Personal Development Course - CFA Fiskville Training College 1-2 Oct

Time flies when you're oblivious to it. I remember it was months ago when I applied for the Personal Development course after the first catch-up with my supervisor. It felt so long ago and then whoosh, the day came and went just like that. Although the outcome of the course wasn't exactly what I expected, still it was good to be away from work, get some fresh air and meet staff from other regions.

Fiskville is about 90-100km away from Melbourne and on the western side of Victoria. Because we were driving from the south eastern side, the journey took extra long. And it didn't help that my other colleague who was driving "didn't allow" me to snooze while he drove. I think he wanted me to keep talking to keep him awake as well. :D Apart from being a venue for courses, The training college actually houses recruits who are training to be firefighters as well. So there are buildings and objects where they can set fire to and then try to put the fire out. A pity we didn't see any action in the 2 days there.

We stayed in chalet-liked houses. There were about 7-8 rooms in each house and us ladies were all piled into one. The buildings were old like from the early 1900s and were newly renovated. I especially love the huge HD TV they had in the living room! Imagine playing Wii on that! :p The rooms were just exactly like hotel rooms though I didn't really sleep well probably cause of unfamiliar surroundings.

On the first day, it was pretty much a "get to know each other" time and also to find out what each individual wanted to achieve from the course. The trainer was very charismatic and her talks were very enriching and fulfilling. We each had a wooden board where we had to write down the excuses that we come up with to not go ahead and do what we want - self talk. And that was sort of like the "baggage" we had to carry with us for the 2 days.

Food was also like a never-ending abundance of supply. We were fed 5 meals a day! Breakfast, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea and dinner. It was food and more food. So some of us decided that we needed to take walks to burn off the calories! And we did, instead of driving or using the golf buggie like the staff there did, we walked the 1km back to the classrooms.

Day 2 was much more relaxing because everyone knew each other better. And the massages we gave each other every couple of hours helped too. We would get into a row and massage the person in front(and then turn around) and you're supposed to wiggle and dance while you do that. :\ We continued with finding out our communication styles; whether we are visuals, kinestatics, auditorial or digital. Most of us have a combination of each and the others were happy to understand why it was so hard to communicate with their superiors.

And we were also allowed to "burn" and throw away our baggage from the day before. But not after we came up with a presentation for the trainer and did a little group dance for her. :p The second half of the day was spent partly in the lecture theater where at one point we all had to stand on the stage and sing an encouragement song together.

Lastly we had to write down the goals that we would like to achieve and set a date where we think we are going to achieve that goal and make sure we work our way towards it. We lied down on the carpet and then I think the trainer was using hypnotism to try and get us to relax. I probably fell fast asleep after like 5 minutes of the tape. :p We ended at 4pm-ish, exchanged our contacts with the people we were more familiar with, gave our hugs, said goodbye and prepared for the long journey home.

* Stay tuned for the next update on my mum's birthday bash in the Dandenong Ranges. :)