Two Ways to Make Better and Easier Planning Decisions

How do you make decisions? From the very beginning of the wedding planning process (or any process for that matter) your decision making style will impact your stress level and your planning success. And as I have discovered, the attitude and time you invest in your choices can make you very happy or very stressed. So the following items are two of the best tips I could offer on how to make decisions as you plan your event, based on my experience so far, and why they will make a difference.

Deciding between linen options!

1) Be as decisive as possible. It is in your best interest to make a decision, stick to it and move on. This isn’t to say you should jump into your decisions because of pressure from your planner, fiancé, and/or family. Nor does it mean you should take an apathetic approach to planning. If there are some items, you really don’t know how to decide on – then wait! But, give yourself a time limit to decide; because the longer you belabor over which salad (or soup?!) you should choose as your first course, the less time you have to keep yourself sane. If you are at all like my fiancé and I, you are planning your wedding between working a full-time job and managing the other incidentals that pop-up in a life (like the leak in the basement or several other friends engagements). The longer you take to make decisions, the longer they will be weighing on your mind; and taking up valuable airspace from all of the other aspects of your life that require your attention. According to Jen Sincero, author of You are a Badass, How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life (which is an incredible book btw), “deciding is freedom, indecision is torture.” By making quick and smart decisions you give yourself permission to plan your day in joy, instead of planning each step in misery. The longer you wait to decide on a first course, photo booth or a signature cocktail, the more stress can build up and take away from what you are really doing: getting ready to start the next exciting chapter of your life’s journey.

One thing that can help you make quick decisions is to use your budget as a guide. If you have an unlimited budget, then shoot for the moon! Get the gold flatware to match the gold ombre cake and the fancy cookies with gold foil from the best bakery in Philadelphia. However, if you are on a budget – like me – think about the items you thought were most important when you first started planning so, you don’t get caught up wasting money and time on the minor decisions. For example, if you are debating over a photo booth and you originally picked your venue based on their dance floor and killer menu options, then do you really want to pay money for an item that could take away from those things instead of complimenting them? Plus, that is one more vendor to be concerned about on the day of. Sometimes less really is more. Channel Paul Rudd’s Surfer attitude from Forgetting Sarah Marshall — “do less!” Your body, mind and wallet will thank you for it later.

2) This is equally as important as number 1; make sure you and your beau are on the same page before you make a decision. Matt and I checked some major items off of our wedding to-do list at our wedding-tasting last weekend which required making a lot of decisions about dinner options. And when it came time for us to make those decisions it was very easy because we agreed on what we wanted before we started the tasting: simplicity for ourselves and classically good food. So, we opted for a variety of awesome appetizers like bacon wrapped scallops, which are easy to eat and drink with. And for our main courses we went with a traditional Ceaser Salad and a surf & turf (with filet mignon and Chilean Sea Bass)! Our guests will enjoy a variety of the best the Windrift has to offer and we won’t need to collect a 150+ entree selections from everyone, win-win! Our wedding coordinator even gave us props for how quickly we decided on each item; And we can proudly say we hold the record for quickest course choices at the Windrift!

Some hors d’oeuvre options – I will take all of the cheesesteak egg rolls, please!

Despite our success, I can see how these choices can become big hang ups for couples. From yummy classic options like Ceaser salad to creamy lobster bisque and New England clam chowder the range of good options is so large, couples could easily get caught up on trying to please everyone instead of just choosing what they both want or even blow their budget on soup and salad for ALL. Worst-case scenario they could end up alienating each other because of disagreements regarding the decisions they make. That can be a one-way ticket to a tortuous tasting event. Going into the process with a united front made the difference between making decisions that suited us both versus ones, which could cause friction – and misery later on.

One-way to limit the opportunities for a disagreement is to write a pro’s and con’s lists for the choices you think you both might get hung up on. And if you run through each of your pro’s and con’s and still are at an impasse, ask an expert. You are hiring a caterer, florist, event planner, photographer etc. for a reason – they are experts at what they do. So don’t feel obligated to have all of the answers. One of the tried and true ways to lighten your planning load (and life load) is to relinquish some control to those who know best! They may think of options that you both didn’t even know existed. For example, we thought we would need to decorate a wedding arch for our beach wedding and we were concerned about the cost. My florist offered me the option to use two palm trees instead which is perfect, not just because it is cost-effective but, because anyone who knows me, understands that palm trees are one of my all time favorite things (alongside sunsets and fireworks) in life. If we hadn’t listened to her ideas or thought we needed to have all of the answers we may never have come up with the perfect option.

