Work less, while growing your start-up? Performance coach Phil Drolet has the mindful secrets to dump the frenzy and befriend the flow.
Albert Einstein believed humanity’s most important question is this: “Is the universe a friendly place?” To LA-based performance coach and entrepreneur Phil Drolet, the answer is a resounding “absolutely.”
If you’re a start-up entrepreneur, work, life, and the world around you might not always feel so friendly. As the leader of a blossoming business – you likely spend your days assessing threats, putting out fires, and wrestling with your calendar to squeeze out any extra productivity you can.
To Drolet, the founder of Unlimited Business, anyone can choose collaboration over conflict, make friends with the universe, and reach performance levels they’ve never seen before.
The secret is mindfulness – and it’s the antithesis of the hussle culture that has so many start-up entrepreneurs running themselves into the ground.
To get my head around the philosophy, practices, and tools that Drolet’s clients call “Jedi mind tricks,” I sat down with the man who’s bringing Zen to LA Startups.
“Entrepreneurial life, especially in LA, can drive you crazy and overwhelm you,” the performance coach explains. “But if you can stay on the right frequency, it can be the ultimate playground where anything’s possible.”
That frequency is one of mindfulness. That can start when you start thinking about your life in all facets, not just work.
Drolet’s belief, developed over 10 years in the coaching space, is that balance outweighs relentless grinding when it comes to finding more opportunities and working productively. Having interacted with many performance coaches in the past – who preach about sacrifices, long days, and the “grind”– this is refreshing to hear.
“Startup entrepreneurs and CEOs have a lot of demands on their time,” he says. “It can be super easy to fall into the trap of just putting all your time and energy into work. What I found – in my life and working with clients – is that intentionally taking time outside of work to be in nature, to spend quality time, or do whatever else you love can actually be the greatest catalyst to greater productivity, results, and creativity.”
We need time to reflect. We need to connect with passions and loved ones that remind us why we work hard in the first place. Without that, we can get lost along the winding road of start-up life.
This is a wisdom Drolet first learned as a former Canadian national team swimmer out of UBC. To rise to the apex of his sport, Drolet had to make recovery and mindfulness his friend. Discovering the wonders of Buddhism at an early age and having spent the last twelve years practicing daily meditation, the performance coach brings the same revelations to start-ups in LA and beyond.
Whether it’s a stolen moment of Zen between meetings, or a airplane-mode-zero-distraction hike through the woods (one of Drolet’s favorite pastimes), these are the mindful moments that allow us to bring clarity, not frenzy, back to work with us.
Like most great teachers, Drolet had to learn this truth the hard way – so that you don’t have to yourself.
As an entrepreneur himself, Drolet went through the fire to start his own business.
“There was so much on the line,” he recalls. He was following in the example of the world’s most prolific entrepreneurs – Musk, Zuckerberg, and the like – who were known to work 80-90 hour weeks and cast everything else by the wayside.
This brought chaos into his life – a hectic frenzy that made him feel like there was never enough time for anything. The hobbies, things, and people he loved were being moved out of his schedule. If you’ve built a business, or are a high-performer in general, you likely know the feeling.
Wanting something different, Drolet set up an experiment. He decided for a month, he was going to be intentional about working less. As he explains in his TEDx talk, his business was able to have its best month because he was stepping back from the weeds, finding clarity, and making better decisions (while showing better rested and happier when executing them).
“Let’s start each day with ten minutes of meditation. Let’s take one night of the week to take our partner on a date. Let’s go on a hike – whatever it is, make it an experiment,” he advises.
Your start-up’s office may be a place of frenzy, where your time is an adversary, not your friend. But does it have to be?
Turning to Drolet for guidance and coaching can bring a healthy – and needed – dose of Zen.
Being start-up entrepreneurs, many of Unlimited Business’ clients are pragmatic and tactical thinkers. Bringing in Drolet has helped them see a more expansive picture of what their lives and companies could become.
“We help them connect with the power of the universe,” Drolet says, “and add in some spiritual principles as well. It opens them to a new reality: you’re not just creating your business from your own sheer willpower, you’re flowing with life.”
The universe can’t get much friendlier than that.
Bring Zen to your start-up (and your life). Check out performance coach Phil Drolet and Unlimited Business on their website.
