Join me Monday, May 20th at 6 p.m. Pacific/9 Eastern on Radio Enso. My guest will be writer, coach, consultant, speaker, and program developer Charlie Gilkey of Productive Flourishing. Charlie was one of my first guests back in 2011 and now returns to the show for what promises to be a great conversation about business and life. To listen, go HERE.

About Productive Flourishing:

Have you ever noticed how hard it is to find business advice that understands what it’s like to be running your own small company?

Small businesses have a unique set of problems that are often left unaddressed by major business publications. Since 99% of all businesses have 20 employees or less, though, this doesn’t make much sense. Just because you’re not a huge venture doesn’t mean you’re not a viable, valuable business.

Led by Charlie Gilkey, an in-demand speaker, coach, and consultant, Productive Flourishing is a small business development company helping people build better businesses by focusing on getting more customers, increasing profit, and growing strategically.

Charlie’s work is routinely cited, showcased, and shared in places like Inc.com, BNET, MSNBC, Project Domino, Under30CEO, Upmarket, Small Business MO, and Carol Roth’s Unsolicited Business Advice Blog, among many others. His forthcoming book, Beyond Bootstrapping, helps entrepreneurs and small business owners become better executives and build better businesses from the business they’ve already built. His focus is on strategy, planning, execution, and leadership development, and he’s worked with hundreds of clients and participants – and he’d love to work with you, too.

About Charlie:

Some people have a hard time understanding who I am because I seem to be a mixture of contradictory traits. I’m philosophical yet pragmatic; compassionate yet disciplined; creative yet analytical; driven yet laid back; happy but calm. These complexities come through in the content I share, so if it throws you off, you wouldn’t be the first to wonder what’s going on.

I’m out to help people thrive by using their creativity and energy in ways that help themselves, those around them, and the world at large. While that seems fairly ambitious, the way we do this is by continually making small steps in the right direction – at a certain point, we look up and the thousand miles are behind us. We build a better future step by step and day by day, and it turns out that it’s possible to enjoy the building of that future in the present.

Who we are today is largely influenced by where we’ve come from, so you might be curious to know a little bit more about where I’m coming from.

Before I got into writing, thinking, coaching, and teaching about meaningful action, I was teaching philosophy at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln while I was completing my Ph.D. (in Philosophy) while simultaneously managing a career as a logistics officer in the Army National Guard. I’m happily married to a loving, beautiful, and brilliant woman – Angela, in case you see me refer to her in posts – so I was doing the best I could to be the husband, friend, and lover that she deserved. And then there was our house that we were remodeling…

On top of all that, I’m an incorrigible polymath – I’m constantly learning new things, which means I’ve constantly got a lot of stuff to do. My complicated, layered life was just an extension of my quest to learn and experience a bunch of new things.

Given that I learn by researching, experimenting, writing, teaching, and sharing, I decided to start helping other people become better at managing a whole bunch of stuff at once. While in the short term, I made my situation worse – after all, starting a blog/business on top of everything was just making another thing to do – in the long term, I figured out how to make my life easier and much more meaningful. It turns out that many of those same techniques and orientations will help you, too.

Today, my life is much less complicated, but by no means simpler. I’m finishing up my Ph.D. this year, but I’m no longer teaching academic philosophy. I’m no longer in the Guard, as of 4/1/2010. I spend each day doing what I love – helping people change the world by sharing ideas through this blog, designing products and programs that help people do meaningful stuff in the world, and helping individuals put some flexible structure into their lives through coaching.

For more about Charlie and Productive Flourishing, visit http://www.productiveflourishing.com/.