Latest / Divorce Coaches Academy / Beyond the Trees: The Proposal Problem and Why Knowing What You Want Isn't Enough for Mediation
Transcript
- Tracy Callahan: Welcome to Divorce Coaches Academy podcast, where we explore the role of divorce coaching in conflict resolution, decision making, and navigating divorce with clarity and intention. Welcome back to Divorce Coaches Academy Podcast. I'm Tracy, and today I want to talk about mediation preparation. But I want to come to add it from a little bit of a different direction. We talk a lot about whether people are prepared for mediation. And I think when most people hear the word prepared, they immediately think about whether they have the information they need. Do they understand the issues? Do they know their finances? Have they talked with their attorney? Do they know what they want? Have they thought about their parenting schedule or the house or support or whatever the major issues happen to be? And yes, all of that matters. But after spending so many years sitting at mediation tables and working with people in conflict, I think there's another part of preparation. That we don't talk nearly enough about. And that's whether someone is actually prepared for the process of negotiation. Because knowing what you want and knowing how to negotiate are not the same thing. In fact, sometimes I think we do clients a disservice when we tell them make sure you know exactly what you want before you go into mediation. Sounds like good advice. And to a certain extent, it is. Of course, you should have some understanding of what matters to you. But if knowing what you want means that you have identified one very specific outcome and you have decided before you even walk into the room anything other than that outcome is acceptable, we may not have prepared you for mediation at all. We may have actually made mediation harder. And that's what I want to explore today, because this is where I think we have to start looking beyond the individual trees and begin seeing the forest. I see this frequently in mediation, right? Someone comes in and they're absolutely certain that they are prepared. They might say, I've thought about this for months. I know exactly what I want. And when we start talking, Yeah, they do. They know they want to keep the house. They know the parenting schedule they want. They know the amount of support they believe is appropriate. They know which asset they don't want touched. They know what they think is fair. So we start there. But then the other person says no. And that's where we discover whether we're actually ready to negotiate. Because now what? If the entire preparation process has been about identifying and defending an outcome, there may be nowhere else to go. The person can give me fifteen reasons why their proposal is fair. They can explain everything the other person has done that makes their position reasonable. They may be able to tell me exactly what their attorney said about the issue. But if I ask, okay, if that doesn't work, what else might you consider? Sometimes the answer is simply nothing. And that's what I call the proposal problem. We tend to assume that because somebody knows what they want, they're prepared to develop proposals. But proposal development requires a very different type of thinking. It requires you to understand not only what you want, but why you want it. What problem are you actually trying to solve? Which parts of this are really important to you? Which parts might have some flexibility? What information are you missing? What are the consequences of different possibilities? What might the other person care about? And if your preferred solution isn't available, are there other ways to accomplish some or even most of what matters to you? Guess what? That is so much harder. And then we have to remember the environment in which we're asking people to do this. We're asking them to engage in flexible, creative, forward-looking, problem solving while they're going through divorce. That's a really pretty tall order. Divorce tends to narrow our thinking. When people feel uncertain or threatened, when they're worried about money, they're worried about their children, worried about where they're going to live, angry about what has happened or simply exhausted from months or years of conflict. They don't naturally pull the camera back and look at the entire landscape. They focus on what is directly in front of them. They see the trees. The house becomes the tree, the parenting schedule becomes the tree, the retirement account becomes the tree. The support number becomes the tree. Sometimes an email somebody sent three weeks ago becomes the tree. And suddenly we are spending 20 minutes of mediation time talking about three sentences in an email when we came there to resolve a settlement. And from outside the conflict, somebody might look at that and think, why are we spending so much time on this? But usually there's a reason. There's a reason that issue has come to represent something larger. It may represent safety, it may represent control, it may represent fairness, it may represent recognition, it may represent fear about the future. Sometimes it represents I've already lost so much and I'm not losing this too. And that's why I think one of the most important things we can do in mediation preparation is become curious about what I call the proposal behind the proposal. So let's use the house because it's always such an easy example. A client says, I have to keep the house. We can take that statement at face value and start talking about the house, or we could get curious and ask, tell me what keeping the house means for you. What does that accomplish? And maybe the client says, Well, the kids have already been through enough. I don't want them to have to move and change schools. Okay. So now we know something we didn't know before. The underlying concern may not actually be ownership of that particular house. It may be stability for the children. Another client can give us the exact same position. I need to keep the house. But when we explore it, they say, I'm terrified it won't qualify for another mortgage. Again, now we're dealing with financial security and uncertainty. Someone else may say, I put everything into that