Common Divorce Mistakes: Setting Goals and Prioritizing
What do you want out of your divorce?
That can be a difficult question. Perfectly valid answers abound:
- “I want custody of my children.”
- “I want to ensure my financial security.”
- “I want just want it to end.”
But while those answers are valid, they’re not particularly useful. It’s one thing to put some effort into making sure that the divorce will pay this month’s phone bill; putting in the kind of mental effort that will help you build a ‘big-picture’ plan of how you want things to end up is much harder. It’s also much more important.
Ask yourself what really matters to you — not as relates to the divorce, but in your life as a whole. Do you value your relationship with your mother? Your opportunity to go to school in Egypt? Your child’s dream of going to college? Where do you see your priorities 20 years from now?
Once you’ve spent some time in contemplation and made a list of what your real priorities are, ask yourself how the divorce process might hinder or further those goals. More importantly, ask your lawyer how the process might hinder or further those goals, and talk about how to turn as much of that hindering as possible into furthering. Don’t talk in legal terms, or about how you think you should the process should further your goals — let your lawyer figure out the how, you focus on making sure you’re confident about what you want.
Prioritizing
Accept that you’re not going to achieve all of your goals. Divorce is, by its nature, a process of compromise. That’s why it’s important to decide which of your goals is the most important — in other words, which is going to have the most long-lasting, meaningful positive effect on your life. Decide which ones you would be willing to make sacrifices in order to achieve, and which would be merely nice to have.
Also accept that your goals need to be realistic. There’s a very easy test for this: ask yourself how you would respond if your spouse came to you with the same (or a very equivalent) demand. If you’d laugh in their face, you might need to consider a more realistic goal.
By carefully determining and then prioritizing your goals, you’ll be giving your attorney a blueprint of what ‘success’ looks like — and they’ll be much more able to attain that goal when they understand what it’s supposed to look like.
Too much information?
We focus exclusively on family law matters so we are always available to answer your questions and help.
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