Difficult Is Not The Same As Impossible.

Something is wrong and you cannot put your finger on it.

For business owners and senior executives.

Sometimes the problem is not one person under load, it is a business that puts everybody under it. The demands are unclear, the handovers only work because somebody happens to know what to do, and the same argument comes round every quarter.

There are two pieces of work for that. A stress risk assessment against the HSE Management Standards, which is what the Health and Safety Executive expects of an employer and which most businesses have never done properly. And a process map, built desk by desk, that finds where the work waits and what only one person can do.

Both are done inside your business rather than from a template, and both are priced and published.

Every fee is published. No VAT is charged. The first conversation is forty-five minutes on the phone and will cost you nothing more than your time.

Something is making the week harder than it used to be, and it is not always obvious which thing.

Is it the people, and the fact that you are managing more of it yourself than you meant to? Is it the systems, which were fine when there were fewer of you and have not kept up? Is it the supply chain, where somebody else’s failure lands on your desk as your problem? Or is it you, and the way you are dealing with all of it?

Most people arrive here with the first three, and they are usually right about them. Those are real problems and we work on them.

But when we start pulling them apart, what turns up almost every time is that the sleep went somewhere along the way. Not as the cause. As the casualty. And once it has gone, every one of those other problems gets harder to think about clearly.

That matters more than it sounds, because sleep is where the day gets sorted out. It is when the load gets cleared and the difficult things get filed. Lose enough of it and nothing gets cleared, so you are still carrying last week when this one starts.

So we work on both. The systems, the people and whatever is coming at you from outside, and getting your sleep back at the same time, because you cannot do the first properly without the second.

Most people have already tried. You know what you should be doing about the team, or the systems, or the sleep, and you cannot make yourself do it, and that is not a discipline problem.

There are two things making your decisions.

One is quick and it never stops. It reads the situation, picks a response and gets on with it, and all of that has happened before you know there was anything to decide.

The other is slower and it takes effort, and that is the one you think of as yourself. It turns up afterwards and explains what the first one has already done.

Under sustained pressure, and particularly when you are not sleeping, the slow one has less to work with and the quick one does more of the deciding. None of that announces itself. You do not feel less capable. You feel exactly the same.

Which is the whole problem with advice. It only ever reaches the slow one, which is why almost everybody who sits down with me knows precisely what they should do and cannot make themselves do it.

The clinical work reaches the other one. That is the difference between understanding your problem and actually shifting it.

There are five ways of running a business well, and most owners are one of them with a bit of another underneath. The one you are is why the business exists. It is also, at a certain size, exactly what starts getting in the way, and almost nobody spots the moment that flips.

Seven questions about what you actually did rather than what you are like. Two minutes, and no email.

If you are looking for guarantees, this is not for you. Nobody can give you them for this sort of work, and anybody who says otherwise is telling you what you want to hear.

What I can do is put a tool in your hands, teach you to use it, and work alongside you while you learn. The change is yours. That is not a caveat, it is the whole reason it holds after you have stopped coming.

Twenty-five minutes, in my own voice. No email and no sign-up.

Almost nobody who comes to me says they have a sleep problem. They come about the temper, or a decision they have gone round four times, or the fact that everything is taking more out of them than it used to. Then a bit later I ask how they are sleeping, and it turns out that went first.

If it is all you need, have it.

Nobody is quoted a number they cannot already read on this site. Programmes are quoted as a whole rather than by the hour.

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The first conversation is forty-five minutes on the phone. It will cost you nothing more than your time, and it could be the best investment you make this year. If it is not right for you, I will say so and tell you what would be.