Let Your Values Stabilize You During Divorce

Sometimes during the divorce process, couples have nuanced issues that require expertise beyond my scope. To help them, I have a team of trusted colleagues who I rely on to guide clients through financial or emotional struggles. During this blog series, I have asked members of my team to come up with some important tips to help divorcing couples during the process.

My third blog writer is Jeff Arthur, founder of The Values Conversation, a coaching and consulting company that focuses on values based growth. In this blog, Jeff discusses how knowing your values can keep you stable when the ground under you begins to shake during your divorce.

“If you are going through a divorce, or a separation, no one needs to tell you that it is overwhelmingly difficult.  You can be hit with more than you would have ever expected which can bring up emotions in you that you very possibly never thought you would experience, and a great deal of the time, we don’t always handle those emotions very well at all.

It is always important to know what we stand on as individuals and it is never more important to know what we stand on than when we are struggling with something so personal as divorce and literally losing our equilibrium in life. 
What we stand on, what our life foundation is begins to factor in like never before.  I want to suggest for you that what we stand on and what our foundation is made up of is our values.

The more we know what our values are, the more stabilized we are when we get hit with the struggles of divorce.  Conversely, when we don’t have a firm foundation that we know we are standing on, the emotions can and will begin to control us and then all we are doing is reacting to situations we’ve never been in before quite possibly making things worse for us because at the moment we are angry, sad, frustrated, humiliated, lonely, betrayed…the list can go on and on.

I encourage you to know what you stand on.  What do you value more than anything else?  Know those values and make decisions based on them.  The emotions will follow those decisions, rather than the emotions controlling your decisions.”

Jeff Arthur

Jeff Arthur is the founder of The Values Conversation, a coaching and consulting company that specializes in facilitating values based growth for both individuals and businesses.  Jeff is also a sought after keynote speaker and is seen as one of the nation’s preeminent authorities on leadership, team building, and executive coaching.  He has been identified by Small Business Monthly Magazine as one of the “Top 100 People to Know in Business in St. Louis,” and he is one of the former co-hosts of “The Smart Biz Show,” a nationally syndicated radio show.

Jeff works with CEO’s, executives, and their leadership personnel to help team members thrive though a better understanding of their personal, team and organizational values while helping to develop the strategies that come from those values.

Jeff works with executives from Fortune 100 & 500 companies as well as CEO’s, presidents and owners of medium to small businesses.  Organizations that engage with Jeff thrive and see dramatic improvements in productivity, revenue, associate retention and internal morale.