S7E2: Hot Take: Your Wedding Day Isn't "Your Day" with First Looks
In wedding planning - just like in life - it’s often more important to hear the truth than what you want to hear.
Even when that truth is hard.
It’s also incredibly important to set yourself up for success by getting the support you need.
But, where do you even find that kind of support when your friends, family, and loved ones might be the cause of your stress?
Guest: Jacquelyn Burt, First Looks
This week, we’re dishing about…
Adaptive communication
Communication under stress
The "fresh start effect”
… and more!
Meet Jacquelyn!
Jacquelyn is the owner of First Looks LLC, an entrepreneurial wedding business based in the Twin Cities of Minnesota.
Combining her experiences as a multi-award-winning wedding makeup artist with her background in higher education and educational counseling, First Looks is pioneering an innovative service that’s disrupting the wedding industry: professional support for the emotional, relational, and communication aspects of wedding planning.
With both on-site makeup artistry and emotional support services, First Looks believes that the experience of planning a wedding and getting married is a unique opportunity to both explore and experience beauty you can FEEL.
Jacquelyn is deeply committed to centering justice and equity in her work as both an educator and entrepreneur, and is passionate about the role that celebration can play in creating sustainable change. Her unique blend of skills and experiences allow her to bring courageous, creative, and compassionate expertise and service to clients and their loved ones.
Across both of my careers as a wedding makeup artist and an educator and student counselor, my training and work has been supporting big feelings and identity shifts during big changes and celebrations.
I specialize in supporting and seeing people through both transformation and celebration; and nothing is more transformative - or celebratory - than a wedding.
My background has developed some "hot take" perspectives, however, and one of the most controversial - and also the one I maybe believe in the most passionately - is that your wedding day is NOT "your day".
We hear so much about "people pleasing", and we're encouraged to not listen to others' opinions and to "set good boundaries" when we feel stressed and overwhelmed - and these messages absolutely show up in the wedding industry.
But the reality is that many of the people in our lives are going to have thoughts, ideas, and feelings about celebrating our marriages... because they have feelings about US.
There IS a way to include values, hopes, and expectations from the people we have invited to celebrate with us as our guests. And there IS a way to balance them with our own needs (and within our own capacities).
My work with First Looks helps wedding celebrants and their loved ones do exactly that, and to reframe the all-too-demonized "people-pleasing" with a more expansive and compassionate take: "INTENTIONAL INCLUSION".
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