It’s January, and you’ve made the decision to get divorced. The question now isn’t whether you’re moving forward. It’s how. This is the phase that requires strategy, not emotion. Not because your emotions don’t matter. They do. But right now, clear thinking matters more than anything else. In this solo episode, I share three things to help you formulate your strategy so you can move forward without creating unnecessary chaos, expense, or regret. 

January is not a sprint. It’s an orientation phase. This is the moment to shift your emotions into the passenger seat and let your strategic mind drive as you get clear on the reality you’re in, gather the right information, and begin building the right team in the right order.

Waiting until after the holidays to move forward with divorce wasn’t a delay. It was a boundary. Moving forward with intention now can protect you and your children long after the paperwork is signed.

What you’ll hear about in this episode:

• Why January is an orientation phase, not a race to file
• What patterns in conflict, money, and boundaries matter most before divorce begins
• What financial information to quietly gather now
• How to think about custody awareness without rushing or overcorrecting
• Why strategy should come before calling an attorney and how that saves time, money, and emotional fallout

Resources & Links:

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Kate’s Substack Newsletter: Divorce Coaching Dispatch
The Divorce Survival Guide Podcast Episodes are also available YouTube!
Seven Step Mindset Reset for Divorce

Show Transcript:

[00:00:00] Hey everyone. Welcome back. So happy new Year. It is now the middle of January, and for many of you, you were waiting until after the holidays to file, and now it’s here. What now? So if you’re listening to this in mid-January, you didn’t arrive here accidentally. You didn’t just wake up one morning and look at the calendar and decide, okay, time to get divorced, right?

You knew this moment was coming. You made a conscious and deliberate decision to get your kids through the holidays first, to preserve some sense of normalcy, to protect them from associating Christmas or Hanukkah or New Year’s with the moment everything blew up and your family was destroyed, right? You weren’t avoiding any truth.

You were prioritizing your children, and in order to do that, you probably [00:01:00] suffered through a pretty difficult holiday yourself, and now they’re over. And maybe the decorations are down, if they’re not down, it’s time. The calendar is quieter, back to school has happened. The emotional bandwidth that did not exist November through December might be available again.

And so the question now isn’t really whether. If you’re moving forward, it’s how are you gonna do this now? How are you gonna move forward without creating unnecessary chaos, expense, regret? So today we’re gonna talk about strategy. We’re not gonna talk about emotions, right? We do that a lot, right? Not because emotions don’t matter.

Of course your emotions matter, but this [00:02:00] phase really requires clear thinking more than anything else. You might remember, think back to my seven step mindset, reset for divorce, and if not, we will link to it in the show notes. Really this is a time of shifting away from what’s fair and how do I feel about this to a strategic mindset, because your feelings about this are not gonna get you through this.

That doesn’t mean they don’t have a time and a place, and that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be processing them with a coach or a therapist. It just means that right now we gotta put your thinking cap on, which means your emotions and the upheaval of all of this needs to take a, let’s say a passenger seat, right?

Not necessarily backseat, but just shift over to the passenger seat so that your strategic mind can do the driving right now. So January, you know this is divorce month, right? But it’s not a sprint. [00:03:00] It’s just, it’s, as I said in my New Year’s episode, this is an orientation phase. It has a strange energy, right?

Everyone else is making all these like bold declarations and new year, new life clean slate and divorce culture can lean into that urgency, right? Law firms are really busy. We’re, a lot of people are talking about divorce month. It’s happening now. There’s this unspoken pressure that says, if you’re doing this, you should do it now.

But here’s the truth, right? The women who fare best in divorce are not the ones who move the fastest, who follow the prescribed timeline, right? They’re the ones who orient themselves first. So think of this phase as standing at the edge of a map. You don’t start walking until you understand the terrain because once [00:04:00] divorce is in motion, it’s much harder and much more expensive to change course.

Trust me. On this, there are three steps, three things I want you to think about this month or right now. The first one, step one. Get oriented in the reality that you are in with the holidays behind you. Your first job is not action. It’s clarity. You need to understand the actual dynamics that you are dealing with, especially if things have felt relatively calm lately.

Ask yourself, when conflict arises, does your spouse take responsibility or shift blame? Are they transparent with money or evasive and controlling? When they feel threatened, do they deescalate or intensify? Have they historically respected boundaries or tested and pushed them? These are not moral [00:05:00] judgments.

Their data points. Because divorce strategy is built on patterns, not hope. So January is the moment to name those patterns honestly before legal processes, force decisions that are hard to undo or very hard to undo, right? So that’s step one. Just orient yourself in the reality that you’re in.

Step two is to shift from emotional readiness to strategic readiness. This is where many women might underestimate what’s required, right? You may feel emotionally ready. You’ve accepted at least that the marriage is ending. You’re no longer negotiating with yourself or your spouse, and that’s really important.

