Unless you’re one of her sheep, you’ve probably never seen Kristina Mänd-Lakhiani with her hair in a loose top knot, sitting at her ancestral Estonian land while explaining the psychological cost of growing up under Soviet rule.
You also wouldn’t guess it from the credentials stacked after her name.
Kristina Mänd-Lakhiani, co-founder of Mindvalley.
Kristina Mänd-Lakhiani, best-selling author of Becoming Flawesome.
Or, if Google’s any indication: Kristina Mänd-Lakhiani, “Vishen Lakhiani’s wife.” (And if that’s what you searched, “Kristina Mänd-Lakhiani divorce” probably popped up, too. It happened. They’re good. Moving on.)
But what you won’t find in those algorithmic assumptions is the version of her that took our call: grounded, unscripted, and right in the middle of real life.
“Oh s***, I forgot I have to take some wool to a weaver today,” she blurts, halfway through a story about her sheep.
That’s Kristina. Candid and real.
Kristina Mänd-Lakhiani was raised to be a good Soviet girl
If you’ve ever wondered how she keeps everything in motion without ever seeming overwhelmed, the answer, strangely enough, is this: the Soviet Union.
Born in what is now Belarus, this Estonian was raised under a regime where feelings weren’t only suppressed but weren’t part of the vocabulary to begin with.
Soviet values shaped generations to prize stoicism and self-sacrifice over emotional expression. Studies have shown that in Russian society, suppressing emotions, especially positive ones, is considered normal rather than harmful. In fact, even under lab conditions, Russians show no physiological stress when they do it.
It’s expected. Even in public, smiling too much was considered suspicious. Expressing joy? Indulgent. Self-reflection? Borderline subversive.
“Personal growth wasn’t a thing,” Kristina explains. “You were supposed to know how to live.”
She knew how to “live,” alright. Straight-A student. Gold medal. Letter from the president. And not once did anyone ask how she felt about it.
But something started to crack around the age of 28. Kristina recalls visiting someone’s house and noticing an old poster that read something along the lines of “You have the right to be happy.”
“I remember standing there looking at it and thinking, ‘What do you mean? Like, I can put myself before the well-being of society?’” she shares. “Like my sacrifices are not a prerequisite for me to be a good human being?”
It was her first revelation into personal growth, and it hit her like a brick. That single line left her standing in the hallway, staring at the possibility that everything she’d been taught to value might not be the whole story.
What happens when the rules stop making sense
Kristina doesn’t glamorize her Soviet upbringing. But she doesn’t rage against it either. It’s just her origin story. And it’s why she can do all that she does and still be weirdly calm about it all.
Constant change doesn’t scare her. She grew up inside it.
When the Soviet Union fell and Estonia was reinventing itself from the ground up, Kristina was in her early twenties. She worked in government, surrounded by ministers, who, too, were barely out of college.
“We had a Minister of Education and a Minister of Defense, two different people, and they both were 27 years old,” she recalls. They had to essentially make it up as they went.
And she still is. But the difference now? She’s doing it on her own terms.
Kristina Mänd-Lakhiani’s self-love includes kicks, reads, and cows
These days, Kristina’s life is a mix of practiced melodies, countryside chores, and a mission to “make reading sexy again.”
That’s no metaphor. She actually has thirty sheep (one who made it onto Mindvalley’s Instagram—hi Shirley!), four Highland cows, and a 400-year-old farmhouse she’s helping restore into a museum. Somewhere in between, she’s hosting Mindvalley Book Club, playing classical piano, and co-parenting two children.
She still finds time to kickbox twice a week. “I don’t consider myself too good,” she shrugs, “but I have been doing it for nine years and I’m actually not bad.”
There’s something calming about hitting something that resists back, apparently. “It helps to sublimate emotions, which makes me more peaceful outside.”
Her day-to-day life isn’t a frenzied kind of busy, but a practiced one. The kind that comes from knowing when to sprint and when to coast.
“She has a great skill to be focused and efficient,” Masha Efimova, the head of product development for Mindvalley Book Club, says, “but at the same time, having fun and enjoying the moment.”
It’s a rhythm Kristina knows well. “A lot of the time my work is just happening in the background,” she says. “And when I’m ready, I sit down, and I just get it all out.”
It sounds a lot like emotional composting. Let the mess break down into something fertile.
No glow-up required
Kristina doesn’t romanticize self-love. It’s not a glow-up or a mantra or a goal, even. It’s just something you do, like taking a shower. “Otherwise, you’ll stink,” she laughs.
And it doesn’t take much. A study from the University of California, Berkeley, found that simply speaking to yourself with compassion for 20 seconds a day can reduce stress and improve emotional well-being.
