Well it’s half way through May already (I told you this year would go fast didn’t I?).  We’ve got some news we’re excited to share and a short discussion on how your environment affects your growth and how to manage that better. 

Blaze Moves to Bigger Premises

We’re moving to a bigger pond.  Well, office really.  We’ve taken a lease on a lovely space at the Grange, about 4k’s to the North of the Brisbane CBD.  We’ll be hosting an office launch party and for those of you in Brisbane we’d love to see you there.  Key features of the new location are (or will be):

• Private meeting rooms for 1 on 1 coaching
• Spacious waiting area and resources library. 
• Dedicated workstations for clients with internet access
• Medium sized training room for group workshops
• Space for up to 4 Blaze team members

We’re really excited about the move and feel we’ve taken a significant step towards creating sufficient capacity for us to really take Blaze to the next level.  We’ve now got space to put on some new team members and to ensure we deliver a comprehensive service to both our private and corporate clients.  Much like the goldfish who grows to the size his pond dictates… we’ve taken on more space so that we can grow too. 

National Career Development Week

The Career Development Association of Australia is promoting National Career Development Week “Get the Life you Love” between the 2^nd and 8^th June.  Blaze Unlimited is proud to be associated and will be hosting an event.  Stay tuned for more information. 

Launch of Public Workshop Schedule

As a result of moving to our new office we can much more easily and economically offer a range of short, sharp and punchy career development workshops that you or your staff can attend.  The workshop topics include:

• You and Your Career – planning for the future
• Your Personality and Career Choices
• How to Improve Work Life Balance
• Developing Emotional Resilience
• Job Search, Applications and Resumes
• Interview Preparation and Practice
• How to Tap into the Hidden Job Market
• How to set Goals and Plan to Achieve them

 They are half day workshops and will be offered on a rotating schedule as set out below (Kirsten do you have this yet?) The workshop fee is $299 (inc Gst) per person with group discounts available for (4 or more participants).  For our existing clients and eZine subscribers, we are offering a further 20% discount for all workshops booked and paid for during the month of May.  NB: The workshop does not need to be attended in May for the discount to apply. 

Goldfish grow to the size of their bowl.

Well, this is not completely true.  They are in fact limited in their growth by the restrictive size of their environment, but it's not a healthy restriction.  What actually happens if you keep a goldfish in too small a bowl is that their environment becomes toxic, stunts their growth and increases the amount of maintenance they need (much like human beings actually).

Needless to say the metaphor is useful though.  Here at Blaze we work with individuals and organisations to help them understand how factors such as environment and people’s attitudes, beliefs and perceptions contribute to limiting performance, growth and development.  We’ve experienced this first hand ourselves and as a result are moving to bigger offices to allow our continued growth.

We quickly got to a point where our office was not big enough to put other staff on, to provide sufficient meeting spaces to cover our busy periods or to provide a training venue.  What this meant was that we could not pursue the corporate stream of our work such as attraction and retention, management coaching, employee career engagement, deployee management, or employee transition because we simply didn’t have the capacity to deliver.  It meant we didn’t promote that aspect of our business and accordingly it wasn’t growing.  So, we changed the size of our bowl. 

So anyway, how does this relate to you?  Well, what I want you to ponder is how does your environment affect what you grow to become? Is your environment (the people you meet, the places you go, the things you get involved in) providing your with opportunities to grow and to develop?  Or are you limiting those opportunities?  Understanding how your environment limits your choices, skews your perspectives and stifles your growth is the first step to being able to proactively manage it.  I challenge you to change your environment in order to change your perspective and go out there and see what’s possible for you.

Remember if you continue to do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got.

Have a great May, keep your comments, stories and questions coming in and don’t forget to check out our blog  as I’ve finally started updating it on a regular basis and if you read it, I'll be committed to continuing to write it.  ;-)

Warm Regards