By Melissa Carter on January 1, 2012
What do I do? Begin to practice detachment by looking at your situations realistically and objectively. Try to separate your emotions when you take an honest look at yourself. What things need to change and how do your actions affect others. Write down 3 things you can do to improve yourself and your relationships. Ask [...]
Posted in Featured, Personal Transformation, Video | Tagged Change, Detachment, Transformation
By Melissa Carter on December 19, 2011
Christmas is rapidly approaching and each year my thoughts return to the Trappist monks of Mepkin Abbey. For many years I religiously spent several weeks over Christmas living and working alongside the monks, but unfortunately the last couple have been so busy that I’ve been unable to get away. But of all my wonderful memories, [...]
Posted in Audio, Featured, Personal Transformation | Tagged Brother John, Christmas Eve, Inspiration, Mepkin Abbey, Monks, Path, Rationalization, recommended, Service and selflessness, Transcendence, Transformation, Umbrella
By Melissa Carter on November 28, 2011
Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly. ― Arnold Edinborough
Posted in Career Success, Featured | Tagged George Clooney, Innovation, Leadership Lessons, Steve Jobs
By Melissa Carter on November 14, 2011
The supposed irrationality of women demonstrates not only an even deeper rationality it is pure genius. How men as well as women use arbitrary and irrational demands to distinguish authentic love from its selfish alternative.
Posted in Personal Transformation | Tagged Advocacy Organizations, Africa, Arbitrariness, Arbitrary, Capricious, Human rights, Human Rights and Liberties, Judean Desert, Standard of review, United States, What Women Want, Women
By Melissa Carter on November 10, 2011
Even my febrile brain is at a loss as to how to apply this wonderful video to business or anything else that is “practical.” It is just such a wonderful piece that I had to watch it over and over and now feel compelled to share it. On the one hand it is only a video of a singleman, Mark Alouf, [...]
Posted in Featured, Personal Transformation, Video | Tagged Faith, Happiness, Inspiration, Jonathan Cook, Passion, Transformation, Trust
By Melissa Carter on November 7, 2011
My brother Tom is a gifted engineer and software developer. He was also my partner in the business we started. One day he said, “I’ve been trying to figure out how you make decisions. I can’t figure it out, but I have to admit that you’re almost always right. So what’s the secret?” Coming from [...]
Posted in Career Success | Tagged Albert Pujols, Apocalypse Now, baseball, Bryan Burwell, Cardinals, Counter-intuitive, Dennis Hopper, Francis Ford Coppola, macrocosm, microcosom, Pujols, Second Nature, Shaun Marcum, Tom Turak
By Melissa Carter on October 24, 2011
A proverb says that only stupid men learn from experience. Wise men learn from other people’s experience. The education I received sitting at Mobley’s feet was priceless, but it would never have happened if I had not been coachable.
Posted in Career Success | Tagged Aristotle, Education, IBM, Leadership Lessons, Mobley, NATO, PGA Tour, Plato, Student
By Melissa Carter on October 17, 2011
Even in great pain, faced with the test of his life, a Navy SEAL has to have the ability to step outside his own pain, put aside his own fear and ask: How can I help the guy next to me? Scientists constantly caution against “confirmation bias.” Confirmation bias is just a gussied up way of [...]
Posted in Transformational Organizations | Tagged Carl Jung, Character, Eric Greitens, heart, humanitarian, Leadership Lessons, Leo Tolstoy, Military, Navy, Survival, United States, United States Navy SEALs, Wall Street Journal, Warren Buffett
By Melissa Carter on October 10, 2011
As counter-intuitive as it may sound, inspiration actually emerges from the soil of action: perspiration is just the water that nourishes it.
Posted in Career Success | Tagged BMW, Chrysler, Counter-intuitive, Health, IBM, Mental health, Motivation, Tom Watson
By Melissa Carter on October 3, 2011
Asking questions means asking enough questions, the right questions, and in the right way until, like Steve Jobs, we know our customers better than they know themselves. Steve Jobs consistently seizes the initiative by anticipating his customer’s wants and needs long before they can be verbally articulated.
Posted in Career Success | Tagged Apple, Creativity, FAQs, Help and Tutorials, Mac, Macintosh, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word, Office, Sales Leadership, Steve Jobs, Word processor, Word Processors, WordSpell checker
By Melissa Carter on September 26, 2011
I recently watched a documentary about six prisoners who escaped from a maximum security, “escape-proof” prison in Pittsburgh. Their exploit was so daring and yes, innovative, that they have gone down as “The Pittsburgh Six.”But what really struck me was the creative process the ringleader used for engineering the escape: a process that might be used as a template for innovation.
Posted in Personal Transformation | Tagged Breakout, Convergent evolution, Convergent thinking, Creativity, Divergent thinking, DNA, Energy, Google, Innovation, Leadership Lessons, Nuno Pontes, Pittsburgh, Prison, The Pittsburgh Six
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