Wow.
It’s been a minute.
Of imagining. Of creating. Of innovating.
And momentum is building.
And fundamentally changing perspectives and practices around divorce and family law.
Since our first Consilium Institute training a little more than a year ago, we have had the great privilege of teaching over two hundred judges and lawyers in Consilium’s unique and proprietary process. We’ve welcomed 30 attorney members to The Tapestry, Consilium’s professional education and netweaving organization. We have hosted eighteen nationally recognized speakers at monthly Tapestry webinars, offered many hours of individual support, problem-solving, and mentorship, and built a remarkable community of like-minded professionals.
- It is a great privilege to see Consilium resonate with seasoned and talented practitioners who embrace its ideals of helping families restructure, not just divorce.
Consilium’s next logical evolution was to launch those practitioners on a new, deeper journey – becoming Consilium Consultants – professionals committed to helping individuals from the very outset of their restructuring path. Consultants weigh in with their unique perspective and expertise before a divorcing client hires legal counsel. The Consultant helps the client envision and create their optimal legal journey alongside their path of personal growth.
- We launched those first Consultants. And we did it in in the spectacular Rocky Mountains on a glorious fall weekend.
- Erin Luizzi Wallace, Jennifer Hatch, and Tomi Hanson began their Consultant training journeys.
- Siobhan McTighe, a seasoned Colorado detective who for many years has worked with victims of sexual and domestic violence, worked with us for a day of transformative programing that she developed after recovering from her own work-related traumas.
- Erin, Jen, and Tomi will work closely with Heidi and Julie as they refine their skills and develop their own consulting practices.
At times like this, I am reminded of the film Field of Dreams, and the famous line “If you build it, they will come.” But that expression can be incomplete – one critical line: “and tell them about it,” was left out. A more accurate (but less poetic) line would have been: “If you build it and tell people about it, they will come.”
- What’s important here is the building and the telling.
- It’s the vision and the action.
It’s what Dan Hunter explains in his book, Learning and Teaching Creativity, as the difference between imagining (all in your head), creating (bringing an idea to life), and innovating (testing to see if an idea is embraced by others).
Consilium developed from Heidi’s observation that although a marriage might dissolve, divorces don’t result in a family’s dissolution. And yet, English contract law doesn’t recognize that truth.
- Imagination resulted in the thought that families need to restructure, reorganize, and rebuild.
- Adapting elements of psychology, law, and business restructuring created The Consilium Process.
After successfully working with clients for over twenty years, Heidi knew that individuals and their families welcomed and benefitted from Consilium. Her next task was to try to alter the well-trod path of family law. Change is difficult, but once something like Consilium is set into motion, it takes on a life of its own.
In order to “tell potential clients about it,” Heidi and Julie wrote a book, Dissolution to Evolution. They soon discovered that, not only did clients want to understand, and use, the Consilium Process, but that lawyers and judges did, too.
- And so. It was time for us to innovate, to test the idea more broadly by training attorneys, judges, financial advisors, and mental health professionals. And now, we proudly invite Consilium Practitioners to take the next leap and become Consilium Consultants.
The momentum is building.
And I can’t think of a more exhilarating and worthy goal than working together to help families build healthy and strong restructured families. We owe it to families. We owe it to our progeny.
Photo credit: Adam Singer, made with an AI visualizer.