Episode 12: How I Built This: Legos & Royal Obsessions That Shaped My Planner Brain

Episode Summary

Today we are unpacking the childhood obsessions with control, order [shocker!], and storytelling that secretly became the blueprint for a career as a wedding planner. Buckle up, it’s a mind episode friends.

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Full Episode Transcript

Hi friends and welcome back to Mind Over Matrimony. Today we’re gonna just talk a little bit about obsession. Obsession in the work that you do and how things that you’ve obsessed about in the past are now serving you in different ways. So much of this podcast is about decoding—decoding why we do something and how we do that thing and what is the little bridge in the middle.

The obsessions that I really want to talk about today are very different and seemingly unrelated, but one is the royal family, the British royal family specifically, and the second is Lego.

From my earliest memories, I have been fascinated with Legos. I grew up in a family where my dad was an architect, and so building things was always a part of the conversation and talking about the intricate details of how buildings work. And so I think Lego was just like a natural extension of that building philosophy.

I remember even from childhood of just like always choosing the Happy Meal that had the Lego because I thought, oh, this is so cool, and you can build it the way that it’s intended to be built. First, follow the instructions, work through it methodically. The pieces have a place, there’s a certain level of control in the Lego in the beginning, and then when you’re tired of playing with it that way, you undo it and you throw it in a pile, and then you can really be as creative as you want.

In so many ways, that is the perfect metaphor for my childhood and also the perfect metaphor for being a wedding planner.

If you had my sister Jacqueline on this podcast, she would tell you that she has a love hate relationship with Lego because as we were growing up, I would want to always control the narrative of the Lego playing. I was obsessed with certain colors, so I would only do like red buildings or all white buildings. And then my sister was literally a saint, and she would just put together whatever else existed once I had picked out the exact pieces that I wanted. If that’s not a wedding planner in the making, I’m really not sure what is.

Now I feel like I get to play with Lego on a different scale because I get to do this job where it’s like having all of those elements and getting to mix and mash and play around with them. And I think the thing that has changed for me in my journey with this obsession is that as a kid, I needed to really control that process so intently, and the reason was just because of the trauma that was happening around me as a child. It was a place that was safe for me.

Now I get to do that in a totally different way where I’m not in control of the story. And for me, that’s huge growth. That’s a place where I get to tell your story through it, and I get to still obsess about the pieces, but it’s through a lot of therapy, a place where I don’t have to always be in control of exactly how the story’s being told.

Now I just get to build with much bigger blocks and much cooler blocks, and the stuff that I get to build people get to actually go inside and experience, and that’s pretty freaking cool.

And then really the other element of all of this is the drama and the glamor and the jewels of the royal family. As a child, you don’t know any of the nuance of maybe someone is deeply unhappy in their marriage. From the outside, it looks like a fairytale. It looks like a prince and a princess moment. It looks like glamor and elegance and elevation and beautiful architecture.

What’s interesting about it is that it’s the pomp and the circumstance of the royal family that really attracted me to it. Again, just like with Lego, it’s control. It’s the controlled telling of the narrative. It’s the controlled telling of a story. It’s the controlled presentation to the media.

It’s so interesting how I have taken all of that I learned and obsessed about and have a very deep understanding about why certain things happen or why a protocol happens, and then using that in a way to help guide people through this very interesting time in their life. Because it’s this time from when you were single, you’re an entity in and of yourself, and then you enter this weird middle period, and then you exit on the backside of this as a unit that you were not before.

In the messy middle of all of that, there’s all of these different players that come into your situation. There’s parents, there’s aunts, there’s uncles, there’s the committee that has all gotten married before that really want to tell you exactly how they did it. You’re doing a group project with your parents for the first time altogether without even knowing that you’re doing it.

The fact that I get to be a guide for you in that situation and walk you through it and help you understand it and try to help you make sense of it and be okay with it and work your way through it is really one of the most special things that I get to do in this job.

For me, clearly it was about control. Shocking friends. Shocking. I’m a wedding planner. I have a control issue. Newsflash. But I think understanding why and digging a little bit down into where that came from and how I use those tools now has been super helpful.

So there you have it, friends. Mind over matrimony. Today’s episode’s about mind. I don’t know if there’s actually a bow on it, as Persephone would say, but it’s just the truth.