119: Mindset Mini: How to Feel Comfortable With Divorce Pace
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(Unedited Transcript Below)
[00:00:42] Hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast. I am coming to you from the woods today. It is gorgeous and sunny out and I could not bear to sit in my office and record a podcast so I decided that I would take you on a walk and bring you outside and perhaps we'll get some background [00:01:00] bird noise or you might even hear a little lawnmower in the distance.
[00:01:05] It is really springy here today. Okay. Everything is in bloom. It is gorgeous out, and I wanted to bring you a Mindset Mini. This is when I share a quick concept that I want you to be able to absorb, understand pretty quickly, and then apply to your life. And today, I wanted to talk about the pace at which things move during a divorce.
[00:01:27] In my experience, working with parents, navigating divorce, there's one person who is wanting to move faster through the process. And there's one person who wants to take it slow.
[00:01:39] My mentor, Karen Bonnell shared this analogy, and I'm not sure if she created or. or she learned it from someone else. But the idea is when you're working through a divorce, and especially when you're working through developing a parenting plan, you are two hikers on a hike together. And there's one fast [00:02:00] hiker and there's one slow hiker.
[00:02:02] And in order to serve everyone the best that you can, you go at the pace of the slowest hiker, but no one gets to sit down and stop. That's the key. We're going to go at the pace of the slowest hiker, but you can't sit down. I love this analogy so much because It just is so clear. As you think about your divorce, perhaps you can easily already see yourself as, I'm the one who wants to get through this quickly, or I'm the one who wants to do this slowly and very thoughtfully, and I need more time to process what's going on.
[00:02:39] Both are very reasonable, normal positions to be in, and I want to talk you through some possibilities of what's going on for each person, and then what you can do to make it easier on yourself. So let's talk about the fast hiker first. This tends to be the person who's ready to make decisions, they're ready to move [00:03:00] on, perhaps they're the one who's actually been thinking about divorce for a longer period of time, so they've processed a lot of their emotions, they've kind of thought through what the future is going to look like, or they just have something that they really want that they think is on the other side of divorce. And that might be living somewhere different or having new partners, or it's making plans that they don't feel like they can make right now.
[00:03:32] The slower hiker is someone who wants to take a lot of time to think through things. They're probably still moving through a lot of emotions, so each decision that comes up brings emotional processing with it. There might be a lot of grief, there might be a lot of anger, frustration, resentment fear, or anxiety about the future.
[00:03:54] They're really afraid of making the wrong decision, and so they want to [00:04:00] know what all the options are. They're afraid that they might not have all the information that they need. They might feel overwhelmed a lot of the time and they don't feel a rush. They might also not be very clear about what the future is going to look like.
[00:04:18] And so for them, it feels safer to stay where they are, than move into a really uncertain future.
[00:04:26] So I often get referrals from lawyers who are supporting folks through either mediation or through the collaborative divorce process, which if you've listened to some of my other podcast episodes, you know, I'm a huge fan of staying out of court. And using a supportive team model, like the Collaborative Divorce Model, to help families create a durable plan that is going to help their family transition from volume [00:05:00] one of their life to volume two. These lawyers will send me either, , the person who wants to move quicker through and needs to find some safety and patience in moving slower, or they'll send me the person who is the slow hiker, whose uncertainty or fear about the future is preventing them from being able to make decisions that will move the process along. And so I wanted to tell you just a little bit about how I work with each person. So the person who wants to move quicker through the process, we talk about how we can get to a place where it's okay for this process to take however long it needs to take. Not that we want it to take forever, but can we be okay with if we still have evidence of the process moving forward, no matter how slow it is, can we be okay with the time it takes?
[00:05:57] And what this requires of us [00:06:00] Is really getting clear on why do we want it to go faster? What is it that we think we'll feel? What is it that we think we will have if it goes faster? And oftentimes what we uncover is that there's a decision that you want to be making that you feel like you can't make right now until the divorce is done.
