Who Are You Listening To

Now you might think to yourself. Yes, of course. Everyone that’s helping me right now is here for the right reasons. And they probably look like that, and maybe they really are helping you. But the reason I’m talking about this today is that I had a phone call this afternoon from someone that said, look, I’m helping a friend from school go through a divorce. And I’m just letting you know that this is what I’ve done. Can you, you know, make sure that that’s okay? So forth and so on. Now, you wouldn’t go to a plumber to give you brain surgery. You just wouldn’t do it. You’re not going to go to a builder and ask them how to bake a cake.

So why would you ask someone that has no idea about how to get divorced? Who has never, ever been through a divorce, what you should do and why you should do it? It doesn’t make sense. Think about it. It doesn’t make sense because the information that this person was given to their friend was utterly incorrect.

It actually would have got the friend that he’s going through the divorce. It would probably get them into a more difficult position. It would probably take longer. It would probably cost them more. And I got so frustrated because I thought. Okay, here it is. And you’re giving me a call to ask me what to tell your friend.

Why wouldn’t you just get your friend to call me and speak to an expert, talk to someone that actually knows what to do and how to make your friend’s life easier. And then I realized because actually, you know what, it wasn’t about the friend who was going through the separation. It’s about the person. It’s about the person wanting to be or wanting to feel needed, wanting to feel like they’re making a difference in their friend’s life.

And, you know, let’s, it could actually be that they do have the right, the right reasons. Or it could just be that there’s someone that needs to feel like they are doing something for someone else. Hopefully, this makes sense because it’s very frustrating for me to hear of people who have taken advice, especially from friends and family who have never, ever been in the situation you’re in right now.

You would not ask someone for advice if you did not want to be in the same position as that person. Let me repeat that. This is a lesson that I learned many years ago. You would not ask someone for advice if you did not want to be that person. So what would you ask for advice from someone that is not in the same position as you?

Let me explain when I was going through my divorce, and I wanted to find a way to become financially free. Why would I go and listen to someone who was struggling with money? Someone who had no idea what it was like to invest in property, mainly because if they’re not successful in property, they will tell me all the negative things, the things that went wrong.

And I can see the evidence from what they’re telling me that they didn’t have the appropriate skills or make the right decisions. Therefore, they’re not the people I want to listen to when it comes to property. I want to listen to the people that are succeeding. Stressful. The people who have made the right decisions, the people who have done the due diligence, different from everyone else because they’re the people who have the case to my success.

I want to be the sum of those people. And the more time I spend with the people who will lift me up and educate me and what I need to do, the quicker I’m going to get to the outcome that I want. So listening to someone that is not where I am is not where I need to go because maybe they’re already married.

Maybe they’ve never been married. Perhaps they’ve never, ever been in the situation that you’re in right now. Why would you listen to them? Well, why would you take advice from that person? Something I want you to think about because what. Is there a plan? Is there a plan to support you? Because if they’re there to keep you, they’re not going to tell you what to do.

They’re going to listen to you. They’re going to ask you, are you okay? You’re going to provide you with food and all that sort of stuff. They’re not going to get you advice because they don’t know the answers to the questions, and the problem is when you’re going through a separation. The more questions you ask, the more questions that are to be answered.

So make sure when you’re going through this stage. If you talk to the right people, you have the right people on your team, the people who will help you get through these quickly and with as little heartache and as little hurt as possible. We want to make this easy for you, not harder. So I’m sure you can hear my frustration in my voice during these podcasts because I hung up the phone, and I thought to myself, You’ve made this person’s life harder than it needs to be. I had no idea what to tell them. They had no idea about the steps. They didn’t know about the legal side, that he know what they needed to do financially. And I wondered to myself when I hung up, was this really about the friend?

Or was it about the person that I was talking to because why wouldn’t they have just put them on the phone to me to make it easier for them? Didn’t make sense. And I remember when I go back and think about my own divorce, it was people in my circle at the time. I no longer see those people, but at the time, they were in my circle of friends that were telling me what to do. They’re encouraging me.

And at the time, I thought they were encouraging me and being supportive. But I look back now and think, well, actually, if I didn’t take that advice, maybe I wouldn’t have made this decision. I wouldn’t have made this mistake. It may not have taken longer than it did. I may not know any of that to be accurate, but I know I could have done things better if those people weren’t telling me what I needed to do because, let’s be very honest right now at this stage of your life, where you are, you are very vulnerable.

You were very vulnerable, and someone must protect you. And if you’re not capable of protecting yourself, make sure the people around you, your confidence, the people you trust. Make sure that they are there for you and supporting you, not telling you what to do. No one should be telling you what to do unless they are an expert in this area.

They should be listening. They should be holding your hand. They should be caring for you. They should be coming even with you. If you need them to, to an appointment with a professional. But they should not be telling you, do this, do this, do that, do that. Because if they are, you need to ask yourself what is their agenda?

And the reason this is so important is that, in many cases, these people actually love and care for you. It is possibly so much that they think that the actions or support they’re giving you will make it happen quicker. The best advice anyone could give you would be to try and get this done as quickly as possible and be amicable.

If they’d telling you to start a war, if they’re telling you, don’t let them get away with that. You need to stand up for yourself. There’s nothing wrong with standing out yourself, but just be mindful of the consequences that happened. If you go to war, because Wars are expensive, was a very, very expensive.

And the truth of the matter is if you go back through history, no one wins from a wall. There are only losers on both sides. Even if someone puts their hand up and says that they won. And you don’t want to be in that position. You want to find a way to make it amicable because life’s too short of having regret life’s too short of having made a decision that you think twice about.

I’m telling you this because I’m on your side. And I want to just warn you. You might have no one at the moment in your life that is like this. Or you might have a few people around you, and this might just be a little wake-up call for you to think about what they’re telling you. And to really ask yourself, is this the best step for me?

Because it’s got to be about you, not about the person that you’re taking the advice from. It’s gotta be about you and what you want and how you feel and what support would best make your life easier?

So that’s it for this week, just a real quick one, but I felt the need to just voice these concerns because you must get the right support network and get the right advice. If you need some help from me, you know, where I am popping in my Facebook group at the Divorce Angel Facebook group, you can email me at tanya@tanyasomerton.com.au or tanya@divorceangel.com.au.

And I will do everything. And I mean, everything I can to try and make your life easier. And hit you in the right direction with all of my skills, my network of experts and my own experiences. That’s what makes me stand out from other people because I’ve been where you are. I’ve done what you were doing.

I know what it’s like, and it doesn’t matter what someone says. It’s a difficult time, but we can make it easier if you take the proper steps. All right. My friends that sit for this week, I hope you have a fantastic week, and I’ll talk to you again soon.