Latest / Beyond The Ceremony: Modern Celebrancy. Unfiltered. / Beyond The Ceremony Podcast Ep 1: Get to Know Your Host!
Transcript
- Speaker 1 0:00 Okay, here we go. Let's do it. Episode One of beyond the ceremony, the brand new podcast all about modern celebrancy, unfiltered. So what can you expect from this podcast? We are going to be talking about a range of different subjects each week, giving you everything you need to know about what it takes to be a modern celebrant. Now, this might be something that you've been considering for a little while. It might be a career that you know is right for you, and you know you'd be great at. It might be something that you're a little bit on the fence about, and you think you know what I want to know a little bit more about it. Well, that is the aim of this podcast. We want to give you everything that you need to know so that you can make a decision and decide whether you think being a celebrant is right for you. Now, each week, I'm going to be joined by some different guests. We're going to have different celebrants who will be featuring, but we also will have some experts in their field that you'll work closely with as a celebrant yourself. For example, accountants. They are very important when you go self employed. But also, there'll be some episodes that's just myself, and I'll be talking to you about a different range of subject areas within the celebrant world. So all different questions. If you've got anything that you want to know, you can get in touch with us at beyond the ceremony, and we will answer your questions on a podcast episode. So first of all, I guess we should start with what is a celebrant now, I imagine if you're listening to this, it's something that you've kind of got a little bit of an idea about already, but this is the specific definition. So I've Googled it. I've used a good old search engine or AI, and this is the result. A celebrant is a person who performs personalized ceremonies for important life events, such as weddings, funerals and naming ceremonies. Celebrants are not legally required to marry people, and their ceremonies are not legally binding. Now we will go into more detail about the legalities of celebrant ceremonies, because depending on where you're based and depending on where you're listening from, the rules can be slightly different, but that answer is based on England. So celebrants in England are not legally required to marry people, and their ceremonies are not legally binding. Now, like I say, it's a whole episode in itself about all the legalities. There's places like Scotland, for example, where celebrants can legally marry people, but that is something that we will go into on another episode. Also, of course, we've spoken about marrying people there. But actually you get funeral celebrants as well. You get celebrants who lead naming ceremonies and a wide range of new ceremonies that are coming forward. So we will have specific episodes breaking down each role. I'm going to have an episode on funeral celebrants, an episode on wedding celebrants and an episode on naming celebrants. But just as a whole, I like to say that celebrants are professional celebrators. That's how I like to think of it. If you've got a celebration that's happening within your life and it's somebody that you want to get involved, a celebrant is the person to lead that ceremony for you. So let's start with myself personally. How did I become a celebrant? Now I first decided that I wanted to become a celebrant after I got married myself, me and my husband, we had a beautiful wedding day. I absolutely loved it. I loved everything about wedding planning, and I got those typical wedding blues after we'd said goodbye to all that process. Now, because of that, I thought, what can I do? I need a career that means that I can still work within weddings. Now, at the time, I was working as a radio presenter, so I knew that I could, you know, put on a show. I knew how to talk for a living, especially when I was a kid, and I used to get told off all the time for talking. That was always something I said, when I'm older, I'm going to get paid for talking. I'm going to, you know, make that my life aim. And that is what happened. But I was working in radio at the time, and I thought, what can I do that combines my skills with presenting, with my love for weddings, and I found wedding celebrants. Now, when I got married, it was 2017 and I had never even heard of a wedding celebrant, so I actually had a registrar lead my wedding ceremony. And it was a lovely ceremony. I really enjoyed it, but it wasn't a standout, memorable moment. It wasn't a ceremony that made me go. I can remember everything about it, from start to finish, and when you look back at the video, it was 17 minutes long. That's how long my wedding ceremony was. So it was great. I loved it. We had a really beautiful day, but it was something that I thought, Do you know what? If I become a celebrant, I can make people have that beautiful ceremony. They remember forever. They remember all the details. But also it's not something that's over like that. So that is where I looked