Your Optimum Outcome Conversation™: what do you want your future to look like?

Your first private session with your Divorce Resolution Expert. A conversation that looks forward, and is entirely about your future.

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Define Your Ideal Future

Since you started the separation process, most of the conversations you've been having have likely been about the past. What went wrong, who did what, and who is to blame? Even the conversations you've had with friends and family will have probably focused on what you’ll be losing or about defending a position.

The Optimum Outcome Conversation™ is different. It is the first meeting in the divorce process after the Process Commitment, and it is entirely about your future, your goals, and what a genuinely good outcome looks like from where you stand. It does not ask you to revisit what went wrong in your marriage. It asks you to look ahead to your post-divorce life, and what it will take to get there.

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What this conversation is

The Optimum Outcome Conversation™ is a private, one-on-one session with your Divorce Mediation Expert, held separately from your spouse's session. It is not a negotiation, nothing is decided and no positions are staked. It is a conversation about possibilities, and your divorce mediator's only role is to ask questions, listen carefully, and help you articulate what you actually want:

where you want to live when this is done,
what financial security looks like for you in practical terms,
how you see your relationship with your children evolving after the separation,
what work or lifestyle goals you may have set aside during the marriage,
and what you are feeling about the months ahead.

They will ask about what matters most to you and what you are not willing to compromise on.

In practice, the conversation goes further than most people expect. It might begin with the family home: whether keeping it is something you genuinely want, or whether beginning a new life somewhere else feels more right. It moves into finances: not the numbers yet, but what financial stability means day to day, what you need to feel secure, and what you could live without. It asks about your children: not custody schedules, but what your relationship with them looks like, how you see the two of you parenting from separate homes, and what you most want to protect for them.

It reaches into territory that is harder to name. Career goals that were put on hold during the marriage. A sense of independence that has quietly eroded. Things you want but have never said out loud, perhaps because saying them felt disloyal or frightening. The grief that sits alongside the resolve. The feelings that don't have clear names yet.

Your divorce mediator’s job is to draw all of this out with patience and without judgement. By the time this conversation is done, you will have a clearer picture of your life after divorce. It becomes your north star for every decision you make in the separation process.

Why it happens separately

One of the most important things about this session is that your spouse is not in the room.

This is not about secrecy, and it is not about building a case against anyone. It is about giving each person the space to speak freely without editing themselves for the other's reaction, without softening something that matters or overstating something that doesn't. When people speak without an audience, what they say is more honest and ultimately more useful.

Two people going through a divorce can want genuinely different things about their post-divorce life and both be entirely reasonable. Your spouse may want to stay in the family home; you may want to start somewhere new. They may have strong feelings about a particular financial arrangement; you may have concerns they don't know about yet. The Optimum Outcome Conversation™ is where both of those pictures get painted separately and privately, before anyone sits down to talk about how they overlap.

This is how the Independently Negotiated Resolution™ model protects both parties. Not by keeping them apart permanently, but by ensuring that each person knows what they actually want before the negotiation begins. That clarity is the foundation of a divorce recovery where both people leave with an outcome that reflects what they actually need.

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Client testimonials

Success comes in many forms. For us, it is hearing back from our clients and reading how we have changed their lives for the better. These stories are the reason we do what we do.

This was the hardest thing I have gone through and I didn’t feel like I was doing it alone with the help of Sarah and everyone else at Fairway. She was extremely knowledgeable, patient, kind, understanding, relatable, empathetic and trustworthy. She tailored our agreement to meet our needs and the needs of our kids while keeping with family law. One million percent I would recommend them to anyone going through this. It will be okay.

- Waterloo Client October 2021

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What comes next

After both individual Optimum Outcome sessions are complete, you and your spouse come back together for the Fairway Divorce Transitions™ Meeting. This joint session takes what each of you has shared privately about your goals and your new life and uses it to build a practical short-term plan — addressing the immediate pressures of living through a separation while the longer divorce process unfolds. You can read more about what that involves on the Interim Plan page.

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