We Got Evacuated And Still Got Married

We walk through how a hurricane evacuation and a flooded Madeira Beach venue forced us to rebuild a wedding plan weeks before the date. We use that real-life pressure test to talk about hard decisions, hard conversations, and why commitment matters more than perfect conditions. 
• evacuating the Tampa region and returning to unexpected destruction 
• learning the venue and hotel plans are no longer workable 
• scrambling for inland options and landing on the Columbia and Hotel Haya 
• reframing pressure as preparation you build over time 
• deciding to cut the guest list to 40 and communicating it clearly 
• choosing hard conversations now to protect the experience later 
• connecting adversity to business, goals, rejection, and persistence 
• remembering marriage is about commitment, not one event 
send me an email at jordan at edwards.consulting or there should be a link to book a call below. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:58

This is a story that I've been wanting to tell you guys for several years. I want to bring you back to September 2024. We are evacuating from a hurricane. It's the second hurricane that's come through the Tampa region that year. And I vividly remember going to Atlanta with my wife, not my wife at the time, my fiance, her younger brother, her mother-in-law, family. And we ended up going to Atlanta. And when we came back, there was so much destruction that happened on the streets that it was kind of challenging for us to comprehend. The thing that we didn't realize was that it was the end of September. It was going into October, and we had our wedding on November 9th. So what I did was I went over the following week or so, or two weeks, I ended up going to our wedding venue. And the wedding venue ended up being in Madeira

Evacuating Tampa As Hurricanes Hit

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Beach. And it got flooded, and they were saying how the storm it's all gonna be good. But I looked around and I was like, this is not it. Like this can't happen. And the pressure starts to build. You know what I mean? I I called the hotel where we were supposed to have everyone staying, and they said, Jordan, everything's been canceled. We are housing locals here. I'm not sure what you expected. I'm not sure how you think that other people are gonna stay here. All the locals don't have a home. Like we have to stay here. So what ended up happening was I called up the the location in Madeira Beach and I said, We we can't have our wedding there. We have to go find a new location. And what ended up happening was over that next week, I started to think to myself, what what should we do? Should we push the wedding?

The Venue Floods And Plans Collapse

SPEAKER_00 2:51

Should we wait? Should we do these things? My wife then fiance was like, We must. We must have the wedding on this day, on November 9th. And so I put myself in the situation and I moved into what I thought was the right thing to do. And we had a wedding planner, we had people helping, we had all of that, but I just no one's gonna take your life as seriously as you take it. The more serious you take something, the better you're gonna show up, and the you're you're gonna do a really good job for what it is. And what I ended up doing was I ended up calling venues in the area, and specifically in in the Ibor area, to try to figure out where people could stay because it was inland enough, it was around Tampa, people were still flying to the same location, it was still possible. And after about a couple hours of calling, I ended up finding two places. It was one was the Columbia, which I had Richard on the podcast, he's amazing, and we were able to get a night before room over there, and then the second thing we did was we went to the the Hotel Haya, which is an incredible boutique hotel. We actually looked there in the very beginning, but we didn't know if it was gonna work. The only constraint was because the room that they originally had was like up to like 150 people or something, and we were gonna have 120, so we didn't know if it made sense. Then when we invited 120, it ended up going down to 80. And when Hotel Haya got there,

Calling New Venues Inland

SPEAKER_00 4:27

they said, Hey, the most we can accommodate is 40. So I'm sitting here going, Do we wait or do we just go for it? And the thing I realized in that moment was that pressure, you don't you they always say pressure makes diamonds, but I think the diamonds are already made in the beginning. Like I think each day we practice, the pressure is being built and we're able to work through these challenges on our own. What I mean by that is when we have challenges, when we have things come up for us, if we don't normally take these things on, then it's gonna feel like adversity, it's gonna feel hard, it's gonna feel challenging. But the more we step into the uncomfortable, the more we step into something and level ourselves up, it starts to become not a big deal because we know that we can handle pressure better, because we're more prepared. What that means is that when they said 40 people, I knew in that moment, I was like, hey, we're gonna have to cut some people off. But the other thing I realized that when you go to a wedding, regardless of the number of people, as the bride and groom, you only really speak to 30 or 40 people because you can't conversate with that many. So what I decided to do was

Why Pressure Feels So Brutal

SPEAKER_00 5:38

I said, we're going for it. We're gonna do 40 people, we're gonna send out emails and we're gonna send out messages letting people know that they should cancel and readjust their travel schedule due to this natural disaster. Because this happens, like stuff happens in our life, and we can sit there and make whoa, whoa, whoa, be sad about it, be disappointed, like really upset, or we can just, hey, these are the cards we're dealt, and we're gonna have to make a new decision here. And as these things start to come up, these new decisions start to happen, and you start to step into a different version of who you are. And that's what ended up happening. We went there, we decided on it, and it was amazing. It was absolutely incredible, and it was everything we could have asked for. It was outside, it was by the pool. Then we had our own room, we heard the stories, we got all of our friends to tell incredible tales and incredible things. And yes, there were some people that we wanted to go, but like we just didn't have the room, and it it goes like that sometimes. And sometimes it we it's not always in the cards, sometimes it's not always everyone's happy, but you have to be happy. So when you're going through these things, you have to do things that make you and your

