Charlie Gilkey Archives

Charlie Gilkey

Charlie Gilkey is the founder of Productive Flourishing, a company that helps professional creatives, leaders, and changemakers take meaningful action on work that matters. He is internationally known as a thought leader on productivity, planning, strategy, and leadership for creative people. Charlie is the author of The Small Business Life Cycle, and is widely cited in outlets such as Inc., Time, Forbes, the Guardian, Lifehacker, and more. He’s also an Army veteran and near-PhD in philosophy. For more, visit productiveflourishing.com .

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Charlie Gilkey: Start Finishing Your Best Work

Charlie Gilkey — September 24, 2019

Charlie Gilkey is an entrepreneur and productivity expert who founded the company Productive Flourishing. With Sounds True, he has published the new book Start Finishing: How to Go from Idea to Done. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Charlie about crafting our best work—and more importantly, how to complete it. They discuss the process of deciding what your best work actually is, as well as how ideas grow into successful projects. Charlie explains why a project needs to be divided into “chunks” in order to really move forward, emphasizing that tangible benchmarks are imperative for actually finishing the work. Finally, Tami and Charlie talk about “creative constipation” and the courage it takes to pour one’s whole self into a beloved endeavor. (69 minutes)

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Why the Summer is Surprisingly Busy—And What To Do A...

Charlie Gilkey — July 8, 2019

Why Summer is Busy & What to Do About It, Charlie Gilkey, Sounds True

Many people find themselves surprisingly busier in the summer than they expect to be. The chief reason we’re surprised is that the summer brings new projects that we often don’t count as projects and we have to weave those projects in with the projects we set in motion in the spring.

Why don’t we count the new projects that summer brings? Simple—many of us don’t count “life” activities as projects or prioritize “life” activities in the same way we do “work” projects. There’s an artificial divide between the work we do and the “life stuff” we do.

But here’s the thing: regardless of whether something falls into the “work” or “life” bucket, it’s going to take time, energy, and attention to get done. My definition of project in Start Finishing is anything that requires time, energy, and attention to complete. The upshot of looking at things this way is that it helps us see more clearly all the stuff we’re carrying and trying to do.

So, what are some “life” projects?

Summer trips are projects.

Transitioning kids from being at school all day to being at home all day for the summer is a project. (As is transitioning them back into school.)

Figuring out how to keep said kids fed every day is a project (that then turns into a new daily routine).

Maintaining yard care equipment is a project (that then turns into a new weekly routine of taking care of the lawn.)

Cleaning out the garage is a project.

Getting the motorcycle and/or bike ready for the season is a project.

I could go on, but you get the point. All of those are summer-specific projects that fall in our laps after the spring. But when we’re setting plans in spring, we’re often not thinking about them because they’re not in our face in the same way as a kid asking where the milk is (where it always is!) or the weeds that are peeking over the window to the backyard.

If it were just that new projects blossom in the summer, it would be one thing. But conjoined with new projects blossoming is that many of us often want to work less in the summer—and, for some of us, the desire to slow down isn’t just emotional, but something primal or spiritual. The long, hot days of summer changes some of us from hard-driving, high-energy, can-do folk into a walking Jimmy Buffet song.

Though we find ourselves in this position every year, it can be hard to see the pattern. Part of it is just the pace of life, but the other part is that we too often think of ourselves as invariant robots rather than the animals we are. Every other animal adapts to the changing world around it—artificial lights and air conditioning may allow us to alter the environment, but the changes still affect us more than we like to let on.

If you’re finding your summer busier and more compressed than you’d like it to be, here are three questions that will help you sink into the season:

What new or recurring seasonal projects emerged that you hadn’t planned for or didn’t fully acknowledge as a project?
Which of the projects you planned in the spring can be put on hold or dropped to make space for this summer’s projects?
Are there any shifts to project timelines or your daily work schedule that would help you keep momentum on your projects while sinking into feeling of summer?

You might also check out Samantha Brody’s Overcoming Overwhelm—it’s a fantastic book that explains how overwhelm shows up in our bodies, hearts, and heads and what to do about it.

Better to adjust now than spend the summer feeling like you’re behind and unable to enjoy the people, nature, and energy of the season.

Charlie Gilkey, Sounds True

Charlie Gilkey is the founder of Productive Flourishing, a company that helps professional creatives, leaders, and changemakers take meaningful action on work that matters. He is the author of The Small Business Life Cycle, and is widely cited in outlets such as Inc., Time, Forbes, the Guardian, Lifehacker,and more. He’s also an Army veteran and near-PhD in philosophy. He lives in Portland, Oregon. For more, visit productiveflourishing.com .

Start Finishing, Charlie Gilkey, Sounds True

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Why Summer is Busy & What to Do About It, Charlie Gilkey, Sounds True

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Tami Simon: Being a Spiritual Entrepreneur

Tami Simon — August 22, 2023

A magazine article about Sounds True founder Tami Simon referred to her as a “spiritual entrepreneur.” At first, Tami wasn’t sure about the label. Yet over time, she came to appreciate and embrace it. Today, the art of spiritual entrepreneurship is a central facet of Sounds True’s Inner MBA® program.

In this host-only episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami shares her thoughts and feelings about what it means to lead a company dedicated to the well-being of its employees as equally as it is to business success. For anyone looking to bridge their innermost values with how they make a living, Tami reveals seven principles of the spiritual entrepreneur, with insightful guidance on honoring the voice of the heart; leading with presence; why relationships need to come first; creating a culture of care, engagement, and well-being; alternating between high performance and good rest; how to embrace challenges as growth opportunities; claiming our personal agency and doing the work of “cleaning up”; business as a means to address real social needs; maintaining trust in the unfolding process; making a commitment to “lift each other up” in the way we do business; recognizing our interdependence; and more.

