WHEN RETIREMENT REVEALED A DEEPER CALLING

“Most of the time, we create our dream by default because we are constricted by the circumstances surrounding us. I had to learn to create my dream by design.”

-Cynthia Encinas-Concordia

Some people discover their purpose at the peak of a career. Others find it only after everything they thought defined them has been quietly dismantled. For Cynthia Encinas-Concordia, it was the latter, and the discovery proved to be the most transformative chapter of her life.

After decades of dedicated service as an HR Analyst at the World Bank, Cynthia retired in October 2019 expecting what most people picture retirement to be: travel, leisure, family, rest. What she found instead was a quiet but persistent emptiness. Something essential was missing. Life, as she experienced it in those early months, felt shallow, as though she were touching only its surface rather than living from its depths.

That restlessness led her to volunteer as a mentor at a local Be-A-Friend Mentorship Programme, where she was paired with a nine-year-old girl who had suffered abuse at the hands of her father, and with the child’s mother, who was navigating divorce and fighting for custody. The experience cracked something open in Cynthia. She understood their pain not as an observer but as someone who had lived inside a version of it herself.

Her own story is one that required enormous courage to tell. Married for twenty-three years and the mother of two children, Cynthia endured domestic violence that began when her daughter was just five months old in the Philippines. The family relocated to the United States with hopes of better opportunities and a renewed marriage, but the violence continued. By 2011, her late husband had been served two restraining orders, and yet throughout that period, Cynthia made a deliberate choice: she told her children, consistently and with love, that their father loved them deeply. She refused to let the dysfunction of her marriage become the defining story of her children’s relationship with their father.

Then came the loss. Four months after her children graduated, their father died of a massive cardiac arrest. Grief was compounded by rejection when his family cut all contact with Cynthia and her children, blaming her for his death. For six years after, she lived inside what she describes as a dark bubble, weighed down by fear of judgment, shame, and a profound sense of failure.

The turning point arrived not through a grand revelation but through a question from her son. He wanted to know if he could go to college, specifically to the Culinary Institute of America in New York. The question, simple as it was, jolted Cynthia back into the present. She still had a purpose. She still had someone who needed her to rise.

“Most of the time, we create our dream by default because we are constricted by the circumstances surrounding us. I had to learn to create my dream by design.”

What followed was a transformation that defied every limiting belief she had carried. Cynthia not only found a way to fund her son’s education but began investing in herself for the first time in years. Her renewed attention to her own well-being translated into better relationships, stronger work performance, and ultimately a promotion. Her son graduated, worked in Michelin-starred kitchens across the globe, and now leads a programme training school cooks in Fresno, California, to prepare meals from scratch. Her daughter became a Deputy Chief of Staff and a volunteer firefighter, honouring the memory of a first responder who had tried to save her father’s life.

Out of this deeply lived journey, Cynthia founded Dream to Rise LLC in September 2020. She became a transformational life coach, an author of four books including My Life Into Becoming and Dream to Rise: From Darkness into Light, an international speaker, and the host of the Dream to Rise Podcast. Each of these expressions of her work carries the same conviction: if she could turn her pain into purpose, others can too.

WHAT PURPOSE-LED LIVING TRULY MEANS

When asked how she defines purpose, Cynthia does not reach for abstraction. For her, purpose-led living is intentional living. It is the conscious act of identifying what matters most, whether that is personal values, innate passions, hard-won skills, or the desire to contribute something meaningful to the world, and then allowing those priorities to guide every significant decision.

She offers a framework of five questions that she invites individuals to use when discerning whether a dream is genuinely worth pursuing. Does it make you come alive in the morning? Does it call you to grow beyond who you currently are? Is it aligned with your deepest values? Does it require something larger than yourself to make it real? And does it benefit others by sharing your light with those who have not yet found theirs?

“If you answer yes to all five,” she says, “then your dream deserves your time, your energy, and your full commitment.”

LEADERSHIP FORGED IN COMPLEXITY

The World Bank, by its very nature, is an institution of global complexity, one where diverse cultures, urgent development challenges, and enormous institutional stakes converge. The leadership lessons Cynthia absorbed over her years there were not acquired from textbooks but from the daily practice of working within and alongside that complexity.

She speaks of collaborative leadership not as a management style but as a moral orientation: true leadership, in her view, is about connection, support, and the willingness to show up for others. She witnessed firsthand, through social networking events and international conferences, the struggles faced by women across cultures, from domestic violence to economic inequality to mental health challenges left largely unaddressed. Her response was not to remain a sympathetic observer but to bring those concerns into the programmes and advocacy platforms she now helps build.

