Reginald “Reggie” Butler

Founder and CEO of Performance Paradigm LLC | Founder of Human Code Project

St. Petersburg, Florida — To be in a room with Reggie Butler was to experience a kind of alchemy. The air changed. Possibilities expanded. People who entered as strangers left as a community. Whether in boardrooms or living rooms, community centers or family gatherings, Reggie had this gift of making everyone feel seen, challenged, and loved all at once. He was a father who loved his kids more than anything - a love that shaped him as much as he shaped them, and he wove stories about them into the experiences he created. An uncle and great uncle, present and devoted across the generations. A Pa-Pa who became the “water monster” splashing his grandkids in the pool with a leaf blower and creating a lifetime of beautiful memories. A friend who showed up, always. A profoundly loving and fiercely loyal partner who built a life and legacy with someone who saw his vision, shared his dreams, and walked every moment of life by his side. Over three decades, he created this magic thousands of times, touching millions of people across continents and cultures - not just through his work, but through the fullness of who he was.

Reginald “Reggie” Butler, partner, father, grandfather, uncle, musician, visionary founder and CEO of Performance Paradigm and founder of the nonprofit Human Code Project, passed away November 3, 2025 after a shocking, short, and courageous battle with leukemia. He was 68. In an unimaginable loss, his older brother Anthony Butler passed away just hours later the very same day.

Memorial Celebration
Early 2026 | St. Petersburg, FL
Details and RSVP information will be shared via email and social media in the coming weeks.

Honor Reggie's Legacy
In lieu of flowers, please donate to Human Code Project, the nonprofit Reggie founded to bring transformation to communities beyond corporate walls. Your support completes his unfinished work and ensures his vision continues for generations.
Donate to Human Code Project

The Foundation: Where Grace Meets Grit

Reggie’s father, Don Carlos Butler, was a World War II veteran who came home to face a world that didn’t always match the ideals he’d fought for. He could have become bitter. He could have taught his son the world was irredeemably broken. Instead, he taught Reggie about grit - the determination to keep going, the refusal to give up, the strength to face life with clear eyes and keep building no matter the naysayers. Don Carlos showed him that leadership means creating something better and that intention without follow-through means nothing.

From his mother, Jonnie Butler, came grace, humor, and empathy. She taught him you could tell the truth with love, that laughter was a form of grace, that people needed and deserved to feel seen. She was always his biggest cheerleader, life force, and the source of that twinkle in his eye. He also learned about humor and grace by watching his older brothers, Kevin and Tony, navigate the world with their unique blend of rule-breaking, storytelling, and infectious laughter that came from a place deep in their souls.

He spoke often about his family and his upbringing as the source of his power. Together, his family gave him the full blueprint: his father’s grit to do the hard work, his mother’s grace to do it with love, the growth that comes with watching your older brothers, and the gratitude for both the joy and the pain that came with all of it. This became the bedrock of everything Reggie built. He used his father’s story to help leaders understand that systems don’t change themselves and how one can lead in the face of adversity. He channeled his mother’s spirit in how he facilitated, with joy and humor that disarmed, with empathy that never patronized, with grace that created room for everyone to grow. That was his superpower.

A Life Fully Lived

Reggie carried these lessons into his own life as a father to Jennifer, David, and Victoria, three people he felt honored to watch emerge as beautifully unique individuals, each with their own gifts and paths. He considered it one of his greatest privileges to watch them become dynamic, deeply talented, and truly generous humans. He was so proud of them, and frequently looked for ways to incorporate them into his work and experiences.

He was Pa-Pa to his five grandchildren, Sierra, Jayla, Emory, Justice, and Dea. Once a year, the whole family descended on his and Kristan’s home in Florida for beautiful chaos. Loud and fun, with an immediate and unanimous request for Victoria’s cinnamon rolls or for hours upon hours in the pool. His grandkids grew up with his hands guiding theirs on piano keys, teaching them scales and songs. They learned to pull weeds beside him in the garden, their small hands in the soil next to his. They played at the playground and made up fantastical stories around the dinner table, building memories in the ordinary moments that make a life. Life gets busy, but these moments with his kids and grandkids were his lifeblood – the joy that fueled every other life domain.

A dedicated weightlifter and bodybuilder, Reggie understood that being his best for others required being his best physically. His commitment to fitness was discipline in service of his mission.