house for 20 years. I am not going to let them take it away from me. Now we may be talking about fairness. Recognition, maybe grief, maybe anger. And another person may say, if I leave that house, it feels like they're getting everything, and I'm the one walking away with nothing. Same proposal, completely different problem underneath it. That's why proposal development is so much more complicated than simply asking someone what they want. And I want to be very careful here, particularly because we're talking to divorce coaches. Our job is not to talk clients out of what they want. We're not trying to make people more compliant or more agreeable. We're not deciding that somebody's position is unreasonable and then coaching them towards what we think would be a better settlement. That crosses an important line. Our role as divorce coaches is to help the client understand their own thinking and expand their capacity to participate in negotiation. And there's a distinction that I think is incredibly important here. There is a difference between developing proposals for a client and helping a client develop the ability to think through proposals. They're not the same thing. A pre-mediation divorce coach should not be saying, here's what I think you should offer. We're not practicing law. We're not deciding whether a financial proposal is a good deal. We're not telling someone what they should be settling for. What we can do is ask really good questions. If a client tells me this is what I want to propose, I can ask, what are you hoping that accomplishes? I can ask. Which part of that is most important to you? I can also ask, if that exact outcome isn't available, what else might address the same concern? Or maybe what information would you need before you could evaluate another possibility? And sometimes the answer to that last question is going to take us directly outside of our scope. Maybe the client needs legal advice. Great. Let's identify the legal question so they can take it to their attorney. Maybe we realize they don't understand the tax implications of two different financial options. That's not something we're going to answer for them. Maybe that's a conversation for a CPA or CDFA or another appropriate financial professional. That's part of good preparation too. You don't have to have all of the answers. You need to know when you don't have the answer and where the client needs to go to get it. And I think this is where divorce coaching can fill a really important gap in this professional process. Think about all of the people who may be involved in a divorce. There may be attorneys providing legal advice and advocacy, financial professionals helping people understand implications of different decisions. Mental health professional supporting someone through the emotional experience of divorce. Mediator, right? Whose job is to facilitate the negotiation while remaining neutral. And of all of those roles, they all matter. But who who I ask is spending the time with the client before mediation helping them think about how they're going to participate in the negotiation? Who is asking? What happens if you hear something in that room that you really don't like? Because more than likely they're going to. And then what happens? Maybe your spouse makes a proposal that you think is completely outrageous. Maybe they say something that feels incredibly unfair. Maybe they raise an issue that you thought was already resolved. Maybe they say something that immediately takes them back into the history of the marriage. What do they do with that? Because the first reaction might be shut down. Absolutely not. And that's okay because we're human. The goal isn't to eliminate the reaction. The question is whether the first reaction has to become the final response. A well prepared client may be able to say, Even if only internally, I don't like this. I can feel myself reacting to this. But before I respond, I need to understand what is actually being proposed. That is completely different level of participation in mediation. Now I can ask questions. What exactly does this proposal mean? What would the consequences be? What part of it doesn't react? work for me? Is there any part that does? What information do I need? Do I need to talk privately with my attorney? Is there a modification that might make this workable? Guess what? Now we're negotiating. And here's another part of this that I think is really important. Understanding the other person's interests does not mean agreeing with them. Sometimes clients resist perspective, right? Because they hear it as you're asking me to see their side. And after everything that's happened, they absolutely have no interest in doing that. Fair enough. But I'm not necessarily asking you to sympathize with them. I'm asking you to gather information. If I understand what matters to the other person, I know more about the negotiation than I did five minutes ago. It's information. If keeping a particular retirement asset is extremely important to them, and I don't particularly care which retirement asset I retain, as long as the financial outcome works, that's useful information. If their biggest concern about the parenting schedule is actually transportation, Rather than the number of overnights? That's useful information. If I can understand what problem they're trying to solve, I may be able to develop possibilities that address my priorities and theirs without either one of us simply giving in. That is negotiation. And this is where we begin moving from one proposal to multiple possibilities. Instead of here is my solution, I need you to agree to it, we start asking, what is the problem we're trying to solve and how many different ways could we potentially solve it? That is a very different conversation. And sometimes that means connecting issues. That the client has been looking at separately. The house doesn't exist independently from cash flow. Cash flow doesn't necessarily exist independently from support. Parenting arrangements affect schedules, transportation, and sometimes expenses. Decisions about one asset may change what's possible with another asset. That's the forest. The individual issues matter, but they exist within a larger system. And if we stare at one tree for far too