by Terri Negus (Founder & Director of the Fellowship of Professional Celebrants)
Anyone looking on the internet now to find a reputable Celebrant Training Organisation will know that it is an absolute minefield.
There are so many now making various promises for this and that, so how do you know who and what lies behind each website? There are some fantastic celebrants trainers out there and there are also some dreadful ones who should be given a very wide berth and I say that on good authority because I have an increasing number of people coming to me asking to be RE-trained because their first experience with another training organisation has been so awful, and the horror stories they tell of how they have been treated both during and after their training leaves me truly shocked to the core.
Several celebrants trainers have had no training themselves and several have little to no experience themselves. When arranging my own Uncles funeral up in the Midlands a couple of years ago I mentioned the name of another celebrant trainer in the area to the funeral director looking after us and his reply was “don’t even mention that man’s name to me, you won’t find a funeral director within a 50 mile radius of here who will use him, he is just so awful’ – and yet here is this same man with a horrific reputation in the profession making great statements of how fantastic his celebrant training programme is, and how is anyone looking for a training provider suppose to know any different?
Hence I decided to write this blog to try and tell you a little more about myself and why I became a celebrant trainer.
I completed my own initial training with a wonderful lady who at the time was based in Bristol and running her own funeral directing business as well. I cannot praise her highly enough for the training and grounding she gave me, but it was very much a case of “you’ve paid me for 3 days training and now you’re on your own”. I admit it was VERY daunting when I started out as I was just one of handful of celebrants then in the U.K.
I had no one to mentor me, no one to support me, no one to ask questions of. It was very much a case of ‘sink or swim’. Thankfully for me I swan, and quickly gained a reputation of excellence from the Funeral Directors and families I served. I was blessed to have found my hearts work at the age of just 32 and from day one I was passionate about making each and every funeral not only personal and unique, but a healing and moving experience for every single person present.
The same passion for unique & personalised ceremony also transferred over into the Weddings, Baby Naming & Renewal of Vows ceremonies which I started conducting around a year later.
By this time I had set up my own celebrant website www.sussexcelebrant.co.uk and as well as receiving lots of enquires asking me to conduct ceremonies. I started also receiving the occasional enquiry about how & where to receive training as a celebrant.
I started to pass on the contact details of the lady who had trained me, but it soon became apparent that she had moved on. Her funeral directing business had been closed, her website taken down and her phone number and email now unobtainable.
As a few more training enquires trickled in I had no one else to refer these people on to, there was no one else outside of the British Humanists Society offering dedicated training for Independent Celebrants like ourselves.
I started to ask myself, “is the fact that I have so many people now asking me how to train as a celebrant a sign that I should be offering it?” I had done plenty of training myself before in my previous corporate career of banking and finance, but celebrant training – could I, should I??
I had been working as a celebrant for just over 4 yrs by this time and has already conducted several hundred ceremonies. There were still times however when I still felt a little out my depth myself. That’s one thing I have come to know about this profession, you will never know everything! People are different, grief affects people differently, people have different needs, ideas, experiences & expectations. It’s what makes the role of a celebrant so interesting and yet challenging. Every single day we are learning, growing and continuously developing our knowledge & skills.
Hence why, when I started to consider running celebrant training, I knew that the on-going support would be as important, if not more so then the courses themselves.
