What kind of company are you building (or working for)? Are you optimizing for chaos or for calm? One of my favorite books from recent years as it relates to company culture — even if you're a culture of one (or one+) — is It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy At Work, by Basecamp co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson.

Jason and David aim for a calm company, so every chapter (and business area) is about asking the question: How do we create calm? How do we choose calm?

This episode is preview lesson from my—totally free!—mini-course, Free-up Founder Time. I cover strategies for time blocking and content batching, and walk you through exactly how I set-up my schedule each week (knowing that life and work never go perfectly to plan).

After you listen, register for the course here — in 15 short actionable lessons, I cover topics like content batching, time blocking, getting ready for your big break, courage cookies, luck trucks, and a whole lot more. Each lesson as a combination of helpful tools, templates, podcast episodes, and book recommendations also available in audio format (most are 5-10 minutes long) for learning on the go.

Check out full show notes from this episode with links to resources mentioned at http://PivotMethod.com/157.

Enjoying the show? Pivot Podcast is listener supported—consider donating to become a Pivot Insider and you’ll get access to a private monthly Q&A call where you can ask me anything, and discuss the latest books, tools and topics I’ve shared in recent episodes.

In 2007, while working within Sheryl Sandberg’s Online Sales and Operations organization at Google, I received a coaching session that changed my life. This was before the word coaching (and careers revolving around it) was ubiquitous outside of the sports arena.

In this episode I share more about how that one session helped spark an entire movement that’s still alive within Google today: an internal “drop-in” coaching program—to make coaching accessible, easy to sign up for, and free—for all employees at all levels of the company. I’ll dive into the big themes and mechanics of how to set this up if you’re hoping to run a pilot within your organization.

That first coach, Erik, in just two sessions also inspired me to attend coach training myself in 2008, restart my (at the time) sleeping website Life After College, and gave me hope that I could be an author someday . . . and the rest is history :)

Shoutout to Denny Clark for submitting the Listener Q&A that inspired this episode!

Learn more about Pivot Programs at PivotMethod.com/companies »

Check out full show notes from this episode with links to resources mentioned at PivotMethod.com/153 »

I have always been curious about solopreneurs who choose to stay small, like me. Seven years into running my own business, I still deliberately choose not to scale in a way that requires hiring any full-time employees or by too much added infrastructure, to support two of my biggest business values of freedom and agility.

But that doesn't mean that I exclude higher earnings as a necessary byproduct. My business mantras: optimize for revenue and joy, look for ways to earn twice as much in half the time (with ease and with even greater impact), and let it be easy, let it be fun.

So I was delighted to stumble upon Elaine Pofeldt, who is similarly obsessed with researching non-employer businesses with 7-figure earnings. In this week's conversation we dive into what she discovered while writing The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business. Related note: I've captured my best strategies for nearly quadrupling my income while working half the time (with no full-time employees) in my Delegation Ninja course.

To help you kick-off the new year in style and soul-aligned next steps, I’m back with my annual Set Your Pivot Strategy episode—new and improved with the best resources and reflection questions to help you craft a compelling vision for 2020. 

I encourage you to get out a pen and paper for this one—yes, analog-style—and pause frequently to journal for as long as you’d like on each prompt. Go big! Go for quantity, not quality, and don’t censor yourself or worry yet about whether or not what you’re envisioning is possible—the time for that will come later. 

When you think you’re done writing, keep going! That just means you’ve gotten your most obvious ideas down. Pushing through the pauses is where you create breakthroughs, and every time you sit with a question you’ve never heard before, you are creating new neural pathways in the brain. 

If you’re attempting any creative or business endeavor, you know that it’s one of the great personal development journeys a person can undertake. Dips, mood drops, discouragement, disillusionment — these are all natural byproducts of forging new territory and taking on the vulnerability and uncertainty that come with creating anything new in the world.

John Jantsch is one of my longtime business mentors-from-afar, someone I’m now lucky to call a friend. In his latest book, The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur: 366 Daily Meditations to Feed Your Soul and Grow Your Business, he combines timeless transcendentalist wisdom with his three decades of entrepreneurial time-in-the-trenches. I hope you enjoy this conversation on luck, pivoting, and the spiritual side of business-building.

Check out full show notes from this episode with links to resources mentioned at PivotMethod.com/145.

Enjoying the show? Pivot Podcast is listener supported—consider donating to become a Pivot Insider and you’ll get access to a private monthly Q&A call where you can ask me anything, and discuss the latest books, tools and topics I’ve shared in recent episodes.

Our last call of the year is coming right up on Friday, December 6!