Sleep Busters

When I was leading and growing our company, I had my share of worries. More times than I can count, I awoke in the middle of the night with concerns over a certain aspect of the business. Lately, I’ve been asking folks to share some of their pressing or nagging business concerns with me, and the response has been surprising…

I like to call these problems or concerns “sleep busters”. They often become so all-consuming in a leader’s mind that they bust through and interrupt an otherwise peaceful night of sleep.

My Sleep Busters

When I was President and CEO, I had four main issues that kept me up at night:

People – Our Company was growing rapidly, so I would ask myself, “How can we build and scale to meet our people needs?” Also, sometimes people would do the darnedest things.

Money/Financing – Because of the growth, I would often ponder, “How could we obtain the capital to grow our existing business and quickly develop new, innovative services to serve our market?”

Government Regulations – The encroachment of more and more regulations was negatively impacting the innovation and efficiencies of our existing business.

Changing ways of customer buying – The old traditional ways were not working any more. The internet has changed just about every way customers buy goods and services.

“Confronting the problem does not always bring a solution, but until you confront a problem, there can be no solution.” – James Baldwin (paraphrased by Zig Ziglar)

 

Others struggle too

I have always been a very curious person. In an effort to learn and understand what other leaders struggle with, I’ve started to ask people about their sleep busters.

I’ve talked with everyone from large company CEOs to small business owners and non-profit organizations.

When I started asking these business owners and leaders about their top problems, or pain points, I was surprised by the diversity of their answers.

It seemed like almost everyone could quickly describe a problem or two that was arresting their attention and disturbing their sleep.

Just about every person, though, really appreciated the exercise because it made them stop and think about what they were frustrated with and how they were going to find a solution.

Ask yourself

Every leader can benefit from listing and thinking about their top problems or concerns.

Three of the questions that I have posed to others are listed below. Think about your current situation and honestly answer these questions.

1. Do you ever wake up thinking about work?  If so, what’s on your mind when you do? 

2. What are the top two challenges (in business or in life) that you are facing right now?

3. What problem or challenge did you spend the most time dealing with yesterday?

Share and Win

Share your sleep busting problems with me and I’ll enter your name in a drawing for a free book. I’ll draw a name from those who share and give the winner a hard-cover book by John C. Maxwell, Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Learn!

Simply answer one or more of the questions above, and we’ll enter you in the drawing.

There are two ways to enter the drawing: 1) you can post your response as a comment to this blog post, or 2) you can email me at Bobby@BobbyAlbert.com. I understand that some of your answers might be personal and that you would prefer to send them via confidential e-mail.

I discovered that the very process of identifying and describing my top problems actually advanced me more quickly toward the best solutions.

Share your sleep busters today; it just might make you a winner!