Introduction (: 00:06

Welcome to the Better Than Bitter Divorce Podcast, where we flip the script on divorce and show you how to have a more amicable divorce resolution. I'm your host, Tania Leichliter a divorce coach, a certified life coach, and the mastermind behind the Bet ter Than Bitter five-step game plan course, where I help individuals build a pathway towards a more amicable divorce resolution.

Each week, I'll bring you uplifting stories from people who've successfully experienced amicable separations, proving that divorce doesn't have to be a battleground. Whether you're overwhelmed with grief, struggling with custody and co-parenting, or just dealing with a high-conflict individual, this podcast is here to guide you towards reclaiming your life and being what I know is possible, better than bitter.

Tania Leichliter (: 01:11

Welcome to the Better Than Bitter Podcast, episode number 32, Does Money Equal Happiness? Tom Shepard, who is the author of Money Isn't Everything, Everything Is Money, and a certified financial planner and investment advisor, has been helping people understand this relationship with money for over 30 years. He participates as a speaker in the Gross Global Happiness Summit in Costa Rica, and he speaks on...

Is it nature or nurture that is more important in your relationship with money? He uses a personal assessment tool called the Finding Your Financial Nature, and he will help you discover your genetic predisposition to money. I've invited Tom here today because I really wanted to get to the bottom of this: does money equal happiness? Do we need to have a known amount of money in our lives to create this happiness? Because in divorce,

There are so many unknowns. And especially if you're somebody who is reaching this empty nest status, and all of a sudden you're also faced with divorce, how do you plan for your future? So all of this is language of our mind and our body to be thinking about trading our time, our energy, and money to create these relationships that we have with our dream life.

So again, you should take this assessment that Tom has on his currencycamp.com website. But today we get to hear from Tom specifically, and this is part two of our series with Tom. So welcome, Tom.

Tom Shepard (: 02:44

Thanks, it's good to be back again. It's a pleasure to see you and share a little bit of time discussing this topic that is very near and dear to me.

Tania Leichliter (: 02:56

So each time we've talked, Tom, I know that the book you've written it's been living in your brain for a very long time. And being able to not only get it out of your brain and on paper, but actually just share it with other individuals holds a very important place in your heart and your journey.

And so if we could just touch a little bit about your journey that you've had to take in order to achieve this idea around happiness, and learning about your own processes, before we jump into what the book is about. Because I know that in the previous episode, we talked a lot about the book. We talked a lot about the assessment. We talked a lot about how the assessment works, but today I want to really focus on this word, happiness. What does that mean to you?

Tom Shepard (: 03:40

So happiness for me is most evident when the life I'm living is easy. When all the lights turn green. When...

you step up to the grocery store, and they open a register, and they invite you to go from fourth in line to first in line. When you make an investment and it immediately becomes profitable. When you ask your kid to do something and they just do it.

When things are easy, when things are flowing, when things are light, that's when I'm most in touch with my favorite version of happiness. And I use that terminology because there are plenty of other ways to be in touch with happiness, and there are plenty of people who are wired differently to experience

life in a way that they'll be happy, when I might just be uncomfortable.

Tania Leichliter (: 04:34

So, everybody listening is like, okay, that sounds really great, but we are all getting divorced, Tom. And there are no green lights in our world right now. They're all red lights. Nothing is easy. Every single day, we are faced with a new challenge. Every single day, we are faced with the unknowns. And even if that grocery line opens and I'm the first one there,

It almost seems like I open up my wallet and there's nothing inside. But when is life going to be easy, Tom? We're getting divorced.

