Ricci M. Victorio

Dear Ricci – Business Assets are splitting my family apart!
August 18, 2008

Dear Ricci: My family has been battling with each other for the last several years as to how to manage and share assets related to our family business. Issues have now escalated where legal action has been initiated. Is there any way we can avoid this and find a peaceful solution?

I sincerely believe there is no business gain worth a family loss. The only way through the situation described above is to address the hard issues in a straightforward manner, leaving bruised egos and hearts at the door and recognizing that the only “satisfactory resolution” can be a win/win, not a win/lose scenario on anyone’s behalf. The only way to achieve this, however, is to have everyone move away significantly from their picture of what their “win” results would be. In putting aside your personal desires for individual victory, you will have collectively achieved the gold ring of reuniting your family and moving into a new era of united achievement.

There are three fundamental steps that must be taken if you want to create any kind of change in your lives:

1. You must take a realistic look in the mirror and admit the truth to yourselves. It doesn’t help if you skew the reflection with what you want, hope or feel you deserve to believe. An apple’s an apple, nothing more, nothing less. No matter how much you want to make it be a tangerine, it will never live up to your expectations of being so. It’s just an apple. So it is with our experiences – if you can remove the emotional baggage as you look at your lives objectively, it is far easier to understand the key issues.
2. Once you have taken that realistic assessment of what is so, you must take responsibility for your part in the situation. No matter how much you want to blame others, there is absolutely nothing gained by blame because it does not call for personal action. Unless you can own your part for where you are and what you have become, there is no way you can move forward. You must stop pointing at everyone and everything else and ask yourselves, “what can I do differently at this very moment to get closer to where I want to be?”
3. Once you have become totally honest in our assessment, and taken responsibility for your part in the situation, you can then develop an action plan for what you want to achieve. You can’t build a house on a foundation of muck with substandard materials and expect it to stand up for any length of time, much less hold up to the challenges of changes in the climate.

Posted by Ricci M. Victorio on August 18, 2008 | Comments (0)