive trajectory.

We can easily name this handful of people, in fact. It is a small and obvious group. 

The question that guides me in my work for the outliers is this: 

Will we spiral into transhumanist technofeudalism? or will we restore ourselves of joy and create the new society for all in correct alignment with Earth?

We live in a time when joy is needed for the human species to continue, when only joy will propel us through this narrow passage.

My own sense of my purpose in this life is to contribute meaningfully to the restoration of JOY to the planet. I have been doing this in many ways.

Sustainable access to joy for those with highly gifted brains occurs through entirely different means and pathways than it does for others.

It is also as much an outlier of experience for the gifted as the gifted themselves are for the overall population.

A through line in all of my adult life has been my steadfast inquiry into the nature of the individual - the “ME” - and the workings of community - the “WE” - and seeking to generate the correct ratio of them to each other at both the individual level and the societal level. 

So that we may finally build a lasting society that functions well for all its members. This inquiry rests in my personal cosmogony and belief that the cosmos is designed for differentiated communion.

My public facing projects in support of my purpose to restore joy are here, in The Outlier Brain, and through my writing of joyful stories and creation of an ecosystem that is free for all of us desiring to remember the joyful story that we each are.

Last summer, I launched my Joyful Story Club app, which is that free home for my primary sharing of joy. It's based on the foundation of my fiction fantasy writing, my nature photography, and my innate and unerring sensation of the energy line of JOY that runs through this cosmos.

Feeling several years of hard personal work suddenly come together and slide effortlessly out, as the app did at the time, was one of those orgasmic outlier brain moments that we truly live for. If you know, you know!

I was given the initial vision for The Stories of the Seven Stars in 2019. There are three separate, interrelated series of books. They are a triptych.

The stories began opening inside me immediately. Massive data packets expanding like so much etheric origami unfolding itself into a dazzling display of beauty.

I was shown that the stories were to travel around the world and touch a billion hearts and lives.

I cannot express with any sense of adequacy the amount of nervous system work that has been required for me to get to the point where I could even tell others about this, never mind beginning to publish them as I have. If you have ever undertaken a truly terrifying personal vision into action, you have some sense of what I have been working with.

And let’s be clear, the terror was not for the doing. The terror was mainly about failing, letting the vision down. But also, it actually was about succeeding. I still wrestle with the repercussions I understand to exist in the succeeding.

I proceed anyway.

(You can read more about this aspect of my journey and work here: https://joyfulstoryclub.mvt.so/jtmain/jtepisode1)

But the Joyful Story Club work is not JUST about my own writing. It is about cultivating and contributing to a global paradigm shift in terms of what stories we entrain ourselves with.

And now my work is to strengthen its foundation and start to grow the Joyful Story Club and my stories themselves (I’ll be writing these books until I die) just as I have simultaneously finally distilled my years of work with the gifted down into more readily accessible resources to support more of us than I could via the private 1:1 and small group services that I still love to provide but do not scale.

My approach to direct service work:

I have a background deeply infused with trauma informed and neuroscience informed methodologies. I also have a deep bench of knowledge about research informing areas such as productivity, artistic high functioning, business models and marketing, and much more.

I only am able to work with the whole person, holistically. There is no corner of a gifted person’s life that is not dominated by this brain type.

I also approach all of us, myself, as completely whole.

I am not focused on “healing” as a concept because I believe we are all perfect exactly as we are.

AND… I also approach all of us from an optimism for our future states that some would call delusional. History is littered with examples of how delusional level optimism is what fuels great work and radical influence on the arc of humanity.

This optimism is directed at:

1: the possibility of all of us coming more and more and then FULLY and ENTIRELY into our own center and connection with that ineffable source of all of the cosmos, by whatever words you call it (Great Spirit, Creator, Divinity, God, Goddess, Source, etc);

2: our potential to develop the skill of cleanly embodying and expressing that ineffable source via the deep sacred current of lifeforce which moves through and animates all things in this cosmos;

3: the joy of clearing away anything that obscures the pristine and unique prism that we each are, through with that ineffable source and lifeforce shine and thereby create the unique expression of divinity that we each are.

Authenticity is a vital concept in this work.

Things feel off for everyone when they are not able to be authentic, but life gets radically derailed for the gifted when we are not creating and sharing from our most authentic self, from that inner center point of the unique individual soul inside each of us.

Ultimately, what I do with Outliers like us is guide you through the wilderness of your beautiful big brain back to your authentic and unique self, and equip you with the skills and strengths to harness and express that, in order that you may, simply by existing authentically, contribute what we all crave to receive from you and that you crave to experience and express yourself creating.

Live Services Menu:

Below are the details on my live services options. I also regularly create custom packages for people.

I work with highly gifted men and women over age 18. I work with couples who are creating together (not for relationship repair) and where at least one is highly gifted. I only work with children in active partnership with their parents, and only after a mutual screening discussion to assess.

All options include free access to Fundamentals of the Highly Gifted Brain as the comprehensive minimum foundation we leap off from, and recordings of sessions.

I have a very unusual calendar in order to meet my personal rhythm needs, so all sessions are manually scheduled between us (versus an automatic online scheduler - I've used these, and they are so helpful, but my rhythms make managing one of these harder than simply booking with you directly).

Reach out if you have questions: melanie@melaniegillespie.com or use the contact form here or in the top menu. For the 10 day or longer options, I am happy to set up a free 15 minute discovery call if you feel that would better help you gauge fit.

Live Services Menu:

-The Jumpstart (2 hours)

-The Slingshot (10 days)

-Cosmic Base Jumping: The Day Trip (3 hours)

-Cosmic Base Jumping: The Wilderness Adventure (10 days)

-UNBOUND (6 weeks)

-Custom-designed based on mutual assessment

(Details on each of these are found below)

I work with highly gifted men and women over age 18. I work with couples who are creating together (not for relationship repair) and where at least one is highly gifted. I only work with children in active partnership with their parents, and only after a mutual screening discussion to assess.

All options include free access to Fundamentals of the Highly Gifted Brain and recordings of sessions.

I have a very unusual calendar in order to meet my personal rhythm needs, so all sessions are manually scheduled between us (versus an automatic online scheduler - I've used these, and they are so helpful, but my rhythms make managing one of these harder than simply booking with you directly).

Reach out if you have questions: melanie@melaniegillespie.com or use the contact form here or in the top menu. For the 10 day or longer options, I am happy to set up a free 15 minute discovery call if you feel that would better help you gauge fit.