into becoming a wedding celebrant. Now, when I first looked into it, and I told kind of my family and my friends, and I was like, yeah, do you know what I think I'm going to become a wedding celebrant? They're all like, well, what's that? Because it was quite a relatively new thing. It was 2019 when I actually started my training. So again, it was still something that was quite new back then. And I said, Well, we work with couples and with families to create a personalized ceremony that is something that they want and that is specific to them. So all my family and friends are kind of like, so what like a register? I was like, Well, yes, but we focus on actually the ceremony rather than the legal side. And they were like, so you can't legally marry people. So what's the point that I use that as fire in my belly to go, do you know what I'm going to make this a career? And now, fast forward five years. Sorry to blow my own trumpet, but I am now a double award winning celebrant, and I do a job that I absolutely love every single day. It's a it's a job that I enjoy in so many different ways, one from working with the couples and families, but two, with everything that comes with that as well that everything that comes with the career. So back in 2017 that was when I thought, right, I've had this wedding. It was a beautiful wedding day. Fast forward to 2019 I was looking at this new career, and I thought, yes, do you know what? If I'd have had a celebrant lead our wedding ceremony, we'd have done things so differently. We'd have just made it more personal, like we added the personality in there. We had some readings from sisters, so my sister and my husband's sister. But actually, if we'd have used a celebrant, we could have made the whole thing completely personal. And yes, before you ask, I am already planning a vow renewal for our 10 year anniversary, which is in what we now 2025 so 2027 two years time, that's when I'm planning to have the vow renewal. And yes, we will be using a celebrant. And yes, I've already chosen them. And I don't know if she knows yet, but I'm hoping the date is in her diary, so that is where I'll be having a celebrant. So personally, for me, I decided that I wanted to do something that was a bit different for couples and guests and families, and make sure that they could have that personalized ceremony. So that's how I became a celebrant. I looked into training. I found a training academy. I did my training with them. Completed it right at the end of 2019 fast forward to 2020 Unknown Speaker 6:43 I was ready to launch my business the third of January, 2020 Speaker 1 6:47 as we all know, what happened a couple of months later, the whole wedding industry shut down, and there I was with this brand new celebrant business. But I didn't let it stop me. I carried on through 2020 through lockdown, through everything changing, and I decided, no, do you know what? I'm just going to stick with this, and this career is going to be the one for me. So funnily enough, I actually think lockdown helped celebrants, because at the time, like myself, a lot of people would just go down the route of a church or a registrar led wedding, and that was it. They would go and have either their legal ceremony at a venue, or they'd go and have a church wedding. But actually, what happened through lockdown is when the rules changed and people could have a legal ceremony, but only with a small number of people. That's exactly what they did. So maybe they had a COVID enforced wedding where they could only have, I don't know, for example, 15 people. They had that wedding ceremony that they called their lockdown wedding, but then they thought, I've missed out on my big wedding day. I've missed out on my big celebration. So actually, that's where they looked into different ways of being able to still have their big wedding day, and that's where they discovered celebrants. So in a way, I know it sounds funny, but I think lockdown, although there were all these enforcements on weddings. I actually think it helped the celebrant industry, because it meant that people discovered celebrants and actually how they could do their wedding round two. A lot of my couples called it that, and a lot of my couples that I met in 2021 they'd already had their legal wedding in COVID, and they had a small number of people, and it was very restricted. They still wanted that big wedding day, so that's where they found celebrants, and that's where they realized they could still have this beautiful, big wedding ceremony that was led by a celebrant. So in a way, I think that helped to raise the awareness and spread the awareness of celebrants, because people started doing that, seeing that actually, do you know what? This is, how it can be done. This is how personal it can feel. And then people started to choose to do it that way. Instead, lockdown did actually help my career in the end, as a celebrant. Because I think although starting in January 2020 and then having all these restrictions put on weddings wasn't great to start with, it was always let's find the silver lining. And from 2021 onwards, I think the world of