Setting Your Wedding Date – Things To Remember
Mar/100
Becoming engaged is an exciting time. First you accept. The you tell everyone. Well, what’s next? It is time to set the date! Setting the date to your wedding is not only important, it is one of those things that makes it all feel real. The day you get married is a day you will remember forever.
It will be the day that you celebrate every year. With this in mind, realize you must pick a date you can live with. When choosing your date there are many things to consider. Some of the basics include what part of the year you want to get married in (or celebrate yearly), if there are any conflicts with your date and if you have enough time to prepare your wedding by that date.
All dates are not created equal. There are some dates you may choose to avoid. It may seem obvious, but planning a wedding can be stressful or exciting and sometimes we don’t put all of our effort into picking a date which we can plan our wedding by and that we will be forever happy with. Read on for more info on setting the date
Holidays
Some people want to get married on holidays but most people choose to avoid these dates. If you do not want to share the spotlight you may want to avoid a holiday wedding, especially a major holiday such as Valentine’s Day or Christmas. Your guests may not be happy with you if you plan a holiday wedding and they have to spend their holiday with you instead of participating in their normal holiday customs, whether they are romantic plans for holidays such as Valentine’s Day or Sweetest Day or more family oriented such as during Thanksgiving or Christmas.
Birthdays or Anniversaries
You may want to avoid having your wedding on birthdays or anniversaries of close friends or family members. If you do choose a date which is important to someone else you may want to consider how other people might feel about you getting married on a certain date. If you really want to use a date that is someone’s anniversary or birthday you should clear it with that person first. Talk to them and explain why you want to marry on that date and ask for their blessing.
Other Days
There are countless days that you may want to avoid, days that are personal to individual families as well as the general public. If your grandparents are deceased you may want to avoid the date of their death or even their birthdays, marrying on one of their birthdays may bring up bad memories or just the feeling of loss – something you do not want on your wedding day. You may want to avoid days like Pearl Harbor day or even the day Kennedy was shot. To be able to avoid painful days for the family you need to know them, listen to what they do or do not want. Days to avoid are really individual to each wedding and family. If you family or his has war veterans you may want to avoid days that are significant to those wars If your mother is an avid Elvis fan or your sister had a shrine to Kurt Cobain growing up would probably avoid the dates of their deaths plus any other dates significant to them.
Still not sure?
Pick the wedding date and ask your family what they think. Find out if there are any problems or concerns from family members. Address what comes up. Then decide if you will go forward with that date or see if you need to reconsider.
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10 Things in Life That Aren’t Fair — and What to Do About Them (Part 2 of 2)
Sep/090
“If life were fair, Elvis would be alive and all the impersonators would be dead.”– Johnny Carson
In Part 1 of this series, I discussed some of the ways that life deals us a bum hand, and some of the ways we can deal with that. In this post, I continue the list, starting with some oddnesses about factors that seem to play as big a role, if not even bigger, as individual merit in determining or life success.
1. Most CEOs are tall.
90% of Fortune 500 CEOs are of above average height. Some 30% – compared with only about 4% in the general population – are 6’2” or taller. Since it’s highly unlikely that a random sample of 500 people would show this great a deviation from the national average, the only explanation is that tallness conveys qualities that are seen as “executive material” even when the tall person might lack those qualities or be merely humdrum. By extension, shorter-than-average people with incredible leadership skills might be passed over in exchange for less-stunning but taller candidates.
What to do about it: This is even tougher than appearance issues, since there’s no good way to increase your height (you can wear lifts, I suppose, but will always risk exposure). Again, confidence is key, and the handful of shorter-than-average CEOs out there (less that 3%) are distinguished by their confidence. Study the behavior of shorter CEOs like Jack Welch or Barry Diller. Think “tall” – be seen, make yourself heard. Shorter CEOs also tend to be those that work their way up in a company, so commit for the long haul; taller CEOs come from executive job searches, where they have less personal history and more “flash” in play. And, of course, you can become an entrepreneur – hopefully you wouldn’t replace yourself with someone taller!
2. People buy brands.
Brand loyalty is one of the major factors influencing people’s buying decisions. Part of this is “following the leader” – if I know the brand, it must be because people are talking about it, thus it must be good.” Part of it is packaging design. And part of it is comfort in previous knowledge – the brand you know and kind of like is a better bet than the one off-brand you don’t know and might love or hate.
What to do about it: Commit yourself to trying something new every so often – maybe every month, replace a favorite brand with a brand you don’t know and see how you like it. You pay a huge premium for branding, often at the expense of quality, so it’s worth it to shed a brand here and there. For durable purchases (as opposed to consumables like food), develop a systematic way of comparing your brand against the competitors – Apple (or Microsoft), Ford (or Chevy), Nike (or Adidas) might not always be the best way for you to go, even if you’ve had good experiences with them in the past.
3. People do, in fact, judge books by their covers.
It’s a publishing industry fact – book covers are what grab and hold attention long enough for a purchase to be made. If it were something about the content, you’d expect authors to have some say, but often they have no contractual right to even see the cover before it’s published, let alone approve or disapprove. (More often, authors can disapprove, but publishers reserve – and usually exercise – the right to ignore the author’s disapproval).