Tom Shepard (: 05:07

Right? So easy has a dark side, right? Because if I'm just to goes with the flow kind of person, and the easiest thing to do in the grocery store is just whip out a credit card and swipe it and postpone the discomfort to a time in the future, it's entirely possible to,

have that, that happiness that comes from things being easy as being too easy, you know, so every way that people can be wired, there are seven different natures. My nature is lever-like systems that create ease. But other people are pursuing happiness because something is a passion of theirs, or something's exciting or fun, or satisfying. So there are a lot of different ways that people try to pursue happiness. And so if your experience in the grocery store line is creating some difficulty, it's okay to accept that at a given point in time, life can be difficult.

because it often is, but there's a truth in that. One of my favorite books was The Road Less Traveled by Scott Beck. And the opening line is that life is difficult, but once you accept that it is difficult, it's just life. And so it goes back to just being something that you have to be in the moment, with the difficulty, and then it's not as difficult.

Because once we accept it, we can work with it. So, when I think about asking my kid to do something and then they resist, do I get angry, or do I have the skill to negotiate and direct them in a way that requires a little bit more effort? I know that

If I'm trying to get somewhere fast and the lights seem to all be turning red, they're not gonna all turn green if I get more angst about it. So there is a way to sort of come back to who you are in any given moment and get back in touch with a place that is still peaceful, even when things get more difficult. And that's really the journey

That I had to go on was if I like things to be a certain way, how can I still maintain some sense of peace and contentment when it's difficult? Because that's the way I'm wired. I want things to be easy, but I also want to find a way to be happy when they are not. So my journey is

similar to everybody's journey. It's like, how do I want happiness to show up in my life? And how can I still find happiness when it doesn't show up in the way that I want it to show up? Because it might show up in another way.

Tania Leichliter (: 08:02

Had a great call today with an individual who's getting divorced, and we were talking about something very similar. And I was saying how in mediation that there's gonna be a lot of discomfort and negotiating any contract, whether it be a divorce agreement or any business contract.

With a level of uncertainty, unknowns, and discomfort, right? Because you're not going to get everything that you want in this negotiation. And how you negotiate is challenging. Because again, it's causing discomfort when you're finding that the other one is coming back with things that aren't aligned with what you want.

You know, that creates discomfort. creates discord. It creates conflict. And so what I was saying is that in those moments, like you said, when you're standing in that line and the other register doesn't open up and things are not easy, what do you do? And so I was saying how it's really important in that negotiation process that you learn how to press pause.

Because at some point when you get highly emotional in your divorce process, in your divorce negotiation, in that mediation room, and you become emotionally charged, and you feel that heat in your body, maybe you feel tightness in your throat, maybe your heart's beating million miles an hour, is that the best time to open your mouth and say something reactive? What I teach is that it's not.

It's you who need to press that pause button. You need to take those deep breaths. And if you find that just by counting to 10, your heart is still racing, your throat is still tight, it's okay to just say, you know what? I need to shelf this for the next conversation. Mediation's not going to happen overnight. You need to wait for that other shopping line to open up so you can be the first in line.

So when you are feeling more at ease, when you've had time to think about, you know, what the topic is, how you're able to negotiate on your own behalf in that process, it's okay to push the pause button. You will get a much better result if you are not emotional because you can become solutions-oriented versus reactive and super focused on the conflict of the problem. So what I hear you saying is that happiness in that moment

could just be the ability to say, you know what? I'm not in a good headspace right now to continue this conversation. Can we move on to something else for right now, so we can come back to this when I'm in a better state of mind? I just don't have the solution right now for what I need to be thinking about. So what I hear you saying is it's okay to press the pause button. It's okay to get to a place of acceptance before you...

Move forward, right? And the other piece of that is just that, so many times when we are in that heightened state of emotion, we don't even know where our own happiness is. We can't even see it. I was talking to this client about vision, the bigger vision versus the minute vision, right? So, what is the bigger picture of happiness for you?

What do I want to make life feel easy? What do I like? What are the bigger things? Not like, do I want half the house, or do I want my car paid off, or do I want that 401k? But like, what is my bigger vision? Because again, if you can get up there and look at your life from a drone's eye view, then the minutia of the negotiation could come with more ease because you're not thinking about all the littles, you're thinking about the bigs. And with divorce, the kids are usually the bigs, right? So sometimes we do things to keep the calm because we are gonna have to be co-parents with those individuals. So what am I willing to give up? Do I, you know, when it comes down to money, like every hour of that lawyer's,

Time is money. Every hour of that mediator's time is money. Every hour of the coach's time is money. So you add up all those things and you think about, oh my gosh, I'm sitting here trying to negotiate for $1,000 and meanwhile I've spent $7,000 to negotiate for that, right?