But strategic readiness is a little different. Strategic readiness means that you understand the landscape enough to move deliberately instead of reactively. This is where we’re [00:06:00] putting. Your emotional self in the passenger seat de moving deliberately starts with gathering information quietly, methodically, perhaps without confrontation.

So here’s what I want you to focus on right now. I want you to focus on financial clarity. You’re not preparing a court filing right now, you’re preparing yourself. So gather whatever you can access without tipping your hand. Here’s a quick list. You want the last two to three years of tax returns.

If you don’t have access to them, but you have signed them, you can go onto the IRS’s website irs.gov and get them. All recent bank statements as much as you can have access to credit card statements, retirement and investment account statements, mortgage or lease documents, any business [00:07:00] financials.

If you or your spouse own their own business you wanna get as much information on that as possible. And a list of debts, credit cards, loans, lines of credit, auto loans, whatever else. You don’t need everything. If you don’t have the, the logins for many of these things, or you can’t get access to the statements, just make a list of what you know that there is.

So if for example, I think we have an account at Fidelity. I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know how much is in it, but I know there is one. Just write that down. You’re building a working understanding of how money flows in your household, where assets and liabilities live, and what questions you’re gonna have to answer later, or that you will need answers to later.

Such as, I know we have an account at Fidelity, but I don’t know anything about it or how much is in it. Write that down so that you know that later on you’re gonna actually need [00:09:00] information on that. So all of this knowledge will change how you show up. In the conversations that follow, which is informed and empowered.

The other thing I want you to be thinking about is financial restraint. So this is all also the moment to not do certain things like make large purchases. You don’t wanna make sudden transfers right now because you’re be tipping your hand. Any financial moves that could look reactive or alarming now.

Here’s where I will deviate from that a little bit, which is that if you are being emotionally, being financially abused, and you are concerned that your spouse is going to, as soon as you do, let them know what you’re doing, that they’re gonna cut you off for money. Move their direct deposits, take everything out of the joint account.

You are entitled to move half of everything that you have access to. You are entitled to take half of everything in your joint checking and savings account because half of [00:10:00] everything that you have collectively is yours. If you are concerned about any financial repercussions, you can protect yourself in advance.

Strategic readiness means thinking two or three steps ahead, not just about what feels fair, but about what creates stability and leverage, and that might be moving some money for yourself. To have your own money. It might also be just getting a snapshot of all the accounts and if they start to do shady shit, just know that you, now you have an accounting of all of that.

It just really does depend on your financial picture. I also want you to start focusing on. Custody awareness. So if you have children, start paying attention to some patterns. Who handles all the school logistics, medical appointments, extracurriculars, daily routines, right? We’re not building a case necessarily.

We are building awareness, and it [00:11:00] is possible that there is a deep imbalance. Now I wanna say something about this that I think is really important. If you, there are two working parents and one parent does all of the labor with the children, domestic labor. Or anything that has to do with the kids, right?

This is an important thing to document because there is another parent who is working just as hard perhaps who is opting out of parenting. If one of the parents is a stay at home parent and the other person is the working parent, this is not a he doesn’t do anything I should have full custody kind of thing.

What this is you, what may happen is at a certain point you guys are gonna have to start to learn to even the scales. And so you’re gonna have to allow them the chance to step [00:12:00] up into a role that has typically been yours by the design of the relationship. By the way, right if you are a stay-at-home parent, that has been your job, and if the working parent does want 50 50 custody, we have to allow them the time and the ability to shift more into that role.

It would be kind and generous for you to help teach them how to shift into that role without taking it over all the time. The courts do favor. 50 50 in a lot of states. And that’s not always a bad thing, but it sometimes is. And we definitely want, if all things being equal and there is safety at play, everyone’s safe.

We need to, we want do wanna allow the other parent the opportunity to shift and change and move into that role and make all the mistakes and all of that. Kindly [00:13:00] gently support them doing that. If all things being otherwise equal, if there is abuse, if this is not a safe parent, then yes, we are gonna be documenting all of those things in this custodial awareness period.

Caveats, right? Everyone’s situation is a little bit different, and so when I give like step one, step two, step three, sometimes it’s but if you’re this, then you don’t need to do that, or right. There’s shifting that is allowable and important because none of this is ever black and white. There is no clear prescription.

I’m just offering you guidance.

So step three. In this January process, build the right team in the right order. So this is where January can often go wrong. [00:14:00] So many women start by calling an attorney. That’s it. January we’re doing this, we’re filing, and while attorneys are essential. They’re not designed to help you think through whether when, or how to move forward.

