We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sherry Winn. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sherry below.

Sherry, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What do you think it takes to be successful?

Success is determined by the thoughts you think. Thoughts create action either toward what you want or what you don’t want. When you learn the power of mindfulness, you can change your thoughts from fear and failure to faith and success. One of my favorite sayings is: “You don’t get what you want; you get who you are. To get what you want, you must change who you are.”

What this saying means is that you must align with your goals. If you want something, but your inner voice tells you that it is going to be difficult, hard, or impossible, your experience is certain to line up with that. When operating in fear, it is more difficult to act. When operating in faith, it is far easier to take daily actions that line up with your goal.

Success begins from the inside-out. I’ve never met a person who won a gold medal who didn’t think that they could. They dreamed about the experience, visualized, and performed a million small acts to win the gold. It is the same with any person who reaches a goal. The effort begins from your mind and then extends to the physical experience.

Many people live in the belief system that they must work harder than anybody else in the world to achieve success. This is hard on the body, mind, and spirit. There is a limit to how hard you can work, but there is no limit to how much you can imagine.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am Two-Time Olympian, National Championship Coach, and CEO of the Winning Leadership Company. I captivate audiences by my edge-of-the-seat storytelling weaving empowering leadership messages throughout my presentation. Affectionately known as Coach Winn, I have earned my place as one of the go-to keynote speakers for conferences who want to begin or end on a high note.

I am the author of three best-selling books including Unleash The Winner Within You: A Success Game Plan for Business, Leadership, and Life. My new book, Winning Leadership: Seven Secrets for Becoming a Truly Powerful Leader, has received rave reviews from business leaders, coaches, and authors. My books provide real-world, practical advice that leaders can immediately implement. I have interviewed over 450 top leaders from Fortune 500 companies to small mom-and-pop businesses to discover the secrets that winning leaders utilize to engage and retain the absolute best people.

I stepped into the world as a leader, first in sports where I attained the highest level possible in athletics–The Olympic Games. I then led college basketball programs for 23 years where I won a National Championship and took my teams to three Elite Eights. Since 2012, I have delivered over 3,700 hours of leadership programs where I have developed Olympic-level leaders.

I have earned a reputation with C-Suite executives for my thoroughness in teaching championship methods for successful leadership. When working with a small company or a Fortune 500 company, I enter each collaborative effort with the same level of passion I used to become a Two-Time Olympian.

My strong skill of coaching leaders to be pragmatic and enthusiastic while driving teams to achieve improbable outcomes makes me among the best in the business. CEOs are astounded by how quickly I get to the root issue of a sticky situation which allows the team to move forward in collaboration.

I have spoken to audiences as large as 14,000 and have spoken for companies such as Dell, Hitachi, and Adobe, I has spoken in Gillette Stadium, airplane hangars, baseball diamonds, and too many hotel convention centers to mention. Organizations such as the Volunteers of America, Florida Chamber of Commerce, Edward Jones, and a host of multi-million and billion-dollar companies invest in my teachings each year.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I was fortunate to have been born with a determined and stubborn nature. These qualities propelled me to the Olympic Games twice and to the National Basketball Championship. However, my determination, which often bordered on stubbornness, did not always serve me or those around me well.

I didn’t initially understand that everyone goes through about 48 life disruptions in their lifetime. A life disruption is an event that impacts your daily life for six weeks to six months. Beyond these disruptions, there are also three to five lifequakes—life disruptions on steroids. A lifequake is a lifelong dream that falls apart, an injury or illness that changes your life forever, or a betrayal by a loved one that feels unforgivable.

I didn’t grasp that life disruptions and lifequakes are part of the human experience. Instead, I believed that events happened to me, leading to depression and even suicidal thoughts.

At 35, I experienced a huge lifequake: chronic pain. I couldn’t sit, stand, or walk without intense pain. I went from hiking, biking, running, and weight training to becoming a couch potato. After consulting 17 doctors and undergoing every test imaginable, I was told that my only option was to learn pain management.

I didn’t accept this prognosis, believing that someone had the answer; it just wasn’t those doctors. Turning to alternative medicine, I discovered that healing required attention not only to the physical body but also to the emotional and spiritual body. It took over five years, but I eventually regained my health and was able to play basketball, run, weight train, and live a normal life.

This experience transformed my belief system and taught me the distinction between pain and suffering. Pain is physiological, but suffering is a choice. I realized I had been suffering for most of my life and decided to eliminate suffering from my vocabulary. I learned the power of self-awareness and how thoughts shape your life experience.

I chose to live in happiness, joy, and serenity.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

We develop our reality through our thoughts, building belief systems around them.

As a young child, my mother often sang a song to me, colloquially known as the “Worm Song.” The lyrics went: “Nobody likes me. Everybody hates me. I need to eat some worms. First you get the bucket, then you get the shovel. Ooo, how they wiggle and squirm.”

Reflecting on these lyrics—”Nobody likes me. Everybody hates me”—I internalized them as factual, simply because I did not know any better. For decades, I lived under the belief that others hated me.

As a young athlete, I was naturally talented. I was consistently among the best players on every team I joined. However, I was convinced that my teammates disliked me, interpreting their words and actions as hostile. Consequently, I distanced myself from them, believing they hated me. My teammates, in turn, saw my withdrawal as arrogance.

This cycle perpetuated issues between me and my teammates, reinforcing my belief that nobody liked me and leading to depression and suicidal thoughts.

Fortunately, I was an avid reader and discovered self-help books in my twenties. It was through these books that I realized I was the common denominator, trapped by a faulty belief system. When I abandoned the belief that nobody liked me, I found that people began to appreciate and love me.

For two and a half decades, I endured unimaginable emotional pain due to a belief system rooted in a nursery rhyme.

I then understood that everyone harbors limiting belief systems that shape their reality. By choosing to actively manage my thoughts, rather than letting them control me, I transformed my life experience.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thewinningleadershipcompany.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thewinningleadershipcompany/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thewinningleadershipcompany/
• Linkedin: LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/thewinningleadershipcompany/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@SherryMWinn