Why Talking About Yourself Feels Harder Than Marrying Strangers

There is something about celebrants that has always fascinated me.

We can stand in front of 100 people we have never met before, microphone in hand, without batting an eyelid.

We can tell an incredibly personal story about two people we've perhaps only met a handful of times.

We can make a room full of strangers laugh.

We can hold the silence when things become emotional.

We can find the right words for complicated families, enormous personalities, heartbreaking absences and stories that don't neatly fit into a traditional wedding script.

And many of us can write a beautiful, completely bespoke wedding ceremony from what initially looks like a fairly unremarkable questionnaire.

Yet ask a celebrant to write 500 words about themselves for their own website and suddenly...

Nothing.

The cursor blinks.

The coffee gets made.

The washing machine gets emptied.

Instagram urgently needs checking.

And somehow reorganising the files on your laptop becomes considerably more appealing than finishing your About page.

Sound familiar?

It seems ridiculous when you think about it.

Because if you can write a beautiful ceremony and confidently marry two strangers in front of everyone they know and love, surely writing about yourself should be easy?

Except it isn't.

And I don't think the problem is that celebrants can't write.

I think we're simply much better at telling everybody else's story than we are at telling our own.

You're brilliant when you have a brief

Think about what happens when you begin writing a ceremony.

You don't sit in front of a blank document and hope inspiration arrives.

You gather information.

You ask questions.

You listen.

You notice the throwaway comment that actually tells you far more about the couple than the polished answer they spent 20 minutes writing.

You spot patterns.

You work out what matters to them.

You identify the stories worth telling and the ones that probably don't need to make it into the ceremony.

You consider tone.

You think about the people sitting in front of you.

Then you take all that information and shape it into something that sounds like them.

That's an extraordinary skill.

But here's the interesting bit.

When you sit down to write your own website, you often abandon the entire process.

Suddenly the questions become enormous.

Who am I?

What makes me different?

Why should somebody book me?

What should I say about myself?

No wonder the cursor keeps blinking.

You're trying to answer questions that are far too big.

You're too close to your own story

When you're writing about a couple, you have perspective.

You're on the outside looking in.

When you're writing about yourself, you're standing right in the middle of the story.

Things that are interesting about you don't necessarily feel interesting because they're normal to you.

The way you conduct ceremonies feels ordinary because you've done it dozens of times.

Your approach to nervous couples might feel obvious.

Your ability to manage an unpredictable ceremony without anyone noticing anything went wrong might simply feel like part of the job.

Your previous career, life experience, personality, values or reasons for becoming a celebrant might seem completely unremarkable from where you're standing.

But your potential clients aren't standing where you're standing.

They're meeting you for the first time.

That's why writing good copy for your own business can be surprisingly difficult.

You don't necessarily have a writing problem.

You have a proximity problem.

Then there's the slightly uncomfortable business of being visible

There's another contradiction I see constantly.

Celebrants are professional public speakers.

We stand in front of rooms full of people and speak with confidence.

We command attention.

We manage emotion.

We improvise.

We recover when something unexpected happens.

We know when to make ourselves bigger and when to disappear into the background.

But suggest recording a 30-second video talking directly to camera?

Absolutely not.

Ask someone to post a photograph of themselves with a caption explaining why they're brilliant at what they do?

Suddenly every insecurity they've ever had turns up for the meeting.

This isn't necessarily a confidence problem either.

It's a different kind of confidence.

During a ceremony, you're not the story.

The couple are.

You're facilitating their moment.

Marketing yourself changes the dynamic.

Now you're saying:

Look at me.

Listen to me.

Here's what I'm good at.

Here's why you should choose me.

And for many people, that feels deeply uncomfortable.

Celebrant training teaches you to talk about other people

If you've completed celebrant training, you've probably spent considerable time learning how to create and conduct ceremonies.

That's exactly what good wedding celebrant training should teach you.

You learn structure.

Storytelling.

Ceremony writing.

