Mr. Dr. Chanta N. Barrett

I attribute my success to prayer and my relationship with God. I wouldn't even be on this trajectory if God didn't call me to be a minister. When I answered that call, that's when all of these different doors began to open. So I have to give credit where credit is due. My oldest daughter serves as my biggest inspiration in the sense that I knew she was watching me, because that's what kids do, they watch their parents. I never wanted to do something that would cause her to fall or stumble. I had to be confident and continue to push and develop internally, do what we call intrapersonal work, because I wanted to be the best for her, and then that would encourage her to be a better person as well. Those are the things that push me. Once you see something about yourself that's not so pretty, like in the poem The Dark Night of the Soul, you have to focus in on those things that are not so nice about yourself. The only way to change those things is to acknowledge that they're there and then actively work at making them better. So those are the things that push me and are my biggest inspiration - trying to be better than I was before, trying to be a good example for my daughter, and answering God's call.

I would say develop your relationship with God. Trust the natural intuition that the Lord has put in all of us, and especially in women. Trust that. Don't go against that, even if your heart is trying to get you to do so - use your brain. There was a song out years ago where the woman said, you know, my head is telling me to leave, but my heart is telling me to stay. My daughter was young and said, well, knock that part in the head and drag it with you as you leave. We can save ourselves so many problems if we would just walk away when our mind has told us, our intuition has showed us, and we just keep trying to make things work - and that's in friendships, romance, whatever. When that intuition tells you it's time to go, please listen.

The biggest challenges I would say is keeping up with technology, but also knowing when not to get into technology and to just lean more into the human side of storytelling. Because with communication and marketing, it's basically you're still selling a story. You can use the technology to polish it and make it nice, but that human element that's going to touch people, that comes from within. So not getting so caught up in using technology that you forget to add in yourself. The biggest opportunity is also within technology, because it can get your story to travel further and faster than it ever could without it. So if you're telling a compelling and a good story, that's what you want. You want it to travel, and you want it to hit as many hearts as possible.

Integrity is most important to me - being who you are even when nobody's watching. Being authentic, and I really mean being authentic. Being good to people is crucial, because the way you treat people says a lot about who you are and how you feel about yourself. It's like when people say, well, if you go out to a restaurant and you mistreat the waiter or the waitress, you're really not a good person. You feel like that person doesn't matter, and everybody matters. So those are the things, no matter professional or personal - I definitely want to see people treat other people well.