The number one complaint they have about celebrants is

Hi celebrant friends, welcome to June!

Josh here for the start of another month writing to you from the cold yet apparently rather warm Britain. It hit 14 degrees Celsius here in London yesterday so people were in the parks in their bikini. Let me go on the record for thanking our English forefathers for their crimes and sailing us all down under. Between then and now things got messy, but I'm glad to have been born Australian.

The CEO of Pepsico, Indra Nooyi, said 'Feminism isn’t about making women stronger. Women are already strong. It’s about changing the way the world perceives that strength.'

I was reflecting on that sage passage and also our chosen career of celebrancy today – I certainly don't think celebrancy requires a Feminism-like movement – but I do see that desire you have to change the perception of the Australian celebrant in so many conversations every day. How much would we pay to have Monica and Chandler pay a celebrant instead of getting Joey to do the marrying? That one episode of television has left a weird dent in our profession.

Whether it's my own conversations with people on the streets, feedback from you, or reading over Sarah's notes from the Marriage Law and Celebrants Section of the AGD meeting with the celebrant associations last week and the repeated conversations on increasing the professionalism of our trade is a constant conversation at those meetings.

When I published this article just over a month ago, many took offence that I would suppose that celebrants are not already exceeding all and sundry professional expectations, whilst others issued thoughts and prayers for my inbox whilst supporting the idea that maybe some of us could up our game. [Side note, Sarah and I podcasted about the kerfuffle along with addressing how I should have written it better. I should have, I was a fool.]

The truth is, for any Australian celebrant that identifies as human there's an ever-increasing chance that we are absolutely embarrassingly terrible at one or more things, and depressingly average at a larger number. You might be the best celebrant in your street, but are you the best writer, gardener, weightlifter, cyclist, or whatever thing someone else is awesome at? I'm finding that as someone who's always enjoyed reading and has always wanted to write a book, as I've gathered my thoughts into a larger document that has the word book in the title, I'm a much better blogger or email writer than the author of a book. Every tap on the keyboard is painful, and then I sent a draft to friends and died inside!

So as we dive into this month's Celebrant Institute mail-out may you be ever encouraged as I am that better is always possible, the only thing you need do is reach for it, try, and try some more.

🧾 The celebrant registration charge for 2023-2024

In 'early July' the MLCS will invoice you for $170 which is what this year's annual fee has been decided to be. For the love of all that is holy, update your email address on the marriage celebrants portal, look out for that email when it comes, and just pay it immediately.

🎓 Marriage paperwork is often submitted wrong

We've been told by people in the government that know, that the number one complaint couples, BDMs, and the AGD have about celebrants is around incorrect paperwork. That's the thing we need to get right as an industry, it's the biggest complaint. $99 gets you our professional development course on completing the most recent marriage forms and how to do them correctly. It's all in text and on video and you can access it as much as you like, always referring back to it if you're unsure.

This is the same content we're teaching in the Certificate IV but it's pulled out in a neat little package for those of us who want the assurance that we're doing it correctly and professionally.

🤖 Generative AI thoughts for June

I'm the guy who's always trying to be at the cutting edge, not to be cool or strange, but just because I have years of experience that have told me that the cutting edge eventually makes its way down to the rest of the population quickly enough and when it does I'd like to be prepared. That's my whole stance on AI. If you were to peer through Sarah and my iMessage history it's mostly me demoing generative AI stuff to her and in response, Sarah wows and compliments me on sharing. I'm a tad over-excited about it but I truly do think that the current phase of computing that the media dubs "AI" is going to change everything.

The best way to understand computers forever is that they work on a GIGO system. Garbage in, garbage out. Whatever you put in gets computed and is spat back out at you. If it's garbage in, you get garbage out.

So here are a few things you can try to get your hands dirty this week, some ways to put some garbage in and see what comes out.

📆 Microsoft Bing Chat or Google Bard or ChatGPT

These systems are all different recipes for the same meal: you chat with a computer.

The secret to using these chats well is to prompt them well. There's a new industry of prompt experts, or spell casters, who know how to ask the best questions and have the best conversations with chat robots.

Here's an example of a chat I just had with ChatGPT to help build a marketing plan if I was moving to Dolphin Sands in Tasmania. That's all really helpful, but ChatGPT doesn't know a lot about local businesses yet, so let's take that data to Microsoft Bing's new AI chat. You have to be using Microsoft Edge as a web browser, then go to bing.com/new. I take the last answer from ChatGPT and feed it into Microsoft Bing Chat and I've got this big list of wedding vendors I should network with along with contact details! From there I wanted to get some SEO information from the horse's mouth, so I went to Google. Google Bard. Here's what Bard told me to do with my website.

Prompting with "Act as if" and then giving detailed instructions is a great way of using these chat robots/chatbots for the best results.

💻 Too long, didn't video

If you have ever gotten off a video call and thought 'What did we even talk about?' then this Generative AI tool is for you. You invite it to your Zoom call and it listens and emails you a summary of the call afterwards. Wild!

💬 Chat with a PDF

Here's a fun one to end out on. ChatPDF lets you upload a PDF then have a conversation with the bot about that PDF. Here's an example: there's a new Steve Jobs book called Maker Something Wonderful. I uploaded that to ChatPDF and I can now chat with the book. 

📝 Some technical notes

Sometimes a generative AI model can sound confident when it's wrong, sometimes it can hallucinate and just talk crazy, and sometimes it's wrong. Use your better judgement. A good example of that is to ask any of these bots this question and watch them get it wrong: "What is the latest date someone can lodge a notice of intended marriage form with their Australian marriage celebrant if they would like to get legally married, according to Australian law, on the 31st of March 2024?" Here's how ChatGPT answers, incorrectly.

If you don't know the answer, that's what Celebrant Institute membership is for, so you can ask questions of Sarah and me because human intelligence and help is still the most valuable form of intelligence.

📧 Making sure your email is delivered

One of the biggest stresses in my personal celebrancy practice, and also at the Celebrant Institute, is whether or not my emails are landing in the inbox or in the spam box.

If you're also worried about that, I recommend using a professional non-Google and non-Microsoft email provider like Melbourne-based Fastmail. I swear by them! Then once you're all set up on something like Fastmail with your own domain name, run a test on your emails at Hello, Hello. They give you a massive list of things to check that you're doing right.

🤝 What do you do?

A final link today if you've struggled to get your introduction right, your social media bio, or your website copy, just right. This TED Talk was so helpful for me!

This a friendly reminder to do your OPD; Update your email and details in the marriage celebrants portal, and; Join a professional celebrants association or network. We run a perfectly good one, but there are others. Each has its own benefits, features, and ways to help, and you can even join a few.

That's another monthly update from your favourite celebrancy professional network, between now and the next one I'll be jotting around Europe looking for good coffee, and if all goes to plan I'll be writing the next one from somewhere in Bel Paese.

You are enjoying another Celebrant Institute production and you're receiving this email because you're a celebrant. If you aren't a celebrant then I don't know how you ended up here. If you've been forwarded this update and you'd like to subscribe for free, you can do that here.