Carolina Garcia on regenerative leadership, the crisis of disconnection, and why wonder is a business strategy.

A conversation with Carolina Garcia, Co-Founder & CEO of Myzelio

When Carolina Garcia picked the “Trust” card at the start of our conversation, she didn’t hesitate. Trust, she told us, is at the very heart of everything she is building and everything she believes the world urgently needs.

Carolina is the Co-Founder and CEO of Myzelio, a company that embeds on-demand teams inside organisations to drive climate, nature, and circularity action across value chains. Before founding Myzelio, she spent nearly eight years at AB InBev - leading the 100+ Accelerator and serving as Global Director for Nature - and four years at the World Wildlife Fund working on climate advocacy and international negotiations. She has explored Antarctica as a Homeward Bound Fellow and is an Aspen Institute First Mover Fellow.

But titles only tell part of the story. What drives Carolina is a deeper and more urgent conviction: that the planetary crisis we are facing is, at its root, a spiritual crisis of disconnection.

We have forgotten that we are part of the web of life. Since the 1800s, we have lost 80% of our connection with nature — and that disconnection has created a crisis in who we are.”

The problem with fear

Humanity has now breached 7 of the 9 planetary boundaries. Scientists say we have entered the Anthropocene, a new geological era, and we are navigating it without a map. The stakes could not be higher.

And yet, Carolina argues, the dominant response, the apocalyptic narrative, is making things worse. Fear triggers fight, flight, or freeze. It provokes scarcity thinking. It causes people to shut down, disengage, or compete rather than collaborate. It doesn’t build strategy. It locks people in place.

The answer, she believes, is not more alarming data. It’s wonder.

“It is only when you begin to de-numb people that they actually get to care,” she says. “It is only when you truly care that you can begin to act.”

Reigniting wonder — practically

So what does this look like in practice? Myzelio works across a wide range of organisations, from impact funds to global corporates like AB InBev, PepsiCo, and Marriott. Whatever the client, the approach carries the same intent: soften the ego first, then build the plan.

Working with PepsiCo on a water strategy for Mexico, one of Latin America’s most water-scarce countries, Myzelio opened the strategy session not with data or KPIs, but with an experience. They brought in their partner Mundo Común to host a two-hour sensory journey called “Bodies of Water: Being Human in a Liquid World.”

Participants put on headphones. They listened to curated water sounds. They moved through poetry and storytelling about water’s place in human life and in the human body. They were reminded that we are water - we are the stories we tell each other.

From that shift in feeling, more honest and ambitious strategy followed naturally. Executives who had been thinking about water as a production input began thinking about it as something sacred. The KPIs that emerged from that room were fundamentally different from the ones they would have produced otherwise.

“If you only focus on changing the KPIs, you never get there. You need to change how people feel first.”

Dissolving the hero paradigm

Carolina is also part of the leadership team of Daughters for Earth, a movement and fund that celebrates women at the forefront of protecting nature. An impact study covering 24 women working across seven different ecosystems found something striking: the most durable environmental outcomes didn’t come from top-down heroic leadership. They came from weaving together livelihood, knowledge exchange, and local capacity building.

Every woman interviewed saw herself as dispensable. That, Carolina says, is precisely the point.

History has handed us a single template for leadership: the indispensable hero at the top, seemingly all-knowing, driving everything forward. It’s the lens through which history books are written. It’s the structure most of our organizations still follow. And it is, Carolina argues, a story that is no longer serving us - not for people, not for organizations, and certainly not for the planet.

Myzelio is consciously building something different. The team is self-organised and non-hierarchical. Carolina refers to her colleagues not as consultants, but as magicians. The culture they cultivate internally - the love and trust they invest in one another - is, she believes, the most important work they do. It is the source of everything else.

“The reason we can show up as we do with our clients and partners is that we do this fuelling work first. Culture is not a side project. It is the work.”

The only way out is in

Carolina is clear that none of this is possible without inner work. You cannot build a regenerative future without first doing the work of becoming more regenerative yourself.

For Carolina, this means deconstructing the ego - recognising the ways in which the hero narrative, the scarcity mindset, and the fear-based default mode operate within us, not just around us. It means cultivating what she calls love and trust as active practices, not abstract values.

It means embracing the concept of “surrendering” - trusting that there is a web of people and living systems working toward the same vision, and that sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is release control and contribute your thread.

It means seeking out what she calls “Islands of Coherence” - spaces and relationships where you can breathe, reimagine, and remember who you are before stepping back into the noise.

And it means cultivating joy. Carolina talks about “mythical time” - those rare days when hours feel like months, when everything flows, when the work and the life and the wonder are all one thing. That, she says, is not a luxury. It is a signal that you are doing the right work, in the right way.

What this means for all of us

Carolina’s vision is not a soft one. It is built on a clear-eyed understanding of the scale of the crisis we face. Seven of nine planetary boundaries breached. A new geological era with no rulebook. A society running on fear, scarcity, and extraction.

But she is, in her own words, a stubborn optimist. She sees the refugia - those pockets of seeds holding the genetic memory of the forest, ready to regenerate when the conditions allow. She sees the islands of coherence. She sees the women weaving long-term change with care and trust. She sees the Pepsi executives who left a strategy session with a new felt sense of what water means.

She sees what is possible when you move at the speed of trust.

“When you cultivate love and trust with someone, magic happens. You don’t need anything else.”

The question she leaves us with is a simple one, and a profound one: are we consciously creating our culture, our teams, our work or are we running on the default mode? Because the default mode, she reminds us, is fear-based. And we already know where that leads.

Podcast mentions 

• Myzelio
• Anthropocene geological era - What is the Anthropocene and why does it matter? | Natural History Museum
• Holocene geological era - Holocene epoch | Causes, Effects, & Facts | Britannica
• University of Derby – Human connection to nature has declined 60% in 200 years, study finds - Human connection to nature has declined 60% in 200 years, study finds | Environment | The Guardian
• “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” – W.B Yeats
• Mundo Común - Common World – A Space for the Collective Practice of the Regenerative Future
• Refugia - https://scienceinsights.org/what-are-refugia-and-why-are-they-important/
• Daughters for Earth - Home - Daughters for Earth
• Grateful Living - Healing Begins With Gratitude - Grateful.org
• Homeward Bound - 124 women leaders in STEMM set sail for historic expedition to Antarctica - Homeward Bound
• The Aspen Institute First Movers Fellowship Program - First Movers Fellowship - Aspen Institute
• One Young World — a global forum for young leaders - One Young World