The Wedding A-List - taking the stress out of planning your own wedding
It's no secret that wedding planning can be a pretty stressful venture - there's just so much to think about, right? Luckily, you needn't go through it alone. The awesome folk at The Wedding A-List aren't your typical, traditional wedding planners - they offer bespoke, affordable, straightforward packages that help you create the wedding you've always dreamed of.
For this month's blog, we asked our friend Sarah over at The Wedding A-List to offer up a little advice on wedding planning for our wedding clients here at Tailored Entertainment - and we were so glad that we did...
Planning your own wedding is an incredibly exciting time – but it can also be notoriously stressful. Researching suppliers, scouring Pinterest, figuring out table plans and handling tricky relatives are time-consuming tasks – and they all have to fit in to your already busy life. It’s no wonder many of the couples we work with say they’ve found wedding planning overwhelming, rather than exciting!
The Wedding A-List has been designed to remove all of the stress, do all of the hard work and allow you to enjoy all the fun parts of wedding planning. We work with busy couples who don’t want or need a traditional wedding planner but do want a helping hand with the time-consuming groundwork that comes with planning your own wedding.
We offer four affordable packages which make planning your own wedding easy. From sourcing the very best suppliers for your wedding – including personally checking their availability – to providing the only organizational tools you need to keep everything on track, The Wedding A-List empowers you to plan the wedding of your dreams, without the stress.
We’re here to make your life easy, and here are some of our top tips for minimizing the stress when you’re planning your own wedding.
1. Prioritize – and budget accordingly
One of the most important things you can when you start planning your own wedding is sit down with your partner and work out what really matters to you both. Do you want to focus on the music and find an incredible, unique wedding band, or are you passionate foodies who want to put on a lavish feast for your guests? Wedding budgets have a nasty habit of spiraling out of control – and one of the best ways to prevent this is to really focus on the elements that mean the most to you and keep the things that don’t really matter to you as simple as possible. Write everything down and revisit it throughout the wedding planning process to remind you what really matters when you’re lost in a Pinterest black hole!
2. Give yourself a break
When you first start wedding planning, it’s shiny, new and all you want to think about. But as your plans progress, you might find it’s all becoming a bit overwhelming. Not to mention the fact that the people around you might want to talk about something else, just occasionally! Plan regular time off - whether it’s dinner with your partner, lunch with your family or a night out with friends – where all wedding chat is strictly off limits. It might be hard at first, but you’ll be thankful for the mental break from wedmin when you’re really in the thick of it!
3. Get moving
At The Wedding A-List, we have no time for any ‘shredding for the wedding’ talk – nobody should feel pressured to look a certain way for their wedding day, or any other day for that matter. However, we are advocates of a bit of regular, gentle exercise and healthy eating (most of the time – it is a time for celebrating after all!). Eating your greens, drinking lots of water and getting plenty of sleep will help you feel more energized and less stressed. Meanwhile, a stroll round the park, yoga class or a few lengths of your local pool can be an invaluable way to get a bit of headspace and time to yourself when wedding planning is in full flow. After all, no-one ever solved a problem staring at a spreadsheet – get moving and I promise you things will feel start to feel a bit less stressful.
4. Prepare a stock answer
This is one of the best tricks you can have up your sleeve when you’re deep into the wedding planning process and everyone from your in-laws to the postman is chipping in with well-meaning but frankly unwanted ideas and advice. Everyone loves a wedding, and it’s great to involve your nearest and dearest in the planning (see next point) but you can’t include every single idea. However, people can get a bit touchy if they feel like you’re dismissing their contributions so have a diplomatic answer ready to deploy whenever you need to gently move the conversation on. I find something like “Thank you so much, we’ll definitely think about that” works a charm!
5. Delegate
You cannot do everything! Make sure to delegate tasks to your partner, your parents and anyone else you can rope in to help! This is a great way of making people feel involved and also takes a huge amount of the pressure off. Write a big list of all the tasks that really don’t need your direct input (do you really need to sew all the bunting or address all the invitations yourself?) and get delegating!
Don’t let wedding planning get on top of you. To find out more about our simple, affordable wedding planning packages, check out The Wedding A-List or contact Sarah directly – sarah@theweddingalist.com.
