Latest / Divorce Coaches Academy / Founding Principles: What America's 250th Can Teach Us About Building a Profession Worth Trusting
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. Hey everyone, and welcome back to the Divorce Coaches Academy podcast. I'm Tracy, and today I'm joining you this holiday week on vacation in New England, different from Florida, and I'd like to have a conversation that's also a little different from the ones we usually have. Over the past several weeks, like many people, I have found myself reading articles and listening to conversations surrounding emergus. two hundred and fiftieth anniversary Now I should probably begin with a confession. I am not much of a history buff, quite unlike various members of my household. If you ask me to recite dates or explain military campaigns, I am definitely not the person you want on your trivia team. But what drew me in wasn't history, and it wasn't politics either. I know, shocking to some. It was a question sitting quietly underneath so many of the conversations I was hearing. How does something last for two hundred and fifty years? Not perfectly. Certainly not without conflict or disagreement. But despite all of that, how does an idea continue to evolve over generations? How does it survive changing leaders, changing cultures, and changing times? The more I thought about that question, the less I found myself thinking about America, and the more I found myself thinking about professions. Yeah, my profession. Now, before our listeners in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, throughout the Arabian Gulf and soon across Europe wonder whether today's episode has suddenly become an American history lesson? I promise it hasn't. In fact, I The international reach of divorce coaches academies community is exactly why this question feels so meaningful to me. Our students practice within different legal systems, court structures, and cultures, yet the underlying work is remarkably similar. Human conflict doesn't recognize national borders. The uncertainty people experience during divorce feels familiar whether someone lives in Florida, Ontario. Melbourne, Auckland, Dubai, or London. The laws differ. The procedures differ, but the responsibility we carry as professionals doesn't. That responsibility, what it means to build a profession worthy of public trust, is what I'd like to explore today. Because I don't believe professions become professions simply because enough people begin using the same title. They become professions because enough people commit themselves to a shared set of principles. That may sound like a subtle distinction, but I think it's one of the most important distinctions we can make. Here's what struck me about the anniversary of America itself. What has fascinated historians for two and a half centuries isn't simply the Declaration of Independence. It's everything that followed. The Declaration was an extraordinary moment. But if history had stopped there, we probably wouldn't still be talking about it. What came next was much harder. People had to determine what kind of nation they were actually trying to build. They debated principles, established systems, made mistakes, corrected some of them, and yet kept growing. Declarations are only beginnings. The enduring work happens afterward. And somewhere in the middle of that thought I found myself asking a different question. What are the founding principles of divorce coaching? Not what do divorce coaches do? Not what services do we offer or how do we market our businesses? Yeah, those are important questions, but underneath them is something more fundamental. What do we stand for? What principles should remain true regardless of where someone practices, what their professional background is, or how much this profession grows over the next 50 years? Where this question began for me is not where Divorce Coaches Academy was founded. They became so much earlier, sitting in mediation rooms and watching families. struggle with decisions they were fully capable of making, but not yet fully prepared to make. For nearly two decades I've had the privilege of working with families during some of the most difficult conversations of their lives. Over time I noticed something that repeated itself with remarkable consistency. It wasn't that people lacked intelligence, quite the opposite. These were thoughtful people Successful professionals, loving parents. But divorce has a way of disrupting our ability to access the very strengths that have served us all of our lives. Looking back, that shouldn't have surprised me. Divorce isn't simply a legal event, a financial event, or an emotional event. It's all of those things happening at once. When people are grieving the loss of a relationship while trying to understand an unfamiliar legal process. Worrying about their children and making significant financial decisions, clarity becomes difficult. I watch attorneys answering legal questions while clients still struggle to articulate what they wanted. I've watched mediators try to facilitate negotiations with people who hadn't yet organized their thoughts or identified their priorities. I've watched therapists help clients heal emotionally while those same clients left wondering what practical steps they need to take next. No one was doing anything wrong. Each discipline was doing exactly what it was trained to do. But it couldn't shake the feeling that something was missing. Not another expert, another process. Someone whose role was to help people develop the capacity to participate more effectively in all of the professional relationships surrounding their divorce. At the time I didn't