celebrancy has snowballed, and people are realizing the choices that they've got, and it has just become a massive new opportunity for families and couples. And I think that has been so fantastic. So yes, in a way, although it was a very strange time to start, I think lockdown definitely did help. Now, how has my career changed in the five years since I started as a celebrant? So as I mentioned, when I first qualified as a celebrant, it was because I still wanted to keep in with the wedding industry. It was something that I really loved and I was really passionate about, but it wasn't my full time job. I was working full time as a radio presenter, and it was breakfast radio, so the hours were six till 10. Was our show. So I'd kind of start work at about 5am finish maybe around midday. So I'd get home in the afternoons. Yes, I'd be worn out, but I'd also be like, Oh, I've got a whole afternoon. What can I do? And that is why I looked into qualifying as a celebrant. So to start with. My celebrant career was definitely a part time thing. Then, like I say 2020 meant that I didn't have that many weddings because it was a brand new business. But also, there were so many restrictions in place. But get to 2021 and that is where things change for me. Now, this was because of a couple of reasons. One, because, obviously the wedding industry got a lot busier because people were allowed to start having weddings again in 2021 so that's where, you know, the wedding inquiry started coming in thicker and faster, and I was starting to get more bookings that way. But also 2021 was a massive change for me, because that is the year that we had our first little boy. So he was born in August. So I did my first ceremonies that year. I think it was May, June, July, and I had one in August. They were all with my baby and when I was pregnant, and then I had him in August, and at that point, that's when I decided I was going to take a break from the radio industry. And that's when I knew that actually, do you know what getting up at 4am starting work at 5am wasn't for me anymore with newborn, because, let's face it, already up in the middle of the night doing night feeds, so I didn't want to be going to work at that time. So actually, it wasn't for me that I had a career that I wanted to escape and a job that I hated and I wanted something new. It was actually the hours didn't work for me, although it was a job that I loved, doing those hours just wasn't going to work anymore. So I could step away from the best job in the world as a radio presenter to the other best job in the world as a celebrant. So that was what I found so fantastic about starting this career. It was just a job that I found that I absolutely adored, it absolutely loved, and it was like, I say the other best job in the world. So it was really nice to be able to leave radio, but still have something that was flexible, can fit alongside my family, but also something that fulfilled that passion in me and something that I really loved. So that's what I did. I then moved into focusing more on my celebrant work alongside the family. So that's how it kind of worked for me. It started off as a bit of a side hustle. We then had our first little boy in 2021 we then moved across the country because we then had our second little boy in 2023 so we moved across the country to be a bit closer for family. And I kind of ran my celebrant business part time alongside having the children. And I think that was a great thing about it. It was flexible enough that I could say yes to, you know, the amount of bookings that would suit around a family, but it also meant I could move across the country and take the business with me. I knew it was still going to work when I moved across the country with the business. So it kind of started off as a part time side hustle while I was doing radio. Then it became more of a, I would say, still part time around the family, but it became more of a focus when I gave up radio being my full time role, and then since having our second little boy, he's now nearly two. He's going to be two in a couple of months, so it's now become my full time focus, and my celebrant career has become my full time income. So I would say if I didn't have the children, this would have happened a lot quicker. But I'm now into my fifth year as a celebrant. And this is definitely my full time career, and this is something that I do full time. So actually, that is something that you if you are thinking that you know what, it's something that I want to start off as a bit of a side hustle, but I want to make it full time eventually. I think a year or two Max is when you could easily make it full time, obviously, if you've got the financial stability that you can just throw yourself at it, then you could do it a lot quicker than that, because I think that's the other thing you need to have the time to dedicate and grow your own business. But actually, if you have that, you can then make it happen a lot quicker. So for me personally, it was kind of my fourth or fifth year when it became full time, but that, like I say, was because I had the children alongside that.