Jun 15 Getting in the Zone: Making the Most of Your Event-Day Mindset for Maximum Success

Perhaps you’ve gone to school, taken classes or gotten a certification. You may have worked as an assistant, apprenticed with someone or worked your way up through a company. If you learned the hard way, you just launched a website, purchased the necessary tools and figured it out along the way. Whatever method brought you to the place you are now, you gained useful knowledge regarding your particular service or product and consider yourself skilled enough to offer it to clients…for money.

There are so many schools, conferences, retreats and online courses that will teach you the specific techniques of your trade. But what about the mental acuity that goes into running your business and preparing for those intense wedding and event days. Let’s face it being a great chef, videographer or limo driver isn’t enough. You need to prepare hundreds of gourmet meals in record time, create stunning imagery among dozens of guests with cameras and transport loud, excited wedding parties to multiple destinations. Not to mention possessing a congenial and even pleasant attitude while performing these tasks. This is the aspect of our career that is the most taxing. So how do you prepare for the intensity of the weekend? Here are my suggestions for getting in the zone mentally so you can handle whatever comes your way.

May 27

May 27 Micro-Manager vs. Laidback Leader: Which are You?

Guest Contributor

Guest Posts, Mindset

(Editor's Note: Friend of WeddingIQ and frequent guest contributor Jennifer Taylor of Taylor'd Events is back today, sharing some insights on different types of leadership within a wedding business. Read more about Jennifer at the end of the post!)

If you work in the event industry, you probably don’t need anyone to tell you how many moving pieces it takes to put on a successful wedding. With that said, the way you handle those pieces speaks a lot to your work style and can have a major effect on the final result.

With so many details to keep track of, it can be fairly easy to micro-manage. Who knows your job better than you? While it’s certainly important to make sure everything falls into just the right place, there is a time and place to take a step back and let the day flow naturally.

May 25

May 25 If You Want Your Wedding Business to Succeed, You Have to Let Go Of These Three Things

Guest Contributor

Mindset, Productivity

Throughout this month, we've written about all kinds of things related to being more productive and effective in your wedding business, from creating systems and workflows to taking baby steps toward outsourcing.

If you truly want your business to be successful, however, there's something important you need to do that doesn't involve taking more on or getting more done. Rather, it's a major mindset shift that absolutely has to take place if you want to grow and thrive. It involves letting go.

May 23

May 23 Work/Life Balance? What's That?! And Can It Exist in the Wedding Industry?

Guest Contributor

Guest Posts, Mindset, Planning

(Editor's Note: Today we welcome our friend and colleague Meghan Ely of OFD Consulting, with a fantastic piece on whether work/life balance is actually an achievable thing in the wedding biz. Read more about Meghan at the end of the post!)

Ah, the ever-coveted work/life balance. From my experience, most people tend to lean towards one side or the other – rarely is it a 50/50 split. In the event industry, it can be especially difficult to prioritize your time as we’re often dealing with weddings and events on the weekends and weeknights.

May 6

May 6 The Myth of Work/Life Balance: How to Make Vacations Work for You

Guest Contributor

Mindset

We hear a lot about work-life balance these days: from parents, colleagues and, well, anyone with a job. There seems to be this belief that work and personal life are completely separate and should be kept so through rigorous scheduling. It implies a "punching of the time clock" mentality in which a worker has set hours on the job that they happily leave behind at the end of the day.

I don’t know about you, but I have never experienced this type of employment, and increasingly, find that my work life and home life have completely melded into one another. When work is no longer confined to an office, when we are in constant contact with clients or when your colleagues are your friends, the lines become blurred - if not nonexistent. Instead, parents now bring their children to work, companies maintain virtual offices and friends start businesses together. More than ever, we are in charge of our own calendars on a daily basis, which is why scheduling down time is so important.