A Guide to Actually Finding the Perfect Gift Idea
Gift Your Loved Ones Happy
Christmas time is gift time. And I love all the parts involved with giving gifts. Everything from collecting ideas to selecting the most beautiful wrapping paper. Envisioning the joyful face of the special someone. The feeling of having done something magical. A deeply personal and thought-out present.
So, as a person who spends hours on end developing different gift-giving plans, I put together a guide for you. Hopefully, it will help you find something special for your loved ones this Christmas.
Empathise with your loved one
Think about the person you want to give a present to. Make a list. Think of their likes and dislikes, problems they are trying to solve, or life changes they are navigating. Those could be very good starting points.
If they started college this year, there are tons of stuff they might need, from furnishings and water bottles to self-help books and life advice about the fact that everything costs money or books or tools that offer a certain amount of life experience.
If they recently retired, they have lots of hours to fill. It’s hard to go from having somewhere to be to staying at home all the time. So if you gift them something they can look forward to, like spending time with you, it will make a difference.
What’s important to keep in mind: your gift should be about the person they are, not who you want them to be.
Gifting someone a book who doesn’t like to read will not magically transform them into an avid reader. Buying jogging shoes for your partner won’t make them join you on your morning rounds.
Don’t guilt trip someone into doing things they wouldn’t normally do by camouflaging it as a gift. That’s why it’s so important to empathise with your loved one.
Make the gift about them and not yourself.
Build a bridge to your relationship
The foundation of the gift should be the other person. But it’s equally important to take your relationship into consideration by answering the following questions.
a) What is my relationship with this person?
b) And how do I want our bond to develop in the future?
Let me give you an example.
The only way you and your sister spent time together this year was by going out to eat or talking on the phone. So, you decide to surprise her with concert tickets for her favourite band, which means you get to spend an evening together in a way you never did before, giving your sibling relationship a chance to grow.
What happened in this example.
First, you empathised with your sister, allowing you to go from knowing her favourite band to coming up with the idea to watch the band at a live concert.
Then you took your relationship into consideration, thinking how you didn’t spend as much time together this year as you would have liked to.
And finally, by envisioning a closer future relationship, you decided you want to join her.
To come up with an amazing and personal gift, that’s really all there is to do. First, empathise with your special someone, then build a bridge to your relationship.
Take away
Think about your loved one first and your current and future relationship second. I’ve found the gifts that brought the most joy were personal ones, the ones that say, ‘I know you, I care about you, and that’s why I want to give you this. To show you how much I care about you.’
And isn’t that what giving gifts is all about—to show the other person all the warm and fuzzy feelings and all the love we have for them?
Stay tuned for the second part of this guide, where we’ll talk about the next step of the gifting process, on how to go from having an idea to holding the imagined gift in your hands.
Until then, thanks for reading. It means the world to me.
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