Delivery.

Rituals.

Working with couples.

Professional responsibilities.

Perhaps you've completed several celebrant courses or invested in ongoing training for celebrants as you've developed your skills.

But there's a big leap between knowing how to be a celebrant and knowing how to build a business around being one.

Once you've completed your celebrant course, nobody magically delivers a queue of couples to your inbox.

You have to make yourself visible.

And that requires a different set of skills.

Marketing a celebrant is particularly personal

This is something I think gets overlooked when we talk about marketing for celebrants.

We're not selling something people can easily compare on a specification sheet.

Couples aren't choosing between two washing machines.

They're choosing a human being who will stand beside them during one of the biggest moments of their lives.

Of course price matters.

Experience matters.

Location matters.

Reviews matter.

But so does something much harder to quantify:

Do I like this person?

Do I trust them?

Do they understand us?

Can I imagine them conducting our ceremony?

Do they feel like our kind of person?

That means hiding your personality can actually make marketing your celebrant business harder.

If your website sounds exactly like every other celebrant website, you've removed one of the biggest reasons somebody has for choosing you: you.

And this is where celebrant websites often go wrong

Take a look around enough celebrant websites and you'll start seeing the same phrases.

Your special day.

Your ceremony, your way.

Creating memories to last a lifetime.

As unique as your love story.

There's nothing inherently terrible about any of them.

The problem is that everybody can say them.

And if everybody is saying essentially the same thing, how is a couple supposed to decide?

This is where your voice matters.

Your website shouldn't simply prove that you know what a celebrant does.

It should give people a glimpse of what it would actually feel like to have you as their celebrant.

Warm?

Calm?

Funny?

Elegant?

Straight-talking?

Romantic?

Relaxed?

Meticulous?

Slightly irreverent?

Your copy should begin answering that question before someone ever gets on a discovery call with you.

Your personality and SEO aren't competing with each other

This is another misconception worth clearing up.

Sometimes when I talk about SEO for Celebrants, people assume writing for Google means sacrificing personality.

It doesn't.

Good SEO shouldn't turn your website into a robotic collection of keywords.

The aim is to understand what your potential clients are actually typing into Google and create genuinely useful, relevant content around those searches.

That's why I created my Keywords That Book Ceremonies course.

Instead of guessing what couples might search for, you can understand the phrases they're actually using and make informed decisions about the content on your website.

But keywords only get someone through the door.

Your personality helps persuade them to stay.

Think of it this way:

SEO helps them find you.

Your words help them choose you.

You need both.

[LINK: Keywords That Book Ceremonies]

So borrow the skills you already use

If writing about yourself makes you freeze, stop trying to "write website copy" for a moment.

Approach yourself like you would approach one of your couples.

Interview yourself.

And don't start with:

What makes me unique?

That's enough to make anyone suddenly forget everything remotely interesting about themselves.

Ask smaller questions.

Why did you become a celebrant?

What do couples regularly thank you for?

What do you do differently?

What part of a ceremony do you secretly love most?

What drives you mad about traditional weddings?

What do you believe a ceremony should feel like?

What kind of couples make you think, YES, these are my people?

What would your favourite previous couple say about you?

What happens at your ceremonies that wouldn't necessarily happen with another celebrant?

What do you want people to feel when they leave?

Now you're gathering material.

Exactly as you would for a ceremony.

Look for evidence rather than adjectives

Here's another useful celebrant tip.

Don't tell me you're warm.

Show me.

Don't tell me you're organised.

Show me what your organisation looks like for your couples.

Don't tell me your ceremonies are personal.

Tell me what you do that makes them personal.

Don't tell me you're relaxed.

Show me what happens when the flower girl refuses to walk down the aisle, the groom loses his vows or Uncle Dave sits in the reserved seat.

Specifics create personality.

Generic adjectives erase it.

And ironically, this is something celebrants already understand instinctively.

You wouldn't write:

"Sarah and James are a fun-loving couple who enjoy spending time with family and friends."

