In our professional journeys, we encounter countless individuals who shape our perspective, challenge our assumptions, and teach us invaluable lessons.
Sometimes these lessons come wrapped in beautiful experiences, while others arrive in more challenging packages.
This reflection explores the profound impact that colleagues, clients, and mentors can have on our personal and professional development, revealing how every interaction offers something valuable if we’re willing to receive it.
Philosophy of Workplace Gifts
I believe everyone we work with gives us gifts, even if sometimes they come in toxic wrapping. I’ve been working since I was 16, so I’ve had many years of work and plenty of gifts along the way.
I’ve had the good fortune to be surrounded by incredible people, every one of whom has given me something valuable: a lesson to take on my journey.
The Golden Gifts
Most of the gifts were gold and a pleasure to unwrap. There were the Japanese farmers, the Chinos, who gave me a job in California when I moved there at 16.
Working with them enabled me to put myself through college, fulfilling my own dreams and those of my parents. (My parents aren’t college graduates.)
Perhaps even more valuably, they took me under their wing and gave me the gift of a value system – curiosity, creativity, humility, and hard work were the values they seeded in me – along with a love for culture.
Dignity and Belonging
There were the men who had escaped Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere, for whom I set up Hong Kong’s first therapy group dedicated to refugees and asylum seekers.
I’d hoped to teach them how to cope in their new lives; they ended up teaching me about the human need for dignity and belonging.
Community and Perseverance
There were the many Filipina and Indonesian domestic helpers I met and taught in Hong Kong.
These women leave behind their families, and often their children, to toil in a foreign land for a meagre wage to send back home.
Yet every Sunday, they turn the parks into kaleidoscopes of music, food, and chatter, as they dance, eat, and connect. Community and perseverance – that’s what they’ve taught me.
Early Influences
There was my maternal aunt who insisted I attend “Bring Your Daughter to Work Day” with her every year I could.
She taught me the importance of a strong work ethic from a young age.
“Don’t ever accept an invitation to slack off and be a princess,” she would say often.
Professional Mentorship
There was Sylvia Yu Friedman, the editor of my new book Rethink the Couch: Into the Bedrooms and Boardrooms of Asia with an Expat Therapist, published by Penguin Random House SEA, who showed me the value of dreaming big and living in a gratitude bubble. (More on this soon.)
The Human Stories
And, of course, there were the many clients who came to me for therapy, some of whom inspired my book and all of whom gave me lessons in the glories and struggles of being human.
They taught me to have reverence for every human story.
The Difficult Gifts
Looking back, I see every person I’ve ever worked with has given me something, whether I realized it at the time or not.
Therein lies the rub.
Not all the gifts we receive are so exquisitely packaged as those above. Writing my book and reflecting on my clients’ relationships and their experiences at work had me thinking about these other gifts, the ones we dread unwrapping.
Stay tuned.
Next week, I’ll share a story from my upcoming book about these particular gifts.
In the meantime, what are the gifts you’ve received along the way?
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