have language for that. So I did what I believe professionals should do. I went looking for education. There was one divorce coach certification program at the time, and I enrolled because I believed deeply in the potential of divorce coaching. Becoming a divorce coach fundamentally changed how I thought about supporting people through divorce, and I later had the privilege of working alongside that organization to help advance the field. Those years were invaluable. They taught me what divorce coaching could become. But they also raised new questions. As my work evolved and I became more involved in the broader dispute resolution community. The American Association, the American Bar Association, excuse me, was being articulate enough in defining divorce coaching. One that recognized it as a dispute resolution process designed to support clients in making informed decisions, improving communication, and participating more effectively in the divorce process. The more I compared that definition with what I saw in practice, The more I recognized an important distinction. Much of the education available at the time was rooted primarily in life coaching principles and divorce support. And there's absolute value in both. But as someone whose professional identity had been shaped by alternative dispute resolution, I saw divorce coaching differently. I didn't see it as an extension of life coaching. I saw an extension of dispute resolution. That distinguish that distinguishment changed everything because it led me to an entirely different set of questions. Not how do we become better coaches? But what kind of profession are we trying to build? Those are not the same question. One asks about skills, the other asks about identity. And professions like Countries are shaped far more by identity than by individual talent. Anyone can adapt a title. Building public trust requires something much deeper. One of the things I love most about ADR is that it has never simply been about solving problems. That may sound odd. Most people come to mediation because they have a problem they want solved. But the longer I've worked in this field, the more I've come to believe ADR isn't about providing answers. It is about creating processes that allow people to discover their own answers. If my role as a mediator is to tell people what they should do, I've misunderstood my role. The same is true in divorce coaching. Our responsibility is not to direct someone's future, it's to help them develop the capacity. the capacity to direct it themselves. That is self determination, and I don't think it's simply one principle among many. I think it's the principle from which almost everything else grows. It's an expression of respect. It acknowledges that our clients remain the experts in their own lives even during periods when they may temporarily lose confidence in their own judgments. That perspective changes the nature of the professional relationship. Instead of asking, how do I help this client? We begin asking, how do I strengthen this client's ability to help themselves? Those questions sound similar, but they lead to very different places. When people hear the word coach, they often assume our role is to motivate, encourage, or inspire. Those things have their place, but they're not what makes divorce coaching unique. What makes divorce coaching unique is that we exist within an interdisciplinary process. Our work is inseparable from the work of attorneys, mediators, financial professionals, mental health professionals, parenting coordinators, collab practitioners, and judges. We're not simply practicing alongside those professions. We're practicing because those professions exist. If mediation didn't exist, there would be no mediation process to prepare clients to engage in. If attorneys weren't providing legal advice, there would be no legal conversation to help clients organize themselves around. Divorce coaching doesn't replace these professions. It enhances a client's ability to benefit from them. I've often said divorce coaching is not about becoming the most important professional in the room. It's about helping every professional surrounding the client become more effective because the client is more prepared, more organized, and more capable of participating meaningfully in the process. When that happens, everyone benefits. The attorney spends less time untangling emotion and more time practicing law. The mediator spends less time trying to establish readiness and more time facilitating thoughtful negotiation. And most importantly, clients begin making decisions from a place of greater clarity instead of greater fear. That isn't accidental. It's the result of understanding our place within a larger system. Professions mature when they become less concerned with what they do and more concerned with why they exist. For me, divorce coaching has never been about adding another service to the divorce marketplace. It has always been about improving the quality of decision making. We exist because human beings rarely make the best decisions when they are overwhelmed by conflict. Conflict narrows our thinking, accelerates our reactions, and convinces us that urgency matters more than reflection. Anyone who works with families in conflict has watched it happen. People stop listening. They become consumed with proving their right and make that decision that solve today's emotional discomfort while unintentionally creating tomorrow's conflict. Not because they're bad people. But because they're human. And this is where I want to gently challenge something that has become common language in our field. For years we've talked about being trauma informed. I