What Keeps You Up At Night
What keeps you up at night?
Every business owner knows the feeling. The tossing, the turning. Your brain won’t stop. There’s a problem, an issue, some sort of pain point that is gnawing at your belly and driving your anxiety through the roof!
Sound familiar? Of course it does. Whether you have something right this moment you’re wrestling with or had a challenge in the past we have all worked through adversity in our businesses. One of the unstated truths about the things that keep us up at night – they can all be distilled down to risk.
A business will never operate without risk. We can never be risk free in any aspect of our lives and certainly not in our businesses. Good leaders and entrepreneurs will make risk – adjusted decisions. We will try to figure out what level of comfort we have for risk as well as our ability to manage to that risk. Risk always comes down not just to tolerance levels, but also to capacity. Can I afford to take the risk, even if I’m comfortable with it? A risk that could put your business out of business for example, you may be comfortable with taking, but your business does not likely have the capacity to take that level of risk!
Many times business owners will gamble with risk unknowingly. Very often, it’s the things we don’t know we don’t know that get us in the most trouble.
A great question to ask yourself is what is keeping me up at night.
This one of my personal favorite questions to uncover needs. It forces you to really consider and be honest with yourself about what’s most concerning to you. It’s also a fantastic way to reflect on whether you’re focused on the root of the problem or a symptom of the problem.
Often it helps us to speak to other professionals around these topics. Find out what keeps others up at night and it might open your eyes to your own concerns about your business.
We covered this topic and more in our most recent podcast featuring Barbara Flynn of People First. If you haven't listened in, you can check it out at
www.jbandthedoctor.com/podcast or any major streaming platform.
So….what keeps you up at night? We’d love to hear from you!
JB