Imagine a world where leaders prioritize wellbeing and cultivate compassion while driving innovation and business growth. Bree Johnson, a pioneering Executive Wellbeing & Leadership Coach and Founder/CEO of Executive Unschool, is making this vision a reality. By integrating cutting-edge wellbeing strategies, mindfulness practices, and transformative coaching, Bree empowers leaders to redefine success on their own terms, elevate their impact, and create a better world. To date, she has mentored hundreds of executives and leaders, resulting in what they describe as life-changing transformations for leaders and small- and medium-sized businesses.
As a Speaker, Mentor, Breathwork Guide, and Fractional Chief Wellness Officer, Bree is dedicated to helping leaders and organizations foster positive cultures, unlock peak performance, and prioritize wellbeing. Her own unique story and varied career inspire a new generation of leaders to create inclusive, creative, and growth-oriented workplaces.
Journey from Courtroom to Boardroom
Bree’s experiences in law firm operations and employment law shaped her understanding of leadership and its impact on organizational wellbeing. She learned from countless clients that poor leadership and ineffective training and development can result in employees being harmed by bad leaders and toxic behavior at work. Her own work experiences include “work wounds”—rupturing or painful experiences at work—and it’s these experiences, both her own and those of her clients, that have led her to become an advocate for making workplaces work for all.
Bree recalls, “When I transitioned to employment law, representing people harmed by sexual harassment, discrimination, and wrongful termination, I thought my work would have a more meaningful impact on healing their work wounds and trauma—but I was wrong.” The civil justice system focuses on compensation to make a person whole after experiencing workplace harm, but it falls far short of healing the root cause of the issue. Moreover, the typically confidential legal processes do little to address workplace problems at their core, meaning that workplaces rarely improve.
As Managing Partner and COO of the law firm she co-founded, she handled hundreds of intake calls about workplace bullying, bad behavior, and betrayal. Recognizing that the cycle of harm often repeated itself, she realized she wanted to be part of a bigger solution. Bree saw that many leaders lacked emotional intelligence, nervous system regulation, and inner wellbeing—critical components for conscious leadership. These insights inspired the creation of Executive Unschool, an HR, wellbeing, and growth consulting firm focused on financial and mental wellbeing for high-achieving leaders and companies that care.
Turning Challenges into Growth Opportunities
Bree’s transition from legal operations to co-founding a law firm, and ultimately building Executive Unschool, presented unique challenges. Starting a law firm taught her the essentials of building a successful business from the start. However, creating a mission-oriented company like Executive Unschool required a shift from a purely results-driven mindset to one centered on purpose and wellbeing.
The key to navigating this change was integrating lessons from her prior ventures with the emotional and human-centered mission of Executive Unschool. Balancing strategic know-how with genuine care for leaders’ personal development was essential to Bree’s successful career transition. She also found that anchoring her work in her core values helped her face challenges as an entrepreneur.
Executive Unschool: Breaking New Ground
Bree chose the name “Executive Unschool” to reflect the firm’s mission to challenge traditional work and leadership paradigms. True growth often requires “unschooling”—unlearning beliefs and behaviors that no longer serve leaders or their organizations. Many leaders are taught outdated models of success that overlook emotional intelligence, mindfulness, and authentic connection.
Executive Unschool creates and delivers custom workshops, immersive training, retreats, and small group programs that focus on improving leaders’ personal and professional lives. Its core values of unlearning, inner wellbeing, conscious leadership, and growth drive its mission to create leaders who thrive by fostering wellbeing in themselves and their teams.
What Sets Executive Unschool Apart?
Executive Unschool differentiates itself by addressing the root causes of workplace issues through leadership development, emotional intelligence, and work wellbeing. Leaders who experience Executive Unschool’s programs feel empowered to redefine their relationship with work and develop a clearer understanding of how to prioritize what matters most—rather than working on autopilot. Unlike traditional consulting firms that focus on surface-level solutions, Executive Unschool’s approach goes deeper. The firm’s best client relationships have been multi-year engagements that facilitate true workplace culture change.
The firm’s philosophy centers around “unschooling” outdated beliefs about work and leadership—such as the idea that constant excessive stress and pressure are necessary for success. Bree and her team help leaders replace these beliefs with practices and tools that expand their approach to include employee wellbeing and conscious leadership. Unsurprisingly, people who feel better at work perform better—with greater motivation, focus, and results.
