Ways to ruin a wedding

There are lots of ways to ruin a wedding.

This weekend I’m officiating a wedding for some family friends.

It’s the 4th one I’ve officiated (with a 5th one coming up in August). So far, I’ve learned a few things about weddings and being an officiant.

There are lots of ways to ruin a wedding, but an important one for the officiant to watch out for…making it about you.

Imagine if I stood up before the couple and began to share about the new suit I bought for this wedding, random facts from my marriage, how great my wedding was, and compare the size of the crowd, venue, flowers, or catering choices to those we made at our wedding. There are so many things I could talk about that are really interesting and important to me.

No one cares.

Everyone in the room is there to focus on and celebrate the bride and groom.

Stay out of the way.

Say “I” as little as possible.

Let the bride and groom have their moment.

There are lots of ways to ruin data and business team collaboration.

For a data professional, it’s making it about you.

Imagine (or more likely - remember) a meeting with the business team and the data leader waxes eloquently about their data tools, cool data architecture, the complicated data quality solution they built, and nerdy data modeling terminology. There are so many data things a data leader could talk about that are really interesting and important to them.

No one cares.

Everyone in the room is there to focus on the business goals.

Stay out of the way.

Say “I” as little as possible.

This moment is about the business team and their needs.

Don’t ruin a wedding by talking about yourself.

Don’t ruin your relationship with the business team by talking about your data stack.

It was good to see you today,

Sawyer