As Alex McClafferty so eloquently states in the Forbes Article, 5 Simple Steps to Improve Your Decision Making, “decision making can be difficult because you become too personally invested in how a decision will make you look and feel.” So making decisions as you plan can be very emotional for you and others involved in the process with you. It can also make each choice seem much more important than it is. If you start to get overwhelmed remember: planning this event is not the end of the world, if anything it is just the beginning of the planning for you an your fiancés future. Have fun and don’t forget why you are doing this all to begin with (and it’s not to go broke and bald from stress). Your wedding is about the love you want to share with all of the people who you love. And if they truly care about you, your linen/floral/food choices won’t matter to them anyway. They will just be excited to spend the day celebrating one of the most amazing gifts life has to offer!

Matt and I – remembering to have FUN!

Have you ever questioned the things you pay attention too?

Attention. Do you ever question the things you give your attention too? Lately, I have started too. Why, you ask? Let me explain… it all started about a week ago when I tried to clean out my e-mail in-box. Every day I am bombarded with a constant stream of e-mails, text messages and even advertisements that require my concentration. And the volume of the information flowing from these channels has catapulted since I have started to plan my wedding.

Despite my conscious effort to filter out un-necessary editorials, these crafty content marketers aren’t stupid, they know just how to keep me coming back for more. For example, I just read this article from “Brides” magazine: 40 Gorgeous Gowns We Love under 1,000! TBH, I already purchased my dress and it is non-refundable so reading this article = a waste of time! But these marketers are clever, and they know how to solicit my subconscious desire to save money and seize opportunities, like this e-mail from a local wedding vendor: “Win a Chance to get this $1,000 photography gift for your wedding!” – you bet I clicked on that e-mail and squandered 5 minutes of my day. They even know how to dictate what I should and shouldn’t do, like this e-mail I received from “The Knot” yesterday: “Nichole, 207 Days to Go! Here’s What to do This Week” – I am an organized person, so I don’t need an e-mail to tell me what to do, but, boom one click and poof! 10 more minutes of my day was gone. This e-mail overload is just the tip of my in-box iceberg. I haven’t even accounted for the demands of social media or phone calls and texts from my fiancé, co-workers, family & friends. The competition for my attention is more intense than Serena Williams contending for a Gold Medal in the Olympic games.

I used to think I didn’t need to focus my attention because my multi-tasking skills would allow me to efficiently overcome the high-demand and efficiently complete all of the tasks required of me. Unfortunately, my knack for multi-tasking does more harm than good for me. According to a 2014 research study at Stanford University, multi-tasking could actually be damaging my brain and my career. Yikes! Even though this study made me realize I cannot just do one thing, while simultaneously starting something else, and expect to be accurate; my own experience made me realize the increased number of distractions and things that I am asked to attend to may also be damaging my health.

This became abundantly clear last Thursday. I was at work. I was going about my normal erratic business of reading e-mail, while talking on the phone and trying to answer the question of a co-worker at my desk. I barely took a breath between sentences when my cell phone pinged – and almost instantaneously I felt the pressure similar to the weight of a heavy anvil arise in the middle of my chest. The pain stayed with me for hours. When I got home, the feeling in my chest was so strong, I was forced to stop and just breathe. This time, it wasn’t my in-box or my phone but, my body that was screaming for overdue attention and it gave me no choice but to stop and listen. As soon as I listened, I started to cry. Not a sad cry, but an exasperated cry; I had been driving myself crazy trying to make decisions about my wedding, research a new medication my doctor wanted me to try for my chronic condition, all while working extra hours on a major project at work. Unknowingly, I got caught up in the chaos of life and was paying the painful price for it.

Luckily for me, I know meditation and the act of non-doing and non-striving can help during times of physical and emotional turmoil. So, I did a full-body scan meditation, and I sat with my breath for 30 minutes. In this time I realized, the pain was a sign of deregulation in my body. The pain was also a sign that I was suffering from my minds constant desire to perform everything demanded of it. I am spending upwards of 30K on my wedding – which is a very significant amount of money – and I realized I am rushing through the whole process.

I am pushing so hard to “get things done” I barely give my decisions or what I am paying attention to a second thought before moving on to the next thing. And maybe, even more importantly, I have forgotten to pay attention to my most important assets – my physical and mental health.