Tom Shepard (: 12:24

So, one of the tools that I use regularly, be it to stay in a centered and grounded place at work or in relationships with kids, ex-spouse,

parents, siblings, friends. One of the tools that I have is yoga. And another tool I have is meditation. And both of these things give you time with yourself, by yourself, to understand yourself.

If I am doing a meditation and I find myself agitated, so that I'm not really paying attention, then I know that this thing meditation, which should be easy, and I want it to be easy. And if it's not, then even that I might need to take a timeout from. So

If I'm also in yoga class and it's going too fast, am I going to try and keep up, or am I going to self-regulate and modify because today I can't keep up, so I can do my own thing? The very first time I ever did meditation or yoga was led by somebody, and so I felt like I had to do it that way and I had to keep up and I had to...

Try and make the same shape that other people were making. So any of these techniques that we can use to understand ourselves when we're by ourselves, the understanding of the self helps you self-regulate and interact with other people in ways that are easier.

On top of that, our approach to understanding, if I'm in a relationship and there's me and the other person and I can understand their nature, their way of trading time and energy to get money to have a relationship with life and I can understand it for myself, then we already know something about what happiness might look like for that person. So if I'm married to somebody who likes to have fun, but doesn't like to organize fun, just wants to have it, then we might never get to the place of creating fun unless I do it.

But if I go with the flow kind of person, then you can see that the person who wants to have fun and the person who wants to go with the flow might not have the skillset to organize and do the work necessary to create that event. And now bring that to the negotiating table, right? I'm just looking to go with the flow. And so I turn to my spouse, say, What do you want?

But talking and thinking about money isn't fun. And so she's like, I don't know. And now you're in front of an attorney, and that exchange costs $10 and didn't get you anywhere. And so when I think about my own personal journey and what I want for myself,

And in the line of work that I'm in what I want for other people is I want all of us to spend a little bit of time, enough time to know who we are and to know what we need and to know what we want. Not just in terms of money, but what does money get us? Does money get us excitement? Does it bring us a certain sense of satisfaction to have it?

because it helps us to just get through a day and do our work. Or do I want to have enough so that I can invest and create? Or do I want to have enough so that I can be generous? And what if I want to be generous, but my...

The significant other wants a different objective. And as we look at the settlement, it seems like they're going to have enough money to be generous, and I'm just going to have enough to get by. Then the things that we need and we want to be happy aren't on the table unless we've taken a little bit of time to reflect and know and understand.

Where our values lie, and to do so in a way that we can talk about. So the language of money and happiness is sometimes difficult to connect with how you speak to yourself. And if you can't speak to yourself about it, then how are you going to speak to somebody else about it, especially if it's during a negotiation?

In which certain words are triggers for you or for the other person.

Tania Leichliter (: 16:51

No, totally, it makes sense to me, and it resonates. Obviously, so many of the reasons why people get divorced are because they have a hard time being on the same page about money. So, for us to think we're going to walk into the negotiation room and click, we're already going to be back there and negotiating in a place of continuity, that's just not going to happen. We're going to be most likely in the same place as we were in our marriage, and you're coming to the table with two different...

kind of views on money. And now, especially if there's an inequality of earnings, not maybe capacity, but of earnings, there's going to be one person who has been a high earner. Maybe there is one person who wasn't making as much money, and the person not making as much money is living in financial fear, and the person who is making the money doesn't want to part with their money. And so then you have like, boom, boom, everyone's just like banging on heads, two different objectives.

