Giving My Best

How transition, failure, success, and honesty are helping me determine my next steps in business. (Sprinkled with some serene images of past work.)

All the beautiful photography, below, is by Cailin from Sanz Studio
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I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want for my life moving forward. When I was younger, I would have been much more afraid of making moves or taking leaps in business, mostly because I used to base my business moves on what I thought people would want from me, what would sell, what was happening in the market, etc.

These are smart things, don’t get me wrong! I built lots of crucial skills that way. But I also took on a lot of projects that didn’t feed my soul or help me develop my brand. But, I had bills to pay and kids to raise and as much as I’d love to say something cute but often entirely impractical like, “Do what you love and the money will follow,” I honestly just don’t believe it’s that simple. At least not when you have real responsibilities.

It’s a dance. Sometimes, you do what you have to do. Other times, you do what you want to do. You learn, adjust, get bigger and bolder as you go, get better at saying yes to what you want and no to what you don’t, taking the right risks become more calculated as you gain strength through learning about yourself, your market, the capabilities of your team, but always always always the goal is making the very best of what you have available in a given moment, and snagging opportunities to do that again and again, all the while getting better and better.

What I loved most about the wedding, above, that I designed and provided florals, printed items, and decor for, was that the couple wanted a day that felt refined, simple, and stayed within a comfortable budget for them. They didn’t fall over themselves to create a ultra-’grammable day that would over-extend their budget, steal an overwhelming amount of their time, and create anxiety. They kept their guest count to 40 people and hired me a year and a half in advance so we had the luxury of time to approach everything thoughtfully and preserve their comfort and sanity along the way. It resulted in a design and overall vibe that felt artful, yet easy and serene - which was absolutely the truth. Slow is good.

Over the course of running my catering business, my consulting/coaching business, and then Jen Harrison Weddings, I’ve built, learned, adjusted, failed at things, succeeded at things, and have continued to refine, refine, and refine some more. It took me fifteen years and running three different businesses to learn about what I love, what I don’t, who I am, and how I want to work. Skills from one type of work have helped me build the next business, and even though my journey has been winding, and often really hard, I wouldn’t change a thing about the process. I’m richer internally because I allowed myself to change.

I love weddings. I do. But I found full-time wedding planning to be deeply exhausting. I decided to pull back, do fewer weddings, and go back to work full time to give myself room to reassess my professional desires. When I found myself in a sales role I didn’t enjoy, I gave it a full year before I started seriously looking for a position that was a better fit. I found it, and took a Sales Manager position at Red Door Catering in Oakland, which I started September 3rd.

But this is not a boring, corporate role. The owner is incredibly creative, design-focused, and has a clear aesthetic point of view, which my colleague said is one of the reasons they wanted me on the team - because of my aesthetic POV. This, more than any hard skill that can be spreadsheeted or KPId, is what I’ve been working on in my wedding business over the past couple years. I have known for a while now that design, creating beauty, making spaces that inspire and make us think and appreciate the moment we’re in is the center of everything for me. Art, beauty, design - they’re all incredibly powerful.

So, I’m continuing to refine. I’m planning to take a slow path (since I do have a full-time + job that I care deeply about succeeding at, hello!) to reimagine Jen Harrison Weddings from a Full Service Wedding Planning & Design company to Jen Harrison Design Co., finding coordination partners who want to handle vendor booking, logistics, and wedding coordination to free me up to take on a Creative Director role - overseeing wedding design, yes, but branching into new product categories. I’m learning surface pattern design at the moment and am just starting to imagine the possibilities of designing everything from linens to dishware to stationery to rugs for weddings, yes, and also for home. It’s a slow path to starting over, and it may not look like anything is happening for quite some time (at least not on the customer facing or social media front) and I’m okay with that. I’m playing the long game.

Nick & Niki on Film

I’ll be 42 next month. I used to be afraid to start over; afraid of running out of time. But I learned through both business and my spiritual worldview that life is not linear, it’s cyclical. We’re always in a season, and if we gather what we need in one season to bring forward to the next, allow our seasons to change, allow ourselves to evolve, marry our darkness and our light, thoughtfully gauge what we give to others and what we take for ourselves, we build a stronger internal core that can guide and sustain us. We build wisdom through following our desires, build on past failures and success, and become less afraid of tearing down what isn’t working and building up what is.

I learned this by working with Spider as an animal ally for years. One thing she taught me during a time that felt like everything was being torn down against my will: when her web is torn down, it is already in her nature to rebuild. She needs a web to survive, catch prey, lay eggs, and build shelter, so when an unexpected broom, strong wind, or storm takes out her web, she might be crushed (I don’t really know the emotions of a spider but I have done plenty of anthropomorphization) but she can’t afford to wallow, blame herself, or feel shitty about it for too long, she just needs to rebuild. And the great thing about rebuilding is that it gives you the opportunity to make new choices.

And I really really really appreciate choices.

We can never truly know how something will work out, and we don’t have to. It helps me so much to remember that linear models fail over time, everything is cyclical, and the future is determined by the present. When I’m feeling down or low energy, rather than setting my needs aside to push ahead, I remember that my energy, creativity, and engagement are necessary ingredients to building the life I want. Without me, none of it works anyway - who wants to build a life they don’t get to exist within? If I’m crucial; if my needs and hopes and wants matter, they get woven into the web I build and my life is just one big love spell that takes shape over time. If it gets knocked down, as long as I have breath and health and will to rebuild, I will, time and time again as it is now in my nature to do so.

Because I know that everything worth doing is probably going to be a shit ton of work, I’m not asking “What’s the fastest path to…what’s the quickest growth model for…how to 10x profit in a single year…blah blah blah…” I’m asking, “What am I willing to give lots of time and attention to? What’s worth spending my limited time and energy on? What do I want to pour myself into long term? What do I want for the second half of my life?”

Maybe that’s it, right there: giving my best. It’s vulnerable to give my best, and maybe it won’t all work out the way I hope, but the alternative sounds boring and lame and boring and lame are not what I’m here to do.

Till Next Time,

Jen