Christie Jenkins

Profile

What do backflips, barbells and bikinis have in common?

Christie is an expert at all of them. Many of us dream of being the best at one thing. Christie has been number 1 in Australia and top 10 in the world in not one, but three different sports: Trampolining, CrossFit and Beach Volleyball.

A typical day in the ‘office’ might include turning triple somersaults ten metres in the air, lifting 100 kilos above her head, or playing 6 beach volleyball matches in a single day.

She brings the mindset from elite sport - including her unique points of view

Aside from being an athlete, Christie is also an investor.

Today, she’s the co-founder and Chief Investment Officer at FC32, a global multi-club ownership group in football (soccer for for us Aussies) with a focus on developing the world’s top players - across both genders.

She’s also a Partner at Athletic Ventures, a syndicate of 250 athletes, who have invested in companies including Guzmen y Gomez, Who Gives a Crap, Canva, and Eucalyptus. And formerly an investor at Australia’s largest VC fund Blackbird Ventures where she helped invest their billion dollar fund into Australia’s best startups, including leading the investment into their fastest growing company of all time.

Ask her why she loves investing, and she’ll tell you it’s because athletes and founders share the same mindset - grit, energy, obsession and wild ambition. The odds of becoming a professional athlete are less than 0.02%. The odds of building a unicorn company are 0.00006%. It takes a rare mindset to dedicate decades of your life to achieving a goal with such low odds of success.

She’s also been a consultant to ASX Top 10 companies, a coach, worked in a chocolate shop (there were a lot of staff samples), and a flying trapeze performer in the circus.

With one foot barefoot in the sand, and one foot in the requisite sneakers of the startup world, Christie is an expert that sits at the intersection of sport and startups. She shares her unique perspective on how leaders can learn the mindset of elite athletes, and the creativity of startups.

Christie is a speaker and writer who doesn't just just talk the talk, she runs, jumps, handstand walks, and backflips it too.

Expertise

Talking Points

Character and Culture

Use habits, standards and identity to level-up as a leader and transform your team culture.

Key Takeaways:

Habits - how do you, as a leader, become a high performer?
What are the behaviours you do without thinking each day? When was the last time you reassessed if those habits were adding energy to your day? Learn how to create new habits (or reprogram poor habits) so you can show up each day as an elite performer.

Standards - how does your team become high performing?
As we build teams and companies, we like to think that we will get what we aim for. The truth is, we get what we settle for. Standards are a hundred times more powerful than goals.

Identity - what will your company become known for?
We all strive to live in a way that is consistent with our identity. In this session you’ll map out exactly what that identity is for your company, and how to turn that into a decision making framework to align everyone in your team to the same identity.

This session is for founders and leaders.

Flip Your Thinking

How to bring the mindset of an athlete, plus the creativity of a startup, to your leadership of a company.

Key Takeaways:

1) Change your story
The story we tell about our lives, becomes the story of our life. Are you telling a story of accountability, or of circumstances? The narrative we tell our team, business, brand, organisation or family becomes our reality, and it becomes the story others eventually tell about us.

2) 10x, not 10%, thinking
What would it take to 10x your revenue? To reduce costs by 10x? To increase your team’s productivity by 10x? Organisations train leaders to deliver to budgets - 10% better than last year is the norm. How can you break that thinking to create real innovation?

3) No plan B
You are probably juggling multiple projects. You’re on several committees. Your team is being pulled in multiple directions. No plan B means committing to a single goal. It’s a mindset that transforms alignment, speed of execution and creativity.

This session is for corporate and industry leaders aiming to drive significant innovation and growth.

Supercharging Feedback

3 ways to reframe feedback so you can give (and take) it like an athlete, transforming your team performance.

Key Takeaways:
Athletes love feedback. We seek it out constantly. We’re disappointed if we get to the end of a training session and our coach hasn’t given us feedback.

But hear ‘I’ve got some feedback for you’ at work and immediately our hearts start racing as we frantically cast our minds back over everything that we might have done wrong.

Learn how to reframe your workplace culture to see feedback differently:
- As a signal of care, not criticism
- As an offer of help for you achieve your goals
- As a way to go from ‘great’ to ‘world class’

This session is for high performing teams.

Mastery Mindset

5 simple ways to embed a growth mindset to succeed in your career

Key Takeaways:

We tell young people to ‘find their passion’. For the millions of young people who have no idea what their passion is, this advice simply adds stress.

Instead, early careers are about building skills and getting exposure to new opportunities. The number one mindset required to do those two things? A growth mindset. The belief that ‘with effort I will improve’.

This session combines storytelling with straight-up tactics to develop this mindset.

It is for students and recent graduates.

Become World Class More Than Once

The systematic approach to winning on the global stage

Key Takeaways:

Winning once we can chalk up to dedication, or talent, or opportunity, or luck, or hard work.

Winning more than once is a system.

We break down the exact ingredients of this system across:
Coaching - how to find the best coach
Teamwork - leaning into strengths and celebrating the ‘glue’ players
Environment - surround yourself with people better than you
Work ethic - what does it really take

This session is for high performing individuals and new leaders.