Conflict Resolution Professional and Author Helena Goto Discusses Her “Together Apart” Approach to Divorce for Business Professionals

Helena Goto is the founder of Goto Consulting and has been successfully running her own consulting business since 2013. Her specialties include advising clients, both public and private companies, in conflict, culture, and communication. After her own recent experience with separation and divorce, Goto began turning her corporate skills toward the personal sector. She just released her new book, “The Modern Family,” and advises others going through similar situations.

Helena holds an MBA from The University of Southern California and a Masters in Dispute Resolution from Pepperdine University’s Straus Institute. She has also worked as an adjunct Professor at USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy. Her most recent career title was a Senior HR Business partner role at a major finance company, where she focused on employee relations and performance management.

As a mother and wife, Helena was recently confronted with her own separation and how that would impact her family. She wasn’t happy to settle for the traditional routes of either a messy divorce or staying happily unmarried, so she launched her own “Together Apart” approach, which became the focus of her new book. Her goal with the book is to empower parents — many of whom are busy entrepreneurs and working professionals — to go through the breakdown of their marriage by living honestly whilst keeping the family intact.

Tell us how your background in HR and as a corporate negotiator and mediator has segwayed into your consulting business and book.

Having a high-conflict divorce was never an option for me, so when I realized my marriage was heading toward divorce, I had to find a way to navigate the process without the conflict that typically goes hand in hand. My background in navigating high-conflict situations allowed me to know what creates and sustains these destructive dynamics. Broken communication, decreased trust, and eventually dehumanizing the other only escalate conflict, and the longer it goes on, the more challenging it is to repair. My work has allowed me to do the opposite personally and to coach others to help them develop the way they communicate, rebuild trust with the other parent, and focus on the common ground, which is doing what is best for our children.

For busy entrepreneurs and founders, what specific advice do you have for navigating a divorce?

Go as far along in the process as you can before hiring lawyers, and only do so when you are not in a heightened emotional state. Don’t lose sight of the reality that when you have children together, you will be in a relationship with your spouse, divorced or not, for the rest of your life. When children are involved, there is no ‘winning’ in divorce. In fact, if one of you ‘wins,’ you both lose. Money is money and time is money, the more you argue the more time it is going to take and the more money you will both bleed from your communal family finances and the more emotional trauma you will create. Do what you need (therapy, boxing class, a trip to Spain, etc), to put your business head on and do an honest cost benefit analysis.

You would probably hire lawyers to write up the contract for a business deal you have made, but you would never expect them to make the deal from the start, right? So why would you let lawyers do that for you when it comes to your family?  Having two sets of lawyers argue over what you think is fair and your partner thinks it is fair is going to be a bad business decision, so how do you decide to move forward and then hire the lawyers to write up the contract?

Does this advice differ if they are married with no kids, or if they are also business partners? 

If you don’t have children or a business, then yes, you are two adults, destroying each other on the way out only hurts you, it really is a zero sum game, the more you get the less the other gets, and vice versa. However, when you share a business and/or children, you are deeply (perhaps selfishly) invested in each other’s well-being. If you destroy the other, your children and/or your business will be collateral damage, and no sane person wants that.

Do you think your Together Apart method is appropriate for entrepreneurs who are balancing business and family demands regarding finances, time constraints, etc.? 

The Together Apart method allows for increased flexibility, which works well with the uncertainty of entrepreneurship. My experience as an entrepreneur has always been to keep my fixed costs as low as possible, allowing me to scale up or scale down depending on the needs of my business. Running two separate households is the opposite of minimizing your fixed overhead.

I also believe that given the business mind of most entrepreneurs, the logistics and finances of Together Apart can be extremely motivating to at least try to make it work, which is why the book is designed to help people answer the question, can I still live with this person? Because, there is a very good business argument for it, at least in the beginning, if you can keep the family and/or business intact.

As a businesswoman yourself, what challenges have you faced in working in the coaching for divorce space? 

The biggest challenge so far has been the shame and secrecy around failing at marriage and the potential divorce. I was shocked at how many people in my life started to tell me their personal stories only after I opened up and was honest about my journey. That is why I was, one might say, brutally honest in the book. I want people to feel less alone, however that is going to require us continuing to normalize and make it okay that marriages don’t always (more often than not) work out.

What do you hope readers take away from your book?

I’m going to go with a sports analogy, and that is that you and your co-parent have a game to win, and winning looks like nurturing your children into healthy adults, mentally, physically, and emotionally, and it is much easier to win if you are playing on the same team, and nearly impossible if you are not. The marriage may be over, your original happy ever after may be over, however you can rewrite a different happy ending, you can find your own family’s happy ending.

Anything else you’d like us to add or include?

If anyone is struggling and feels stuck in a marriage that is over because of children or a shared business, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me.