And it's hard to like come to a center spot. It's hard to come to a place of being able to look from a different perspective on that. But I do really believe what you said, it's about what money brings you? One person could be a giver and wants to be generous with their money. One person could wanna be more pretentious and have lots of things. And maybe that's important to them. One person potentially just wants to invest in having good experiences in life. enough to do whatever. Someone could be a giver and say, I just want to be able to give away a hundred dollars a month. It's different than somebody saying, I just want to be able to go to dinner when I want to go to dinner, and I don't want to think about it.

I don't want to think about how much money I spend at the grocery store. I just want to buy what I want to need and I want to be able to put it in my cart and I want to check out and I want to go home. That's happiness for me. I want to eat what I want to eat, and I just want to eat it. I don't want to have to think about the food going into the grocery cart. mean, these are really common things that people are struggling with in how I am going to pay my housing expenses.

How am I going to be able to buy out? want to stay in the family home. How do I buy out the other individual? These are huge amounts of very small, minute, tactical things that are going through people's minds. These are the thoughts of everybody going through a divorce. And what I try to teach them is that I get all those things to exist, but how do we look up higher? How do we look from that drone's view?

And like you said, what are the small things that are going to bring you joy, in the bigger picture? And I try to get them back to say, is it the money or is it the relationships that you're creating what you're negotiating for? Because, you know, people have children, you know, is it as important to stay in the family home?

as it is to be able to make sure you have a home where your heart is. Ask your kids, is it as important for me to stay in this home with you, or can we live somewhere else as long as we're all together? I try to get people thinking bigger about happiness because sometimes, if you put yourself in such a financial position where you can't go to the grocery store to buy what you want to buy,

because you've decided that staying in the family home was important. So you poured all your money into buying the other person out. And then the next thing you know, like everything else, is not easy. You made that one big choice because you thought that's what was important. And now you've made difficulty everywhere else in your life because you stretched yourself too thin. So, how do you guide people from a financial perspective?

In terms of really thinking about those bigger picture things. Like, what is actually important?

Tom Shepard (: 20:34

Because money is the most visible manifestation of what we value, there's an opportunity to explore it in sort of three or four different ways. So the first way that we work with somebody to explore their relationship with money is just to try to understand what their motivation is with money.

Is it to hold on to what you have, that's called protection. Is it to pursue more, that's to pursue. Or is it to try to manage your money? So protect, manage, or pursue. Which of those three motivations is the one that feels the most real for you? Are you a protector, a pursuer, or a manager?

That's the easiest one because there are only three; we can have a conversation about that. The next one is why we created an assessment is because there's an energy that you resonate around money. There's an energy. Is it exciting for you? Like, is it full of drama and or...

Do you use money, and when you have it, it's fun, and when you don't have it, it's not fun. So that's kind of an up-and-down sort of relationship. Are you happiest when you're doing something to earn it? And so you have a sense of purpose, and life is satisfying. So the seven relationships are spend, earn, save, invest, leverage, give, and take. So if you...

Go to thecurrencycamp.com, and you can find your financial nature assessment. Then you can get an idea of what language you use to talk to yourself about your money, because that actually points you in the direction of how you pursue happiness. So I might be somebody who spends money to create fun, and I'm happiest when we're pursuing fun.

But I might be less happy when I have to manage the money to create an opportunity to have some fun. And then I'm really unhappy when I have to protect the money I have. And so I can't go have fun. Right? So, so every single one of those natures can be broken down into like three subsets based on your motivation. So we end up with 21 different types of people. And if you know what type you are,

Tania Leichliter (: 22:34

Right.

Tom Shepard (: 22:53

Then you can actually talk about what you're experiencing when it isn't happiness or when it is. And so that's what we help people to really get beneath the surface. The easiest time to talk about money is when you're in a divorce.

because you have to, right? But I was married for 25 years, and the easiest conversation about money was when divorce was on the table. Every other one is a voluntary conversation with a topic that you don't understand, and are uncomfortable with. And so it becomes this loaded thing.

where you don't have the language to talk about it. It's not on the table. You don't know what you are. They don't know what you are. So this way to get curious about yourself and about anybody else in your life is to wonder what is my financial nature? So, what type of person am I? And then...

to come to somebody else and you first disclose, you say, I am a lever pursuer. I like things to be easy, and I will pursue any kind of life decision that creates a system that allows life to be more fluid and go with the flow, and like, that's who I am. That's what makes me happy. What makes you happy? And.

