Industry Views & NewsBlogs

I’m an Oracle Card Enthusiast…which basically means I use decks of card with cool pictures and inspiring messages to guide me in my decision-making. It’s an interesting process and I have been having fun finding interesting new ways to play with this ancient form of wisdom & guidance. You might be asking yourself right about now, what in the world does this have to do with the Insolvency World? Well, let me answer that question J One of my ‘To Do List’ items for the month is: Write a blog article for CAIRP’s website And the month is quickly coming to a close… So I opened up Word, put my fingers on the keyboard and started trying to ‘think’ about what I could write about. Have you ever done that? Get stuck in the thinking?.... “Come on Mary Ann, what topic can you write about!”…talk about a creative block. Sheesh! So I paused, put my head in my hands, took a breather and asked myself…what would be a cool topic to discuss. And the thought that popped in my mind was, “Ask the cards”. Ok then! And this is the card I pulled – Conflict & Chaos. Seriously? Could there be a better card for summing up the Insolvency World, the process of insolvency, debt restructuring, debt elimination. I mean, really, could there??!! At first glance once might think that “Chaos & Conflict” is a negative card. On the contrary, it is anything but. It is a card of hope and encouragement. Here is the message it offers to all of us. Let’s see if you can relate this to the world of Insolvency. Opposing forces come together to create a turbulent atmosphere. – “You think?”…debtors and debt, debtors and creditors. The mere act of owing money you can’t repay or having money owed to you that you can’t recover is certainly creating a turbulent situation. But the message goes on to remind us to consider the value of chaos that serves you well, as you become unmoored by it. I can hear some of you now saying, “Say what?” … it goes on to say that scattered to the wind, you leave behind parts of yourself you no longer need and disperse seeds to reinvent yourself anew. And isn’t that the Insolvency world in a nutshell? Filing a Consumer Proposal or Bankruptcy or Receivership or a CCAA, is accomplishing exactly that. It is tearing down the structures that don’t work any longer to rebuild a fresh new structure. Although the conflict appears to exist externally, its essence is also internal, projected outward and causing disarray. Again. A BIG yes. We help debtors deal with the external mess, the debt, but the shift that takes place for them is often much deeper, changing the way they perceive debt, the way they manage their finances in the future (at least that is our hope and dream) J This card signifies that one may feel themselves facing a storm that one feels they cannot control. Yet every storm passes, and chaos leads to a reordering of things. Conflict provides a way to see more than one side of a situation. And I, for one, can attest that this is EXACTLY the AHA moment that many individuals have when they go through the insolvency process. The initial process creates feelings of fear, shame and guilt. But once they rid themselves of the huge burden of mistakes of the past, they can begin to heal and rebuild. And the final words on the card - This is a time to understand rather than be understood – are a reminder to take this life experience and learn from it. Go inside and look at the choices, the patterns, and the beliefs, the circumstances that have led you to this moment in your life and use them to rebuild a better version of you.