From Fog to Focus – Clarifying Questions to Discover Your Breakthrough - by Carlos Salum

From Fog to Focus – Clarifying Questions to Discover Your Breakthrough, the second book by Carlos Salum, explores actionable strategies for achieving clarity and purpose in business leadership. Designed to cut through the noise and complexity of modern decision-making,

From Fog to Focus provides the tools needed to create your next Breakthrough and lead with precision and resilience.

Based on the principles of Carlos Salum’s first book, The Glass is Full and a Half, it includes fundamental questions for you to navigate today’s complex landscape and inspire actionable growth within your teams and organizations.

Paperback: 205 pages - Kindle/Digital: 227 pages

Foreword by Gustavo Raitzin, Harvard ALI 2018, Former Member of the Executive Board at Bank Julius Baer, Switzerland

In this inspiring book, you will find:

• Core strategies to sharpen focus and refine your Leadership Performance Strategy

• Techniques to align your vision with purposeful action

• Self-Evaluations to calibrate your rituals, commitments and action plans

• Real-world examples that illustrate how to navigate through ambiguity with confidence

As a Leadership Performance Strategist, Carlos Salum empowers international leaders and their teams to think creatively and design solutions that drive peak performance and deliver extraordinary results. His purpose is to transform possibility into reality, bridging the gap between aspiration and achievement.

From Fog to Focus is the result of four decades of leadership consulting, working with high performers in industries and positions where failure or imprecision are not an option, because the consequences can be either catastrophic or severely stunt future growth.

• The lessons, questions and prompts in the book have already benefited several generations of extraordinarily capable executives who are laser-focused on excellence.

• From Fog to Focus invites you to embark on a journey of inquiry, introspection, and purposeful design, exploring how to create enduring success by refining your vision and intentionally crafting a roadmap for meaningful achievements.

• In leadership, the art of asking questions isn’t just a skill—it’s the difference between navigating with purpose or leading blindly. Great questions are catalysts for insight, clarity, and action. They steer leaders toward new opportunities, uncover potential risks, and inspire teams to stretch beyond the obvious.

• With clear direction, carefully crafted questions become more than just tools—they become a guiding force, helping you inspire others, achieve clarity in complex situations, and set a course that aligns with your deepest values and greatest aspirations.

This journey is about helping you imagine a brighter future, fueling the desire to improve through new habits, and ultimately inspiring positive action that brings real value to the world.

The journey from Fog to Focus is a fascinating “treasure hunt of the mind.” Love the challenge. Design your Breakthrough. Build your inspiring legacy.

Speak. Align. Become - Declarations for a Resonant Breakthrough Life

Breakthrough Doesn’t Wait. It’s Designed. One Declaration at a Time. Speak. Align. Become. is a transformative guide for leaders, creators, and changemakers who seek to live and lead with purpose so they can make significant contributions.

My third book in the Breakthrough Design trilogy is an invitation to design your next strategic steps in life through intention, resonance, and courageous action.

With hundreds of original declarations organized into five transformative stages — Imagine, Improve, Inspire, Ignite, and Integrate — this book gives you the language, structure, and daily practice to obtain Breakthrough outcomes.

Paperback: 103 pages. Kindle/Digital: 112 pages

Foreword by Pietro Fittipaldi, professional race car driver (Formula 1, IndyCar, ELMS, WEC, IMSA, DTM)

What You’ll Discover in This Book

• How to speak a new version of yourself into existence

• How to align your mindset, energy, and behavior with what matters most

• How to become the kind of leader others are inspired to follow — not through force, but by example

• A powerful alternative to superficial affirmations: declarations that move identity into action

• A daily ritual of focus, reflection, and momentum, even in the midst of uncertainty

What This Book Will Help You Do

• Cultivate a mindset rooted in abundance, not scarcity

• Reframe adversity into fuel for resilience and growth

• Replace mental noise with purposeful inner dialogue

• Build micro-habits that align with your long-term vision

• Inspire others without preaching — simply by how you live

• Lead from coherence, not charisma

• Design your days with the clarity of who you're becoming

Why I Wrote This Book

Over decades of working with executives, athletes, creators, and change-makers across the globe, I noticed a pattern: those who transformed most powerfully did so through daily alignment with a compelling inner narrative. They didn’t just react. They didn’t just wish. They declared. And then they designed their lives to make those declarations a reality. Speak. Align. Become is the culmination of that work — and a continuation of the journey I began with The Glass is Full and a Half and From Fog to Focus. It’s a mental gym, a self-leadership guide, and a reflective companion for anyone ready to stop wishing and start becoming.