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Jeremy Hunter: Untaught Essentials for Business Humans

Jeremy Hunter — August 15, 2023

How do you transform your mind, and how do you do it in real time amidst the challenges of work and life? How do you remain openhearted and generous in a competitive or even cutthroat environment? These aren’t usually the kinds of questions that businesspeople ask themselves. Yet it’s become Jeremy Hunter’s mission to help today’s entrepreneurs and organizational leaders realize the incredible value of asking—and answering—these deep questions.

In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with the core faculty member of Sounds True’s Inner MBA® program and a renowned authority on mindfulness and leadership about the “untaught essentials for business humans,” discussing the lifesaving practice of meditation; training our perception (and not just our intellect); why managers must learn how to manage themselves; placing a high value on attention and presence; examining how you construct your experience; using spiritual tools and teachings to create real business results; unconditional love; developing somatic intelligence; why it’s so important to be grounded as a leader; setting the emotional tone for the group you work with; activating our collaborative superpowers by caring about and meeting each other’s needs; transforming fear and anxiety into vitality and joy; pleasure, enjoyment, and recovering from “Frivolity Deficiency Syndrome”; acknowledging what is beautiful in your world; gratitude vs. appreciation; the opportunity for businesspeople in our times of uncertainty and accelerating change; creating a relationship with solidity; letting go of the beliefs and behaviors that no longer fit; and more.

Note: This episode originally aired on Sounds True One, where these special episodes of Insights at the Edge are available to watch live on video and with exclusive access to Q&As with our guests. Learn more at join.soundstrue.com.

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Authenticity is a Unique Superpower That We All Have

Jessica Zweig — January 10, 2023

People often think that “personal branding” is a dirty word. That it revolves around ego and vanity and self-promotion. After building and running my personal branding agency, SimplyBe. and reflecting on our unique approach to this space, I realized that there was something much deeper to this work.

Each of us is here for a specific reason. Each of us has a light that we need to shine. And most people don’t know how to technically, practically tell their own story. Most of all, they don’t feel they have the permission, the confidence, the support, to take the leap. My book, Be: A No-Bullsh*t Guide to Increasing Your Self Worth and Net Worth by Simply Being Yourself, is that permission slip—for you to get out of your own way, to dive deep and take the journey within. Although often perceived as a practice in exterior image, personal brand is really about how you see yourself, how you know yourself, how you come to cherish yourself. That is the journey that awaits you in Be.

There are a lot of people who don’t want to be on social media or don’t want to be “famous” and therefore feel like the work of personal branding isn’t for them. But frankly, it doesn’t matter if you use social media every day or if you never touch it for the rest of your life—you have a personal brand.

Your personal brand is your value. It’s your worth. It’s the impression you leave behind in any room or crowd. It’s how you make people feel. It’s how you interface with people wherever you go—the way you treat your barista, the way you talk to your children’s teachers, the way you communicate with your team at work, how you create relationships in our community. It’s your legacy. All of these daily interactions are opportunities to hone and master your brand on your terms. That is personal branding.

My background is in marketing and branding. I’ve cut my teeth in the world of social media working with Fortune 500 brands over the last 15+ years. That said, in this book you will find frameworks and easy DIY tools to build your brand from the ground up and to take it online and leverage it to build your business, your career, your reputation, your followership. You’ll learn how to craft a message and a strategy, build PR awareness, create original content, identify your competitive landscape, and much more. It is a very tactical book in that sense. But my biggest inspiration and passion is bringing more humanity to business. Be. is a personal empowerment book at its core. Simply put, Be. is a study in the power of authenticity.

Authenticity is a unique superpower that we all have. It’s a practice in you simply being you, inclusive of all of your shadows, sh*t, failures, weaknesses, AND all of your successes, triumphs, talents, and unique gifts. That’s what Be. will really challenge you to own—your fully unapologetic YOU.

My book is far more than what meets the eye. I hope you pick it up and learn that you, indeed, have a brand and that this simply means that you have something worthy and meaningful to share with the world. Personal branding, at its core, is an act of service. It is about what we are here to give versus what we are here to get. And when we architect a personal brand from that place, we come alive.

The world needs your light.

The world needs you to shine.

Every one of us has not just the privilege but the responsibility to step forward and simply be.

Don’t let us down.

With love and light,

Jessica Zweig
Bestselling author of Be.
Founder & CEO, SimplyBe.

Jessica Zweig is the CEO and founder of the SimplyBe. agency, a personal branding company that helps millions of people worldwide. She’s been named a “personal branding expert” by Forbes, a Top Digital Marketer to Watch by Inc., one of 2020’s Most Notable Entrepreneurs by Crain’s Chicago Business, and the 2018 and 2019 recipient of the international Stevie® Award for Female Entrepreneur of the Year. She’s been featured on FOX, ABC, NBC, Thrive Global, Business Insider, and more as an expert on how an authentic personal brand is the key to a more successful career. For more, visit jessicazweig.com.

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Charlie Gilkey

Also By Author

Charlie Gilkey: Start Finishing Your Best Work

Why the Summer is Surprisingly Busy—And What To Do A...

Products By Author

Start Finishing

Start Finishing

You Might Also Enjoy

Tami Simon: Being a Spiritual Entrepreneur

Jeremy Hunter: Untaught Essentials for Business Humans

Authenticity is a Unique Superpower That We All Have

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