Creating Your Best Life After Divorce or Separation ~ Eleanore Crawford

I was married at 20 and then had babies straight away and my second child, Chloe, was born when I was 23. When she was 18 months, she was diagnosed with cancer and so it was a really massive sort of learning experience and caring experience and just a really huge lesson of courage and resilience, watching my daughter go through cancer treatment. Unbelievable. She was so brave. By then, I already knew that because I tried to heal my heart from the outside, that I was actually feeling really unhappy and I was just broken inside. So at 28, after Chloe had had a liver transplant and I’d had another son, I decided to leave that marriage with three young kids.

My former husband and I bought a holiday house on Hindmarsh Island and then we moved there and I really felt like I needed to move somewhere with some space and water and serenity. It really was my spiritual coming home because after I opened The Boxing Room, which was a real grind for about 11 years, I put my heart and soul into it.

Unfortunately, it just didn’t build and expand the way that I really wanted it to, and gyms became really competitive and that’s when the F45 Gyms came in and we were really knocked around by that, so we moved to Hindmarsh island.

Just over a year ago, I started doing some extra work on myself and trained as an NLP Practitioner. I’d already been struggling with my own happiness during that year and when I did NLP, I realised that I needed to honour my heart. I’ve been doing that but not in a real way. I really tried to do that, so that I would be a much better wife and I could step up and be a better partner but unfortunately, it just got to a point where nothing was going in the direction that I wanted it to go and so after getting my Master Practitioner in NLP, I decided to leave that marriage earlier this year.

I was already coaching women and then when I separated from my husband, I decided that because it was my third time, and that I was approaching this time with such a different energy, an energy of surrender and love and forgiveness for myself, and also for my husband and total respect, I tried to respect who he was and where he was in his life and my intention is 100% to live at cause which means that anything that happens outside of me, I have a choice of how I respond to that.

I take full responsibility for myself and my actions and my emotions. So I thought when I started doing that, it was working really well for me, internally for my happiness and my peace and my calm so it wasn’t a stressful, overwhelming time, even though there were moments, mostly it’s been pretty calm and peaceful. I thought if I can do it this way, I can show other women how to do it and I also have my other experiences to lean on to help them get through times when they’re having a bit more drama in their life.

How did you manage your financial situation with each divorce?

After the first divorce when I was 28, I was very broken. I worked part time, I relied on government support and I also had some child support coming in but then the child support dropped dramatically and I was really on my own. I was lucky in as much that the settlement was fine for that divorce because we didn’t really have much as we were young.

In my second marriage, my dad had died so he’d left me a small inheritance, so I had a bit more behind me and then when that marriage went bust, my second husband and I are still really best friends and he just decided that he would do nothing to actually hurt me financially so he pretty much walked away with very little. I have total respect for him, because it was all mine when I brought it  into the marriage, and this one, we’re still negotiating so we’ll see how this one goes.

What is a Divorce Coach?

In addition to my NLP qualifications, I also have a qualification in Advanced Clinical and Conversational Hypnosis, which I find is like the glue that holds everything together. I’m also very empathetic and I have a lot of experience. I’m very good at Talk Therapy, and I’ve studied Psychology, so I’ve got a lot of tools in my tool belt.

I coach women, and I coach women who are either at the point in their marriage where they know that they need to leave, but they don’t know how, or the woman whose partner has made the decision and they’ve been left feeling heartbroken or feeling angry, or whatever the emotions are. I then coach them through being really mindful that emotions are just emotions, and we can actually deal with them, we can express them, and then we can release them because if we don’t, our body holds on to them, and it continues to hold on to them, and that’s where dis-ease occurs, not being at ease is when you’ve got emotions building up so it’s really important that we express our emotions.

It’s one-on-one coaching. I have a couple of different packages to help them all the way through, depending on how long they need me for and we’ll do 90 minutes to two hour sessions every week or fortnight however they need at the time. I have a bespoke package where they can have a number of hours and they can use them as they need, which I think is a really good way because it just gives them more at the beginning when they might need it more and then less towards the end of our time together. Just when they’re sort of doing clean up and then maybe projecting forward.

One of the big intentions of my coaching is to help them create the life they really want. I’m a huge believer, follower, leader, learner, of conscious creation that we are conscious creators, and what we put out is what we get back. So it’s really important to me to actually help them understand that, and if they need help financially, then I’ll bring in someone who can help them with manifestation and abundance. I can help them to a certain extent, but that’s not where my qualifications are.

