How to Get Your Life Back After Divorce: Consider Hiring a Life Coach

Guest Blog By Julie Ketover, Divorce and Life Coach

Divorce is a major transition in your life. For some, the transition is welcome. For others, it’s thrust upon you. Either way, you are entering new territory and chances are you’re feeling confused and without a clear path forward.

That’s where a life coach can help.

In any major transition, such as moving, changing jobs, becoming a parent, or getting divorced, experts provide many tips to help you navigate these changes in your life. One thing is clear, however; when you are in transition, you need support – probably more support than you are accustomed to asking for or having.

A highly effective type of support is a coaching relationship. Coaching is a creative partnership, one in which your coach will help you to create the future you want for yourself – one aligned with your goals and dreams.

Divorce is draining both financially and emotionally. It can make you feel like you are stuck in place. Coaching helps you regain control and to get your life back on track.

How, you ask?

There are three key ways in which a coaching relationship can help you navigate life after divorce.

1. Coaching Helps You Take Stock of Your Life and Feelings

A coach acts like a mirror to help you see your life in an unbiased and analytical way. It’s also a unique opportunity to have a powerful conversation about your life and future. Importantly, unlike discussions with friends or family, there’s no romance, friendship or family history to get in your way.

One of the primary benefits of coaching is that it provides you the space to be wherever you are in your process and feel whatever you’re feeling without judgment. Divorce evokes many emotions. While the work of coaching does not focus on emotional healing (and is, in this way, different from therapy), sometimes you just need to permit yourself to acknowledge your feelings and share them with another person.

In coaching, you also explore where your life will take you next. In the context of divorce, a coach will offer you the tools to move past your feelings and into action. Let’s face it, moving past the obstacles is the most positive way to live a more peaceful and fulfilling life.

2. Coaches Helps You Identify Your Goals and Priorities

Once your emotions are effectively acknowledged and released, you will have clarity about what comes next. Coaches are trained to ask powerful questions to elicit that clarity of purpose even if the emotional release doesn’t produce the proverbial “aha” moment.

Divorce is ugly. All those involved can suffer and cause others to suffer. It can be a lengthy period of time characterized by anger, sadness, grief and pain. Working with a coach can support you to not only release some of the negative energy but to also gain clarity on how you really want your life to look. In an effective coaching relationship, you will learn what really matters to you and what your priorities truly are. Where do you want to be in a year? In 5 years? What do you want your life to look like- personally and professionally? A good coach will support you to make choices about how to be and what to do based on those priorities, not based on your feelings. Choices made from anger and pain are often be “bad” choices that worsen the quality of your life and the lives of others.

Consider the ramifications of choosing a path forward based on priorities rather than feelings. How would that impact your approach to asset distribution, to parenting disagreements, to new romantic relationships for you or your ex or to child custody, for example? Once your priorities are clear, your choices will be more reliable, more satisfying and less likely to cause negative consequences.

3. Finally, Coaches Help You Design a Life in Line with Your Priorities with Clear Goals, Structure and Accountability

Once you are clear on your goals and priorities, your coach will work with you to design your future. You will co-create projects that reflect what you care about. Your coach will also challenge you to create a clear “what by when” calendar and will support you to put in place the structures and plans to get there.

The benefit of creating project plans is that you remain committed to your goals and can get coached around the barriers stopping you from achieving them. You are engaged in a future orientated conversation and moving forward in your life. This is a particularly useful framework for someone going through something as all-consuming as a divorce.

Divorce is challenging. There are many ways in which to grow and learn even in this stressful time. Consider hiring a coach to support you to have space for your experience, get clear on what you care about and design plans for your life after divorce.

If you are interested in experiencing coaching, please feel free to contact me, Julie Ketover, for a free discovery session.