Clean Break

In a random, chaotic system like the traditional system of divorce, you seldom know what’s coming next. As a result, making informed, forward-looking decisions is all but impossible.

A child’s fear of the dark stems from uncertainty about what may be lurking in the unlit corners. Fear of public speaking, one of the most common and debilitating of all human fears, arises largely from uncertainty about how the audience will respond. (“Will they be able to see how nervous I am? And will they listen, or will they just sit there, judging me and tallying my inadequacies?”) And those who fear death fear most of all the uncertainty in which it is shrouded.

The current system of divorce is filled with fear, and rightly so, for you simply never know what’s coming next. Will it be a letter from your spouse’s attorney, suggesting you’re an unfit parent? Will it be a court order for a parental assessment? Will it be a motion to slash your living allowance because your spouse alleges you squander money in casinos and nightclubs?

Whatever it is, you can almost be certain it won’t paint you in flattering brushstrokes, and after the picture gets framed in an affidavit, it gets filed in the court records forever.

When you make decisions from a place of fear, you give away all your power to your opponent, and I don’t mean just your spouse. The system is your real opponent, for it is through fear creation that the lawyers position their clients to win, the same kind of “win” a general proclaims as the field is strewn with bodies from both sides of the battle.

“Win-win” is rarely the term that comes to mind when you’re in the midst of a divorce, especially when you’re aligned with a lawyer who stakes a position far, far away from “win-win” in hopes of ending up somewhere near the middle. The situation is made even worse when a client is on the path of revenge, determined to “win” at all costs.

Fairway Divorce Solutions takes a different view of victory: a “win-win” approach whose benefits extend not only to all involved in a divorce but to society as a whole. There is a better way to end things. It’s not about “How can I lose the least?” It’s about “How can we both win the most?”

The present system of divorce both creates and thrives on a climate of fear, the wellspring of which is uncertainty. As you move at a snail’s pace through the divorce battle, with your spouse hunkered down in one camp and you hunkered down in another, you have no way to ascertain the other side’s next move.

You remain, therefore, in a constant state of high alert, a position of perpetual defensiveness, ready to react (and we’ve already explored the dire negative consequences of operating in reactive mode).

So if you’re not in control and your spouse isn’t in control, who is? Some would say the lawyers, whose correspondence and maneuvering keep their clients constantly in the fear-inducing dark. But even they are not in control.

Never knowing what may come next from opposing counsel, the lawyers must remain forever ready in a defensive, reactive position. Regrettably, this state of perpetual defensiveness precludes proactive problem solving.

Case in point: A recent client thought all was well—that things were moving slowly forward. Then out of the blue came a massive affidavit from her spouse. Her lawyer’s comment: “Wow, I didn’t see that coming. They must have spent most of the summer preparing this attack.” And what an attack it was, demanding full custody of the children and full control of the business—more than 100 pages of permanent relationship and co-parenting destruction.

You may very well land a lawyer who’s a strategic thinker and proactive problem solver by nature, but that nature simply cannot thrive in the current system because there’s always another lawyer somewhere in the picture.

Another way to look at fear is as a negative anticipation of something to come. In the divorce process as we know it, decisions are made, more often than not, from a place of such fear, a place plagued with maybes and what ifs and I don’t knows.

“If I don’t take forceful action right away, how do I know the other side won’t try to take advantage of me?” “If I don’t take this offer, maybe the next one will be even worse.” “If I don’t give in to my spouse’s demands for the summer cottage, some of my unsavory secrets might come out during the custody hearings.” “My spouse’s lawyer said if I don’t agree to my husband’s conditions, they’ll see me in court, and it won’t be pleasant.”

We really need to heed Molière: “Unreasonable haste is the direct road to error.” More simply, as the old saying goes, “Haste makes waste.”

Another adage you’ve heard me use before promises “We are never handed anything we cannot handle.” And like all enduring adages, this one arises from a timeless, universal truth. Sometimes to our great surprise, we find we can handle most of the curveballs, fastballs, knuckleballs, and screwballs that life throws our way. Think about your past. In hindsight, was there anything you really couldn’t handle? The answer must be no because you’re still here to answer the question. In most cases, it is negative anticipation of what is to come that is our enemy, not what actually comes.

In this context, fear loses its legitimacy: It is reduced to a state of mind whose foundation is shaky at best. And if we can change our frame of reference, we can illuminate fear and chase it out of those dark places in which it resides.

For help, you can look to innovative thinkers who’ve expanded upon the “power of positive thinking” model and helped countless people tap the amazing power of their minds. For example, Brian Tracy’s Goals! can help you use visualization to set in motion a positive future. When I started putting pen to paper and writing about my goals as you did in the painted picture—about what I wanted to create in my future—things started happening for me. Without setting my goals and steering in the direction of those goals, who knows where I would have ended up? Almost certainly it wouldn’t have included writing this book or the clarity with which I now pursue my mission to change the way people move through divorce.

It is very difficult to make informed, “eyes wide open” decisions when feeling pressured or afraid. To ensure you’re getting to the right outcome for you and your family, you need a step-by-step problem-solving process that facilitates decisions you can live with. After all, the division of assets and the other questions you’ll face during your divorce will require some of the most important decisions of your life, and the impact of those decisions will extend far into your future.

As such, you need to be able to ask questions, get answers, and know you can trust those answers before you settle on any course of action, no matter how minor it may seem at the time. You need to trust that details will receive the attention they deserve—that all the t’s will be crossed and all the i’s dotted—because an error or omission can mean the difference between long-term security and financial ruin.

The only way to ensure you’ve made the right decisions and, in the end, arrived at a fair settlement, is to ensure you took smart steps along the way. Back-and-forth correspondence and position bargaining, the hallmarks of the traditional divorce process, are the very antitheses of methodical decision making. You need to know where you came from, where you’re going, and exactly how you’re going to get there. Only then you can trust that you’ve arrived in the right place.

Remembering that fear arises from lack of knowledge, giving people the knowledge they need empowers them to make enlightened decisions. Such empowerment springs from five main sources:

1. Knowing that a sound and intelligent process exists

2. Clearly understanding that process (not only what will happen, but why)

3. Trusting that each decision along the way will hold up and impact the final outcome exactly as it should (something I call “empowered decision making”)

4. Having the information you need to make prudent, forward-looking decisions

5. Knowing full well the information that guides your decisions is based on fact, not on perception or fallacy or fear

A truly empowering system like the Fairway Divorce Solutions approach not only allows its participants to make informed, educated decisions, it ensures they do. To the participants, these decisions sound no intuitive alarm bells; they leave no lingering doubts about “what have I done?” They just feel right because they arise from a sound analytical process.