The future of leadership is conscious, courageous, and deeply human.
The future of leadership is conscious, courageous, and deeply human.
When change accelerates, drama rises, trust gets fragile, and people default to survival mode.
I help leaders respond with clarity, emotional intelligence, and courage — so they can create cultures where people think better, collaborate better, and become the best version of themselves at work.
When change accelerates, drama rises, trust gets fragile, and people default to survival mode.
I help leaders respond with clarity, emotional intelligence, and courage — so they can create cultures where people think better, collaborate better, and become the best version of themselves at work.
The old leadership playbook was not built for this much change.
Leaders are being asked to move faster, make smarter decisions, retain talent, inspire trust, manage disruption, implement new technologies, and create cultures people want to belong to — all while navigating their own uncertainty.
And beneath the strategy decks, performance goals, and transformation plans, is the part most organizations still underestimate:
Emotion is already driving the room.
Fear. Frustration. Defensiveness. Disconnection. Avoidance. Burnout. Silence.
Ignore those signals, and they become culture.
Learn to read them, and they become intelligence.
“Conscious leadership is not soft. It is strategic.”
Sherril Harris
Conscious leaders know how to pause before reacting, challenge their own assumptions, listen without collapsing into defensiveness, and create the conditions where people feel safe enough to tell the truth, take risks, innovate, and grow.
They understand that culture is not built by posters, perks, or polished values statements.
Culture is built in the moments when pressure rises. But most leaders were never taught how to talk about emotions at work.
That’s where I come in.
The Conscious Leadership Shift.
- Recognize the Reaction
Understand the survival mind, emotional hijacking, bias, defensiveness, and the hidden stories driving behavior. - Recover and Respond
Use emotional literacy, self-awareness, intellectual humility, and communication tools to cut through drama without blame or shame. - Rebuild the Culture
Create psychological safety, trust, purpose, and emotionally intelligent systems that help people thrive through change.
What changes when leaders become more conscious?
WARNING: Side effects of exposure to Sherril may include…
“Love to work here!” culture that attracts and retains top talent.
Confident leaders who know how to take decisive action and ignite potential in teams.
Customers crowing about your exceptional customer service, creating a deluge of referrals.
Tackling uncomfortable conversations with ease and clarity.
Slaying of ‘zombie problems’ – you know, the ones that used keep coming back.
Feeling inspired by new technology and creative in the face of change.
Awesome! Here are the most popular ways to ignite the shift!
Signature Keynote: Be the Water, not the rock
How today’s leaders can respond to uncertainty with clarity, courage, and emotionally intelligent decision-making.
A powerful 60-minute keynote for leaders who are navigating change, complexity, conflict, disruption and the rising emotional demands of the modern workplace.
Audiences will learn how to recognize the survival mind, interrupt reactive patterns, cut through drama with respect, lead from clarity rather than chaos and find their flow.
Best for: leadership conferences, executive retreats, HR events, talent development programs, culture initiatives, and organizational resets.
Audience takeaways:
Leaders will leave with a clearer understanding of how emotion, bias, fear, and uncertainty shape behavior — and how conscious leadership creates stronger decisions, deeper trust, and more resilient cultures.
Keynote: Conscious Customer Experience
Transform difficult customer moments into opportunities for trust, connection and magnetic loyalty.
A 60-minute keynote that helps leaders and customer-facing teams understand the emotional reality behind every customer interaction.
Because customers do not simply remember what happened. They remember how they felt while it was happening.
This keynote explores how emotional intelligence, empathy, self-regulation, and conscious communication can transform conflict, increase trust, and turn ordinary service moments into loyalty-building experiences.
Best for: customer-facing teams, sales and service organizations, hospitality, healthcare, retail, financial services, and associations.
Audience takeaways:
Participants will learn how to respond instead of react, de-escalate emotional moments, and create customer experiences that feel human, trustworthy, and magnetic.
From awareness to Transformation
Full-Day Workshops:
Creating Conscious Leadership,
Creating Conscious Culture, or
Creating Conscious Customer Experience
Highly interactive, customized workshop designed around your organization’s unique leadership, culture, communication, or customer experience challenges.
Leveraging positive psychology, emotional literacy, social neuroscience, reflective conversation, and gamification, I’ll help teams identify what is really happening beneath the surface of every human interaction — and what needs to shift in order for people and performance to thrive.
Best for: leadership teams, culture transformation initiatives, off-sites, team resets, customer experience redesign, and change readiness initiatives.
Typical Workshop outcomes:
Teams leave with a shared language, greater emotional awareness, a clear behavioral framework, renewed trust, and practical tools for navigating change, conflict, and collaboration.
Sherril Harris literally changed my professional life.