It’s important to understand that people are not their behaviors. I’m such a great believer that we are all one source so I am you and you are me, and I say that about my husband, I am him and he is me so when he does something that could potentially trigger me, I just understand and come from empathy and understand where his level of awarenesses is because we all are completely unique and we all have different experiences and conditioning and education and knowledge and so there’s no way that two people are going to see the same thing, in the same way, even if it’s in a peaceful,  joyful situation, let alone when you put in some drama and stress, they’re definitely not going to see eye to eye, and that’s OK.

How to Create Your Best Life – 3 Key Take-aways

1. As the observer of your life, you’re also the creator because every event and experience is neutral until you put meaning on it, that’s when the emotion comes in. So that is great, because you can put any meaning you like on it, you can still be neutral, make it be joyful, or happy or a learning experience, whatever you want to, to continue to create the life that you want. It’s a really big concept and it’s not something that we can cover in five minutes, for sure but I think if people start to grasp that whole observer concept that when, as you observe your life, you’re creating at the same time.
2. You are worth it. Every baby is born with completely pure confidence and they’ve got posture and sass and all of that stuff and it just gets conditioned out of us after about five to pretty much when we go to school, especially if we’ve got good models of parents at home, then it’s generally school that really remodels us out of that and makes our insecurities come in and with our bodies changing and all of the things that come with puberty and just growing up and all of our experiences. So I think we need to return to the fact that when we were born, we had completely 100% self worth and self confidence and that’s who we are, in essence as people, so everyone deserves anything that they want in their life.
3. If you can think of something or ideate about something, it means that it’s actually possible. I think that’s really important as well.

What about forgiveness?

I love the Hawaiian Ho’oponopono prayer, that is beautiful and it’s “I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you” and I use that a lot to myself and, outwardly as well and I think coming back to the fact that we are all one, so if you don’t forgive someone outside of you, then you’re actually not forgiving yourself. I think it comes a lot from forgiving yourself and therefore forgiving others and it’s like a natural flow.

Divorce Diva’s Club & Lounge

I think that even in today’s progressive society, divorce has still got some shame around it and it may be self created by an individual woman or group of women but I still think that there is shame there.

My intention is to build the Divorce Diva’s Club to flip divorce on its head and make it something you can be proud of. I’m not saying that the breakdown of a marriage is to be proud of that, what I’m saying is that what you do after that, be proud of that.

At our first Divorce Diva’s lunch, I was talking to one of the ladies there and she said she’d gone to hospital and the boxes that she had to tick about marriage status was either single, married, separated or divorced and she said her hand was hovering over divorce and she didn’t want to tick it. When I went into the hospital, this time, I was like, yes, and I ticked that divorce box! I want people to be proud to tick the box, because it’s such a massive experience in our lives and I really want women to understand that for them to survive, and then thrive and build a new chapter and have this sense of freedom is such a massive overcoming, and they’ve stepped over that with courage and

resilience, and they’ve built something new for themselves and they get to do it again. We only have this very short, one conscious life. A divorce is the closing of one chapter, which can be sad and heartbreaking and bring all the emotion but it gives you an opportunity to have a new fresh chapter with a complete freedom in front of you. I just think that is actually kind of special. I really want to help women to flip that perception in their own minds to be really proud to tick that box.

So that’s one thing and then it just snowballed into this Divorce Diva’s Club. I started with a lunch that’s only just recently launched, in October, and then at the end of this month, on the 30th of November, on my website, I’m launching the Divorce Diva’s Club Lounge and in the lounge will be a heap of different resources and content that women can access which is lunches and day retreats coming next year, and they get lots of different articles and some hypnosis meditations and some lessons on resilience and all these different things. I’m super excited to launch that at the end of the month.

I’m actually really proud of my marriages and I really have so much utter respect and love for my husbands because my experience with them made me the woman I am today, and I am the happiest I’ve ever been in my life, happy within myself and I could never have said that before the last couple of years so I’m really proud and I really respect and love them.

The lunches are quarterly in different geographical areas but I only have one booked at the moment, which is at Seaford in South Australia, South of Adelaide on Sunday, February the 13th, it’s a bit in honor of Valentine’s Day, because I know Valentine’s Day can be a bit of a tricky time for women who are single or newly divorced or even women in general and so I thought it would be good to have it on that Sunday, because the day after is Valentine’s Day, so at least it’s a bit of a celebration. It’s from 12pm until 4pm at the Seaford Hotel.

Contact Elle

www.eleanorcrawford.com

https://sueshaw.com.au/listing/eleanor-crawford-coaching