If You've Ever Considering Being A Wedding Planner...

This article is written by one of my favorite wedding planner/blogger/business women.  She has amazing insight about the wedding industry and life as a whole!  If you want to be inspired in business read her blog Think Splendid.  Personally I love it!  Here's today's blog post, which actually happens to come from a few years back, but still carries the same weight.  Everything she says is true.  Wedding planning is not for the glitz and glam, there actually isn't much of that.  It's for the people seeking to truly make a difference in someones life on the most important day in their lives thus far.  Many, many hats are worn in this job.  This article describes a few!  Enjoy!

The Must-Have Trait for Wedding Pros (And Everyone Else) Posted: 17 Jul 2014 01:45 AM PDT My first job was in high school as a receptionist and shampoo girl at a hair salon. I learned many important skills at that job but the most valuable was learning how to listen to people on a deep level. It's a universal law that hair salons are some mysterious safe zone where people open up about their most vulnerable feelings while reading gossip magazines. As the professional, you're suddenly entrusted with a piece of their heart, whether you asked to be or not. It's like this in weddings, too. If you expect everyone to be rational, logical and approach decisions with level-headed analysis, the wedding industry is not for you. Every engaged couple and every wedding brings with it a lifetime of family dynamics and subtext that you must learn to navigate almost immediately. Some of it you'll recognize right away: the emotional loss of identity when two financially independent people are looking at merging accounts, a mom who can't seem to cut the apron strings even though her son hasn't lived at home in 14 years, divorced parents who will be in the same room for the first time in decades, crazy Aunt Mary who doesn't fall off the wagon, she jumps every chance she gets. And then there's the stuff that's less obvious: the sibling rivalry only heightened as adults because of differing life choices, the unspoken social expectations passed down through generations, the years of dinner table conversations and the perspectives they shaped, the hours of therapy the bride or groom has sat through as an adult because of family circumstances. Sometimes I'll "assist" a colleague on an event in order to observe the behavioral dynamics behind the scenes. At one wedding in Chicago a couple years ago, the mother of the bride made a tear-filled comment to me about how frumpy her arms looked in her sleeveless dress. On the surface this seems like a common insecurity every woman has had at some point in her life. What mattered, though, was that the mom wasn't looking at me when she was talking to me. She was looking across the room at her ex-husband's much younger (read: bride's age) new wife, whose arms could have given Michelle Obama's a run for their money. There, in the middle of photographs and makeup and hair styling and laughing over champagne, was a woman who was simultaneously excited for her daughter's wedding and grieving afresh her own shattered dreams. She wasn't interested in hearing that her arms looked fine and she looked beautiful, she wanted to know that she was still lovable and worthy of being pursued. These are tricky waters to navigate and require the ability to listen and pay attention on a level most jobs do not. They require building a team that practices empathy and isn't solely concerned with their own art, fame, timelines, Instagram updates or checkmarks on a to-do list. They require a thick-skin, grit and a willingness to forgive and forget when people's emotions prevail against their better judgment. They require consistently paying attention to a world beyond ourselves. Originally published January 2011