long, we may miss an option that becomes visible only, only when we pull back and look at everything together. This is also why I think we need to be careful about assuming that mediation preparation is something any divorce coach can automatically do. I don't believe that. And I say that as somebody who's very committed to the profession of divorce coaching. Preparing someone for mediation requires specific competencies. You need to understand conflict dynamics. You need to understand negotiation. You need to understand the difference between positions and interests and how proposals evolve. You need to recognize what happens in the To decision making when people become activated or overwhelmed. You need to know how to ask questions that expand thinking without directing a client's outcome. You need to understand the role of the mediator, the role of the attorney, the role of the financial professional, and importantly, the boundaries of your own role. That's not just being supportive, it's a specialized form of divorce coaching. And I think that's where the profession gets really interesting. Because I don't want divorce coaching to simply be defined as having someone beside you who understands that divorce is hard. Yes, that matters, of course. But we can do more than provide emotional support. We have to. We can help clients develop conflict competency. We can help them become better communicators, better coordinators. Question askers, better consumers of professional advice, better able to recognize when they're reacting instead of responding, better able to identify what they know, what they don't know, and what they need to know before making a decision. And ultimately, better able to participate in their own dispute resolution process. When that work is done well, it doesn't compete with the attorney or the mediator or the financial professional. In my experience, it can make the work of all of those professionals more effective because the client arrives better prepared to use them. They know what questions they need to ask their attorney. They understand what financial information they still need. They're better able to articulate what is important to them. They may even be better able to hear a proposal without immediately rejecting it simply because it came from the other person. And they understand that mediation isn't necessarily about walking into a room and fighting for the one thing they decided they wanted three months ago. It's about trying to solve a series of interconnected problems so that two people can move forward. That doesn't mean everybody leaves thrilled. That is not a realistic measure of success in mediation. It means we've created an environment in which people have enough information, enough understanding of their own prior priorities, and enough capacity. To consider possibilities that they can make informed decisions about their future. And that's really what I mean when I talk about seeing the forest beyond the trees. When someone is in divorce, they're often standing right in the middle of those trees. Yeah, they can see the house, they can see the bank account, they can see Tuesday nights with the children, they can see the thing their spouse said yesterday. They can see the proposal sitting in front of them that they absolutely hate. What they may not be able to see yet is how all of those pieces fit together. And the most valuable thing we can do as divorce coaches is not give them the answer. It's to help them get enough perspective that they can begin asking better questions and finding their own way through. And this is exactly why we developed the pre-mediation divorce coach training at Divorce Coaches Academy. Our next training begins September 16th. It is a six-week specialized training open to certified divorce coaches and mediators who want to develop the skills to help clients prepare more effectively for the actual work of mediation. Because as we've been talking about today, Preparing someone for mediation is about much more than helping them identify what they want before they walk into the room. It's helping them understand what matters to them and why. Recognize where they may be getting stuck in a position. Think through proposals and possibilities. Prepare for difficult conversations and And to become better able to participate in the negotiation and decision-making process. That's what we'll spend six weeks learning how to do. We're going to dig into conflict and negotiation, positions and interests, proposal development, communication, decision-making, and the practical skills that help clients move from simply defending a position to being able to explore and evaluate possibilities. We'll also spend time on something I think is essential to doing this work well. Understanding professional roles and scope of practice. A pre-mediation divorce coach isn't there to give legal advice, evaluate the financial merits of a settlement, or tell a client what they should propose or accept. Part of the skill is knowing how to help clients recognize the questions they need answered. And when those questions need to go back to their attorney, financial professional, mediator, or another appropriate member of their professional team. Because there really is a difference between being ready to go to mediation and being ready to negotiate in mediation. And if we want divorce coaches to have a meaningful role within the family dispute resolution process, I think we need to be developing the competencies. that allow us to do this work responsibly and effectively. So, if this is an area of your practice you want to develop, I'd love to have you join us. The next pre-mediation divorce coach training at Divorce Coaches Academy begins September 16th, and you'll find all of the course information and the registration link in the show notes. Good mediation preparation is not about giving clients the answers. It's about helping them see beyond the individual trees. Understand the larger landscape and become more capable participants in the decisions that will shape what comes next. I want to thank you so much for joining me, and I'll see you next time. Thank you for listening to the Divorce Coaches Academy podcast. For more insights and training, visit divorcecoachesacademy.com.