About Dra. CarolLaine M García, Ph.D.
Decolonial Researcher, Artist, Poet
What is the opposite of systemic oppression?
It's systemic expression, and I created Queen Mindset Leadership® as an anti-oppression paradigm that helps cultivate creative embodiment.
As I lived and researched, I realized these systems don’t just live “out there”—they show up in our fears, our avoidances, and even in what we believe we’re allowed to have in life.
The very three core values I reclaimed in myself—Creativity, Inner Harmony, Wisdom—are the same teachings I facilitate at Dr. García Brands, a Creative Liberation Leadership Studio serving those embracing Second Half of Life Consciousness.
Jump To
Doctora García (Dra. García)
My name is CarolLaine
What happens when a woman spends a lifetime learning to distinguish her own voice from the scripts that have told her who she is supposed to be—and then begins building a life, body of knowledge, and body of work around what she discovers?
I'm based in Dallas, Texas, and the Dominican Republic.
I'm a Dominican-American, AfroEuroTaína woman building a liberated and creative life.
I have a doctorate in I/O Psychology and a decade of corporate consulting behind me. I left it all to create Queen Mindset Leadership®—a comprehensive system for women rebuilding lives from wholeness instead of the fragmentation of patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, and colonization.
I am childfree and marriage-free by choice, an unscripted woman, and I teach the sovereignty I live. I teach you how to reclaim your attention to author your own life.
My work centers:
Joy as resistance.
Creativity as birthright.
Ancestral wisdom as strategy.
Rest as revolution.
Cultural practices as medicine.
I don't teach leadership development—I teach women paradigm creation.
The Stages of My Story
Newsletter
Cosmic Love Letters
Where creativity gets embodied.
A bimonthly newsletter published on the Lunar 13th and Solar 27th of each month by Dra. CarolLaine M García—decolonial researcher, poet, artist, and founder of Queen Mindset Leadership®.
My Creative Awakening
The Grief That Led to My Becoming
My father was my first loss. He died after my first year of my doctorate program. I was 21. Immigrating to the US with my mom and brother to meet my family led to our physical separation.
I wasn't a citizen yet, which meant I last saw him when I was 10, gathering anger and resentment for what I perceived as abandonment. Ten years later, when I graduated from college in three years as a first gen, I saw him once again.
And then, 13 months after that visit, his death. July 13th. I had missed my father my whole life, and now he was gone. I swallowed the depth of my grief... for 10 years.
I started therapy a couple of years before the pandemic in an effort to heal this wound, because it was starting to impact my romances and friendships alike.
I was anxiously attached, furiously afraid of being abandoned, and creatively constipated.
I had dreams buried underneath my grief: writing a book, painting, learning piano—all practices I'd practiced but always abandoned. Keeping the pattern alive.
And then, in 2024 I worked through The Artist's Way in a local group in Dallas. I was enlivened.
In the morning pages I began writing, I found both my life's complaints and desires. Despite the achievement of a PhD, I never forgot about my artistic desires.
And though I'd been part of dance teams, taken painting lessons, even bought a few keyboards, I could never commit to designing an Artist's Life. Who was I to want that?
One particular chapter of the book transformed me. It was the one where she asks you to evaluate your relationship with a higher power, and ask yourself whether that higher power desires your expression, and creativity. That's when I realized the anger at my father's life and death (and my ancestors), kept me from being. From committing to myself, my inner child, that I could be a researcher AND an artist AND a poet, because my life was mine.
That was my creative awakening.
Jump to: My Creative Embodiment
Queen Mindset Leadership®
The Journey of Decolonizing
I never intended to "decolonize." In fact, for years, despite the immersion in an I/O Psychology PhD and the DEI work inherent to it, I'd never heard of the word decolonial.
Like many who have not yet studied the colonial mind, I thought colonization was in the past. The pandemic's quarantine made me question the origin of time itself, the meaning of life, and the purpose of my existence beyond the roles I'd been cast in.
That's when the work started, as I sought to create a life where I led myself in nourishment, creativity, and aliveness. After so many years studying and applying leadership to organizations, I had yet to come across a leadership that included all of me.
I had questions:
Where was the leadership paradigm that accounted for the impact of thousands of years of the patriarchy?
Where was the leadership paradigm that accounted for intersectional identities and the systems that oppress them?
Where was the leadership paradigm that includes all parts of life as leadership, including the self?
And where was the leadership that taught women how to integrate all of who they are, without hating who they have been?
Since 2022, I have been planting the seeds for Queen Mindset Leadership®. I named it that after reading The Audacity to Be Queen. It emerged after reading hundreds of books, investing in coaching as a coach and client, and gathering different epistemologies that explored what this planet and existence were.
My Creative Awakening taught me that I could create my own path, my own paradigm even. But my Creative Liberation is what allowed me to forgive time, and learn how to collaborate with it.
Queen Mindset Leadership® is the result of that excavation.
I created it to teach myself and others, what a model of leadership looks like when we're intact.
My Creative Embodiment
Designing a Post-Patriarchal Life
My work exists at the intersection of authors like bell hooks, Thich Nhat Hanh, and hundreds of other fiction and non-fiction authors who broke open my worldview.
Through reading, I imagined a different reality.
Designing a post-patriarchal life has meant refusing to stay fragmented.
These authors taught me how to reject survival mode and build a life where my time, body, mind, and spirit belong exclusively to me.
I began learning how to rest, how to see creativity as an expansion of perception and time, how to heal my ancestral line through practices. I learned to love Love as the foundation of life.
I made the decision to be permanently childfree in my mid 30s, a decision that cleared the psychic space to reevaluate my whole life and question everything. As a woman who is now childfree, marriage-free, and has no desire to bend to the will of society, I transformed accordingly.
Without marriage, children, or the corporate ladder as definers of my identity, returning to creative practices taught me how to attend to time, to expand my perception, and to enjoy the sacredness of traveling on this organic spaceship through spacetime (aka Earth).
My creative awakening cleared the path for me to become the integrated artist I'd wanted to be. Now, I am committed to a life of creativity; where writing, piano, dancing, painting, and awe are daily parts of my life. The vision became the practice became the path.
Today I am a woman who loves herself, past-present-future; who trusts the wholeness of her voice; and who has dared explore what generational thriving looks like after generational disruption. Welcome to my pocket of public scholarship.
Newsletter
Cosmic Love Letters
Where creativity gets embodied.
2026 moves through the four elements (Earth, Water, Fire, Air) and then the seven chakras (Root through Crown), each pair of newsletters a complete teaching cycle rooted in the question: what does it take to become an Alma Soberana—a sovereign soul?