What to do about it: If you’re in the authoring game, let book cover designers do what they do best – they know their domain far better than you do. For buyers, check reviews – lots of handheld software allows you to access Amazon and other sites with reviews while you’re standing in the store. Also, get used to using your library – most libraries have online reservation systems that are nearly as effective as Amazon at getting your chosen books to you in a couple of days. That way, you minimize the risk of blowing money on books that turn out to be less than the cover promises.
4. Most people would rather not choose at all than choose between two equally good options.
This is decision paralysis of a sort – when presented with two equally good options, we freeze. Two options where one is clearly better we handle fine, but not where they are equally good, or for that matter, difficult to compare on the same criteria (the apples v. oranges dilemma).
What to do about it: The standard response to difficult decisions is to list pros and cons, but where things are more or less equal, or where pros and cons aren’t comparable, this isn’t helpful. A better option is to re-frame the decision – the think out a way of looking at the choices in a way that is comparable. One way to do that is to look at goals and objectives – what is the goal you hope to meet by choosing one or the other, and which one is better suited to that goal? This moves you past the immediate characteristics of the objects under consideration – that is, one tastes delicious, the other offers two hours of solid motion picture excitement, so if your goal is to have fun for as long as possible, you might spend your $10 on the movie and not the super-sundae.
5. The best ideas often get lost for lack of funding, competence, or experience.
The people who think up brilliant ideas aren’t always in a position to make them happen. They lack sales skills, people skills, marketing skills, or, quite often, just enough money to bring an innovation to market or the mainstream. Or a start-up gets bought out by a monopolistic corporation simply in order to quash their project.
What to do about it: If you’re in a position to do so, seek out start-ups without the skills to succeed and support them however you can. If you’re an idea person yourself, seek out people with the skills you lack – do not could on your idea to succeed for its greatness.
Well, that about covers it – as before, I’d love to hear what you think is unfair about life, and how you’ve dealt with unfairness in your own life. Let us know about it in the comments.
Dustin M. Wax is the project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer’s Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he’s not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don’t Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.
Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.
7 Steps to Start Lucid Dreaming
Aug/090
Lucid Dreaming is consciously being aware within your dream. When you are dreaming and you become conscious that you are dreaming you can start to control your dreams and the direction they go in.
Lucid dreaming can help with recurring nightmares, solving creative problems, speaking with loved ones who have passed on, anxiety, and problem solving. It can be an exhilarating experience and the feeling of euphoria after your first few lucid dreams can last for days. <!–more–>
7 Steps to Start Lucid Dreaming
1. Remember your ordinary dreams.
A lot of people say ‘I don’t dream’, everybody dreams, whilst you may not remember them you still dream. To start remembering your dreams try this simple technique.
Each night before drifting off to sleep repeat the phrase ‘I will remember my dreams as soon as I wake up’. Say this phrase over and over until you fall asleep, after a few days you will start to remember your ordinary dreams.
2. Keep a dream journal
This can be tedious but it’s well worth the effort. Even writing a few short sentences about your dream is enough. This will get you into the habit of remembering your ordinary dreams and to start looking for dream signs within your dreams. It can also be a tool to analyze your thought processes.
3. Pick out dream signs
A lot of your ordinary dreams will have objects or people in them that could act as a cue to you waking up in your dreams. For example if you regularly talk to ‘Elvis’ in your ordinary dreams this is an obvious dream sign and can be used to ask yourself if you are dreaming because you know Elvis is dead.
4. Notice your waking world
To be conscious in your dream world means you have to be conscious in your waking world. That might sound crazy, as you are conscious when you are awake. However what I mean is ‘consciously focused’ . For example you are consciously focused when learning a new task, you are thinking about every action you are taking to get the right steps. When you have learned the new task you no longer have to focus as intently as you did when learning it. Being consciously focused means looking around you and saying what you see, feel, hear, smell and touch and voicing it. This has the added benefit of being in the moment and can help you to inner calmness, it’s almost zen like.
If you start to consciously focus on the world around you, you will carry this over into the dream world.
5. Ask yourself; ‘Am I dreaming?’
Ask yourself just now ‘Am I dreaming?’. Your obvious answer is to say no, of course you are not dreaming. How do you know? Don’t just say; because I know, try and think about why you are not dreaming. For example you could say if I was dreaming I would be able to fly. When you are dreaming you cannot read text for longer than a few seconds, so try reading text to prove to yourself you are not dreaming.
This again will carry over into your dreaming world and you will start asking the same questions in your dreams which can turn into a lucid dream.
6. Your first lucid dream
Many people have their first lucid dream simply by reading about it. You might find that you become over-excited and lose the lucid dream however, you first lucid dream will be remembered for years to come.
7. Staying lucid
I have used different techniques to stay within a dream however by far the best one is calming myself down with self talk and dream spinning. If you find that you are losing your lucidity you can talk to yourself to calm yourself down and just start noticing the things around you in your dream.
Dream spinning is when you feel you are losing control of your dream you mentally spin like a tornado to stay within your dream. This is focusing the mind on staying lucid.
Have you ever had a lucid dream? If you have why not tell us about it by leaving a comment.
Steven Aitchison writes about personal development and making money on the web. His home page is at www.stevenaitchison.co.uk/blog.
