Kerry Secrest is a leadership coach for individuals and organizations who inspires the best in individual and organizational performance. She has extensive training in professional coaching, and has worked with a variety of individuals to significantly increase their performance, goal-attainment and personal fulfillment. Kerry brings compassion, rigor and experience to her coaching practice, using established methodologies to achieve major, lasting improvements in clients’ personal and professional lives.

She has an eighteen-year career in non-profit organizations, small business, and government, both in the United States and abroad. She has led trainings and facilitations in such areas as team-building, change management, strategic planning, diversity, conflict resolution, volunteer management, and leadership development.  With international experience in Africa, Europe, and Asia, she is committed to promoting intercultural understanding and diversity as powerful resources for reaching organizational goals.

In Washington, D.C. Kerry served as a program director with the American Red Cross, where she received awards for excellence in management. She has also worked as director of a $3 million dollar program at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Prior to that, drawing on her Lithuanian-American heritage and experience living two years in Soviet-occupied Lithuania, she served as Advisor for Educational and Cultural Affairs at the Embassy of Lithuania in Washington, D.C. as part of the country’s first diplomatic mission following independence.

In her youth, Kerry was a competitive gymnast who trained at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Her experience in those formative years helps her now as a coach to understand that a large part of success is getting back up after a fall.

She believes that life is an adventure and has organized her own unguided trips rafting north of the Arctic Circle and backpacking for a month in Siberia. To date, her most profound adventure has been parenthood, with two young daughters. In 2003, she and her family moved from Washington, D.C. to Brattleboro, Vermont as a conscious decision to live in a place that better supported their goals of living in a small community, closer to nature, with a better “work-life” balance. One of her newer interests is learning aerial fabrics at the New England Center for Circus Arts, where she is also a board member.

She is certified as an Integral Coach through New Ventures West, is credentialed with the International Coach Federation, and is certified in mediation through the Center for Dispute Settlement in Washington, D.C. Additionally, she holds certificates in Team Coaching through Team Coaching International and in the Skilled Facilitator approach by Roger Schwarz. She is also a qualified administrator of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and Personnel Decisions, Inc. 360 Degree feedback instruments. Watershed Coaching is a Women Owned Business Enterprise (WBE).