Are my contingency plans appropriate?

Photo by Cameron Clark — *Photo by* *Cameron Clark*

I’ve been fortunate to have worked with wedding pros from 94 countries over my career and I’ve heard from a ton of them this past month – all with similar questions, stories of lost business, uncertainties of what to say to clients who are completely stressed.⁣

We’re all in this together. If you have questions on Coronavirus and your wedding business, feel free to email me at hello@thinksplendid.com. ⁣I’ll be sharing my answers here on the Think Splendid blog so that everyone can benefit.⁣ I’ll also keep your name anonymous. Totally free, no strings attached – I truly do not care if you never hire me.

Focus on the Splendid

We're an industry that makes our living by celebrating life's milestones, so I'm going to start each of these update posts with a few positive COVID-19 things we can all smile about:

TOTAL GLOBAL RECOVERIES

The number of global recoveries is now more than 166,500 people, up from 165,000 yesterday.

OLD-FASHIONED GROCERY DELIVERY MAKES A COMEBACK

Elderly people in Turkey are receiving their groceries by baskets in an old tradition that has been revived due to the coronavirus outbreak pic.twitter.com/eW9QDBobmx
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) March 27, 2020

This question is from a luxury wedding planner in the United States:

I have loved receiving your emails and advice on how to navigate this delicate and unfortunate situation.

I find myself asking the same question every day and am struck with two very different opinions depending on who I ask and where they live.

My question is: Should I plan and prepare to move weddings for June, July, August . . . ?

I spoke to a bride of ours in NYC today and her perspective totally humbled me. She has known five people in NYC who have DIED from coronavirus and dozens in her personal network are seriously sick.

She had to push her May 2020 wedding back to 2021 and urged me to begin talking to our Summer couples about how this situation is so much bigger (and frankly more important) than their wedding.

People are DYING and we cannot think that by June, July, or even August that we are in the clear and ready to dance on packed dance floors, share hors d'oeuvres, etc. She felt it was socially irresponsible to even consider asking guests to travel this Summer.

It then got me thinking because I am immunocompromised and maybe I don't even want to be at weddings this Summer . . . .

Then I had a call with a wedding-based PR firm and they are singing a much different, MUCH more optimistic tune to wedding professionals about how this will all be ancient history by mid-Summer and people will be eager to celebrate again.

I am so torn with how to proceed. We have contingency plans in place but it just feels like time to start pulling the trigger to strongly urge people to postpone for the health and wellness of the guests, the community, the country, the world! Or maybe I am just hoping this can be a larger conversation with the industry where we can take a realistic, selfless approach.

I think it is time we begin having these HARD conversations in the wedding world about how it is our responsibility to advocate for the HEALTH and wellness of the greater population, which is far more important than a wedding at this point.

I feel like everyone I talk to is in la la land of denial and it's making me feel a bit of a downer and pessimist.

I would love thoughts on this!

Answer from Liene

You are right – it is not just our businesses on the line, it is our health.

I personally know 11 people in various states and countries who are confirmed positive with COVID-19, and that number has been increasing every couple of days over the past week. Some of these people are in the wedding industry and have well-known brands. They are each younger than 45.

I received an email yesterday from a wedding professional who has two family members in medically induced comas because they caught it through community spread.

Another (thankfully healthy) friend and wedding industry colleague living in Shanghai, China shared a photo of himself from this weekend on an empty (and normally extremely crowded) street in the middle of the day. Things there are not yet as bustling as we’d hoped they would be by now.

Coronavirus is in our wedding community.

It is not just infecting people in the news whose lives are removed from ours.

It is infecting people we know and work with, people we stay up late with in resort lobby bars at wedding industry conferences, people whose work we admire on Instagram, people we say “let’s catch up” to but rarely do because we never usually make the time.

It is infecting our friends and family, frenemies and competitors, industry veterans and newcomers.

We have to get real here. We just do.

No matter how hard it is – and it is hard – we have to face reality head on if we are going to move forward in an ultimately positive way.

AUTHENTIC OPTIMISM

Make no mistake: I believe we will get through this. In order to do so, we have to be authentically optimistic.

Optimism believes that science can be an answer to prayers.