Music ran through everything he did. As a classically trained pianist, he could lose himself in scales and sonatas, his hands moving across keys with the same grace he brought to facilitation. Prince was his ultimate, the artist who showed him that you could be brilliant, bold, and unapologetically yourself. His band, The Sounds of St. Louis let him be pure performer, bringing joy through music in its most direct form.

Speed and style combined in his love for Corvettes, the American dream on wheels. That is what it represented to a kid from St. Louis. He was a member of a local Corvette club, drawn as much to the machines themselves as to the community of enthusiasts who appreciated the engineering, the power, the pure joy of the drive. It was another way to connect.

His childhood was spent in his room reading Marvel comics, especially Black Panther. Reggie saw himself reflected in a Black, superhero king who led with both strength and wisdom, long before much of the world caught up to that vision. But he didn’t discriminate with Marvel, if it was a comic he was reading it; if it was a TV show or a movie he was watching it; if it was a figurine he was collecting it. They reminded him the impossible was possible and you could create the things you wish existed.

Raised Catholic, his spiritual curiosity and world travels led him to study and appreciate Eastern religions, always seeking to understand different paths to truth and meaning. “Why not?” was his approach to adventures, to new experiences, to possibilities others might dismiss. Many of these experiences were memorialized as tattoos, a journey map of his life.

In his yard, he touched every square inch of the soil. Like with everything else, his sense of space was unmatched. He dreamed it, drew it, and then built it with his own hands. Every curve, every plant, every light. Landscaping became his meditation, his way of creating beauty, his connection to the earth and the practice of patience required to nurture living things. Animals, especially his Chinese Shar-Pei Dexter and his cat Sherlock, knew him as a kindred spirit; he had a way with them that spoke to his capacity to connect across any boundary.

These passions weren’t separate from his work. They were all expressions of the same core truth: Reggie believed in beauty, in growth, in connection, in the full experience of being alive. He brought his whole self everywhere - the weightlifter and the pianist, the facilitator and the gardener, the strategist and the comic book reader, the executive coach and Pa-Pa, the keynote speaker and the roller-skater. He showed the rest of us that we don’t have to choose between different parts of ourselves. We can be all of it, all at once.

The Experience of Transformation

Transformation isn’t intellectual, it’s visceral. Reggie understood this in his soul. He had a way of looking at you that said: I see exactly who you are, and I see exactly who you can become. And then he would hold that vision so powerfully that you couldn’t help but believe him, even if you didn’t always have the same belief in yourself.

He studied Theater and Music at Washington University in St. Louis, learning the ancient art of moving an audience, of creating catharsis through rhythm, silence, and surprise. He added a Master’s in Educational Administration from Xavier University, combining art with the science of learning. But his real education came from performing, fronting The Sounds of St. Louis, appearing in print and TV ads, working as a choir director. He learned stagecraft from the inside: the power of a well-timed pause, the way a question could hang in the air and change the chemistry in a room, the importance of the pacing and musicality of his words. The complete lack of fear to “go there” because he had full confidence in his ability to keep an entire room full of people whole on the other side.

His fusion of performance and pedagogy made his work unlike anything or anyone else’s. He incorporated performance artists and art, understanding that sometimes a song or a story could say what a presentation alone never could. He used his voice like an instrument, knowing exactly when to whisper and when to roar. He asked questions people couldn’t shake for weeks: What makes you keep going when all signals point to stop? Who would you be if you weren’t afraid? What’s most helpful to you today?

Every session was a performance in the deepest sense. Not artifice, but craft in service of truth. If there was a table in the room, he was going to move it to the perfect spot. If there was a lighting cue, it was rehearsed until the whole team had it down cold.

But his real artistry was in making the audience the story. Reggie didn’t teach about transformation, he created the conditions for people to transform themselves. He made space for their stories, their struggles, their breakthroughs. He directed the room like a maestro, knowing exactly when someone needed to speak and when they needed to listen. His mantra was “It’s about the learner.” It didn’t matter if the audience was junior college students or an important executive team - they deserved the best possible experience Reggie could deliver. Every. Single. Time.

He believed his purpose was to help people see what they couldn’t see for themselves. “You can only go as far as you can see,” he would say. And then he would expand that vision, showing people possibilities they never knew existed. Leadership that expands human potential and connection. That was his life’s work.

Building a Movement

Before founding Performance Paradigm in 2013, Reggie served as Managing Director at PricewaterhouseCoopers and Vice-President at Global Lead Management Consulting. He learned the language of business and the architecture of change management. But he never forgot that underneath all the systems were human beings—messy, complex, yearning to belong.

