Welcome to Grow Your Connections, a program that will help you build relationships to really succeed at work. Work can be rewarding - but it can also be really stressful at times. Whether you work for yourself or work for others we can often feel isolated and lonely. Having strong relationships and leveraging our connections helps to lower rates of anxiety and depression, have higher self-esteem, greater empathy, and build more trusting and supportive relationships. This program is all about forming and maintaining connections – both personal and professional. We’ll ask you to assess your connections, create a network map and develop a plan to maximise your relationships, including mentoring and networking tips. Along the way we’ll also give you a lot of practical tips for creating strong, healthy networks that support you in times of stress.

To what extent do you have and utilise friends for fun, relaxation and support? What about family? And how about professionally? Do you have strong connections or a network of associates? Or a mentor to help you solve problems? ​Where do you seek help? Where can you go for support? ​This program is for you if you often feel stressed and anxious at work and are looking for some strategies that you can adopt to reduce your level of stress. You might even find that your stress at or about work is impacting your personal life. If that’s the case, now is the time to take action.

Brian and Tracey, your instructors on this course, have years of experience in the workplace and understand the unique pressures that you face. They are also behaviour change experts, with a wealth of knowledge and proven strategies to help you take back control for success at work.

A strong, healthy network helps us to manage our stress and build our resilience during challenging times. However, forming strong networks is not always easy.

In this program, we’ll help you understand why relationships are so critical to our well-being. We’ll distinguish between personal and professional relationships and discuss strategies for building and sustaining both types of networks. We’ll also give you some networking tips and how to make the most of a mentoring relationship. We’ll help you strengthen your relationships by developing some strategies to ‘pay it forward’ and support others in your network. Our network map will help you identify who is in your network and the role they play. It will also help you identify any gaps in your network that you may need to fill.

And, at the end of the program, you’ll create your own Personal Change Plan to put into practice the strategies covered in this program to sustainably build strong connections.

What you’ll learn:

· Identify the importance of strong, healthy networks for managing stress and building resilience

· The difference between personal and professional networks.

· Identify the role each of your connections plays in your network

· The importance of mentoring

· Networking strategies

· How to support others and strengthen your relationships

· How to develop an achievable action plan that will help you take control of your life and help you reduce stress and build resilience for work.

This course is part of a series of programs designed to help you manage your stress and build your resilience for work. Our goal is to help people get more joy and satisfaction from their work, and we know that one of the factors that can really affect your work experience is the amount of stress you face.

These programs are for you if you often feel stressed and anxious at work and are looking for some strategies that you can adopt to reduce your level of stress. You might even find that your stress at or about work is impacting your personal life. If that’s the case, now is the time to take action.

You may also like to check out the other programs in our series.

• “Change Your Thinking” which helps you understand and shape your internal dialogue and thinking patterns to help you better manage yourself and your experience of stress

• “Take Back Control” helps you put yourself back in the driver’s seat of your life and build your sphere of control at work and at home

• And “Build Your Resilience” gives you some strategies to help you reflect, calm and relax you and build your ability to bounce back when the going gets tough.