Optimism knows that social distancing measures can help the spread slow and be contained.

Optimism allows itself to hide in the bathroom and ugly cry and then gets up and makes dinner and starts a dance party in the kitchen so the kids can have as much normalcy and levity as possible.

Optimism channels its justified anger at a completely unjust situation into doing something that makes even the tiniest positive difference: joining in on the #SewTogether movement to sew masks, donating to people who have lost their jobs and their health insurance, checking in on friends via FaceTime and Zoom, using professional expertise to help people manage their stress, etc.

Optimism requires that our priorities ensure that not only our businesses survive this, but that the actual people we know and love survive this, too.

We’ve kept our fingers crossed hoping all this will just magically disappear but true optimism requires we uncross our fingers and get to work.

SEPARATING FACTS FROM FAKE NEWS

Yes, you should push your weddings for June, July, and August back.

People are going to be eager to celebrate again, but we are unfortunately likely NOT going to be through this by mid-Summer in the United States.

I don’t believe the wedding PR person was intentionally misleading you but they are misinformed and/or underinformed.

While we have seen exceptional people-over-politics bipartisan leadership on COVID-19 in the United States from certain governors, we are also being blatantly lied to daily by leaders at the federal level on things that are easily fact-checked.

If someone is only getting their news from the daily national press briefings, it will be difficult for them to gauge just how extensively serious a situation we are in.

If you watch the daily briefings, I’d recommend also adding other sources to your news intake, including from reliable outlets whose politics you may not normally agree with.

Here are some experts and news sources I trust, even though I strongly disagree with some of them when it comes to political issues. A virus doesn’t care about our politics and we have to set them aside for this.

Here are just a few of the facts we know as of this morning, March 31, 2020:

Yesterday, Virginia governor Ralph Northam announced a statewide stay-at-home order through June 10th (spanning the next 10 weeks).
About 75% of Americans are now under orders to stay at home, or will be soon and yet people are still not taking it seriously.
In NYC, a pop-up tented emergency field hospital with ICU capabilities was constructed this weekend in Central Park across from Mount Sinai Hospital. It is expected to open today.
Javits Center – home to the National Stationery Show, NY NOW, and other event and retail industry b2b trade shows – has been turned into a 1200 bed emergency field hospital with plans in place to expand to up to 3000 beds if needed.
New York, Seattle, and Ohio are not the only hard hit places. “New York has suffered about two deaths per 100,000 residents. Louisiana is at 1.8. To put the numbers into perspective, if Louisiana were a country, its death count would put it in the top 15 globally.”
170 of the ventilators Los Angeles received from the national stockpile were shipped to them broken (Bloom Energy repaired them over the weekend so they can be put to use).

It’s impossible to forecast an exact date everything will be back to normal, but it is possible to look at the facts we currently have to rule out certain timelines and adjust accordingly.

The idea that COVID will be long gone by mid-Summer is not at all realistic. I wish it were. I truly do. But it is not, and we have to face that fact head on in order to come up with the best solutions for our clients and our businesses.

We also need to remember we will be navigating the emotional aftershocks of this for a while which will impact the decisions made by both engaged couples and their wedding guests.

I know this is not the cheerleader candy-coated rah rah message that so many people are desperate for, but it would be irresponsible for me to give that message if it's not the reality of the situation. And, unfortunately, it’s not the reality of the situation.

Again, I would love nothing more than to be wrong about this. My business is suffering too, along with everyone else’s in the wedding and event industry. What I know for sure, though, is that we cannot survive on sugar alone. We need the nutrition that comes from facing the real facts with courage and authentic optimism.

I know this is a lot. A lot, a lot. It’s mentally a lot, it’s emotionally a lot. The ramifications are unfair to everyone, on every level.

Reschedule your Summer weddings and please stay safe, especially as you yourself are immunocompromised. Do not literally risk your own life in order to make one weekend of someone else’s life special.

Better days are ahead. They may not arrive as soon as we’d like them to, but they ARE coming.

While I know this is a lot to take in, I also know that you can’t save your business if you can’t get out of bed in the morning because of fear and anxiety. WIth that in mind, here are 5 practical ways to stay focused, hopeful, and confident, with insights from a clinical psychologist.