Choosing A 40 Person Wedding

SPEAKER_00 6:53

people happy. You know what I mean? That doesn't mean that everyone's always gonna be satisfied, you're always gonna get people that get dealt a bad hand and things that happen, and you have tough decisions. And trust me, we were getting a lot of it from different people being like, I can't believe I can't come. I can't believe I got. And I'm like, it's okay because it's expected. Whenever you go through a challenging time or you go through something hard, or you go through something, whatever it is, you know that there's always gonna be adversity along the way. There's always gonna be challenges, there's always gonna be rejection, there's always gonna be failure. This same concept is so true on so many levels to business, to extreme sports, to everything. Because you realize how many times in our life have we set a committed goal to something, something pops up in the way, and we go, uh, I don't want to do this anymore. I lost the client, I got fired, this that life goes on. Like you're gonna have to make a decision. Whether you decide to quit today, or you decide to put your head down and be like, yes, we are gonna keep moving forward with this. Those are both choices. And these choices don't get removed or changed. You have to make the decisions. You might not want to, and it's a lot more empowering once you've made hard decisions, because hard decisions are the the worst part. It's the hard conversations. You telling me three weeks before the wedding that I'm gonna tell half the people that, hey, you can't come anymore. That's a hard conversation. It's not a conversation I want to have, but it's a conversation I have to have. Because I'd much rather that than they show up. The alternative is they show up, you never tell them, they don't have a place to stay, and they're like, this was a horrible experience. I thought I was gonna be able to go on the beach and do this and that. And none of it was true. And none of it was true. So, my point being here is sometimes it's much easier to have the hard conversations. So, as we're going through this, what hard conversation are you avoiding? What place in your life do you not want to have that conversation and build that trust with the people around you? Because the people will start to trust you more if you're able to have that hard conversation. If you're able to move the envelope for them, they will trust you more. And that will be a better experience for them. So I just want you to realize that going through this kind of stuff, there's a lot of realizations that end up happening. You start to realize who really cares about you, you start to realize who's there to support you, you start to realize how can we make things work in the way we want to, and you also start to realize that not everything's in our control, and that's okay. How many times have we gotten upset about something because it's not in our control? Well, I'm gonna let you know the more people you know, the more things you start to do, the more places you're around, the more you're gonna start to feel negativity stacking. You could

Hard Conversations Build Trust

SPEAKER_00 9:41

also see positivity stacking, but you have to make that choice because the choice isn't always easy. The choice can be really challenging, and that's what happened to us. It was a hard decision, but like this is what we wanted to do. And it was the best, it was the best four days ever. Like, it was so awesome. Like doing the Columbia the night before, we had the red room, and everyone was able to sit there, speak, share, and it was just an incredible, incredible experience, and it was so much fun. And then the next night we did at the high end, it was awesome. It was awesome. Did people do everything we wanted? No, they never do. But was it incredible and we had a really awesome, amazing time? Absolutely. Would I do it again? Yes, yes, because the truth is that marriage is not about a wedding moment, it's about who are you committing your life to and who do you want to connect with and stay connected with? And people, I think, sometimes put out of proportion like what something is. And we don't always realize the reality of like what we're actually doing and what what's the reason behind this? It's not just a party, it's it's two people coming together to actually share that life. And I just want you to realize the magnitude of what occurs when that decision is made. So as you're going through this, I want to think about what are the hard decisions you're avoiding, what are the hard conversations you don't want to have? Where's pressure coming up for you and you're avoiding it? Because the truth is your life is gonna look so much better if you face that pressure, if you face that challenge, if you face that adversity, if you face that hard thing, that will be so much better for you and your future because you practiced.

Marriage Is Bigger Than The Party

SPEAKER_00 11:23

You need to practice taking on pressure. The more you take on pressure, the more preparation you have, the more fulfillment you're gonna have, the better you're gonna be able to show up against adversity. And that's why I ask you today, where does pressure show up? When I ask that question, what do you think about? What's going on with you? Where are you stressing? And as you start to dive into this and as you go deeper and deeper, you're gonna start to realize there's just a few conversations that are holding you back from the life you want. And I don't want that to be the case anymore. I don't want that to be the case. I want you to go ask the girl out or ask the guy out. I want you to quit the job. I want you to live the life that you want. I want you to go on the trip. I want you to experience life to the fullest because that's what we're here to do. No one's getting out of here alive. We have to go make the most of what we got. And we have to realize that we can do this. We can do this. If you feel like any of this aligned with you and you want to dive a little bit deeper with me, send me an email at jordan at edwards.consulting or there should be a link to book a call below. Talk soon. Hope you have an incredible, incredible rest of your day.