Lance W. Orndorff  MS.Ed.

As a Family & Divorce Mediator, Lance Orndorff facilitates sessions with pre-divorce, divorcing, post-divorce couples, and struggling families, with the goal of  the participants to reveal key needs, assemble ideas for resolution, and determine agreed upon conclusions, all resulting in a final written take-away document.

Lance utilizes proven methods, some open source and some proprietary, to increase awareness among participants and provide a safe and confidential environment for the formulation of participant directed outcomes and solutions.

Watch this video to understand the benefits of mediation.  Lance is a member of the Mediators to Go mediation team and specializes in family related mediation. After watching the video, read on how mediation can benefit you specifically with your family mediation needs:

The outcomes can include, but are not limited to:

Prior to (or alternative) filing for divorce

- Joint family best-effort revitalization and reconciliation agreement
- Joint children or teen behavioral or substance abuse management agreement
- Joint asset management agreement
- Marriage wind-down agreement

In preparation to file for divorce:

- Separation agreement, including maintenance
- Temporary custody and visitation agreement
- Temporary business operations/asset management agreement

After filing for divorce or post divorce

- Final family, asset, and children management agreement
- Proposed modifications to financial, custody, visitation, business operation or other agreement

Lance asks – do we want to:

• Enable divorcing couples or struggling family members to feel more confident and participate fully in results oriented solutions? YES
• Ensure participants understand clearly what each other are striving for? YES
• Develop confidence among conflicting parties to strive for true, actionable results? YES
• Capture authentic feelings, input, objections, and solutions between divorcing parties or struggling, broken families? YES
• Create agreed upon, documented solutions without months or years of legal wrangling? YES
• Save couples tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on drawn out legal battles? YES
• Provide a mechanism for developing a relationship healing environment to potentially derail the looming divorce momentum when the couples believe there is a chance of reconciliation? YES

Lance’s clear answer is YES to all of the questions above, and he is confident that you agree as well.

About Mediation

Through mediation, Lance can increase the potential of all of these outcomes through communications that are clear and concise and are guided by a neutral, trained, mediator. A family and divorce mediator can help couples and families uncover and develop powerful messages that explain in the participant’s own language what they stand for, where the goals and vision disconnects are, what they want, and how jointly they can agree to get there.

Effective neutral guided mediation helps participants to crystallize their thoughts and opinions about their struggle in the marriage or family crisis/breakdown. The power is in how the skilled mediator leads couples to express and then connect disjointed or disconnecting narratives, emotionally charged disappointments, shattered trust feelings, and unfulfilled needs, and ushers all of that information towards a structured, written agreement.

The key is a mediator like Lance with a range of experience, skills, and talent to navigate the participants to their own creative solutions.

A Family & Divorce Mediator: Why do they need one?

Within a divorce or family crisis or breakdown, communication – being heard and hearing – is nearly all cases the origins of the dispute. Once the communication breaks down, many other behaviors, feelings, and outcomes follow. Then, the couples or family attempts to deal with the results of the communication breakdown instead of the communications.

More often than not, the issues are taken into the litigation arena where the battle is for outcomes based on the resolution of the secondary issues, without going back to square one and making a full-handed attempt at rehearing the original or root uncommunicated, or poorly communicated, issues that led to the dispute that led to the court case.

The result is a steep investment in litigation, a tremendous amount of emotional and financial burdens, and at the end of the day, at the end of the case, the result is typically a give and take anyway, but arrived at by way of an end-game deal – and at a high, high cost.

Why should couples and families drag themselves and their children through such a damaging ordeal when they could have began, and likely come to resolution, through mediation?

They don’t have to.

Asking Lance to be their Family & Divorce Mediator brings to the table decades of experience in working with pre-marriage couples, married couples, families, and post-divorce couples, along with content experience in a wide array of counseling, investigative services, community leadership, military life, education and student services,  and other areas that culminate in a dynamic, prepared mediation professional.

Send your questions to: Lance@NationalFamilyMediation.com