Melissa Schenker has combined an MBA with psychotherapy training to create an innovative consulting practice working with individuals and organizations to create satisfying work situations. She focuses on working one on one with individual clients interested in discerning and designing a life deeply aligned with their core purposes. Her expertise in the practical aspects of living and working with narcissists allows her to offer individual clients and organizations unusual insight into their most difficult relationships.

The original motivation behind the creation of Work/Life is a long held belief that people unhappy at work spread their unhappiness, and that one avenue to life satisfaction is work that is a fit for an individual's personal idiosyncrasies, and workplaces cognizant of the human nature of the people they employ. Melissa is fascinated by what makes people tick and has a gift for discerning the threads of a person's core motivations and helping them weave this into a big picture reality. She's a process and systems thinker and is skilled in applying this toward workplace effectiveness.

Work/Life launched in 1996 and has served hundreds of clients. Melissa is also the author of Sweet Relief From the Everyday Narcissist, co-written with psychotherapist Tina Moody. This added a niche consulting expertise in how to take care of oneself (personally and professionally) while living and working with difficult people. Specialized support for individuals and organizations is available through the website sweetreliefworks.com.

Melissa has an MBA from the Sloan School of Management at MIT where she focused on innovations in labor/management relations. She has an economics degree from the University of Texas at Austin. She also completed an intensive year-long experiential leadership training program in New York City run by the CORO foundation. It is designed to provide well rounded insight into the pressures that go into making public policy. Through CORO she had the opportunity to work for a non-profit, a business, a presidential campaign, a government agency and labor union. Melissa has worked as an internal management consultant for the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission, as an operations consultant for Deloitte & Touche, and in a variety of capacities in city government in Austin, Texas and New York City. She has served in leadership roles on several non-profit boards of directors. She's worked in political campaigns at the local, state and national level. She maintains her working knowledge of economics through an active options trading practice. She also maintains a (somewhat) regular meditation practice; elements of Buddhism suffuse her consulting point of view.