I don’t need to say it, but I will anyway, are only 24 hours in a day and most of us – including myself, are asleep for about 1/3 of those hours. So for the 16 hours I am rushing my life away by trying to get things done and respond to all of the communications that are sent to me. This is probably why life seems to be passing me by quicker than ever. Jon Kabat –Zinn author of “Full Catastrophe Living” called this phenomena the “age of anxiety” based on the speed of which we live our lives and ask our minds to function in the digital age. And according to him the items, which beg for my attention, will not slow down, “with the advent of the digital age, we have entered an amazing world of 24/7 connectivity. It was supposed to make our lives much easier – and it has in many ways. But it has also made us dependent on technology that can become oppressive, as well as convenient, because the communications never stop coming” (John Kabat-Zinn, 2011). So the technology is both hard to live with at times (just think about the e-mail overload I mentioned earlier) and impossible to live without. And this is only the beginning.

After my wedding is planned and over, there will be something else that begs for my attention. It is a guarantee that my life will be filled with many more distractions.

I am immersed in an unusual and ever-changing world with all of its promise and also potential costs. And I find these electronic communications are excellent at diverting me from the people, work, and hobbies that require my time and energy. So it’s time for me to do more than just “opt out”, I need to strategically decide what I focus on and when I focus on it. I need to be mindful of why I am doing what I am doing at any given moment. Because, as you can probably tell, this is about more than my wedding, it is about how I choose to live my life. So, I ask again, have you ever questioned the things you pay attention too?

 

The Bridezilla Trap, Day 375

One of my biggest fears during wedding planning is becoming the dreaded Bridezilla. A Bridezilla is so eloquently defined by the Urban Dictionary as, “one ridiculous spoiled bitch, that thinks she is the center of the universe because ‘her show’ a.k.a her wedding, is 18 months from now.” It is not just an American TV series; Bridezilla behavior is a real life phenomenon that ends engagements, friendships, and divides families. We all have heard the horror stories: “Bride smashes grooms phone because it rings during rehearsal ceremony; “bride asks for MOH to handed her grapes so, she won’t mess up her makeup” and my personal favorite; “bride demands bridesmaids contribute towards her $10,500 wedding gown, after she maxes out her budget on Egyptian cotton linens.” Yikes.

So, this made me question, what is it about wedding planning that turns even the mildest mannered ladies into egocentric, obsessive, attention-starved monsters?

To answer that question, I needed to travel back years, even decades. I needed to go back to when girls are innocent, impressionable and perhaps awkward, early adolescence. You see, the seed is planted during this stage of life. There is no specific occurrence that that starts the germination process; it could be as a flower girl in an aunt’s wedding or when she first witnesses a woman dressed as a beautiful bride on TV. However, the underlying message that triggers the process is always the same and it goes something like this; someday you will grow up and be a princess for a day. It will be on a warm, sunny day. Everyone you love will be there and they will all be fixated on you. And when the day ends, you will ride off into the sunset with a hansom man – your prince. Basically, the day will be like a perfect dream. At first, girls don’t realize this message had an impact. We continue through adolescence, the teenage years and college. Maybe we even date a few guys and have a high-school sweetheart. Maybe we right their first name with his last name in our spiral notebooks. But what we don’t realize is that message, the seed that was planted so long ago, was silently being fertilized during this whole process and grew into several sprouts.

How do I know this? I know because, over half of women will have a wedding planning Pinterest board, well before they are ever engaged. I know because, some single women shop for an engagement rings. And I know because, there are the late night talks with girlfriends about what the dream wedding dress will look like.

Now you may be saying to yourself, just because I have a pre-marital Pinterest board, doesn’t mean I will become a bridezilla…and that is probably true. But, the fact cannot be ruled out, women are set up from girlhood to believe their wedding day should not only be special, but perfect. The concept of a perfect wedding day is embedded in our culture, taught to us unwittingly by some of our parents, and enforced by a billion dollar wedding industry that wants you to believe your day can and should be perfect. And that is a lot of pressure. Especially since, most things in life – like the weather, others behavior, financial burdens, are out of everyone’s control.

So, when the moment finally happens and the love your life asks for your hand in marriage, everything that you have thought about for decades floods in your mind faster than a tidal wave on the banks of the North Shore, flooding every crevice and synapse in your brain; all because the possibility of the “dream” just got real. Only now you start to realize that prefect may not exist. There are financial restrictions, time restrictions, and hell, even legal restrictions that will prevent you from having the magical day you believe your fairy tale wedding is made of.