His work wasn’t about teaching skills or checking compliance boxes. It was about creating experiences that fundamentally shifted how people showed up in the world. He believed deeply that “when individuals thrive, teams excel, and organizations reach their full potential.” But achieving it required something most organizations weren’t willing to do: get uncomfortable.

Reggie created “safe spaces for humans to navigate and explore current topics, increasing capacity and emotional muscle to dwell in discomfort.” Emotional muscle to dwell in discomfort. This was his genius - understanding that growth happens at the edge of our comfort zone, and most of us need someone to hold space while we stand there, afraid, deciding whether to leap.

He never shied away from the hard topics. Race. Power. Privilege. Belonging. The ways we hurt each other, often without meaning to. He named these truths with a directness that could take your breath away. But he did it with such grace, such evident care for everyone in the room, that even people who came in defensive left open to reflect and evolve.

Each year, he touched 20,000 people directly, leaders across all industries - technology, finance, healthcare, professional services, aviation, automotive, consumer products, cultural institutions, police departments, and nonprofits who sought him out not for conventional training, but for transformation. His experiences were immersive and unforgettable, designed not just to teach, but to fundamentally shift perspective.

What made Reggie different: he brought the same intensity to every engagement. He didn’t have a “keynote mode” and a “workshop mode.” He had one mode: fully present, fully committed, fully himself. This authenticity was magnetic. People trusted him because they could feel he wasn’t performing transformation, he was living it with them.

His facilitation was an art form. High-energy but never frenetic. Structured but responsive. He knew when to push and when to pause, when to bring in humor or silence or music. His mantras became invitations to a different way of being: “Change is inevitable; suffering is optional.” “Make progress, not excuses.” “People can hate people for no reason, so I can love people for no reason.” “We can all do better, be better, and care more.”

The Immeasurable Impact

"I want people not to measure time in days and hours, but to measure impact and energy."

— Reggie Butler

How do you measure a life like Reggie’s? You could count: 1.5 million people trained. Partnerships with hundreds of organizations. Thousands of keynotes and workshops. Decades of service. But these are just shadows of the real impact.

The real impact is in the executive who finally brought her whole self to work after one of his sessions on belonging. The fractured team who learned to see each other as humans first. The organization that chose to reckon with its culture instead of papering over problems.

It’s in the woman who went home from an experience and had a conversation with her teenage son about race that she’d been too afraid to have. The manager who learned to ask “What’s most helpful to you today?” instead of giving orders. The countless people who heard Reggie speak about his parents and realized they could hold both grief and grace, both anger and hope.

The real impact is in how rooms changed because Reggie was in them. Not just during the session, but after. How the conversations continued, how people showed up differently, how teams started building something new.

There are organizations whose cultures are fundamentally different because Reggie worked with them. Leaders who think differently about power, belonging, and what’s possible. Teams who have a shared language for navigating discomfort together. And here’s the miracle: those people are still creating ripples. The leader Reggie coached is now coaching others. The team that learned to collaborate differently is modeling it for other teams. Reggie’s impact doesn’t end, it exponentially expands, touching people he will never meet, in rooms he will never enter, in futures he didn’t live to see. You are a part of that beautiful and important legacy.

But perhaps his greatest legacy lives in his family - in a partner who will guard the flame and ensure his vision remains, herself forever changed by loving him so deeply. In children who knew him best, who carry his spirit in how they move through the world, in grandchildren who will grow up with stories and memories of Pa-Pa and the lessons he taught through love, in a niece and nephew and their children who knew an uncle who showed up. They don’t just remember him, they embody the best of what he taught: that we can be fully ourselves, that love shows up in action, that being present is the greatest gift we can give. They are his legacy, and they are proof that what he built will endure.

The Legacy: Human Code Project

Make no mistake: this is a tragic loss and far too soon. Reggie was determined to live and defiantly not done. His work is unfinished. Human Code Project was his answer to what he called “the basic human code under siege.” He saw our human connection atrophy, dreams deferred, a devolution of hope, and a lack of commitment to a shared future. His response wasn’t to fight darkness in the dark, but to create a new parallel fight in the light, a movement of purposeful, positive human engagement.

Human Code Project was designed as three interconnected programs:

Human First: A collective focused on self-discovery and inclusive education. Programs that help individuals learn about their own power and behaviors - inspiring change one person at a time out in community spaces, in addition to corporate spaces.

