Anyone who is familiar with the world of celebrities have heard of public relations firms aka PR companies, but just what does such a company provide?

Well, to answer that, one has to understand the term "public relations". As one would suspect, the term implies a reciprocal relationship between two or more parties. Often, one of the parties engaged is the "public".

For years, the idea of generating customer traffic by offering a toll-free 0800 phone number far outweighed the idea of charging for the call. However recent figures are suggesting that in fact sales of the 0845 variety are today, far outweighing use of the 0800 number. So why the change and why are we now suddenly being asked to call a number that is no longer free of charge?

0845 numbers do not represent a particular geographical location.

If you have an abusive boss, one who criticises or belittles you, and shows no respect for your abilities or concern for your development, you may decide to hold your tongue, keep your head down, and get along as best you can until you find another position. But you dread getting up for work every morning.

Alternatively, your sense of outrage may take over and one day you explode in frustration and anger.

I doubt whether you have ever opened a conversation with the words: I know that I am more to blame for this than you are; I know I do not have all the facts; and I know that what I am about to say makes no sense at all!

One of the hardest parts of planning for a difficult conversation is to think through how your own behaviour may have contributed to the problem.

We face difficult conversations every day. They can be with our children, our parents, family members and spouses; with colleagues, employees and with the boss; with friends and neighbors; with tenants, landlords, business partners, and in the sports team.

Sometimes these conversations are about the big issues of race, religion, gender and politics.

Most people have experienced change in their working lives in recent years. It may have been a major restructuring of your department or your organisation, or something as apparently straight forward as moving from your own private office into an open plan environment.

Either way, it is common to find yourself working closely with a new group of people in working conditions where you have to be concerned not only about their competence, but also about their personal behaviour and often irritating habits.

A recent announcement by Google came with much fanfare and excitement from most Gmail users. The introduction of voice and video chat capabilities is viewed by most as an exciting step forward for the already "feature-rich" Google e-mail interface. Slowly but consistently, Google is creating a centralized portal for users to communicate with the world through a multitude of mediums.

In any conversation where you speak up on something that is upsetting you it is important that you get your facts straight and that you use them to open the conversation. This is not as easy as it might sound.

When your emotions run strongly, it is difficult to separate facts from feelings and you are likely to open the conversation with an emotionally charged statement that will probably sound like an accusation to the other person.

If as a school we want to develop relationships with stakeholders that encourage genuine input to the schools strategic direction we, first, have to learn to listen.

When another person speaks, we are usually listening at one of four levels:

Ignoring, not really listening at all;
Pretending, Yeah, Uh,huh. Right;
Selective listening, hearing only certain parts of the conversation;
Attentive listening, paying attention and focusing on the words that
are being said.

There are difficult conversations in our lives; and then there are the really difficult ones! Conversations between a manager and employee about poor performance at least have the advantages that roles are clear, and that performance can be measured and recorded. Conversations become a lot more difficult, and require a lot more skill, when you are talking about issues of respect, attitude and relationships in a team.