Meet Sherry Winn
Sherry Winn
Is a three-time Amazon best-selling author. She is an in-demand internationally renowned speaker who frequently speaks for up to 14,000 people at a time including organizations such as McDonald’s, Cisco, Stanford Health Care, Symetra, Dell, Hitachi, Banner Health, and Edward Jones.
Sherry is known as a leader of leaders and a visionary of visionaries who has written six books, including her most recent work, The Olympic Code: How High-Performing Leaders Deliver Under Pressure
CEO’s rave about Sherry’s ability to weave practical steps with life-changing messages throughout a humorous presentation which keeps leaders and team members on the edge-of-their seats.
With over 34 years of practicing leadership as a National Championship Basketball Coach and a Two-Time Olympian, Sherry is an expert at coaching leaders and team members to championship status. She has successfully taken leaders beyond their levels of comfort to “WIN” against competitors who were superior in talent, facilities, and financial budgets. Through her WIN Philosophy ™ and WINNER Principles ™, she shares insider secrets on how to succeed even when the odds seem insurmountable so that your team feels, acts, and conquers their goals like Olympians.
The Story Behind the Method
The credentials are real. The framework works. But neither of those things is why Sherry Winn’s clients trust her the way they do.
They trust her because she has been in the place most leaders are afraid to admit they’re in — the place where your best effort isn’t working, where the gap between who you are and who you need to be feels impossible to close — and she found her way through it. More than once.
That’s not a speaking point. It’s the foundation everything else is built on.
She wasn't supposed to make the Olympic team.
She spent most of her collegiate career on the bench. Not a starter. Not a standout. A substitute on a team that wasn’t yet thinking about her name in connection with the words Olympic athlete. Most people in that position accept the ceiling and move on.
She didn’t. She made the U.S. Olympic Team — twice.
She spent five years in chronic pain so severe most people would have stopped moving entirely.
She didn’t stop. She hiked 300 miles.
Not as a metaphor. As a choice — the same kind of choice she now helps executives make when the pressure of leadership starts to feel like a weight rather than a calling.
She went through a period of severe depression that took everything she thought she knew about herself and broke it apart.
She came out the other side as an award-winning speaker who has stood in front of audiences as large as 14,000 people and told the truth about what it takes to keep going when going feels impossible. That’s not a recovery story. That’s a transformation story — and it’s the reason her keynotes land differently than most.
Her first head coaching job ended with her being fired.
She went on to win a national championship and become national coach of the year.
Every ceiling she hit was real. Every comeback was a choice — not about talent or luck, but about the response she chose when the event didn’t go her way.
The method didn’t come from a textbook. It came from a life.
More about Sherry Winn
What It's Like to Be in the Room With Sherry
There’s a particular kind of speaker who makes you feel, somewhere in the middle of their talk, that they’re speaking directly to you — not to the room, but to the specific thing you’ve been carrying around and haven’t said out loud yet.
That’s what people describe after a Sherry Winn keynote.
It’s not because she’s funny, though she is. It’s not because she’s inspiring, though the room will feel that too. It’s because she has actually lived what she’s talking about — the pressure, the failure, the decision to get back up anyway — and she knows how to translate that experience into something a leader can use the next morning.
Her talks move. They’re fast and warm and honest, with the kind of humor that comes from someone who has learned to find it in hard places. People laugh, then go quiet, then lean forward. They leave with something specific they’re going to do differently — not just a feeling that fades by the following week.