Human2Human: Social engagement experiments bringing people together in solidarity through large-scale events like the Race for Humanity, human connection experiences like The Belonging Conference, and artistic expressions of human connection like short films. Creating experiences where strangers become community and we look through a different perspective for a moment.

Human Kindness: Philanthropic endeavors based on anonymous acts of kindness - matching willing donors with individual and community needs, funding education, creating moments that matter.

Reggie dreamed of reaching beyond corporate walls to bring transformation, connection, and education to communities that need it most. He imagined redefining what solidarity could look like: “Instead of locked arms in protest, imagine united minds and communities building for humanity.” The moments he most looked forward to were usually the ones where he got to be a counselor and share what he knew – helping the high school kids at the gym understand leadership, guiding the small business owner he met at the grocery store who needed help planning his next move, or motivating junior college students just starting to discover their purpose.

He didn’t get to see Human Code Project fully launched. But the work of building a more human, more connected, more just world is never finished. It’s a daily practice, a choice we make in every interaction, a commitment we renew with every breath. That work continues now, not as a memorial, but as a living practice.

The Light That Remains

Reggie Butler never just took up space. He filled rooms with possibility and made the air hum with potential.

To know Reggie was to feel seen - not for who you pretended to be, but for who you actually were and who you might become. He had this way of making you feel like the most important person in the room, even in a room of hundreds. He could name your potential so clearly that you couldn’t unsee it. He could hold space for your worst self and your best self simultaneously, believing you capable of choosing which one to give life to.

This was his gift: he looked at broken things - broken systems, broken teams, broken people - and saw what they could become. And then, with tremendous skill, presence, and heart, he helped them become it. He could speak truth that stung and somehow make you grateful for it. To work with Reggie was to be challenged and championed in the same breath. To be loved by Reggie was to be held in the kind of grace that makes you want to be better, not because you should, but because you can.

He was fully, magnificently, unapologetically human - which meant he was messy and vulnerable and real. On hard days, he said it was hard. He worked relentlessly, probably to a fault, driven by something deeper than ambition. He was a son who honored his parents’ legacy by becoming the change his father started, wearing his dog tags until his last day. He was both the polished executive in a suit and the creative who’d rather be in head-to-toe Nike at the piano or digging in the dirt. He could transform a room of strangers but couldn’t read a map to save his life - and he’d own it and laugh about it. A teacher, artist, prophet, builder, little kid, minion all at once, never pretending to be anything other than exactly who he was.

And in being so completely himself, he gave the rest of us permission to do the same.

The world is dimmer and flatter without him. And his work - the beautiful, hard, necessary work of helping humans connect, grow, and build something better together - that work is ours to carry now.

Those Who Carry Him Forward

Reggie is survived by his partner of thirteen years, Kristan; his children Jennifer, David and his wife Erica, and Victoria and her partner Andrew; five grandchildren: Sierra, Jayla, Emory, Justice, and Dea; his niece Brandy; his nephew Tony; great-nieces and great-nephews; and a small and mighty team of incredibly loyal colleagues who became family: Maria, Rachelle, and Isaiah. He was preceded in death by his parents, Don Carlos and Jonnie Butler; his older brother, Mark Kevin Butler; and his brother Anthony Ignatius Butler passed away just hours after Reggie on the same day.

Thousands of colleagues, clients, and friends across the globe were touched by Reggie’s light and carry his legacy forward.

Honoring His Legacy

We know so many of you want to gather in person to celebrate this man who impacted you so deeply. His family and team agree and are putting together a celebration worthy of his impact. A memorial experience will be held in early 2026 in St. Petersburg, FL. Details on the date, location, and RSVP link will be shared via email and social media in the coming weeks.

In lieu of flowers, please consider donating to Human Code Project - Reggie’s passion and his legacy.

Reggie didn’t live to see Human Code Project launched to the world. Your donation helps us complete what he started. Every contribution brings us closer to ensuring his vision, his wisdom, and his commitment to human transformation continue to ripple outward for generations to come.

Help us honor Reggie by helping him reach the people he most wanted to serve.

At Performance Paradigm, the team will continue to honor his legacy by carrying forward his mission: to co-create how we co-exist, to build spaces of belonging, and to always lead with growth, grit, gratitude, and grace. We will do better, we will be better, and we will care more.