I created the Gift Mindset after one of the most defining moments of my life: losing my Dad at an early age. Grief has a way of cracking you open. And in that crack, if you are willing to look, you find something extraordinary. You find the gifts. The lessons. The perspective. The resilience you never knew you had.
From that experience I developed a mindset that has shaped everything I do as a leader, a coach, and a human being. The Gift Mindset is the practice of opening and unwrapping the learnings and lessons we encounter in life: the hard ones, the joyful ones, the unexpected ones, and choosing to grow from them and share them with others.
It also became the title of my latest award-winning book, Gift Mindset, because I believe this is one of the most powerful and transformational practices available to every single one of us.
When we adopt the Gift Mindset, the benefits are three-fold:
🎁 We reinforce the learnings for ourselves.
🎁 We give others a blueprint to adapt and learn from.
🎁 We create a living legacy that outlasts any role, title, or organisation we will ever be part of.
Here is why this matters more than ever right now. We are living in a world where artificial intelligence is accelerating at a pace none of us have seen before. Technical skills are being automated. Processes are being replicated. But the one thing AI cannot replicate is you.
✨ Your wisdom ✨ Your story ✨ Your hard-won lessons ✨ Your humanity
When we adopt the Gift Mindset, we deepen and develop the key human skills that differentiate us as leaders, as business owners, and as personal brands in a world where artificial intelligence is increasingly the focus. Your gifts are your greatest competitive advantage.
Who Are Your Kris Kringles?
So, here is the question I want you to sit with today. Who or what are your Kris Kringle gifts?
A Kris Kringle is a random gift. You ask for a particular perfume and you unwrap a statue of an elephant. Life is exactly like that. We rarely get what we expect, and sometimes what turns up is the very thing we needed most, even if we could not see it at the time.
The most powerful Kris Kringle gifts in our lives are often the most challenging people we encounter. They show up in and out of work. They might be someone brand new to your world or someone you have known for years. They arrive uninvited and they almost always deliver something unexpected.
Your Most Challenging People Are Your Greatest Teachers
In my corporate life, I had a Kris Kringle manager. He never shared anything with the team. He took ideas and claimed them as his own. He made work almost unbearable, and yet he seemed to have little awareness of the impact his behaviour had on the people around him.
As unpleasant as that experience was, it gave me one of the most valuable gifts of my career: the absolute clarity of knowing how not to lead. It sent me on a deep journey of self-development that shaped everything I do today. That difficult manager became one of my greatest teachers.
Time to Unwrap Your Gifts
I want to invite you to reflect on the challenging people in your life, past and present. The ones who frustrated you, stretched you, and pushed you to your limits. What did they teach you? What gifts did they leave behind, even when they were wrapped in difficulty?
Three questions worth sitting with:
🎁 Who are your Kris Kringles: the people who have challenged and shaped you most?
🎁 What lessons did they gift you: about leadership, about yourself, about how you want to show up in the world?
🎁 How can you unwrap and share those lessons: with your team, your peers, or the next generation of leaders?
Challenging and even toxic people can be the gifts that keep on giving. They are often the catalysts for our greatest growth and our most important breakthroughs.
Thank your Kris Kringles. They have given you some of your most valuable lessons.
And now it is your turn to pass the gift on.
Explore our world-class Gift Mindset Culture Program and start unwrapping the gifts within your team and organisation.
Lead to be limitless.
