Financial planning involves a lot of listening (and hearing), certainly there is a dialogue – asking questions that perhaps others don’t get to. It is good to be heard. I’m conscious that information, however well intended from a financial planner can be perceived as unrequested, intrusive and perhaps unwelcome, there is a degree of interuption. If this has been your experience I apologise. My purpose for this blog is to provide a sense of relevant and hopefully helpful commentary about matters arising in the world in which we live. Sometimes this involves reporting “bad news” which one might argue is not always helpful. I guess I’m trying to prompt, inform “shine a light” on issues that have an impact on most, if not all of us.

This week (and its only Wednesday morning) I have felt a degree of being heard in two significant ways. Firstly a difficult case that I have been working on finally got my goat so much that I fired off a polite but blunt email to the Boardroom of a multinational firm, resulting in a surprisingly rapid response with a phone call from the CEO (within about 4 minutes). This then resulted in resolution of the main problem within the next 24 hours. A result. The second was the ability to spend some time with the owner of our main software supplier, the backbone of our business. This was a really useful time (hopefully for him too) being able to express my thoughts and suggestions about requirements for the future so that I can provide better services to clients and deliver even better business effectiveness and reduce commercial risk. Again a sense of being heard, though of course the outcome is rather more long-term.

To me, being heard and understood is pretty important and perhaps I am a little over-invested in providing information that I believe should be heard and understood – which of course is open to interpretation and really little more than my opinion. By flagging up problems or drawing attention to the need to face some stark truths can seem very dreary and doomsday-like. This is something that I will probably wrestle with for the foreseeable future and so I’m simply going to come clean, that my take on life is that information is important to help plan for the future, however bleak the situation I always have hope, though inevitably some difficult decisions need to be taken and some of these may be uncomfortable. This applies to my own life as well as anyone elses.

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