Leadership, Career and Retirement Coach and Facilitator
Your Partner in Reaching Your Peak Potential
Professional Certified Coach Sherry Dutra is fiercely committed to partnering with leaders like you to tap into your highest potential and achieve clarity of goals and purpose. This opens the door to new possibilities that allow you to choose who you truly desire to be in your role and create the rewarding and fulfilling career and life of your dreams. Through a customized and collaborative process, Sherry helps you to design action strategies that lead to tangible, sustainable results for your personal and organizational success.
If you are looking for a proven professional who can partner with you to address issues such as:
- ongoing overwhelm,
- the fear of stepping outside your comfort zone,
- nonstop firefighting,
- the challenges of constant change, or
- difficulty communicating with your team,
you’ve come to the right place. With extensive experience working with amazing clients with similar worries and concerns and partnering with them to achieve remarkable success, Sherry’s mission and commitment is to help get you back in touch with what you want to create in your life and to partner with you to create strategies that fuel your engagement and energy while accelerating your progress toward your goals.
A Unique Perspective
Sherry’s Story & Background
Sherry’s path to becoming a coach started at an early age. As a child, one of her favorite games to play in the family basement was “school” complete with desk, chalkboard, and any family, friends, or stuffed animals who would be her “students.” It was clear that helping others to learn and grow would become an important part of Sherry’s life. As she learned the power of coaching, she realized that we each have all the wisdom and answers we need inside ourselves and that through coaching, her clients would learn how to tap into the resources within for more powerful results.
What lights Sherry up about doing this work is that by helping others to gain new insights and perspectives along with seeing the best in themselves, she is making a difference in their lives.
Known for her compassionate yet direct candor, Sherry has coached and trained hundreds of leaders in eight countries since launching Dutra Associates in 2008. Whether working one-on-one with clients or facilitating leadership and talent development programs, Sherry’s commitment is to approach each interaction with integrity, while building trusting and long-term relationships with her clients.

What sets Sherry apart is the unique perspective she brings from her own journey through each of the career stages she now coaches. After 25 years of working as an employee and leader for several technology and retail firms, she understands the challenges of leading in a fast-paced and rapidly changing environment. She grappled with discovering her next steps when she realized she wanted a new career direction, leading to the founding of her business. As a Baby Boomer, she is passionate about continuing to live a vibrant, healthy, and meaningful life for decades to come and thrives on helping others to do the same.
“I have truly enjoyed working with Sherry these last few months and am amazed by what I was able to accomplish, thanks to Sherry! I have benefited from Sherry’s thoughtful career coaching, accountable guidance towards progress, and professional perspective each step of the way.”
C.C.
Senior Program ManagerSherry’s Education and Credentials
You can feel confident engaging Sherry to partner with you and your organization to create inspiring, sustainable results. She is a Professional Certified Coach, an engaging learning facilitator, and a graduate of the accredited Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching (iPEC) program where she served as a faculty member for 13 years. She has augmented her formal coach training with specialized coursework to enhance her service to her clients. A partial list of her earned certifications includes:
- ACE Coach Accelerator Enhanced Practitioner – Accelerating Coach Excellence (ACE)
- Certified Canfield Trainer in the Success Principles – The Canfield Training Group
- Bregman Leadership Coach Training – Bregman Partners, Inc.
- Transformational Presence Leadership in Action – The Center for Transformational Presence
- Transformational Presence Coach Training – The Center for Transformational Presence
- Results System™ Certified Practitioner – Thought Action, LLC
- Genos Emotional Intelligence Accreditation – Genos International
- Now What? Coaching Authorized Program Facilitator – Laura Berman Fortgang
- CPI Certified Senior Career Transition Consultant – Career Partners International
- Certified Professional Retirement Coach – Retirement Project, LLC
Sherry earned an MBA from Rivier University and a BA in Human Development from Boston College. She also received a Certificate in Training and Development from Boston University.
Awards and Recognition
Sherry has been recognized with the Business Coach of the Year Award by the International Coach Federation – New England. Her perspectives on business and career have been featured on WMUR-TV, New Hampshire’s ABC affiliate; Your Next Bold Move cable TV show with Wendy Capland; Jory Fisher’s BlogTalk Radio show; Wickedly Smart Women podcast with Anjel B. Hartwell; She Built This LIVE n’ Learn podcast with Emily Aborn; and Overcoming Distractions podcast with David Greenwood.
On a personal note

Sherry grew up in a small town on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and has always lived in New England. When she was ten, she started making submarine sandwiches for her family’s grocery store and worked eleven summers in the family business. Sherry credits this early exposure to work-life for her strong work ethic and yearning to own her own business. She resides in southern New Hampshire with her partner, David and together they enjoy hiking and being active, going to concerts, and spending time with friends and family. Sherry enjoys reading, listening to music, cooking, exercising, and playing the piano.