They'll, they might be able to describe it, but you say, you know, you might even be able to talk about it better if you took this assessment and then you talk to Tom and, and, and you got some language and then we can come back together and, realize I'm this, you're this. We can support each other. can help each other. And even if it's now at the point where you're going through a divorce, it will go smoother. It will go better. And the energy and the exchange.

It could be healthier because this is the first time you've really given yourselves permission to talk about money.

Tania Leichliter (: 24:52

I know in my relationship, we've done the assessment on me, so I'm a pursuer. But I think that my ex was not only a protector, but also a manager. And so he, I would say, split in both those categories. And I was completely frustrating to him because he was always trying to protect and manage, and I was always trying to pursue.

Tom Shepard (: 25:09

Yeah.

Tania Leichliter (: 25:14

The challenge is when you go through a divorce and you recognize that you have less than you always did, when you're naturally a pursuer and you're not a manager or a protector, but when you get divorced, you kind of need to come up with being able to take on all the roles. And so there's just this whole new world of discomfort that comes along with the unknown of how.

Well, I know I'm naturally a pursuer, but now I have to become a protector and a manager of my own money because I have nobody else there doing that for me and it creates a lot of discomfort and a lot of unknowns because I work with a lot of clients who, didn't manage the money, They might have made money, but maybe they didn't manage their money. They never managed their finances, and for the first time, they have to learn that.

And not only do they have to learn how to manage it, but they have to learn how to protect it because they have less of it. And so, I know we're naturally one way, but there is this like crazy thing that happens in divorce that you don't get to be your nature.

Tom Shepard (: 26:22

No,

so this is what I was saying at the outset is even though I'm happy-est when it's going the way I want it to go to discover a way to be happy when it's not, it's very, very, very useful for me to have a relationship or conversation with a friend or a sibling or a parent who discovers other ways to be happy and they share it with you.

You know, so even though I like to go with the flow.

In the middle of a divorce, I also have to figure out how to manage myself, how to manage the conversation, how to look at money through the lens of we've got to work it out. So we've got to allocate some money to this and allocate some money to that. I don't like allocating money. I'd like to spend money. I like earning money. I like the flow of money.

I don't like the effort required to manage it. And yet here we are being forced to have a real, honest, and truthful discussion about it in a way that's uncomfortable for me. But choosing and accepting that is a legitimate way that some people are perfectly happy with.

It allows me to know that it's not weird to be a way that I'm not. It feels uncomfortable to be a way that I'm not, but it's not weird. And it's uncomfortable because it's not my nature and I'm not practiced at it. I don't have to spend a lot of time.

Managing my checkbook to make sure there's enough money to pay bills. But if post-divorce it gets tighter, now I might have to be content with doing that task that I didn't have to do before. And so acceptance of the roles and responsibilities.

The other thing that happens a lot of times when couples get together is they just, by default, fall into roles that then dictate patterns, and unless you know...

How you naturally are with money, you might end up with one person doing six roles and the other person doing one.

We can show that imbalance if we can get them to accept that there are seven relationships and the division of labor should be a little bit more equal. You're this, she's that.

That for each of you, now let's divvy up the other pieces so that you are equally yoked and pulling your weight. And that's not easy because you're one person who might be a pursuer of savings to pick up some management responsibility.

And the other person might have gotten the six other things because they like to manage everything, and they're not willing to let go. So it's not one person's problem. It's two people's problem to figure out who they are, what they fell into by default, and then come up with a new negotiation. And so sometimes divorce moves people.

