Making life a Novel not Manual - Progress, Success, and Motivation:

Letter from the editor:  text by Jaime Valdes-Riench

I usually like to write something heart felt around New Year’s, but it took until now to feel compelled and inspired to write.  I feel this blog post is from my heart now that we are entering our 10 year business anniversary and welcoming all the new changes that will come with that.  So please enjoy! The words are from my heart.

With Love (and Style of course):
Jaime Valdes-Riench

It is interesting that we all can be creatures of habit.  If you are like me, you take a certain comfort when you can forecast and look ahead in order to anticipate what the next hurtle will be.  After all, that is 90% of what an event planner has to do, right?  We trouble shoot by nature; it’s deeply rooted within us. Now what happens when you start allow that to creep into daily to business life and even your personal life?  If we all forecast too often we start living life like a manual.  But life is a novel, not a manual. 

If you among that 2%, who is driven to be a leader and innovator, following your “manual” will just choke your inspiration and motivated spirit.  Do not fall victim to the comfort of the manual.

Not everyone will believe there is such a thing as your true destiny.  Yes, we make our own destiny.  I do believe however there is an infinite potential we all have when we follow through will all aspects of our passions to the maximum of our given talents.  How do we achieve success? Constant and consistent motivation; moving that momentum into progress; and following through until we reach success.  Now here is the kicker.. there is no end. If you want longevity of consistent success you have to continue even AFTER you reach your goal, OR you start the manual mode.  You also need to take comfort that you are making progress, even when it is not as apparent (i.e. challenging situations).  Make your personal and business life a novel, not a manual.  Allow ups and downs to occur, but do not let them strangle you.  It is developing an ear to listen to life when it is forcing you to your true potential.  It is seeing that your where not thrown into a “hard time”, but rather catapulted into something that makes you uncomfortable, and in turn.. makes you better.  Sometimes things have to happen to push us out of the “manual” mode so we get back to making a riveting novel that other want to actually read.  Make your novel inspiring to others.  That ensures your life continues, even after your life ends.  2013 taught me to throw away my manual.  2014 is all about writing a novel.  I encourage you to write yours, and get ready for an amazing harvest of the best years of your life.

Thanks for reading.

Garden Engagement Party

Text by Jaime Valdes-Riench
 
Sunday, July 7, 2013 was a warm sunny day and a perfect day to have a garden engagement party.  The With Style Team was hired to create a stylish, but intimate setting for a newly engaged couple.  The setting was a private home by the water.  There was a warm breeze and birds singing.  You could not have asked for a better setting to begin our décor building and create something inimate and wonderful.
 

The theme of the event was to embrace wild flowers as though they where hand picked that day since it was situated in a garden.  We styled the flowers on our own to give it a hand picked looked and placed them in old mason jars that used to belong to the grandmother of the bride.  We also used gardening utensil boxes and fun items we could find the dress the table.  We did have one feature flower, the king protea.  We immediately fell in love with this flower because it resembled something like an exotic pink sunflower.  It gave an abstract yet local element to the florals.  The rest of the centerpieces included fresh peaches, pears and apricots that were placed in cake stand pedestals.  They were later enjoyed by guests as dessert once it was paired with vanilla ice cream.  This gave a practical element to the table scape and mirrored the surroundings since there where fruit trees in the garden below.

When designing we made sure the décor also had elegant elements that infused style in the ambience (let’s be honest, a lot of us would love to have a chandelier in our garden).  With mixing the two styles of simple garden and chic elegance, it made for an eclectic mix that matched the couple’s personalities.  That is what took the simple garden look to an elegant secret garden ambience we were trying to achieve. 

 Event design, rentals and set up by Travel & Events With Style
Event chairs rentals U-Rent it.
Flowers provided by Fache Floral Design