Wedding Plan

Planning Your Wedding - A Simpler and Common Sense Approach

Planning a wedding can be a frustrating and stressful process. But it can also be a pleasant pathway to a well organized event that lays the foundations for lots of wonderful memories.

Here’s a simple five-step formula. The goal of these five steps is to maximise your enjoyment, reduce stress levels and keep you in control.

Step 1: List the key components of your wedding
Every wedding is made up of a series of components or events. Your first task should be to make a list of the elements that will make up your wedding. This list can also be your big picture checklist.

To help your thinking, you may wish to group them in three categories: pre-wedding, main event and post-wedding. Here are some examples:

Pre-wedding – e.g. the wedding date, guest list, printed invitations, bridal party, etc.

Main event – e.g. Church or ceremony location, minister or celebrant, reception location, food and drink, wedding cake, bridal gown, photography, etc.

Post wedding – honeymoon, thank you cards, paying accounts, etc.

Step 2: Clarify your expectations
This could well be your most important planning step. It’s a step that is frequently overlooked and because of this, communication errors occur. Stress and disappointment are the likely consequences.

What’s required in this step is that you get clear on what your emotional expectations are for each important part of your wedding experience.

This is what you should do. Read through the list you prepared in Step 1. When you come to an item or event that you or your fiancee feel is important or critical, do this.

Get a fresh sheet of paper. At the top of the page write a title that identifies a critical event, for example: The Wedding Gown.

Next write a paragraph or two or more, which describes your expectations. What’s important here is that you describe your expectations in emotional teams.

A simple way to do this is to use sentences that contain feeling words. As an example, for the wedding dress, you might write:

“During the wedding ceremony and reception, I want to truly feel that this is my special day. I also want to attract genuine praise from our guests. I want the dress to really reflect my style and personality.”

In other words, describe the emotional impact that you would like important parts of your wedding to have on the people involved.

Repeat this procedure for each part of your wedding for which you have strong happiness expectations.

Step 3: List your options
Your next task is to consider the how-to options you could use to make your wedding a success.

Start with the parts of your wedding that you have identified as critical to success. For each item, make a short list of the solution options that are available to you. Where possible, include costs or at least estimates.

For example, for the wedding gown, you might list:

(a) A low cost, eBay option. This would cost about $…
(b) The local wedding shop has quoted me $… for …
(c) A superb gown from the city specialist will cost $…

Note: getting specialist advice may also be a worthwhile option if it’s an important item and you are low on knowledge or experience.

When you have listed options for all the critical parts, repeat the process for the less than critical items.

Step 4: Make decisions
Your task now is to consider your options and make decisions. Of the options you have identified, which is the best match for your budget and success expectation.

As you go about making these decisions, make time to consider the required delivery times. Also determine who will be responsible for each component or task. Is it you or your finance or one of your friends or family? Attention to this detail will go a long way to making your total event a joyful experience.

Step 5: Stress reduction
It should come as no surprise that very few weddings go strictly to plan. In other words, it’s highly likely that some part of your great event will need to be changed or adjusted.

With this in mind, you should mentally prepare yourself.

Accept that your wedding arrangements will likely be ‘normal’ and that things won’t work out exactly as expected.

In life, there are things that happen to us, that we have little or no control over. However, with good planning and preparation, you can reduce stress and move on to better outcomes.

By Andrea Freimiz