Divorce Without Destroying Your Business or Career, #53

An ending is a new beginning,

Hey friends, this is it—the grand finale for On Fire Empire! Next stop? Our big, bold rebrand to The Splitting Smart Podcast! But before we fully dive into this exciting new era, we need to tackle something major: how to keep your career or business thriving during a divorce.

Let’s face it—divorce is messy. But here’s the deal: it doesn’t have to take down everything you’ve built. Whether you’re a small business owner or crushing it in your dream career, you can safeguard the work you’ve poured your heart into.

In this episode, I’m sharing my go-to strategies to help you stay focused, protect your livelihood, and dodge the classic pitfalls that can throw you off track. We’ll cover why your business or work matters more than ever, how to schedule your energy (instead of letting divorce drain it), the power of having a flexible game plan, and how to build a rock-solid support system that actually lifts you up.

You’ll get real-world advice, a few ‘aha!’ moments, and plenty of tools to help you split smart without letting the chaos of divorce derail your life. You’ve worked too hard to let that happen. Let’s do this!"

What’s Next?

The Splitting Smart Podcast, launches January 6th. Get ready for all-new episodes full of tips, tools, and strategies to navigate family law conflicts with clarity and confidence.

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WATCH ON YOUTUBE: Kelly Bennett, Esq.

FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM:  Instagram.com/saperelawfirm

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NEED A QUALITY LEGAL HELP? Visit Sapere Law & Mediation

NEED SOME ENCOURAGMENT? Kelly wrote a book just for YOU:
Victim Is Not Your Name: Remembering Your True Identity In the Midst of Life Challenges

Transcript

So she sat in my office after a long day of seeing patients. This lady was a crackerjack physician, well-loved in the community and she had spent years building her medical practice. She absolutely had a calling and loved her patients and really worked hard to build the business. And then she got served with divorce papers.

As she sat in my office, she was so frustrated because she was so very busy and she was experiencing what everyone experiences when they're introduced into the divorce arena. And that is overwhelmed, emotional, upset, and racing thoughts, quite frankly. And so as we talked about divorce and what that means and what the path forward looks like, she kept asking me, "How do I focus on my patients and my business when I keep waking up at night thinking about this? It's so distracting. Well, she had a really good point. She really loved her family, was very sad about the divorce, but she had a calling in her business. And her biggest concern was how do you navigate this divorce without letting it Interfere and destroy her business and her medical practice? I think most people who have careers and businesses and have gone through divorce understand exactly what we're talking about here. So, how do you handle a giant conflict like divorce without upending your entire life?

Is it possible? Well, I'm here viewers, my wonderful On Fire Empire viewers. I'm here to tell you, yes. As a divorce attorney and a divorce mediator, I've watched this struggle with folks over 30 years of this struggle. So today I'm going to share with you four key strategies for how to protect your career and your business from a divorce.

Number one, identify what your business and your career will provide for you as you're going through divorce and after divorce. Well, what does that mean? I want you to get clear on what your business means to you, what your career means to you. Because when you get clear on that, you'll understand why it's so important to protect it.

Right? Now, it's not going to be smooth sailing. That's for sure. It just isn't because unless you're a robot, human beings, we get impacted by things in our personal lives and they, they do bleed over from time to time. But I want you to think about how important that business is, how important that career is, what it's done for you over the years, what it stands to do for you in the future.

And when times get really difficult, as a divorce proceeds, you're going to reflect back on what that business means to you because the significance of that business is going to help you implement some of these other strategies we're going to talk about. The other thing is as you identify how important your business is to you and your career and the significance of it, nurture it like a relationship.

Sometimes, when we get caught in the middle of emotional upheaval, like somebody moving out of a home, dividing assets, the complications if there are minor children, children sharing two homes, and just all the things that are involved in this thing we call divorce or a splitting up of a relationship, it's easy to ignore other parts of our lives.

But if you looked at your business or your career - like a relationship. If you had a relationship with somebody you treasure tremendously, like a significant other that you are madly in love with or your children that you absolutely adore, and you of course want the best for them, you wouldn't turn your backs on them for two weeks, a month, six months, a year at a time, would you?

