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10/10 A successful event manages to keep guests connected to the story being told.

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A successful event managed to keep guests connected to the story being told.

Wedding formulas put people to sleep because they know the outcome already. Guest’s wait for the next box to be check. To avoid this you need a point of view. You can’t be everything all at once; classic but not conformist, innovative but still traditional, bright yet subtle…you know who you are. 

Are you the fun couple with doors always open? When friends need a shoulder to lean on, are you the ones they think of first? Are you the trailblazers that inspire others to follow their dreams? Are you the most simple, safe and down to earth of your friends? 

Social media has changed our thinking of events. So many think in terms of whats going to be inside that box rather than what is experienced throughout an evening. 

What are the adjectives that give energy to your intention? What is not your intention with this event? What are some analogies? Is this a journey through a season? A journey to an island? Is this a fabulous ending or an amazing beginning? Give those ideas some more language. 

Keep the night moving. I find that sometimes overtime should only be thirty minutes or not take place at all, if you have a cool after party that is ideally close by. You don’t want guests to lose their steam. You want to have their attention at the end. 

(6/10) What is your wedding for and what is it not for? Get specific

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Six of Ten: What is your wedding for and what is it not for? Get specific. 

Adding to five of ten (see our previous instagram post a few days ago).

Maybe your wedding is to celebrate how far you both have come personally and professionally because of one another. 

Maybe your wedding is to thank your community that has supported you and accepted you as you are through the years. 

Maybe your wedding is to celebrate all that you both plan to create and do in the years to come.

Maybe your wedding is to celebrate your family of origin that helped set you up for success in relationships. 

You recognize that it takes a village to create a meaningful life. How has this community supported you? How does this community make you both feel? 

Giving language to your ‘why’ helps maintain perspective and creates energy for the experience you want to have, not just for that weekend but in the months leading up to this special day. ***It directs focus away from the unimportant minutiae that will stress you out.***

What is your wedding not for? We all have anxieties. Let go of the baggage getting in your way and get on with YOUR amazing planning and weekend. What baggage? You know, the performance anxiety that many people carry. 

Your wedding is not to prove your worth. 

Your wedding is not to prove your status.

Your wedding is not a competition with your social sphere. 

Own your own day and be true to yourself. 

MY YEAR END TOP 10 THINGS TO REMEMBER - 2020

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The last year has been such a gift and I am grateful that I have been in healthy position in all senses of the word. I know that all the people reading this cannot say the same, especially those in the event industry. Oh there were blows, believe me, but perspective was sustained and silver linings appreciated. Without discrediting the hardships that others have endured in 2020, I do know whatever happens to you happens for you. This is my saying of sayings 24/7 and has been for years. You have to turn your circumstances on their head, facing you, like a box of paints standing still, waiting for you to either be reactive or create. You may have to feel a ton of shit but hard feelings don’t hurt you, they only make you stronger - it’s not feeling them, holding them, hiding that will.

Some years I post my top ten things to remember and sometimes I keep them to myself. Going all in for 2020-2021. I am in love with life and all it has to offer and all I have to offer it in return. Maybe the snow is making me glow this week - I am SO pumped.

Check back before the thirty-first, as this blog is one of two installments for New Year’s End. In the next I will tweak this life hack list and deliver you some of my subjective wedding hack lessons.

  1. Whatever happens to you, happens for you.

  2. Where your attention goes, energy flows, and that energy compounds and so becomes your life. Another nice way of saying, ‘the entirety of your experience will be determined by the quality of your mind’. (I meditate daily. I don’t know how I ever managed without!)

  3. It’s wise to drop all stories so that you can first see things as they are. First you have to realize where you are holding stories, bringing them into rooms with yourself and other people. How are you perhaps enabling another person’s story because it serves your own story? Then when you drop them all, you realize just how much ‘okay’, ‘validation’ and ‘enough’ there truly is for everyone. 

  4. There are no problems as long as there are solutions. The only problem is that you have yet to find your way to courage. 

  5. Boundaries isn’t a bad word and they serves the other people as well. 

  6. Long term goals are more generous than short term goals. One day it will be okay if you piss people off in the short term because you are going to create, achieve or do something that will benefit them more tomorrow. 

  7. Being interested is a lot more loving, trustworthy, genuine and productive than trying to be interesting. 

  8. Time and health are all we have. That is a sobering, scary and strengthening one to digest fully and reread daily on a sticky note posted to your front door…not that you should be going anywhere in 2020 except for a good long walk but you know what I mean. 

  9. Show up to connect, rather than control or coerces to power.  How can you know what you are going to offer next when you have not digested what the other person has sent your way? Living generously and well is just like the craft of acting, living right in the moment. Acting powerful or being defensive is not going to protect you from anything but move you farther from you goal. The only protection from anything you will ever have is your ability to face things head on, without defense, soft. 

  10. Resistance is the only pain…Another common way of saying the same thing as above. So true. And there is no BUT, only AND. 

As always, ignore my dyslexic grammar. I think pace and personality are more important anyway.

I love and forgive you 2020 just don’t come back here again.

XO

Ashley D.

The Power of Choice

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These times are not easy and its absolutely not at all easy to shift our attention to anything but the uncertainly of the present moment but we all need each other to do so. We all need ourselves and each other to keep life moving forward.

Life keeps moving forward whether you are ready for it or not, whether you want it to or not. Resistance always reveals itself to be the only pain.

Everything does happen for a reason. The current moment would not have happened if the previous moment did not take place. We merely do not always know what caused the current moment but something did.

The only way to be in alignment with our best selves in the present moment is to have not resisted the previous one. Pain leads to happiness and happiness will lead to pain, or discomfort, over and over again. That is the nature of life.

If you give yourself a chance, some time to try again and again, you may find yourself engrossed in some task that makes you feel better. Get your attention off yourself and focus on something that will effect your future, that will effect our future.

I am so grateful for our clients with future events. Events we are currently assuming won’t be cancelled. They immediately take our minds into the future and keep them in the reality that this too shall pass. There may be a new normal but life will continue.

I am grateful for the added time I currently have to work on some long term projects that I had previously been battling time to complete.

I am grateful that I can be accountable to my own time. I still do have the power of choice and the power to choose my thoughts.

I am grateful for my health.

I am grateful that I took that plunge ten years ago to work for myself.

I am so grateful for my partner who is lovingly putting up with me and vise versa. Who meditates with me each morning, cooks with me and takes yoga with me.

I am grateful that I have discipline that I attribute in large part to having been a performer and a ballet dancer as a child. Its coming in way handy now.

I am grateful to my clients that are so appreciative of the time I am giving them during these odd times.

I am grateful for the fresh food I still have in the fridge.

I am grateful for everything that wedding planning has taught me, and event planning too. God, it teaches a ton. And working for yourself teaches you a ton. It makes you stronger than you ever thought you could be.

I am grateful for the work I have done on myself to get me to this moment because it makes these times far easier and there is still room for joy.

I hope....

In the long run I hope these times make us less judgmental, more grateful, more simple, less petty, more creative, more down to earth and connected as we now know how to better focus on what matters most.

XO

Ashley

P.S. Don’t judge my poor grammar please. :-)