24 Neelam Dhall - The Nasty Business of Divorce & Why The Right Mediator Can Be Your Best Ally

"Every one needs emotional support, but you need to figure out who you need emotional support from. It’s not your lawyer."

My guest today is Neelam Dhall, accredited family mediator, author, divorce coach, chartered accountant, and the owner of Simple Solutions Mediation. She handles this very unique topic - mediation, divorce, settlement, and negotiation with your partner. Neelam stresses how important it is to do your research and get all the information to make sure you’re hiring the right professional and that you are thinking through what they are telling you and what makes sense in your own scenario. (She lived through the worst of it, so you dont have to!)

Neelam divorced a lawyer and during that experience she learned how to represent herself and that mediation is a helpful way to cooperate, especially when it comes to kids. You end up not hating each other at the end of a process, instead you are working together to come up with a solution for your unique family needs.

Having gone through mediation and seeing what value it brought into their lives, Neelam turned it into a service she now offers and helps people with. She strongly felt it was adding value to people and realized it became a real passion for her (to say the least).

When people step on the path of divorce, they often expect lawyers to deal with their emotional and mental health issues, but that’s not their job. "We need to figure out who we need emotional support from." From that support point of view, we need different types of professionals. And we need the ones we click with.

"Advice we get from people around us, like friends and family, are based on just one part of the story, the one they are familiar with. It’s not good advice because they don’t know everything they need to know to help us go through the process. So it’s helpful to talk to someone objective who can help you get the information to come up with a solution, but you are the one who has to be ready for the step and be very sure is the right thing for you."

It’s essential to know that the litigation is not the only route. What steps does someone need to take when they know it is the right time to make the decision? "Research, research, research, because knowledge is power."

409 – The Adventure of the Red Circle – Part 2