Difficult life situations shift the emphasis from creativity to adaptation, create a threat of giftedness wasting. Gifted individuals struggle with these situations using personal resources conceptualized as psychological resilience, hardiness, ability to recover, ego strength, self-efficacy, coping strategies, assertiveness. The first three concepts are descriptive and partially overlapping, but they do not reveal the ultimate sources and mechanisms of gifted people’s adverse life situations surviving. Ego strength, self-efficacy, productive coping strategies, assertiveness are intrinsically connected with the giftedness psychological structure and personality dynamics what developed by such people to overcome obstacles in realizing their potential.
There is complex relationship between assertiveness and giftedness. Communicative assertiveness can be considered as a tool for gifted people to promote their achievements, to ensure social recognition of the creative activity products. In other case insufficient assertiveness prevents recognition, does not allow a person to be considered as a realized gifted. It is possible what communicative assertiveness have unequal weight in giftedness different types. It may be that assertiveness is more deeply or somewhat in other forms integrated into the psychological structure of social and athletic giftedness.
Another facet of assertiveness – life assertiveness what maintains one’s own value regulation of activity and social interaction in which giftedness and talent manifest, develop, and gain recognition. In this way, assertiveness allows not to mask giftedness, not to stop its development.