appreciate the tremendous contributions trauma research has made to our understanding of human behavior. But I've increasingly found myself using a different phrase conflict informed. Not because trauma isn't important, of course it is. But divorce coaching is not fundamentally a trauma treatment model. It's a conflict engagement model. Our role isn't to diagnose or treat trauma. Our role is to understand how conflict influences thinking, communication, relationships, and decision making. And then help clients engage with that conflict more intentionally. That is an ADR mindset. That distinction has profound implications for how we educate professionals. If we understand divorce coaching primarily as life coaching, we'll teach one set of skills. If we understand it as a dispute resolution profession grounded in self determination, informed decision making, interdisciplinary collaboration, ethics, our educational priorities become very different. We aren't simply teaching people how to coach, we're teaching them how to think, cultivating practitioners who understand the principles deeply enough to exercise thoughtful judgment in situations where there are no easy answers. Because divorce rarely presents us with easy answers. It presents us with human beings, and human beings deserve professionals who not only do what they do, but But understand why they're doing it. One of the unexpected gifts of helping educate divorce coaches has been watching this profession grow well beyond the country where much of its early development occurred. Long before Divorce Coaches Academy existed, professionals in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the Middle East were recognizing the same gap I had observed in mediation. The need for divorce coaching was never uniquely American. But as my own work evolved, a question began to emerge. Is there a difference between teaching internationally and building an international profession? At first glance those sound almost identical, but they're not. Any educational program naturally reflects the environment where it was created. A curriculum developed in the United States will understandably reference American legal process, terminology, and court structure. Had divorce coaching first developed in Australia or Canada, the model would have reflected those systems instead. There's nothing wrong with that. It's simply how professions begin. What interested me was a different question. What belongs to the profession and what belongs to the jurisdiction? One of the beautiful things about ADR is that it has always understood this distinction. The principles remain remarkably consistent. Self-determination, Informed decision making, professional neutrality, respect for client autonomy, interdisciplinary collaboration, ethical practice. Those principles don't belong to one country, one court system, or one educational institution. They belong to the profession itself. The application of those principles, however, should also reflect the legal, cultural, and professional context in which people practice. To me, that's not inconsistency, that's integrity. Respecting context is, in many ways, another expression of respecting self-determination. As Divorce Coaches Academy has grown, that philosophy has become increasingly important to us. When professionals from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Arabian Gulf joined our community, and now as we begin developing educational opportunities in Europe, we haven't asked. How do we export what we've already created? We've asked, how do we work alongside professionals within their own countries to build a profession that reflects both universal ADR principles and the realities of their own legal systems and cultures? We're not asking professionals around the world to become American divorce coaches. We're inviting them to become divorce coaches within their own professional communities. Those are not the same thing. That's exactly what founding principles are meant to do. Provide enough consistency that professionals recognize one another whether they practice enough flexibility to serve families in a way that are meaningful within their own systems. Medicine looks different around the world, law looks different around the world, mediation certainly does, yet each remains grounded in shared professional principles. Divorce coaching deserves that same thoughtful evolution. Not an American profession with international students, but an international profession united by principles and responsive to the communities it serves. Working alongside professionals for so many countries has also taught me that education isn't simply about sharing knowledge. It's about listening to how conflict is understood in different cultures. To how legal systems shape decision making, to perspectives that challenge our own assumptions. That kind of listening doesn't weaken a profession, it strengthens it. And there's something we don't discuss nearly enough when we talk about professions. Why they exist in the first place? It's easy to assume they exist for the people who practice within them. We create standards, certifications, codes of ethics, associations, and education programs. All of that matters. But I don't think that's why professions exist. Professions exist because the public deserves to know who they can trust. When someone hires an attorney, they're simply purchasing legal knowledge. Right? They're also placing extraordinary trust in another human being during one of the most significant moments of their life. The same is true when someone hires a physician, a therapist, a mediator, or a divorce coach. Very few people seek out a divorce coach