[00:06:20] And so we talk about that. We also talk about what is really in your control. Sometimes when we're so focused on the divorce isn't moving as fast as we want, we lose sight of everything that we can control in our life, the kind of life that we can be living right now, even while this divorce process is happening.
[00:06:42] For the slower folks that work with me, we talk about processing our emotions. , we use a lot of space and time to work through the grief and the anger and the sadness of this marriage [00:07:00] ending and this chapter closing. And we work a lot on acceptance that the future that we thought we were going to have isn't the future that we're going to have and we're going to be creating a new future.
[00:07:12] I encourage these folks to start differentiating the parts of the process that feel easy for them to do and those that feel hard to do. Sometimes without support, the slow hiker in the divorce process can hold everything up because they feel like if we make any sort of progress on anything, then it's going to kind of snowball out of control.
[00:07:40] And what I help them do is to figure out, well, there's probably some things that are really easy, actually, for you to move forward on. Let's differentiate those from the ones that are very difficult, and then on the ones that feel hard, let's get really granular and identify why they feel [00:08:00] hard.
[00:08:00] I'll give you an example here. I've had clients who are really not progressing on coming to an agreement about spousal support after the divorce. And when we look underneath it, what we find is that the slower hiker is really uncertain about what their future employment might look like. Perhaps they've been a stay at home parent or perhaps they've just been working a little bit part time as they support the kids, and they're not sure what it's going to look like to perhaps go full time again, or find a creative career solution.
[00:08:41] And so they're holding up the spousal support conversation because they don't know what their future is going to look like. And what we find is once we can come up with that plan, Once we have a good idea of what that's going to look like, then the spousal support conversation and decisions can actually move [00:09:00] forward.
[00:09:00] But until we acknowledge that that is what needs to be dealt with, we can't move forward on other pieces. What I like to remind folks, whether they're the fast hiker or the slow hiker, is that the other person's speed is not a reflection on you. It really doesn't have to do with you. It has to do with what they're thinking about, what they're processing in their own minds.
[00:09:25] And there's a lot of different reasons that people want to move at whatever speed. They seem to want to move at, and during a divorce, oftentimes they're not going to share all those reasons with you. It just isn't a time when people are sharing the underlying reasons always.
[00:09:44] So, I just want to remind you, we don't want to go too slow or stop in this process, because that's not fair to the fast hiker. All right, they want to move on with their life, but we don't want to rush through in order [00:10:00] to appease the fast hiker because we probably aren't going to reach a durable agreement.
[00:10:06] And what a durable agreement is, is something that both parties really agree to. And it's going to be able to last through their co parenting. If we don't reach a durable agreement, chances are good, you're going to end up back in some sort of mediation or conflict resolution process, or worst case back in court, arguing about parenting plan or child support or something like that.
[00:10:34] So we really want to find this perfect pace through the divorce, where We're moving fast enough so that things are happening for the fast hiker, but we're moving slow enough so that the slow hiker can really feel safe and can have time to think through everything that they need to think through.
[00:10:58] When we hit that sweet spot [00:11:00] and people are moving at a pace that they are okay with, both people end up getting what they need and they make agreements that stick. And that is our goal. So if you identify yourself after listening to me as either the fast hiker or the slow hiker, and you would like some support navigating your divorce process, feel free to reach out to me.
[00:11:26] I would love to talk to you about how coaching might be just the thing to help you out. All right, y'all, I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful day and go enjoy the sunshine. Talk to you soon. Bye now./
[00:11:39] [00:12:00]
In every divorce, there's a fast hiker and a slow hiker. In mediation or a collaborative divorce process, the goal is to find a pace that works for both people.
Listen in to learn the characteristics of each hiker, to identify which hiker you are, and to see what you can do to feel more comfortable with the pace of the divorce.
Interested in learning more about how coaching can support you? Check out the Work with Meg page or drop me a note with your questions.
