A well-tweeted article on LinkedIn last week by Michael Lazerow pointed out the crucial need for business leaders to be able to focus. “If an entrepreneur (or CEO in general) can’t name their top 3 priorities without hesitation, how will the rest of the company know?”

I think most of us can agree on that. But how to focus? How to identify what is the problem?

I would like to tackle the subject from another angle. All of us cry out in pain. It can be physical pain. It may be a pain that something – in life, in business – just ain’t working right. Either way, this is leading to some hard, internal grief, which we do not like.

However, quite often, if we are truly honest, we become so tied up with the immediacy of what is going on around us, the plot escapes us. We lose sight of the key issues. We run about putting out fires rather than making long term decisions. And how true that is in commerce and business.

Everything has to be done at once. Cash flow pressures throw us around that we do not know whether to rush to cajole a client, appease a bank or ignore a supplier. Production lines need maintaining, but you need to spend money on raw materials. A new sales person has to be trained, but your car has broken down. And so the list goes on.

How to list the issues in terms of importance and what to deal with first? For all the horrendous problems of difficulties, has the CEO identified the key issue? In the case above, it was an inability to manage their time efficiently.

Yesterday, I was reading about the biblical story of the children of Israel as slaves in Egypt. In the book of Exodus, it describes how they called out in pain. It would be simple enough to explain that the cry was due to the physical tasks that had to be performed. Yet, commentators teach us that it took a “Higher Authority” to listen to them and realise that the true pain was the fact that the men were no longer able to have marital relations with their wives. To such depths they had fallen, but could not pinpoint their agony.

In a modern sense, this “Authority” is a mentor. As we know, a business coach is somebody who can listen and see the whole picture and then suggest a way through the dirt. Obvious? Maybe, but how many of us, when facing some serious troubles reach out for help?