Through a process where you have an honest conversation with money, you get divorced, and then after that is all over, you're like, hey, we get along so well now, why did we get divorced?

Tania Leichliter (: 29:40

No, I totally agree when you each have to do everything for yourself. There is no divvying up. You're doing it all. And I have to say that personally, I found it very empowering because I think that all the things that I thought I could never do, I can do. And I actually can do them very well.

Tom Shepard (: 29:46

See around.

Tania Leichliter (: 29:59

I never protected or managed. I was always the pursuer. I knew how to make money. And the other pieces of it, I just never really knew my own capacity for it. Or I just, like you said, wasn't favorable. It wasn't something I liked doing. And I still don't like doing it. But what I do understand is I know what I'm doing, and I can learn and I've got full capabilities, and it's super empowering.

And so I really just tell everybody out there, as much as you don't want to go do that, and as much as like it's causing you discomfort, you know, just like if your spouse didn't book medical appointments for your kids, or maybe they didn't do the food shopping or the cooking or, you know, the housekeeping, well, guess what? You both are going to have to do everything. And no matter what it was that you thought you didn't like, even if you didn't like it, and you can show yourself, you can do it, it feels really good.

So go out there and just go do it. Just don't say you can't because you can and you will, and guess what? You have to. And so stop playing victim, just go do it. And I promise you, you're going to actually feel better on the other side, doing the things that are causing you discomfort to realize that it's not as hard as you thought it was going to be, and you actually could be pretty good at it. So just go do it and stop complaining.

Tom Shepard (: 30:48

Great.

There's a mantra I like to say: word, action, belief, right? Word, action, belief. And so if the words I'm using are a negative belief, but then I have a positive action, I can change my belief and then change the words that I use to speak to myself about it. So like, if, if I say to myself,

I can't save money. I'm horrible at saving money. Well, guess what? You're reinforcing, if that's the language you're using, you're reinforcing that. You're not going to be good at saving money if you constantly believe and say and communicate to yourself that you're not good at saving money. But if you actually create an intention to save some money,

Tania Leichliter (: 31:50

Yeah. Yeah.

Tom Shepard (: 31:56

And you reinforce it by saying, I can save money, then it starts to rewire your brain. You do it, you say it, you believe it, and it starts creating, and you can do that with any of the seven natures, any of the motivations, and you can also do it with any of the four currencies. didn't talk about that, but.

When I, when I, I am working with a couple, I want to know like, what's your favorite currency? Is it money, or is it time,e or is it energy and health, or is it relationships?

And then Susan's major priorities are health and relationships. And she puts time into that, and she wants nothing to do with money. And so by being honest with ourselves about what our favorite currencies are and then looking at how we talk about them and turning the language that we use to talk about them to do something that's more positive.

Then we can have positive words that lead to positive actions that change our beliefs. And then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if you don't have the ability to break things down so that you can look at it in a discrete way, then it just becomes all overwhelming.

You know, time management, energy management, diet, exercise, sleep, money, you know, it just, it just all becomes a great big giant swirling stew. And if you don't like stew, if you like your food very separate on a plate, then you know, you're going to be unhappy.

Tania Leichliter (: 33:15

Yuck!

Yeah, I mean, a lot of the way that you have positioned or created your model around it is very much like the thought framework that we teach it better than better. You know, thinking about the fact that it's not our life circumstances or the facts in our life that are creating feelings that are getting us our results. It's the thoughts that we're having about what's going on in our lives that are creating our feelings. And when we feel a certain way, so if we feel like we're insecure, we're feeling fearful, we're feeling

anxious about something to do with a thought about money. And that fear or that anxiety or that insecurity is going to affect the way that we act and the way that we react. It's going to affect the way we behave. It's going to create either actions or inaction in our lives. And when we act, react, behave, or don't act, that's what's creating the results.