Who This Book Is For

• Leaders who want to build cultures rooted in clarity and energy

• Entrepreneurs navigating the highs and lows of vision execution

• Athletes and creatives who understand that performance begins in the mind

• Coaches, facilitators, and mentors who need a language of empowerment

• Anyone ready to live in alignment with their highest self — not someday, but now

This is your moment to step into the life you were designed to live — not by waiting for it, but by declaring it, aligning with it, and becoming it.

Foresight Under Pressure - The Inner Discipline of Resonant Leadership Performance

For executives, founders, coaches, and high performers who are done managing a career and ready to design a resonant life.

The gap between where you perform and where you can perform is almost always a function of the lens you're looking through.

For forty years, I stood stood beside peak performers at the highest levels of professional sport and executive leadership — Grand Slam champions, Formula 1 drivers, CEOs navigating crisis — and found the same truth in every arena: excellence is not a talent you're born with. It's an architecture you build.

Foresight Under Pressure is the blueprint.

Most leadership books hand you inspiration and leave you to improvise. This one hands you a system — the same deliberate-practice engine that turns athletes into champions, applied to the way you think, decide, recover, and lead. At its heart is a single shift in perception I call seeing the glass as full and a half: the trained capacity to see reality exactly as it is and what can be created from it, at the same time.

Paperback: 355 pages. Kindle/Digital: 397 pages

Across six sections and nineteen chapters, you'll learn to:

• Compound your growth by mastering the feedback cycle — the smallest unit of all improvement

• Protect your signal by governing attention and treating energy as your true strategic currency

• Decide with integrity under pressure, before certainty ever arrives

• Regulate emotion as data rather than disruption

• Lead from coherence, generating the resonance that separates transformative leaders from merely effective ones

• Design a life that compounds — aligning achievement, fulfillment, resonance, and legacy

Every chapter pairs a deep, story-rich essay with a hands-on worksheet — reflection questions, thinking tools, and weekly challenges that turn ideas into trained instinct. This is not a book you finish. It's a discipline you practice. If you've ever stood at the threshold of your own excellence and wondered whether the next version of yourself was worth the crossing — it is. This book is your architecture for that crossing.

TheSircle: a Theater of Purpose - Stories. Ideas. Relationships - The Power of Profound Leadership Conversations

In TheSircle: A Theater of Purpose, I tell the story of an experiment I started for entirely selfish reasons: I was tired of leaving professional gatherings full of exchanges but empty of anything that lasted a week. So, I built the table I always wanted to sit at, and discovered that what I craved, leaders everywhere were quietly starving for. TheSircle Executive Club started in 2009 in Charlotte, North Carolina, and has been gathering intellectually curious leaders for dinner ever since. [Read more about TheSircle]

Paperback: 267 pages - Kindle/Digital: 293 pages

The book takes its name from the three forces I believe change us when we gather honestly: Stories (how we transmit what experience taught us, stripped of the performance layer), Ideas (the currency we exchange when we are truly present to a question), and Relationships (the long-arc infrastructure behind every career, decision, and legacy).

At its core lies a single, bracing conviction: the quality of our conversations determines the quality of our thinking, the quality of our thinking determines the quality of our leadership, and the quality of our leadership determines the quality of the world we build together.

Across these pages, I uncover the loneliness that so often arrives with consequence, dismantles the digital-first habits that leave leaders connected everywhere yet close to no one, and offers a practical blueprint for creating rooms designed for depth—where the armor comes off, the questions are genuine, and a breakthrough can surface at any moment.

Whether the reader leads a company, a team, or simply a life worth examining, they will come away with a way to think better in the company of others. And that is my larger ambition: to carry this practice beyond Charlotte and across oceans, building a worldwide federation of facilitators and tables so that anyone, in any city, can pull up a chair.

The theater of purpose belongs to everyone fascinated enough to share stories, ideas, and relationships around the world—because the table is the answer wherever the hunger lives.