After struggling to advance I hired Sherril for her Executive Social and Emotional Intelligence Coaching. With Sherril’s coaching, I was able to realize a professional advancement of tenfold of what I would have believed possible going in. In only 6 short months of coaching, I was able to identify and utilize my core values and strengths, master new and more effective interpersonal skills, and leverage my passion to secure a more challenging and fulfilling position at another company.
I made the right choice in hiring Sherril to speak at this event! She’s not only an experienced, powerful, and commanding speaker, she has great advice for attendees. Her stories and lessons are powerful for leaders and relevant to every person in any audience. She’s very collaborative, shows up every time, has insightful feedback, and goes the extra mile to help the event become a success. She brought a thoughtful gift to every attendee and made the audience feel right at home. I can’t speak highly enough about Sherril as a professional public speaker.
“Sherril brings a rare combination to the stage when she speaks. Her stage presence, combined with content that meets you where you are, and humor that softens serious talking points, makes audiences lean in and listen to every word she says. I say this as a speaking coach who has worked with speakers worldwide across multiple industries…Sherril Harris is as good as it gets when it comes to delivering meaningful messages that inspire introspection and change.”
“From the moment Sherril took the stage, her passion and enthusiasm were palpable. She effortlessly captured the audience’s attention with an articulate and charismatic delivery. Sherril has a unique ability to blend insightful content with humor keeping everyone thoroughly engaged throughout the entire talk. It was evident that she possessed a rare talent for connecting with the audience on a personal level, creating an atmosphere of inclusivity and shared inspiration. This talk has made a significant contribution to the success of my training team and will undoubtedly resonate with attendees long after the event.“
Meet Sherril Harris
Why this?
After a decade in Luxury Goods, another in TV and then 20+ years in talent development, CX Transformation, and Executive Coaching, I can tell you this: Drama is expensive!
It burns up time, burns out talent, and erodes trust. Don’t rely on the smiles alone. Some of the happiest employees I have ever met had just finished polishing their CVs.
I’m a big fan of AI in process innovation, but I cringe when decision makers tell me they are choosing to invest in AI but not EI (Emotional Intelligence). We’ve been here before.
Anyone who’s lived through the transition from live customer service agents to fully automated phone trees can tell you how the cost of losing a customer can far exceed any savings promised by the latest technology.
I have seen both sides.
I’ve been on the team that’s just “phoning it in” because we didn’t feel valued, safe, or inspired. I know what’s behind the smiles that don’t quite reach the eyes. Your expensive AI initiative needs genuine receptivity from your people in order to be successful. Do you have it? Are you sure?
I am that customer whose question is always outside the scope of what your AI agent can deliver. By the time I finally get to a live human being, my patience is low and expectations are high. Disappoint me, and I’ll take my business elsewhere and tell all my friends to do the same.
I need you to understand this… to a customer, that one human represents the totality of your company. Which is why your most valuable competitive advantage isn’t your AI, it’s your people.
‘Reaction’ is an unintentional creative force, a doorway through which the garbage in our minds becomes the garbage in our lives. And the garbage doesn’t just stay at work… we take it home with us.
This is why I love helping people understand how to use their emotions, challenge their assumptions, communicate with greater clarity, and respond to difficult moments with courage, compassion and confidence. Because it doesn’t just get better at work, it gets better everywhere.
And when people love where they work, shareholders love their returns.
This highly charged landscape of uncertainty is familiar territory for me. The language of possibility is my native tongue, and pattern interruption is my superpower. So, if your organization wants the ‘locals only’ tour, then I am your Sherpa.
Let me be your partner in upgrading the human side of high performance.
Why me?
I live in three beautiful places –Florida, France, and Belgium. What can I say, as you may already know, I suffer from Travel Lust.
I am married to a very tall Frenchman, also a professional, speaker who is my “reward partner.” -the one I earned by becoming the kind of person he deserves. On some days, I am sure he’d tell you I am still working on that;-)
I love dogs. I may never remember your name, but I will always remember every detail you share with me about your dog. If I wasn’t doing this, I’d probably be running a doggy daycare. Dogs are my happy place!
I am originally from New Jersey but have lived in a lot of places including Tulsa, Ok so the accents a bit of a mix but the “talking with my hands” thing is hard-wired in. I am an Introvert. I love what I do but sometimes it can get a little “People-y” so I tend to be a bit of a hermit on the weekends.
I have spent most of my professional life being one of the only women in the room. What can I say, I have a bit of a pioneering spirit that way.
My first career was in luxury Fashion and television. In the way back times, I used to host TV news magazines and 30-minute infomercials. If I look familiar, you might have been an insomniac in the 1990’s and there is a good chance I sold you a canoe.
Passionate Life-long Learner
