3 Ways to Move Forward after a Financial Loss
It’s not easy to recover from substantial financial loss. Anyone who remembers 2008 can attest to that. I didn’t suffer too badly then, but I did lose $80K overnight so I wasn’t unscathed.
At that time, it wasn’t the end of the world. I still owned my home outright. But times have changed and I don’t even have that anymore.
So how can you recover from losing everything? These are 3 ways I am moving forward:
Don’t Blame Yourself
It’s easy to do this. It was all my fault. I’m the one that is supposed to understand business and yet I completely lost everything in 83 days. How could this happen?
Understand, that it wasn’t just you and your decisions that affected the loss. There are HUGE market forces at play that are seen and unseen and you won’t know or understand them until you are actually in or out of the game. You can’t see the rip in the water when you’re in it, but when you stand back you can see it clearly. Give yourself time to reflect and understand that it wasn’t just you. It wasn’t your bad decision that caused the loss.
Don’t Play the If Only Game
This is one of my favourites. If only I’d invested in XX shares when they were 10c. If only I had kept my emergency money separate and out of the business. If only I didn’t buy that business.
It’s done. It’s happened. Learn and move on. Looking back or trying to reconstruct history and transfer it onto present day just doesn’t work.
Focus on the Future
Where to from now? Turns out the future is wide open. I have nothing, literally, to lose so I can try anything and fail. Why not? As long as I can earn some money to keep the roof over my head the world is pretty much my oyster. The worst has happened and I’m still breathing so it hasn’t killed me, the world didn’t swallow me up and so far I haven’t had stones thrown at me or people yelling at me in the street as the biggest loser of all.
These are things I thought would happen but haven’t. People may judge me privately (we all do that so I can live with it) so long as publicly they are supportive and encouraging. I have found that if you get up and keep going, there will be people everywhere helping you move forward.
Once you stop crying or beating yourself up or breaking things, let it go. Look ahead. Feel the freedom of the responsibility of the debt, the pressure to meet payroll or any other pressures you felt in your circumstance, leave you. It’s done. It’s all gone.
Now What? I can hardly wait.
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