Experiencing anxiety during floral work and throughout the demands of designing events is a real thing. Even the most experienced floral designers still feel anxiety at some point in the process of planning, managing, and executing a large event. From worries over whether we bought enough flowers to stress over a particular bouquet or design, not to mention managing timelines, hiring and working with freelancers, and making it all happen on event-day, there are many instances that can put us on edge and rattle our confidence and peace of mind as we try to do our best creative work.
I've received several questions about this from students, mentees, and our community, so I've put together here five accessible pieces of advice to help you manage anxiety and stress when it comes to your floral event work:
01 MAKE AN EVENT-WEEK PLAN
Make a plan for each day of your event week ahead of time. Here's how my event week generally goes:
Monday — Prepare hard goods (vessels, vases, candle bases, candles, hurricanes, etc.) as well as ribbon, tool kits, and other props and supplies we need for the event's planned designs.
Tuesday — Market Day 1 (visit the market, review my order, pull additional finds from the floor) and Mechanics Prep (prep all vases and vessels with chickenwire armatures and tape or floral pin frogs, etc.).
Wednesday — Market Day 2 (pick up my entire flower order or have it delivered to the studio), and Stem Processing (all flowers unpackaged, freshly cut, and organized in buckets with fresh water to hydrate).
Thursday — Design Day 1 ("greening," or creating base coverage for all centerpieces, building base coverage for any and all water-filled foam-free floral installation mechanics, and starting anything else we have time for, such as cocktail arrangements, bud vases, floral urns, or satellite arrangements).
Friday — Design Day 2 (finishing all floral centerpieces and table arrangements, building all personals, including bridal and maiden, boutonnières, wearable flowers such as corsages or crowns, and setting aside buckets of flowers for Ceremony and other Reception installations), and start Packing Up any hard goods, mechanics, tool kits, and other non-flowery supplies and structures into the truck. Also: Event Day Grocery Run — this is so important to save time to do or send one of your teammates to do for you while you design in the studio. Have them pick up easy, healthy, grab-and-go sandwiches or wraps for the team on event day. I love a Trader Joe's trip for sharable and nourishing snacks like carrot sticks, hummus, snow peas, little packets of cheese, almonds, trail mix, and something really yummy like chocolate-covered peanut butter cups. Pick up some water bottles too, so that you and your team can more easily stay hydrated on-site.
Saturday — Event Day (early load up of all supplies and florals, transport, arrival, unloading, review & repairs of arrangements, on-site installations, setup, delivery of personals, clean up, pack up, and prepare the strike team with a list of what to gather and where to find it at the end of the night). Have someone on your team be appointed "wellness support," the person who in addition to helping unload and execute the day is also going to make sure to remind you and the rest of the team to drink water and have a snack throughout the day. This will save you so much pain and misery and mood swings (and sleep loss and hormone imbalance and stress) to make sure you keep drinking water and having food, even amid as busy and demanding a day as wedding days are.
02 CREATE TASK LISTS
I live for checklists. This helps me stay organized and able to visually touch base with and keep track of what we need to do each day, and what is done as we go along. I often create a checklist in my phone for easy access, using the iPhone Notes app and its little "checklist" feature. So satisfying! This structure allows you to relax and trust the plan you've made to execute this thing so that the unforeseen mishaps or challenges that often pop up unexpectedly are easier to meet and solve, since everything else is accounted for and tidy.
03 HAVE SUPPORT
Your team is your greatest asset when it comes to event week and event day peace-of-mind. We are not meant to (and honestly cannot sustainably) make things this big happen on our own, and it is so much less stressful and anxiety-provoking when you have support. Make sure to vet your freelancers (ask for references and meet with them, even if just virtually, beforehand to get a feel for how well they will fit your team and what their strengths and weaknesses are), and book them well in advance. It's helpful to have some teammates be more advanced in design skill so that you can instruct them in what you envision and trust that they can execute it (with your guidance), while it's also helpful to have other teammates who are more of your logistics and support team. Floristry is a lot of schlepping, and it's helpful to have extra hands for all the load-in, distributing materials to their locations at the venue, cleaning up, and loading out. I also highly recommend appointing someone on your team
04 TAKE A BREAK
When you're designing with flowers, you are working with a perishable product, which makes a certain level of tension naturally, as you are trying to keep flowers as fresh and beautiful as possible while they are, as a fact, slowly dying. This is one of the funniest realizations I had one day during a big wedding week: we floral designers are actually trying to help flowers die as slowly and beautifully as possible. Of course we're doing more than this, but awareness of this can bring a bit levity (and acceptance) to an inherently stressful situation. Additionally, while we are designing, we are so micro-focused and asking so much of our mind and body that we can start to lose perspective and get hyper-critical or deeply self-doubting in all of the output of energy. If you start to feel more and more anxious, it helps to take a break. Even though you think: "There is so much to do, and there's no time to lollygag!" the reality is that when your mind or body is exhausted, everything is hard. Taking a short break to stretch your body, to step outside for a little walk to take in some fresh air and sky, or to drink water and have lunch or a snack will refresh and revive you. Once you've taken a break, you will notice that you always return with renewed energy and regained perspective. That bridal bouquet you were almost in tears about because it just wasn't working is actually really beautiful, and now that you've given yourself a break, you can see that it will be easy to finish (or maybe it's already done!).
05 THE MOST IMPORTANT THING
Above all, remember to breathe. Breathing is one of our greatest necessities and powers as living beings. We must breathe in order to live, of course, but I mean taking intentional deep, mindful, soothing, and centering breaths. This is both relaxing and relieving, especially when you take a moment to breathe deeply into your diaphragm so that your belly rises with each inhale and falls with each exhale. This diaphragmatic breathing actually taps into your Vegas nerve, which signals to your body that it's safe to move out of your sympathetic nervous system response (anxiety, freaking out, fight-flight-or-freeze mode) and into your parasympathetic nervous system response (rest and digest — which means both digest your food and also digest mentally with more clarity what's going on and what needs to be done).
Whether you are obsessing over a centerpiece and don't know what to do next or how to "fix" it or starting to panic over how much work needs to be done still for your event week, take a moment to breathe and connect with yourself, and your body will transform your entire experience for the better. Also, as many of you know from my classes and workshops, I always teach that if you can breathe, your work can breathe. If your designs are turning out tight or one-dimensional, it's likely because you are so focused and tense that you are barely breathing yourself. Your body is tight. So breathe, open up your body with kindness and oxygen, and watch your work relax and become more airy and effortless too.
ONE MORE GREAT TRICK
And with that, let's nourish ourselves, give ourselves the gift of organization, have support in place, remember to breathe, and head into a floral event season in which we are more regulated and able to meet the wildness that comes along with all of the beauty. I want to mention here too a bonus tip, which is to keep humor in your back pocket. Humor is one of the most alleviating and helpful tricks in any situation to shift the energy and loosen things up. When we are more loose, we can think better and are more open to realizing other ideas, solutions, and options.
Keep your questions coming, my friends! Drop me a line here or on IG anytime.
With love and flowers,
XX
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Cover image by Sposto Photography.