WHAT BROUGHT US TOGETHER

Lunch brought us together! We thought we were meeting for lunch to build our respective practices (Maren is a relationship coach; Suzanne is a divorce attorney). But our luncheon meeting turned out to be an afternoon of sharing how adversity had led to personal growth for each of us.

Maren told of her “personal tsunami,” which had been raging for about a year. During this time, Maren lost five members of her family, sent a son to Iraq, faced divorcing her husband of 33 years, and struggled with health issues and a change of career.

This struck a chord with Suzanne. Years earlier, at age 24, she had an idiopathic grand mal seizure. Suzanne had to go through a battery of testing, which ultimately ruled out brain cancer, seizure disorder, or a heart ailment. Nonetheless, Suzanne’s involuntary loss of consciousness forced her to abandon her chosen profession, flying, and led her to shift careers from being a corporate pilot to practicing law.

At lunch, we talked about “who’s to say what’s good and what’s bad.” We talked about growing through our adversity, developing skills we didn’t know we had, and reinventing ourselves. Maren described feeling mostly resilient, strong, and steady—even in the midst of chaos. She called this perspective “being in the thriver’s seat.”

If we could do it, we believed our divorce clients could certainly learn how to get through adversity by developing skills that they didn’t know they had—by reinventing themselves, all while feeling resilient, strong and steady. We decided to create an educational program that would help them do this, which is how we got together.