Dr Sue Palmer-Conn
Sue divorced at the age of 50 after 25 years of marriage. She worked hard to create a new and exciting career. Sue had been a teacher. She was a stay-at-home mum for 7 years until her youngest son started school, then she went back into teaching part-time. The following year she was diagnosed with MS and, as she was told she might lose mental faculty as well as physical, she completed first a Psychology degree, then a PhD in educational psychology. She soon realised she was one of the lucky ones as her MS was relapsing and remitting, but mainly remitting.
It was after her PhD, when she got a full-time lectureship, that her marriage broke down. In the next five years Sue got rapid promotion from junior lectureship to senior manager. With no management experience, Sue embarked on an MBA and a coaching diploma. She used the coaching every day with staff and students alike. Over the years as her thoughts turned to retirement, she continued to get more coaching qualifications, first in health and wellness and only later became formally qualified as a divorce coach because she was attracting many men and women going through divorce and she wanted to be able to serve them to the best of her ability.
Sue has now been coaching for over twelve years and has worked with over a thousand men, women, couples, and their children, supporting them to navigate the stormy seas of divorce. As time progressed, she realised that she could perhaps help to prevent divorce as well as help people during and after their divorce. She is currently the UK’s only discernment counsellor and helps couples on the brink to make more informed decisions about whether the marriage can be saved and if not to divorce with dignity in the most amicable way possible.
When Sue eventually retired in 2021, she knew she had to start training more divorce coaches and, together with Tom, Mr Divorce Coach, and Mel, Ireland’s first divorce coach, they founded the Divorce Coaching Academy which is now the only externally accredited divorce training programme in the UK. To date they have trained 30 divorce coaches, each with the same high ethical and professional standards as Sue.
The following year, Sue and Tom joined forces with an HR consultant, Jenny from Jam HR, to write a family transition policy which subsequently got government approval. The Family Transition Company work with employers to raise awareness of the effects of divorce on their employees ability to work effectively and efficiently. They also offer training programmes for in-house family transition champions for larger organisations and access to their pool of professional divorce coaches for smaller organisations..
Sue offers a range of programmes for individuals and groups covering the whole of the divorce journey.
Sue has recently published a best-selling book ‘From ME ” WE: Conversation starters to help you Plan the Marriage, not just the Wedding’ to help couples think about all the pitfalls and talk about how they would handle working to a solution, before they actually tie the knot. This book is available in kindle, paperback and hardback version. One of her readers commented ‘This book should be sold with every engagement ring!’ Sue wrote it in an attempt to help keep the number of divorces from rising year on year.