It’s one way to overcome perfectionism. You show up for yourself, repeatedly and gently. And that’s where Kristina lives now.
There’s no curated quest to become her best self anymore. That was a whole other chapter. These days, it’s about being honest—with herself, her values, and whatever version of her that shows up that day.
That’s the version of her people feel most.
“She started to talk and I had the feeling of pure authenticity,” Dr. Michael Breus, a clinical psychologist and the trainer of Mindvalley’s The Mastery of Sleep, shares on Mindvalley Stories. “Her energy was coming out, it was unique to me.”
It also comes through in her writing, especially how “unique” it is, according to Amy White, the editor of Becoming Flawesome. She explains it’s the most authentic, grounded, and human she’s ever come across, adding, “[Kristina] balances logic and emotion in a way that I haven’t seen in anybody else.”
And that’s the point.
“I’ve wasted my whole first part of my life trying to be the best version of myself,” she says. “Right now, I just try to be honest with myself. And do things that matter.”
Sometimes, that’s being the host of a global book club. Sometimes, it’s overseeing the restoration of the farmhouse-turned-museum. And other times, it’s showing up for her two not-so-little humans.
But more often than not, it’s just being Kristina… Reading a book. Taking care of her fam. And getting on with her day.
Kristina Mänd-Lakhiani proves you don’t have to be perfect to build something beautiful
Ask her how she ended up living between livestock and literature, raising humans while building a company, and Kristina will probably pause and say something about “just going with it.”
But the real answer is more nuanced.
There was no grand five-year moment with a Sharpie on a whiteboard while sipping a smoothie made of moral superiority. Instead, she was, as she puts it, “sucked into it.”
She fell into entrepreneurship sideways—moving from government work to social work to co-founding Mindvalley with her then-husband, Vishen. Not that it was a dream, but more of a next step. She stayed because, well, she was needed. Then, over time, because it turned out she was good at it.
But Kristina has never fit neatly into the mold of the traditional founder. She didn’t build a personal brand with glossy photos or curated collections of self-affirmation hashtags. Instead, her journey from government worker to public figure was anything but linear.
Along the way, she also became a mother, a classical pianist, a farmhand, and a woman who once moved to New York for a year and left with more thought-provoking questions than answers. Lately, she’s been diving deep into neuropsychology and how “our contemporary lifestyle is reprogramming how our brains work.”
As Kristina explains it, focus is like a muscle. Without use, it atrophies, just like when the body goes too long without movement. “It will be hard to get back to it,” she says, “and AI is actually making a huge, huge impact on the way our brains work and it’s not a positive one.”
This is what flawesome looks like
Kristina has range, but she’s never needed you to notice it. And maybe that’s what makes her so magnetic.
No, she doesn’t radiate guru energy or try to win you over with answers. She’s more likely to ask questions like, What if you treated yourself the way you treat the one person you love unconditionally?
That question threads through her life and her book, Becoming Flawesome. It’s a gentle rebellion against polished perfection and a reminder that the most meaningful transformations aren’t Instagrammable.
Because even the Kristina Mänd-Lakhiani doesn’t pretend to have it all together. She just shows up for what matters, like spending time in a bookstore, getting ice cream with her children, feeding the farm animals…
That could also be why people keep coming back to her. Her grounded, unfiltered steadiness is what cuts through the noise.
“Her energy grounded me,” reflects Brendan Kane, a growth hacker for Fortune 500 corporations, brands, and celebrities, on Mindvalley Stories. “It gave me clarity and reminded me I could move in a new direction.”
That kind of shift is what Kristina hopes to spark in others. Not just in conversation, but in the way people show up to their lives.
It’s also why she always asks her guest authors the same question: How would you like your book to change the world?
When asked that herself, Kristina keeps it simple. “I’d like people to love themselves more, properly,” she says. “Not the distortion that we often mistake for love.”
She doesn’t call this a mission or a legacy. (She’d probably roll her eyes at both words.)
But something is being built. It’s quiet and steady, with no fanfare and no formulas. Just the kind of something that comes from setting down perfection and choosing to be flawesome instead.
Fuel your mind
If you’ve ever wanted to feel less alone in your questions, your mess, your midlife rewrites, Kristina Mänd-Lakhiani’s got a chair saved for you.
She hosts the Mindvalley Book Club like most people host friends in their kitchen: casually, curiously, without judgment. No icebreakers or book snobbery. Just real conversations about the ideas that actually change people.
Each week, she sits down with authors whose work in personal growth or business cuts through the noise and makes you look at your life a little differently.
No prep need (or to even finish the book). Just have to show up with your thoughts, your questions, and your beautifully flawesome self.
Join the Mindvalley Book Club. Come for the stories. Stay for the shift.
Welcome in.
