We live in a fast-paced and pressurised world. Being able to communicate well with those around you is often critical. The more proficient your communication skills, the more successful you are likely to be within your chosen career.

Knitting the team together can be an expensive affair (think team building events and summer trips). During those activities, as your people participate and achieve objectives together, colleagues within and across team may feel a sense of personal connection – that “we are all in this together.” Once the event has ended, that personal connection seems to fade off as well. Why is this so?

In any office environment, skillful organisation provides the strong foundations of any working day. If you work in a secretarial or administrative role, your employers expect you to manage not just your own workload efficiently, but also be familiar with the workload of the people around you.

I love to use this phrase; even with my very limited French. When trying to decide an equivalent English word for my business name, with a little oomph thrown in, I chose Vitality. Vitality is Energy. Excitement. Vigor for Life. While at the same time, being at peace with ourselves, and with our role on this planet. By definition: Vitality is ‘the state of being strong and full of energy physically, emotionally and mentally’.

Like many other children, I used to have nightmares, when I was a little girl. My mum would do her best to comfort me and one of her favourite sayings was: “Darling, even if you dream that you got eaten by a monster, remember that you have two ways out!"

What can you do, though, when you really want to stand out from the crowd? Of course it makes a difference whether you have spoken with the person before, perhaps on the phone or by email, but for our purposes today, let’s assume you’ve never met these people before.

It smacks us all – usually mid-afternoon, when we’re trying to get through a productive period at work, and muster up energy for the remaining 8 or so hours of our day.