Well, hopefully you wouldn't.

You'd find the story that proves it.

Do the same for yourself.

You don't need to become louder

Finding your voice doesn't mean becoming an extrovert.

It doesn't mean sharing every detail of your life on Instagram.

And it definitely doesn't mean copying the celebrant who seems to have cracked social media by dancing in every Reel.

Your version of visibility might look completely different.

That's the point.

The objective isn't to develop a "marketing personality."

It's to make the personality that's already there easier to see.

Sometimes that is difficult to do alone.

This is where one-to-one celebrant coaching can help

One of the most useful things about celebrant coaching isn't having somebody give you another enormous list of things you should be doing.

Often, you already have enough lists.

What can be far more valuable is having someone on the outside ask the questions you can't easily ask yourself.

That's something I work on through my one-to-one celebrant coaching.

We can dig into what makes you different, who you're actually trying to attract and how you naturally communicate.

Sometimes I'll hear somebody explain their business brilliantly during a conversation and then look at their website and think:

Where did that person go?

The personality has disappeared.

Everything they just told me with enthusiasm, humour and conviction has somehow become:

"I am passionate about creating unique and memorable ceremonies..."

No!

Bring the person back.

Having someone else reflect your words back to you can help you hear your own voice more clearly.

And once you've identified it, writing becomes considerably easier.

So does posting.

So does talking to camera.

So does selling.

Because you're no longer constantly wondering what you're supposed to sound like.

>>>: One-to-One Celebrant Coaching

Your voice will evolve too

Don't make the mistake of thinking you have to discover your perfect brand voice before you're allowed to say anything.

You won't.

Your voice develops as your business develops.

The celebrant you are immediately after completing a celebrant online course or initial training won't necessarily be the celebrant you are after 20, 50 or 100 ceremonies.

Experience changes your opinions.

You discover what matters to you.

You become clearer about the couples you love working with.

You develop stories.

You find your boundaries.

You become more comfortable saying, this is how I do things.

That's why ongoing celebrant mentorship, coaching, celebrant resources and business training can be valuable long after your initial qualification.

Learning how to conduct a ceremony is only the beginning.

Learning how to build a business that actually reflects you is another journey entirely.

Stop trying to sound like a celebrant

Perhaps that's the biggest shift of all.

You don't need to sound more professional.

More polished.

More "celebranty."

You need to sound more like you.

Because there isn't a shortage of celebrants telling couples they'll create a personal ceremony.

There's a shortage of websites that make someone stop and think:

I want HER.

Or:

He's exactly our kind of person.

Or simply:

This feels like us.

That's what strong marketing does.

SEO gets you into the room.

Good celebrant resources, training and strategy can give you the tools.

But connection happens when people can actually see the human being behind the business.

You already know how to do this

That's the wonderful irony in all of this.

You already have many of the skills.

You know how to ask questions.

You know how to find stories.

You know how to take lots of information and identify the important bits.

You know how to write for an audience.

You know how to create emotion.

You know how to communicate.

You know how to stand in front of strangers and speak.

You've just been pointing those skills in the other direction.

So the next time you're staring at a blinking cursor trying to write your About page, imagine you're not writing about yourself.

Imagine you've just been given a new couple.

Except this time, the person you're interviewing is you.

Ask better questions.

Listen to the answers.

Look for the stories.

Find the specifics.

Keep the bits that sound unmistakably like you.

Then start writing.

Because if you can stand in front of 100 strangers and marry two people you've known for six months...

you can absolutely write an Instagram caption about yourself.

And if you need help finding the words, defining your voice or working out what makes you worth choosing, that's exactly the kind of block we can break together through my one-to-one celebrant coaching.

And if your challenge isn't just knowing what to say, but making sure couples can actually find what you're saying, start with Keywords That Book Ceremonies and learn how to use the searches real couples are making to build a website that gets seen — and gives them a reason to choose you when they arrive.