Listen. You Cannot Afford Not To.
Listening is probably the least respected and most useful skill anyone can have in any aspect of life. Relationships, business, school, and any other facet of dealing with another person is applicable to the use of listening as a skill.
Second Wind Consultants deals with clients who are all good people. We do not take people who are trying to pull something or anyone trying to use a process meant to help people as a means to enrich their lives. All of these clients are also people who are being crushed by debt. None of these people got to the point they are at on purpose in an effort to defraud a creditor or for any other nefarious reason. Most bankers could have helped these people if they were willing to listen. Bankers are viewed as the enemy, not because they are the person who is going to sue a client, but because they refuse to listen.
No human being with an ounce of decency can listen to the stories we hear and not go to bat for the people behind the facts. We have an entire non-profit division for the purpose of not turning people away simply because we cannot and will not make the choice to refuse to listen. If a banker, even once, chose to truly listen, they would go to the top of the food chain and beat down whatever obstacles were in the way to get the client, another deferment, some counseling to revamp the business, or some other means to save the enterprise they initially believed in enough to loan money for.
Some businesses are not salvageable, but the staggering number of businesses going down in flames across the country is not the number that truly could not survive. Debt forgiveness should not be a battle, our program is based on logic! What is the purpose to suing someone with no money? Why not agree that the choice to loan the initial cash was a bad choice and both go on their way? Most people would probably fall into that category and in our capitalist nation it cannot and will not happen. A bank will never leave the altar of the almighty greenback to which they pray. Why not? They do not and cannot listen. People are trained through life to avoid listening at all costs. This does not mean they do not hear what you are saying, but instead of internalizing the dialogue and using their own judgement and feeling the repercussions emotionally which result from these terrible, tragic, stories people are trained to be thinking of a response.
Are you guilty? Catch yourself the next time you are thinking of what YOU want to say when someone else is talking. STOP and LISTEN! You can make a conscious choice to listen.
Second Wind Consultant listens. I could probably do my job for every client without ever hearing the “sob story.” Those details of tragic misfortune behind the numbers. I could act like the opposition and use the numbers to argue, and I do, but I also do something more. I listen. I let the client tell me their troubles. I hear about the divorce resulting from the weight debt is placing on a relationship. I hear about the client who’s wife has Multiple Sclerosis and his every dollar is going to medical bills and forcing him to decide if he buys the medication so his wife can smile again without pain twisting her features or if instead he pays the electricity for his house. I hear about the man who spent his entire life in the art industry and it is his only marketable expertise and is now going blind from a medical condition deteriorating his retinas.
How can we not get personally involved? How can we not get angry at a banker picking apart these issues and basically calling our clients scum because instead of paying for an outrageous loan payment on a business that cannot support itself they are putting food on the table for their children. Would you be able to ignore it? Of course you would, if you were thinking about how they were lying and how they are trying to “screw over” the bank you work for.
Let me ask the question a different way. Could you be emotionally detached from the situation if you truly listened and accepted these indisputable facts without the armor of the words running through your head deflecting the information before it sank in? The answer is no. There is no way. Any banker that for a minute let their guard down and truly listened to the facts would be in tears from what these people go through.
That’s the crux of the issue. These are people. They are not $1,000,000.00 in Ohio and $500,000.00 in Florida. These are Keith, and Janet, and Denise, and John, and Matthew, and Michael and a host of other PEOPLE! In a society where we can go around the world to fight for other peoples freedoms because we have that much moral conviction, we are willing to put our own citizens at risk as soldiers, whatever your political leanings on the wars we fight, you should agree we should be able to save the people at home being killed off by our economic system. Are you less dead by a bullet than by living with no stable home, no job, no income and living day to day without any hope for the future because of debt? I personally would opt for the bullet, at least that has a finite timeframe and certain resolution.
Do not live a life that has no hope because it is not a life at all. Life is not the sum of it’s parts. Can you call walking, breathing, eating, and sleeping life? I call it a death that has not caught up with reality yet. Call Second Wind and end the pain and the torment. Do not sacrifice your family, your marriage, and your life on the altar of the dollar that the creditors pray to. Call Second Wind Consultants and get out.
We call every past civilization that practiced human sacrifice like the Mayans and the Incas backwards for that practice. Does no one realize we do the exact same thing across the planet and especially in this country every day. Open your ears and listen. Take it in. Use your gift of thought and remove the blinders. Our small business owners are being sacrificed and killed off at an alarming rate.
This blog is for more than potential clients. It is for everyone. Stop the slaughter, whatever it takes. It starts with relearning how to listen.