Right? No. What would happen? That relationship would die. So as we're looking at the significance of your business and your career, keep in mind the idea of nurturing your business the way you would nurture a relationship. Your business would probably be impacted a little bit here or there along the way, but the nurturing, the continued nurturing, even through tough times of a divorce will keep it strong and intact and it'll help it return the favor to you as you need the benefits that come from your business.

And now. Another way you can protect your business, and this is still under identifying the significance of a business and what it does for you or your career if you don't own the business, is if you're not married or you're finishing a divorce and maybe you're thinking of getting married again. Some people do that very quickly. If you're one of those folks, think about a prenup, protect your career, protect your business with a prenup agreement where you keep the business separate. It becomes your separate property and the efforts that you make to grow your business are your separate property.

If you can get an agreement like that before you go into a marriage, that's another way of protecting it. But again, when you don't realize the significance of what your business means, it's easy to lose sight of these things. So that's the first one, identify the significance of your business and  what it'll bring to you.

 Second thing, to protect your business from your divorce, schedule thinking time. What the heck is thinking time? You know what? We are living in times where our cultures and our society and everything coming at us from the outside is so intrusive and keeping us so busy between work, running our kids from here to there, from all the activities they're in and school and all of that sort of thing. Social media, everything on the television, everything that's online. It's crazy how much is coming at us day in and day out. Thinking time is a time to step away from all this and not keep ourselves so preoccupied with all the stuff that doesn't mean anything, right? Thinking time is planned, scheduled time that you literally put it on your calendar and you schedule time to think about certain things that are going on in your life, especially as you're going through a divorce.

So I call this compartmentalizing calendar. So decide when are you going to think about work? What days of the week? Are you going to think about work Saturday and Sunday? If you're like me, you might have a tendency to work six, seven days a week. So I have to sit back and calendar when am I going to think about and do work and when am I not going to, right?

Get real intentional about it. When are you going to think about your personal care? What days of the week are you going to think about it? Focus on it. Pay attention to it. When are you going to think about your kids? It's probably every day, right? There's probably big chunks of time in your week if they're busy in school and activities you may be you know on the volleyball circuit right now.

I don't know but There are times during your week where you're going to focus on that. And then, when are you going to think about your divorce? When you compartmentalize and calendar those things, it gives you the opportunity to really kind of control the flow. The divorce does not have to be the ever present thing in your mind 24 hours a day.

There tends to be A gender difference between men and women. I've noticed over the years that not all men, but a lot of men are really good in the way their brains run of thinking in compartmentalized segments. When they're focusing and thinking on one thing, they're not thinking about 300 other things at the same time.

 And I think as women, sometimes we're built, most of us are built a little differently and there's a tendency to let this computer we have called our brain run and run and run. But I've noticed that if you develop a practice of intentionally compartmentalizing, and when your brain wants to come in and say, okay, we're going to think about what the attorney said the other day and are we going to court, maybe you're Suzy surgeon, right? And you're in the middle of a surgery and your brain starts talking to you about all those things and it starts disrupting your medical practice. The discipline is stopping the computer and telling it, no, we're not going to think about that right now. Right now we're thinking about work. That is a practice I've developed over the years.

It does work. It can be done. So this whole idea of compartmentalizing and calendaring when you're going to think about things, including the divorce, will help you tremendously in curtailing the emotional upset. So, you may have appointments with your attorney, right? Those are calendared times we're going to think about and talk about our divorce. We may need to prepare some things for our attorney or say you're going into mediation. As you know, I do a lot of family law mediation and so there's a lot of prep that goes in. Well, the people who are successful in preparing for mediation calendar it and that's the time they're going to think about it.

And then that frees you up. And gives you permission to say to your brain later on when you're trying to focus on your children or another relationship or your work. We're not thinking about that right now. I'm going talk to you as you talk to yourself. We're going think about this on Thursday between 7 and 9 a.m. Whatever it is. So write it down. Calendar it. There's a phrase that "you get what you focus on," or our friend Tony Robbins says "where focus goes, energy flows." It's so true. So if you decide you're going to compartmentalize and focus on certain things at certain times, your energy is going to go to it and you're going to be a lot more productive.

