Episode 21: Planner ESP: What You’re Saying Without Saying It

Episode Summary

Every couple communicates and makes decisions differently, and that’s one of the things I love most about wedding planning. In this episode, I share how our team listens for cues, adapts our tools, and learns what works for you, from early vendor decisions to the details of a design board. I also talk about why it can be hard to picture a wedding that hasn’t existed before. Friends, please tell us how you learn, what you need, and when something isn’t working. Honest, open communication helps us adjust, make better decisions together, and have a lot more fun along the way.

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julianleaver.com | @julianleaver

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Full Episode Transcript

Hi friends, and welcome back to Mind Over Matrimony. This episode is really mostly gonna be about the things that you're saying without saying them. We are going to dive a little bit more into the mind piece of this thing. And what's fun about it is that every couple that we get to interact with is so different. There's none that are the same.

And we get to show up as the planning and design team in a different way for each couple and exercise and use different tools in our toolkit to be able to help navigate this whole process, right?

Okay, because what's very odd about this job is that we don't get to do everything in a linear fashion because there are multiple clients and you're all here at the same time, and you're all making very different decisions, and you're all in different phases in the process, which is what makes it interesting and why we keep coming back.

But we're also shifting every single meeting. We're shifting from this meeting that was at noon to the next meeting that's at one, and it's a totally different dynamic. Maybe in meeting at noon, we're just dealing with the bride. There's no parents involved, or we're dealing with the bride and the groom in the next meeting, or the meeting after that is the bride and the groom's parents or vice versa. So there's lots of different combinations of trying to unpack and understand how your dynamic works and how we fit into that dynamic.

And it really all starts for us with the discovery calls. When you all write in your inquiry, and then we jump on the phone, and then we do a follow-up. And I think in each of those meetings, I am just listening to what you have to say. And the more that you tell us in the beginning, the easier it is to uncover how best we can help you.

I always say that the rehearsal dinner day is actually my favorite day because it is the day where all of your friends get up and tell everything about you. And sometimes I will turn to whoever happens to be standing next to me and I'm like, Oh my God, why couldn't we have heard this speech on day one? Like, why couldn't have their friends said, Oh, they're totally this way. And this is the reasoning behind it, because they get to see this large arc of your relationship, right? They get to be in it with you the entire time to understand how you're communicating and how the two of you as a unit are operating. And we're just learning it for the very first time, right, when we meet you in the very beginning, right? You know a lot about us. We put a lot out there. There's a podcast, there's all of the information on our website, there's an Instagram. It's a very public situation. We don't really know that much about you, so we have to get to know you very quickly.

And so really we're watching, right? We're watching for cues. We're watching for how you guys look at each other when we ask you to make a decision. We're learning how you like to communicate. Do you like to have all of the information given to you and then you like to go away and make a decision and then come back to us? Or do you like to make a decision in the moment? Are you very decisive? Do you know exactly what you want? And so we're just building our muscle memory again and again and again and again. And I think that's why we always say that we start with those feeling vendors at the beginning because it's a lower, it's like a low high-stakes situation, right? Because it's lower stakes in terms of the number of decisions that you're going to have to make with that person, right?

Because really, with those feeling vendors, which again are like entertainment and photo and video and hair and makeup, you're basically making the decision at the beginning and then we're not talking to them for a very long time until the end. And so how you make those decisions shows us how you're going to make all of the rest of the decisions.

And so we're listening. We're trying to unpack that. We're trying to understand how you like to be given information. And then we're adapting to you to give you that information in the best way that we know how. And what I will also say about that too, is if you need something else from us, it's important to say it. Hey, I like the cadence of the way that this is going, but could we also do X, Y, and Z? Or could you include us on this set of emails because we'd like to have the visibility into that because our decision-making process maybe takes a little bit longer because we have maybe some more stakeholders that need to run through something before we can make a decision. And so every single person is a little bit different. And I think that's the thing that I've loved about this job is unpacking that and deploying my tools from therapy and from AA and figuring out how to relate to you and help you make the best decisions possible. Where I will say this gets a little tricky for couples, right? We can help you make decisions on vendors all day long. You go, you make the decision, you unpack it, you work through it. You do what you need to do and you come back to us, right? A lot of the time you're interviewing those people too. So there's another person involved in that process.

Where the decision-making gets a little bit more complicated in wedding planning is in the decor decisions because it's not something that I can show you. This is exactly what it's going to look like because it's never existed in the world before until your wedding.

And so that's where we really have to work together in terms of communicating and you telling us exactly what it is that you need. Because sometimes we cannot, we don't know exactly how you learn or how you process.

And so a lot of it is trial and error. We're showing you something, we see how you react to it, and then we show you the next thing and we see how you react to it. Generally, I would say almost everyone's reactions follow a similar pattern once we understand how that reaction works.

And how do I describe that to you? I think… some people have a hard time looking at a design board and then looking at a very linear budget and understanding how those two things relate to each other and how they are all, how they're all integrated and put together. And so sometimes we just have to spend a little bit more time walking you through what each line item is and pointing that all out. And I will say our process is really evolving in that way, right?

We've been changing our design boards so that at every point in the design board, there's a little snapshot now of the part of the diagram that part of the design board relates to. So you're not flipping back and forth, you're literally, oh, okay, this is the little part, I saw the big diagram as a whole, and now here's a little bit more digestible piece right here, so that you can have like a very good understanding.

And then what we've also been doing, another design board that then shows kind of like, okay, this is what we're renting and this is what was existing in the space. So we're walking you through kind of those decisions and helping you understand what all of the line items mean. Because unlike building a house, which this building a wedding is very similar to building a house, building a house, you get to go to the showroom and you get to pick all the things out, right? You get to debate over the Carrara marble, right? Or the Taj Mahal marble, right? Or do we want these gold brushed stainless handles? Or do we want these cool black industrial ones? With weddings, it's not as much like that because with flowers, you don't get to go and pick out the flowers from the flower market. You would have to fly to Holland, you know, so we're not trying to do that for you. We're trying to visually represent something for you and then help you unpack it and understand it.

Everybody learns in a different way, and it's okay to learn in a different way. And I think that's really the thrust of what I'm trying to say, is that it's okay to say, hey guys, this is not working for me, right? I need to learn this in a different way or I process in a different way and we won't know that until you tell us and we welcome that feedback.

Please, God, tell us, right? Let us know because if we can present it in a different way, then it makes a lot more sense.

Also, if we can streamline the way that the payments are being made, we're happy to do that. If we can streamline a way that the contracts are being handled, we can do that.

We can adjust, but we don't know that it's a problem until you tell us it's a problem and then we can go and solve it, right? That's the, I think, the beauty of Julian Leaver Events. That's the thing that has really been so important to me in this whole journey, has been being adaptable to whatever situation arises and not saying, you've hired Julian Leaver Events and now you're going to do it our way or it's the highway.

And that's never been our approach, and it's never been the way that I want to run this business because I don't think you learn or you adapt or you flex those muscles and tools if you are always doing the same thing in exactly the same way every single time. So I guess this is all just to say that a lot of this is communication, friends. Please don't be afraid to hurt our feelings. You're not going to hurt our feelings. We say this all the time. This is not our only wedding this year. This is your only wedding this year and probably forever.

And so you have to just be super honest, super real, super transparent, and we all get to have a lot more fun if you are like with it and tell us exactly what it is that you want, because then we can deliver that. So if the takeaway today is just to be open, be honest, be willing to put it out there and know that we are ready to receive it no matter what it is. So thanks for being here and really that's it. No bow.

A The Media Socialites Production