About Beyond Cubicles
📢 #BeyondCubicles is a weekly LinkedIn series created by Carolina D’Souza, born out of her own experience transitioning from a corporate career to independent consulting. Since its launch in June 2024, the series has evolved into a platform that showcases the inspiring journeys of several founders who have redefined the traditional 9-to-5.
Through authentic narratives, #BeyondCubicles highlights themes of courage, resilience, and purpose. The stories feature individuals from diverse industries—ranging from tech and education to wellness and adventure—who share their experiences of stepping away from conventional roles to pursue passion-driven careers.Â
✨ Note: All features in this series are unpaid and shared as a way to honor and amplify real stories of transformation.
“Leadership success is built from the inside out. And yet, leaders rarely receive the kind of support that transforms them,” says Dagmara Asbreuk, founder of Extraordinary Leadership™, and a transformational executive leadership partner.
With 15 years across senior roles inside Fortune 500 companies, she built a corporate identity. From the outside, it looked like success, but inside it felt like a struggle.
But as she pursued coaching education, her understanding of leadership changed. She saw firsthand how inner work reshaped decision-making, strengthened self-trust, and deepened emotional intelligence.
She began coaching alongside her corporate role, and witnessed breakthroughs, piloting her first leadership program with strong results.
By the time she left corporate, her first six months of clients were already secured. “It felt aligned,” she says.
Change, however, was unfolding on more than one front, with her family deciding to relocate from Europe to Dubai. What followed was a period of identity expansion.
Over more than a decade, she deepened her understanding of human behavior through coaching, neuroscience, body awareness, and energy work.
The toughest emotions were fear of the unknown and of losing an identity she had spent years building. She navigated this space for nearly two years without guidance. What ultimately moved her forward was the realization that her desire for impact had grown stronger than her fear.
“The pain of staying stuck became greater than the risk of the unknown,” she says.
That realization came through quantum and energetic leadership. “That’s the space I now love guiding leaders into,” she says, working at the intersection of leadership, identity expansion, and the energetics of organizations and business.
Dagmara never expected to build her own business, shaped in part by watching her father struggle as an entrepreneur. Nor did she expect to move to Dubai or launch the Extraordinary Leadership podcast, which allows her to meet global change makers and amplify her mission.
Her story is a testament to the idea that when identity evolves, leadership, life, and organizations expand with it. “I’m not the same version of me I was 2, 4, 10, or 15 years ago, and I see that as the essence of embodied leadership: continuous evolution.”