Okay. Number three, the third strategy for protecting your career and your business from divorce is build a flexible master plan with your divorce pro. If you come into my law office and you're a brand new client, the first thing we do once we get all your papers in order and you know, gather your file if it came from another lawyer or get all your information - is we sit down and we look at all of the facts, all of the needs and we develop what we call a case management plan. In mediation, it's a very similar process. We sit down with the parties and we say, okay, we gather the information. What are the issues at hand? And then we give them a schedule and a plan for how we're going to prepare for, divorce mediation or family mediation. What's going to happen at the mediation and then what we need to do after the mediation to finalize all the paperwork and conclude the process.

So that's a master plan. So whoever your divorce pro is, if it's an attorney you're seeing, ask them for case management plan. If it's a mediator you're seeing, they should be giving you a plan of action. Now, I've said it needs to be a flexible plan. And why is that? Because, sometimes things change along the way.

 There's a few corners that might be turned, some things balls out of left field and the plan needs to be adjusted a little bit and tweaked as we go along. But the reason this is a strategy for protecting your business and your career from a divorce is because when you have a plan we can see where we're going.

We can see when we will probably have court and we can not plan the vacation of a lifetime during the two months we think we're going to be in court arguing about something with the judge. Maybe it's custody and visitation. Maybe it's a protracted hearing on spousal support. But when you have a plan, you can see that in advance and you can plan around it.

That alleviates an awful lot of stress and it also alleviates disruption in your business. Also, when you have a plan, you can plan for the time away you're going to need from your business to take care of the business of the divorce. And so, as you develop with your divorce pro, a case management plan or a mediation plan of action then you can sit down with your team at your office - you don't have to tell them all the nitty gritty about your divorce, but you can say during this time period, I'm going to leave need a little more grace or a little more time away from the office, or perhaps it's not a great time to plan a really intense project where we need to really get into the grind.

If you have that ability or you can delegate, train and delegate others, to help you during those time periods. It's going to really help your business, your career, and keep it all together. And you're going feel a lot better about it. The fourth one, and I think probably the most important one, really, and this is whether you have a business, a career, or not, to really get through a divorce in a more productive and positive way, and not allow it to bleed into every other area of your life, is go build a strong inner circle.

Oh my goodness. This is so important. I've done a lot of podcasts and public speaking on this whole idea of an inner circle because it is so important. A lot of times we float through life and we've got a lot of people in our lives, a lot of friends, acquaintances, neighbors, family members, but they're not all inner circle worthy.

Inner circle people are people who deserve to be there. And who won't drag you down, who are solution oriented, and they're smart, and they're wise. So, you need a good professional, right? You need a divorce pro, mediator, or attorney, okay? You might need a really good therapist. That's a good person to have in your inner circle, but make sure they're somebody who's smart, who's wise, who has the same worldview that you do, values the same kinds of things that you do, and can be a help not a hindrance along the way.

And then your family and friends. We all have lots of family and friends who are well intended but they ought not to be in that inner circle because they may just not have the chops, they may not have the skill set and the maturity and the qualities of someone you really need to help you make good choices and decisions as you move forward.

I'm going to tell you right now, you don't need someone who's going to pat you on the back and say, yes, you are such a victim and you have every right to be mad and fosters that on and on. There is a time and a place for when you've been wronged to acknowledge it, but then it's time to move on and see the assignment in it.

That of course goes to that book I wrote a couple of years ago called Victim Is Not Your Name. Sometimes we get surrounded within our inner circle with people who just feel sorry for us. And it's nice to have sympathy and compassion, but it really shouldn't be in an unlimited capacity over time because it doesn't serve.

It just doesn't over time. So creating that strong inner circle, that strong support system is super, super important. 

Well, my On Fire Empire listeners, friends. This is the last episode, but like I said, we'll be back next month under the Splitting Smart Podcast that's dropping on January 6th. And you'll hear more advice and helpful hints and strategies for getting through tough family law situations, conflict situations, very similar to today.

Along with some other Sapere pros that are coming in and if you didn't catch the last Episode I just want to remind you that the reason we decided to relaunch and pivot On Fire Empire into The Splitting Smart Podcast is because we recognized and heard from so many people and members of our listening audience that are struggling with these very things, these issues relating to going through family disputes and divorce.

And there is a better way, there is a much better way through keen negotiation, getting some skills to do it, through mediation, those court alternatives. Those are usually the way to peace. So we'll be talking about when mediation is right and circumstances where it's probably not a good fit and what the alternatives are along with all kinds of other things within The Splitting Smart Podcast.

Thank you for listening.