Executive Unschool also emphasizes nervous system regulation as a core leadership skill. Teaching leaders to manage stress and avoid burnout is central to its programming. Bree explains, “We don’t just provide leadership development; we offer a path to healing emotional and psychological work wounds, creating truly transformative change that starts from within.”
Additionally, Executive Unschool integrates conscious leadership practices, such as its proven RACE framework (Regulation, Awareness, Connection, Expansion), which helps leaders stay regulated, aware, and connected to themselves and their teams. This focus on conscious leadership creates an environment where collaboration, psychological safety, and clear communication can thrive. Bree and her team build bridges between people, ensuring that leadership isn’t just about power or authority but about fostering genuine connection for collective impact.
The Work Wound Institute™
The Work Wound Institute™ is the research arm of Executive Unschool, focusing on prevalent workplace issues and work wounds—such as betrayal, bullying, and bad behavior. The Institute’s core mission is to evaluate data-driven insights on workplace wellbeing and the impact of stress while researching how to create lasting change in organizations.
The future of The Work Wound Institute™ includes continuing research on the powerful link between work wounds and physical health. Executive Unschool believes that conscious leadership and mindfulness can improve workplace wellbeing, as demonstrated by health biomarker improvements like reduced cortisol levels, blood pressure, and physical health risks. They are committed to further evaluating the connection between physical wellbeing and healthy workplaces with regulated environments.
Challenging Traditional Norms
Through the work of both Executive Unschool and the impactful research of The Work Wound Institute, Bree challenges the misconception that corporate wellness programs can rely on surface-level solutions like time management tricks or perks. Many companies offer gym memberships or wellness days, believing these will boost engagement, but such approaches fail to fully address the systemic issues causing disengagement and poor motivation. They are also insufficient to overcome the harm caused by toxic leaders who don’t know any better.
In its work, Executive Unschool tackles the deeper causes of disengagement and burnout, focusing on conscious leadership, psychological safety, and clear communication. The firm’s holistic approach, which combines emotional intelligence, nervous system regulation, and unlearning conditioned beliefs, helps leaders and teams break the stress cycle and expand into their biggest, most audacious goals.
Tailored Solutions for Long-term Impact
Bree customizes Executive Unschool’s programming to meet the unique needs of each leader and organization. She starts with an in-depth assessment of the organization’s culture, leadership dynamics, and challenges, followed by tailored workshops or programs.
Executive Unschool’s programming and private mentorship are also adaptable in format—whether in person, virtual, or hybrid—to meet the logistical needs of the organization. Experiential activities and group exercises are curated to ensure leaders and teams engage with the material in ways that resonate best with them. Ongoing support, follow-up resources, and mentorship are offered to help leaders and organizations implement the changes needed for long-term impact.
Whether enhancing communication or focusing on emotional intelligence, Executive Unschool ensures its programs are relevant, actionable, and aligned with the organization’s vision.
At Executive Unschool, success is measured by both qualitative and quantitative KPIs, including leader engagement, emotional intelligence development, stress reduction, team cohesion, and profit increases. Bree also evaluates physical and mental health improvements through data collected by The Work Wound Institute™, demonstrating the tangible impact of her programs in coordination with the organization’s goals.
A Transformative Success Story
One of Executive Unschool’s most impactful success stories involves a mid-sized company struggling with employee engagement and a lack of cohesive focus on high-priority projects.
The Executive Unschool team identified leaders’ stress, emotional dysregulation, and scattered priorities as core issues to address. Through a customized year-long training and development program, leaders at all levels learned the necessary skills and tools to regulate their stress, refocus on key priorities, and engage more effectively with their teams. The results were clear: the company saw increased profits, improved team engagement, and reported a healthier workplace culture.
Roadmap for the Future
The long-term vision for Executive Unschool is to reshape leadership development and organizational wellbeing across industries. Bree’s focus on expanding program offerings, innovating cutting-edge research in work wellbeing, and building a community for leaders who care aims to create a movement that inspires leaders to prioritize wellbeing, authenticity, and connection.
“I believe that as we continue to evolve and innovate, Executive Unschool will be at the forefront of redefining what it means to lead with heart and intention,” Bree concludes.
For More Info: https://www.executiveunschool.com/