because life is going exactly as planned. They come to us overwhelmed, emotionally exhausted, financially concerned and trying to make decisions that will affect not only their future, but the future of their children and family. That kind of trust deserves more than good intentions. It deserves competence, something we speak about as Education as though it exists to help professionals build successful businesses. Education certainly contributes to professional growth, but that's not its primary purpose. Education exists because our clients deserve professionals who know what they are doing, and equally important who understand what falls outside of their role. I've often said one of the most important sentences a profession can learn is that's outside my role. Not because we're unwilling to help, but because we understand that helping sometimes means referring. I don't see referrals as giving business away. I see them as one of the clear Clearest expressions of professional confidence. When I support a client and looking for an attorney for legal advice, I'm not diminishing my role. I'm respecting theirs. When I encourage someone to think about working with a therapist because deeper emotional healing is needed, I'm honoring the expertise of another profession. That's one of the defining characteristics of a mature profession. It understands its place within a larger system. And that takes humility. The more years I spend in this work, the more convinced I become that humility isn't the opposite of expertise. It's one of the highest forms of professional competence. It reminds us that our responsibility isn't to have all of the answers, it is to ask thoughtful questions. Exercise sound judgment and know when another professional is better positioned to serve the client. That's what professional standards are really about, not creating barriers, creating trust. So, as I think about America's 250th anniversary, I keep coming back to one simple realization. Every generation inherits something it did not create. The people celebrating that anniversary today didn't write the declaration or draft the Constitution. What they inherited was a responsibility to preserve the principles worth carrying forward while continuing to improve what could be improved. Professions ask exactly the same thing of us. None of us created divorce coaching. None of us owns that. Each of us inherited it at a particular moment in its evolution, and future generations will inherit something different because of the work all of us are doing right now. I find that incredibly hopeful because stewardship isn't about resisting change. Healthy professions should change. They should should keep learning and keep asking difficult questions and become more inclusive, more thoughtful, and more responsive to the people they serve. Stewardship is about ensuring that as the profession evolves, it never loses sight of the principles that gave it purpose in the first place. Those principles are what allow us to innovate without losing our identity. When I look at our profession today, I see extraordinary reasons for optimism. Professionals are entering this work from mediation, law, mental health, financial planning, HR, and beyond. Thoughtful conversations are happening across the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Arabian Gulf, and soon Europe. We're asking better questions than we were asking ten years ago. Not because we have found all the answers, but because we've become more thoughtful about the questions. Perhaps that is the greatest privilege of working in a profession that is still very young. Very few people get to help shape a profession while it is still discovering its voice. We do. Every client we serve, every ethical decision we make, every referral we offer, every time we choose principles over convenience or strengthen a client's capacity instead of solving the problem for them, we are helping define what it means to be a divorce coach. That's a responsibility I do not take lightly. When I first began reflecting on America's 250th anniversary, I thought I was thinking about history. I realized I was actually thinking about responsibility. Every generation inherits institutions, professions, and ideas that someone else had the courage to begin. The question isn't whether we'll change them, because we will. The question is whether we understand them deeply enough to know what should never change. For me, those are founding principles. A belief in self-determination, a commitment to ethical practice, respect for interdisciplinary collaboration, the humility to recognize the limits of our role, and the understanding that our greatest responsibility is not to direct our clients' lives, but to help them develop the capacity to direct their own. My hope is is that years from now people won't remember who founded one organization or another. I hope they'll remember that this generation of divorce coaches chose to build a profession worthy of the trust families place in it. Because professions aren't built on personalities. They're built on principles. And those principles aren't preserved by the generation that first articulated them. They're preserved by every generation that chooses to live them. So I want to thank you for spending this time with me today. I hope this conversation prompts you to reflect not only on your own practice, but on the profession we're building together. Until next time, take care of yourselves, take care of your clients, and take care of this profession. Its future is in very good hands. Thank you for listening to the Divorce Coaches Academy podcast. For more insights and training, visit divorcecoachesacademy.com.