Today I’m going to tell you the story of my journey to becoming a wedding planner educator.
One very hot day during my sophomore year of high school, my family took a trip to downtown Sacramento. I don’t really remember much about the trip anymore (problems of getting older!), but the one thing that does stand out in my mind is having my fortune told by a gypsy. “You are going to marry your best friend.” “You are going to teach students.” “You are going to have heartache.” At the time, I laughed her off. Sure, heartache—a boyfriend who dumps me, I guessed. Not sure about marrying my best friend since he was a guy I’d known since eighth grade and never once had romantic feelings for.
Wedding Planner Educator
Teacher, me? I hate little kids, I thought to myself. Okay, “hate” is a strong word, but I had no desire to be snotted on, nor did I have the patience of a saint. Well, that’s out, I thought to myself. What a whackadoo.
The Gypsy Was Right
Last year, I realized the gypsy was right. She had predicted my future accurately. I had married my best friend, someone I met in Hawaii while living there. I knew what the very worst kind of heartbreak is, the loss of a child. And I had started teaching. It’s funny to look back on it now. Although her mystic powers were pretty general and laughable, sometimes I wonder if she really did see the future in my palm.
Hiring Consultants
If you haven’t looked at my bio yet, please do. It will save me lots of time on typing. Long story short, my husband is in the military. We moved about a zillion times, and the last time we moved, I had this brilliant idea of hiring consultants to run the areas of my business I was familiar with. Okay, “brilliant” might not be the right word, maybe “crazy.” I jest, I jest. I never considered myself a teacher, but I quickly learned that I was going to have to teach them how to be wedding consultants. It was a horrible beginning. Trying to figure out how to teach my method of doing business while being five states away was difficult, to say the least. We had weekly conference calls where I would be peppered with a thousand questions. I ended up creating a training manual with a PowerPoint presentation, which made for a smoother training sessions. I’m pretty proud of my girls and how they represented my company. It wasn’t easy, and I was constantly changing and modifying the training to better explain what we did and how we did it.
Making Lemonade
Then my whole life changed. I cannot explain or even really write down the most traumatic experience of my life—when I gave birth to a baby girl and she died just six hours later. That will have to be a story for another time. But this is the kind of heartbreak you never quite recover from. It doesn’t get better with time; the wound stays open for eternity, and having more children will never replace the one that isn’t here but should be. After this unimaginable loss, I struggled to continue growing my business. And during this time, I regret to say that my girls were mentorless and had to figure out how to problem-solve on their own. They did a great job, and I like to think it was my amazing training that gave them the wings to soar in business.
To Serve and Give Back
So I took a long break from wedding planning, and then, one day, I woke up. The proverbial kind of wake-up where your heart isn’t quite as heavy and you start to see things a little more clearly. There had been lots of therapy in between as well as the birth of my son. And when I awoke, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to empower new wedding planners to find their feet on shaky ground. I enjoyed mentoring my girls so much that I wanted to do more of it. In this new season of life, the reward of mentoring was so much greater than doing a wedding myself. And so I started the Engaged Wedding Planner Academy.
Turns out, that gypsy was right about all of it. In recent years, I learned that I do love to teach. Not little children, but grown adult women who share my passion of wedding planning. You can check out the EWPA courses here.
