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About Paul D. Willis
If you're an executive wondering whether burnout is just part of the job — it's not. And I can help.
I'm Paul Willis — a leadership coach, ordained clergy, and the founder of The Uncontrolling Leader. For over 20 years I've worked in leadership, both in business and with non-profit organizations, sitting with high-achieving people at their breaking points. What I've watched happen — over and over — is that the most accomplished leaders burn out not because they worked too hard, but because they built their identity entirely on performance. Performance of themselves and of their organizations. When performance fails them, there's nothing underneath.
My coaching is grounded in Open and Relational leadership — a non-coercive, relationship-first philosophy that treats the future as genuinely open and leadership influence as persuasive rather than controlling. Practically, that means helping executives recover from burnout at the identity level and rebuild a way of leading that is sustainable, relational, and rooted in meaning rather than metrics.
I hold a Master of Divinity from Northwest Nazarene University, Bachelor in History, and am exploring doctoral work in Open and Relational Leadership. I live in Monroe, NC with my wife Heather — a devotional writer and calming force, and our daughter Holly.
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