Meet Sherry Lowry: Mentor Award Winner

By: Sheri Parr

The 2012 Banner Brunch Mentor Award winner goes to Sherry Lowry, MCC, of The Lowry Group and Vision Enactors Collective. Lowry is a professional business mentor and an alliance and collaboration coach, and her inexhaustible energy and commitment to serving others makes her an outstanding selection for this year’s mentor award.

Known by many as a lifetime serial entrepreneur, Lowry has created seven businesses within seven different industries, deliberately creating opportunities to work cross-culturally and cross-generationally with others. She is also active in community service, participating on 15 community-related boards, both non-profit and corporate, over four decades.

Recently, Lowry took the time to offer insight into some of her recent projects, as well as share best practices and excellent advice.

AWC: Sherry, you clearly share a passion for bringing people together to facilitate collaboration, professional growth and personal support. How does this passion relate to your latest endeavor, the All Content Matters series, and the All Content Tribe you’ve created?
SL: In recent years I became increasingly aware in participating with many groups and their events that the featured talents—keynoters, panelists, and workshop leaders—were sharing deeply of their experience and capabilities. However, I did not immediately see a parallel and collective opportunity for them to come together as a group of bright, community-focused and collaborative professionals working on forwarding possibilities together. Simultaneously, the most significant component I wanted to develop for myself was the possibility of a talent team that could support cross-collaboration of projects in Central Texas and the immediate Austin area.

So, it became a 2012 goal to serve as a catalyst to find a feasible means for those various talents to come together, and with some degree of regularity. From there, the vehicle became the All Content Matters 2012 Series, which fosters cross-collaboration and interactive, hands-on learning between the professionals who elect to become part of our open community. All of us in the All Content Tribe are on some level developing, reading, integrating and delivering content in some format: written, audio, video, photographic, and more recently via mixed and cross-media channels. A great many of the AWC members do exactly some or all of this.

AWC: What led you to coaching and what about coaching do you most enjoy?
SL: My own history led me directly to coaching—both the style with which I work and the role I so often found myself in within my Board volunteerism and community involvement. Over a period of time I realized it was not what I thought or what I did that made the big differences, but what I came to discover and understand about others.

A truly capable coach combines the skills of a communicator and futurist: to see clearly the potential in the future path of another, in terms of existing capabilities and possibility. This applies to both individuals and organizations.

What I enjoy the very most about coaching is two-fold: I love being one of those fortunate persons watching for “the gold” in people, opportunities and real-life circumstances, and then getting to be there when they see the light within them turn fully on.

You see, most people never realize that their future is unfolding within. They are too close to that. They take that for granted. Mostly, it’s the rest of us—if and when we know how to be on that special watch—who get the pleasure of helping reveal that to them. It’s a very special role. I’ve fully enjoyed playing it when I get that chance.

AWC: You’ve given much of your time mentoring others through Freelance Austin. Tell us a little bit about Freelance Austin and why you believe in supporting this group.
SL: Freelance Austin is actually a committee in full partnership with AWC Austin that helps extend AWC’s mission into the grassroots community of freelancers whose communication methods may include the full range of creative communication vehicles (written, graphic, web-design, audio-video-photographic), as well as talent consultancies.

My experience with Freelance Austin carries the camaraderie and extends the possibility for developing new relationships to the clients or customers of AWC members, or even to those providing employment opportunities to them.

AWC Austin and Freelance Austin certainly have membership playing major leadership roles in how public relations, communications and especially social business are in the forefront at this point in time.

AWC: What’s a best practice you would recommend to the members of AWC Austin and professionals everywhere?  
SL:  What I believe is broadly generalizable and transferable for us all is building automatics into our lives in a really practical and in-the-moment way. Ask yourself each morning and at least once again each day these questions:

• What do I want MORE of?
• What do I want LESS of?
• What is it I want to STOP?
• What is it I’d be wise to START?

This can serve as an almost instant cure for overwhelm, choosing between the many opportunities and options I know so many of the talented AWC members are presented with daily and weekly.

AWC: Do you have any closing thoughts you’d like to share?  
SL: In my experience almost everyone is showing up regularly in our lives, professionally and/or personally, and is either there ready to serve in some way as a mentor or is seeking some aspect of that from us. I’m not referencing our casual friends or acquaintances, but those who when there we go, there they also are. Those are not accidental path-crossings. Pay attention to what else these meetings and relationships may hold for you.

In the end, it’s not really about the goals accomplished. It always comes back down the people, the friendships and the mutual caring and shared interests. I see a lot of realization of all this within the AWC and Freelance-Austin comrades.

Please come celebrate Sherry and other Banner Brunch award winners on Saturday, April 28, from 10:30 a.m. – 1 p.m. For more information and to register, visit www.BannerBrunch.com.