…because what you do matters…
Cheryl knows that each of us is uniquely positioned to have an impact through our leadership and our organizations. She also recognizes that many of us reach the end of our life without ever having stepped into our purpose…
As she has wrestled with identifying, and acting on, her purpose, she has come to understand that her ‘why’ is captured by the phrase at the top “because what you do matters.”
She did everything humanly possible to ensure she wouldn’t be asked to serve as a hospital President. But, she was asked anyway. After much prayer, she realized this was a “God thing” and she needed to take the hint and accept the job.
Because of that decision, she is now able to share ‘how’ their hospital was able to consistently hit 99th percentile performance with leaders who want to unlock that level of performance inside their own organization.
Her purpose was not to just create these insights and develop these practices just for the hospital. It is to share what they did with all the leaders who want to replicate these achievements.
Over time, Cheryl has become more and more aware of the importance of community – of walking through this life with people who support you and challenge you. Not only is she making the effort to belong to such communities, she is very focused on offering the same support and challenge to those inside her communities. She loves to connect with people who are pushing themselves to stretch and grow, and are willing to step outside their comfort zone to do so.
She finds it fascinating to look back at a single moment in time, and trace the impact that one moment has had in her life... pulling those threads & continuing to weave them into an ever-shifting image.
One of her mentors challenged her to identify three words that identified how she showed up when she was performing at her best, and it took a bit of work to isolate just three. What she settled on were: rooted, bold & relentless. When she is rooted in her faith, and steps out boldly and takes relentless action, she feels most congruent and focused.
Two of her favorite quotes are “If you don’t ask, the answer is always ‘no’” and “The one who says it can’t be done should never interrupt the one who is doing it”. These both support her focus on taking bold action so that she moves forward and makes progress.
She wrapped up her career working for others in late July 2018. It was a hard decision because she had the pleasure of working with a fantastic team at her hospital…she had been President for five years when she stepped away. But she felt compelled to do so, as she knew that the hospital would continue to perform at 99th percentile (as they had been doing the entire time she served as President), and she also knew that there were many organizations out there who would want to learn the secrets of this level of performance.
She also firmly believes that each of us has a unique contribution to make, and that if we don’t show up and do it, we deprive the world of what only we can do. It was time for her to step into what was next for her and spread the proven practices to other leaders and organizations so they too could create the same level of performance.
Cheryl is insatiably curious and loves to constantly be learning new things, or deepening her knowledge in areas in which she already plays. But she will freely admit she gets irritated when she is learning something new and she doesn’t do it well enough to suit her…
She currently lives in Texas with her husband and Australian cattle dog, Indigo, after having lived in the Southeast, Northeast, Pacific Northwest, and the Sonoran desert…Her husband describes her as “being between horses” as a few years ago she had to say goodbye to the mare who had traveled the country with her. She and the mare, Jetsena, were together for over 22 years, and the shared experiences they had certainly shaped Cheryl into the woman she is now. She loves to travel and is endlessly fascinated by the ways in which we answer the same questions very differently.
She enjoys a diverse range of activities: hiking, river rafting, reading, kayaking, martial arts, photography, trail-running with her dog, stitching, weight-training, yoga, riding her peloton bike, and horse-back riding…