So if you think about the results in your life, if you think about the outcomes in your life, they're directly related to the beliefs that you've created, the thoughts you've created, the stories you're telling yourself. And if you can rethink, you can re-feel, and you're going to get different results. Right? So that's my hashtag, hashtag rethink re-feel, because it's exactly what you say. It's the stories and the beliefs. It's the words that we choose within those thoughts. It's the I can's and they wills versus the I can't's and they won't.

It's the, like I said, it's the belief system you created. Those aren't facts. They're your truths versus the truth. They say the truth is your facts, your circumstances. Your truths are what you're making them mean. Your truth is that thought. Your truth is that story. Well, it's just, again, that's your truth. You've created that for yourself.

So in order to feel differently, so you can act and show up differently, so you can get the result, you've got to rethink. You've got to just flip the script. So I love the fact that you've taken that kind of thought framework, or it's a lot of cognitive behavioral therapy work. You've made it into this really cool financial model showing how it works with the relationships that we have with money, our natures.

How we value our currency, whether it's time, whether it's energy. I love that. So I am going to wrap it up because this is a three-part series with Tom. And some of it is definitely repeated from episode 31, but it's never too much repetitiveness because again, really understanding...

This idea around nature versus nurture understanding your currency understanding the relationship that you have with money like that's all So important in creating happiness, so it goes back to this does money equal happiness Well, it doesn't in different forms, but not in the way that people think of it I have to have a lot of money in order to be happy and that's not what we're talking about at all today So I always like to wrap up with the kind of the three top tips

And I want people to think about all of the nature versus nurture that Tom talked about today. What is the type of relationship you have with money? Meaning, what is that currency? Is it time? Is it energy? Is it healthy? Is it relationships? What is your currency that is important to you to make you feel what I consider rich, right? So the other piece of that is, are you a protector? Are you a manager? Are you a pursuer? And like I said, and kind of converted that to be talking about it as it relates to divorce, there's one place in there that you're going to find comfort, and the other two, it doesn't mean that you don't do them because in divorce, you're going to have to do all three. But putting it in my own words, like...

take some time to figure out how to do those other things, because it's about doing things that were causing you discomfort and then recognizing that you're actually good at those things and that you should give yourself a pat on the back and feel empowered by the fact that you've taken on something that maybe gave you discomfort, but now you've recognized you actually can be pretty good at it. And the third piece of it is just around the stories and the beliefs that we talk to ourselves in those.

Those words Tom was talking about are just so important, and being able to talk about those very specific words, they're really important. How are you talking to yourself? I can, I will, or I can't and I won't. So make sure that you're talking to yourself with positive self-talk.

So you can move forward in this divorce process knowing that it is going to be different. It is going to have a lot of unknowns, and it is going to be hard, but you can do it if you begin to talk to yourself differently. So I want to just thank Tom again for his time on the Better Than Bitter podcast, and we do get him for one more episode next week. So, thank you, Tom, for showing up again, and we look forward to next week's discussion.

Tom Shepard (: 38:31

Take

Tania Leichliter (: 38:31

Thanks for tuning in to Better Than Bitter, navigating an amicable divorce. Whether you are at the beginning of your divorce journey, midway through, or even done, we want the stories from our guests to give you hope that an amicable resolution is possible. If you'd like to dive deeper into today's episode, check out our show notes for a full transcript, reflections, and links to learn more about Better Than Bitter's coaching courses.

and how to connect with our fabulous guests. If you're ready for more support, you can head over to betterthanbitter. coach. Daily, you'll find details and additional information on our five-step game plan multimedia course, our one-to-one Zoom coaching, group coaching, monthly memberships, events and retreats, and a whole lot more. Plus, we've got a ton of free resources, like our monthly newsletter,

our private Facebook group, Instagram channel, and a library of articles and free webinars to help you along the way. When you go to our website, you'll be able to schedule a free 45-minute breakthrough call. Remember, we're here to help you reach an amicable resolution. Find your courage and believe in your brighter future because you know what? It is possible.

At Better Than Bitter, we measure success by what we give and not by what we get. So let's change the divorce dialogue together. It's time to be better than bitter.