As we transition from Thanksgiving into the Holiday season, it's 'bout that time to brush up on our gift-giving skills.
As we transition from Thanksgiving into the Holiday season, it's 'bout that time to brush up on our gift-giving skills.
The muscle you want to train to get nice at gift-giving is, not surprisingly, selflessness.
Selflessness focuses on giving more than you're getting: selfless people are preoccupied with others' interests, advancement, and, most importantly, happiness.
We want to build our selflessness to a point where giving gifts is automatic and enjoyable.
The gift experience is made up of two things: delivery and fit.
The delivery factor is like your tone of voice; it's independent of the core message but can still strongly influence the recipient's experience.
Here you want to focus on the presentation of your gift and on making it a surprise.
The fit factor is the name of the game; you have to give something that the other person will enjoy or find helpful.
Here you want to focus on matching your gift to the person's interests, hobbies, wants, needs, etc.
Essentially, gift-giving is just another interaction between you and your people. Just like a text or phone call, it provides a touchpoint between you and another person while offering an opportunity to form a deeper connection.
Like other interactions, we can probably stand to do more of it.
Moving like a Holiday Hero™️ year-round will improve the quality and quantity of your gifts.
You'll be more adept at handing non-holiday gift-giving occasions like birthdays, graduations, and retirements. Additionally, you could improve your gifts per year by giving gifts on events outside of the "The Holidays."
One of the most radical shifts you can make on your way to becoming a gift-giving guru is to remove the time boundary from your giving.
As a refresher, a People Database is just an address book that can hold more than addresses. You can use it to remember your peoples' interests, contact info, etc.
Your People Database helps within the gifting process by telling you who you need to get gifts for. It improves your coverage and increases the number of folks you get gifts for.
More importantly, your People Database improves the quality of your gifts. The more you know and can remember about a person, the better the fit of your gift.
For this reason, you should nearly always start your process by figuring out who you're getting gifts for.
Try:
Listing who we plan to get gifts for helps us identify the right people, budget for the haul, and be logistically thorough.
Identifying the folks you plan to get gifts for allows you to reference your People Database and refresh your memory on what makes them unique.
For many of us, details on our folks' hobbies, interests, and wants may be scattered across physical and digital locations or may be stored in our heads.
This is completely okay. Remember, we're playing a marginal game; remembering just one additional detail about a recipient could mean delivering one more rock-solid gift.
The name of the game is matching these details to gifts. If someone is into photography, things like memory cards, wrist straps, and lenses–big bread–would be good fits.
But gifts aren't just limited to physical stuff. For this aspiring photographer, you could also consider an exclusive photography course with a professional–an experience–or a subscription to editing software like Lightroom–a digital product.
Once you've selected the right gift for the right person, you want to lay the gift out like a chef lays out a dish: presentation matters.
Above all else, do your best to make it a surprise.
Here are some things to think about with delivery:
Here are a few gift guides I've come across:
Here's a notion template I put together.
It has easy, medium, and advanced methods for getting started on your gift database. I'll dive deeper into these another time.
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