In conclusion, blaming a bride for being an unreasonable abhorrent bitch is easy. Questioning how she got there, not so much. Is there a bride gene that lingers under the surface when we are born jut waiting to be activated? I have no idea, but I highly doubt it. What is more likely, is there is a cultural seed that is planted early on in life and fed a steady diet of fertilizer, until it finally sprouts unexpectedly when we start wedding planning. As for me, I am going to do my best to keep my head on straight, for the next 375 days of planning. And I am really going to try and enjoy the process. I might have my moments, but I hope I remember what is most important – the life I am about to create, with the love of my life.

 

 

 

How My Family of Origin May Affect My Marriage – Day 389.

I am getting married in 389 days and I never thought I would be excited about the prospect of marriage and wedding planning.

Here is a little background on me –  Growing up in a predominantly single family house hold, independence always seem to reign supreme. My parents divorced when I was 5 years old and for the most part, they remained mutually exclusive entities that only collided during pre-scheduled pick-up and drop-off points every other weekend. Moreover, my mother who is the unintentional matriarch of my family, never pushed the idea of matrimony on me or my younger sister. In fact, despite that I am 32 and in long-term loving relationship,  I think she is still having a hard time grappling with the fact that I am now engaged.

Interestingly enough, she and my father both remarried successfully. My Dad married my step-mom, Ginny, about a year after their initail divorce. And my mom married Steve about 10 years later. They both have been re-married for over a decade now, but their separation always seemed to be the most influential relationship preceptor during my early days of dating. Like a dark cloud looming in my mind, I always had this underlying feeling that relationships were not built to last; for the longest time I could truly relate to the famous words of Regina Spektor – “I never loved nobody fully, always one foot on the ground.” I felt no need to fall head over heals, if I was just going to land alone. Plus to compound my gamophobia, I found it hard for any of my partners to live up to my unreasonably high expectations of a male partner, formed by none other than Walt Disney Studios (thanks a lot, Prince Charming).  As I would later find out during an undergrad social psychology class, I am not alone in my feelings. The longitudinal research on children who hail from divorced families support my commitment apprehension; the long-term outcomes on children from divorced families show, we have lower levels of resilience, higher rejection sensitivity, often unfounded relationship expectations and “experience heightened anxiety in forming enduring attachments at later developmental stages including adulthood.”

Which is why, the thought of planning for a lifelong commitment – in all its glory, excitement, and frustration – always seemed like an enticing but foreign concept to me. A pragmatic girly girl – yes, I want to dress up in a big white ball gown but how could I justify spending upwards of $20,000 on one day?! Impractical! And then, one day, when I least expected it, I found my person. And all of the ambivalence, life lessons, and apprehension melted away. Just kidding! I still feel overwhelmed at times.  But I am, for the first time in my life, slowly feeling myself get sucked into the wedding industry vortex. I am excited about the possibility of  an amazing life-long marriage and a killer wedding reception. We have picked a venue, a DJ, photographer, and we are in the process of making a guest list. I have poured over Pinterest boards, studied dress designers and contemplated over color pallets. We have dedicated thousands of our (and our parents) hard earned dollars towards this day.

So as I find myself not only in love, but in the midst of planning for this major life event, I want to share all of the dealings – the good, the bad, and the unexpected – that come along with the commitment to blend my life in with my partner, until death do us part, with you.

During all of the major events in my life to date, I have shared all of my experiences – reservations, joy, and confusion – with my close friends and family as a way to help me remember and to help keep me sane. I have also kept private journals from all of these different moments in my life, which inspired me to start this blog. I hope you will read along with me, maybe cry with me and hopefully laugh a lot with me as I make my way from Miss to Mrs. over the next 389 days.

Author pictured on the left, in the flower dress, with her Mom, sister, fiance and step-Dad in Martha’s Vineyard.

References:

Schaan, V.K. & Vögele, C.(2016) Resilience and rejection sensitivity mediate long-term outcomes of parental divorce. Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry.  doi:10.1007/s00787-016-0893

Wallerstien, J. S. (The Long-Term Effects of Divorce on Children: A Review. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Volume 30 , Issue 3 , 349 – 360. doi:10.1097/00004583-199105000-00001