They’re trained to respond once a legal process begins or to begin the legal process, right? Oh, you want a divorce? Okay, great. We’re gonna file. Here we go. Woo. And then all of a sudden things are often running and you might not have thought strategically first. So what you need before that is the strategy.

So this is where perhaps I come in. Your first call should be a strategy call, not necessarily a legal one. So before you even hire a attorney you need help knowing what kind of divorce am I likely facing? What pace [00:15:00] will protect me and my children best? Where am I vulnerable? Where do I have leverage?

What information do I need before legal conversations even begin? What questions should I ask in an attorney consultation to make sure I’m actually hiring the right attorney for my case? So this is the work that I do with women every day. We slow the process down before it speeds up. And it saves a shit ton of money, a shit ton of time, and a shit ton of emotional chaos.

Because once lawyers are involved, every misstep will cost you financially and emotionally. So after strategy, after we have created the strategy that works best for you, then you build your team in intentionally. You an attorney that is aligned with your specific situation, possibly a [00:16:00] financial professional, a C-D-F-A, and sometimes a therapist who understands high conflict or coercive dynamics, which is very important.

So all those pieces of the team first, then we can start moving in the legal direction, right? Here’s what I don’t want you doing right now in January, there are a couple of traps that might be common this time of year. I don’t want you to announce your plan prematurely. I often talk about my blurting out that I want a divorce on Christmas Eve, if you’re listening to this in January, hopefully you’ve already avoided that. Not that did any damage strategically to my divorce at all. It was just awful. Made for a really shitty Christmas. But we want strategy before you have the conversation. This isn’t to be deceptive. This is again, strategic.

So don’t assume cooperation is gonna last. Every [00:18:00] calm does not. Predict long term behavior every time they suddenly start acting like husband of the year doesn’t mean that everything has changed. If you have told them and now suddenly they’re acting perfect, it can be really confusing and really terrifying.

And you might think that you’ve made a terrible mistake. You have not misunderstood the last decade of this relationship. And the calm or the cooperation or the niceness or the, super dad or super husband is part of the cycle of this relationship, right? It’s the intermittent reinforcement that keeps you hooked into it so that there, and there will always be another shift out of it.

There just is. I’ve been doing this for a very long time and I can tell you that most people. Do not change quickly [00:19:00] or overnight, and it’s usually just part of the process and the game and the manipulation. I also don’t want you to be confused. Being reasonable with being agreeable, right? You can be strategic without being cruel.

You can do all of this. Kindly, no matter how they’re responding, no matter how they’re reacting, I want you to continue to be strategic while also being kind. This is about keeping your side of the street really clean. You’re not being aggressive in this time. There’s no, you don’t need to, right? Because you’re done.

So if you’re done, there’s an assertiveness. There’s a boundary setting. There’s a, yeah, I get it. This isn’t what you want. Unfortunately, this is where we’re at, right? There’s a groundedness and a maturity that is not emotional. Remember, he’s in the passenger seat. [00:20:00] You your strategic. Are in the driver’s seat, and and you can do, you can drive without being an asshole.

I want you to be able to lay your head down at night and go, okay, I did that and I did it well, and I feel good about how I had that conversation. It was hard, but I feel pretty good about it. And if you don’t, you get to clean it up later and say, listen, I’m sorry that I got so emotional. I’m sorry I got so angry.

That’s not how I want this to go for us. And I’m gonna work on really trying to keep my anger and resentment out of this as much as possible. And if they’re doing all the anger and resentment cool, but you don’t have to, just to wrap all this up waiting until after the holidays to move forward with all of this, it wasn’t a delay, it was a boundary.

January doesn’t have to be about blowing your life up. It’s about constructing the path forward with intention. [00:21:00] For you and your kids. So if you are ready to start mapping that path and want support doing it intelligently you can work with me through private coaching or inside Phoenix Rising. As I have this group program called Phoenix Rising, and it’s an amazing group program of women who are all going through this together.

My private coaching I offer three packs. Six packs or my premium coaching package, which is a much longer and more involved one-on-one working relationship. Obviously. All of the details of all of that are at my website, which is kate anthony.com. You don’t have to rush. Remember, you just don’t have to rush, but you do get to move forward.

Informed, supported, and grounded. I promise you that will change everything. All right? That’s all I have for you today. I love you all so very much. Truly I do. I’ll see you next time.

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DISCLAIMER:  THE COMMENTARY AND OPINIONS AVAILABLE ON THIS PODCAST ARE FOR INFORMATIONAL AND ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY AND NOT FOR THE PURPOSE OF PROVIDING LEGAL OR PSYCHOLOGICAL ADVICE.  YOU SHOULD CONTACT AN ATTORNEY, COACH, OR THERAPIST IN YOUR STATE TO OBTAIN ADVICE WITH RESPECT TO ANY PARTICULAR ISSUE OR PROBLEM.