Empathy, adaptability, integrity, vision, and the commitment to sustainable rather than merely immediate impact form the core of her leadership philosophy. What ties them together is a belief that leaders are ultimately models. How they behave, how they respond under pressure, and how they treat the people around them determines not just their outcomes but the culture they leave behind.

THE DREAM TO RISE METHOD: A FRAMEWORK FOR BECOMING

The first phase, the Blueprint, invites clients to design the life they actually want across four major dimensions: health and wellbeing, love and relationships, vocation and purpose, and time and financial freedom. The second phase, Bridging the Gap, addresses the inner obstacles that stand between that vision and reality, teaching clients to befriend fear, shift from a mindset of scarcity to one of abundance, and discover how forgiveness can fundamentally alter their perception of the world. The third phase, Building, focuses on acceleration: developing intuition, constructing a support system, and reframing failure as a necessary stepping stone. The fourth and final phase, Becoming, asks the most important question of all: who have you become through this journey?

“We are used to creating our dreams by default,” Cynthia explains, “constricted by the fears, the past pains, and the limiting beliefs that surround us. But each person has the power to create the life they love. Every single one.”

“Each one of us has the power to create the life we love. The only thing standing between us and that life is the courage to begin.”

FACING FEAR: FOUR STEPS THAT CHANGE EVERYTHING

Across all the work Cynthia does, whether coaching, speaking, writing, or hosting her podcast, one theme returns again and again: fear is the great immobiliser. She knows this not theoretically but from six years of living inside it.

Her approach to overcoming fear is grounded, practical, and built from personal experience. She encourages people first to simply feel their fear rather than deny it, noting that suppressed emotions gain power while acknowledged ones tend to lose it. Research, she points out, suggests that most emotional surges last no longer than ninety seconds. The second step is to embrace fear as a companion, not a commander: it belongs on the journey, but it does not get to hold the steering wheel. The third step is action, even imperfect, even trembling. As Aristotle understood, courage is not the absence of fear but the decision to act in spite of it. The fourth step is to repeat the process, again and again, until the fear loses its grip and confidence quietly takes its place.

“Every time you face something unfamiliar, it will be scary,” she acknowledges. “But each time you act on it, the fear becomes a little smaller. And you become a little stronger.”

A STORY THAT SPEAKS FOR THE METHOD

Perhaps no illustration of Cynthia’s impact is more powerful than the story of Sharaya Smith, a twenty-one-year-old client who came to coaching with deep hesitation and left with a completely different relationship to herself and her future.

Before beginning the programme, Sharaya struggled with consistency and found it difficult to imagine a version of herself beyond her present circumstances. She was sceptical about life coaching, worried it would make her seem weak or suggest she had not yet recovered from her hardest seasons. But she committed to the process, and in the weeks that followed, the programme became an anchor during some of the most difficult personal challenges she had faced.

By the time she finished, the people around her noticed the change before she did. She began taking her health seriously, gave up junk food, established a consistent fitness routine, and lost close to fifteen pounds. She moved forward with her education, completing community college and preparing to transfer to the University of North Texas. More than any of these outcomes, though, was the shift in how she spoke about herself. “I am capable of handling any obstacle in my way,” she said, “and I am worthy of an amazing life.”

She was careful to credit both Cynthia and herself. “It isn’t the programme or the life coach that will change you. Those things are there to guide you. Ultimately, you have to be willing to change.”

That insight, Cynthia would say, is exactly the point.

GRATITUDE AS DAILY PRACTICE, NOT PASSING GESTURE

Every coaching session Cynthia facilitates begins with the same two questions: what are you grateful for, and what are you proud of from the past week? The intention is deliberate. Gratitude, in her philosophy, is not sentiment. It is an energetic orientation, a way of training the mind to seek abundance rather than fixate on lack.

She encourages clients to keep a gratitude journal, recording not only what they are thankful for but what they have achieved, including the small wins that tend to go unnoticed. Celebrating those moments, she believes, is how confidence compounds over time. Thoughts become feelings. Feelings become actions. Actions become results. The direction of that chain is determined by what we choose to nurture.

“Where your attention goes, energy flows,” she says simply. “So be very careful about what you are feeding.”

A VISION BUILT ON RIPPLES, NOT WAVES

Looking toward 2026 and the years beyond, Cynthia’s vision is both grand and intimate. She does not speak of expanding market share or scaling a business. She speaks of spreading sunshine and watching it ripple outward. In a world fractured by conflict, division, and the seductive pull of cynicism, she places her faith in individual action: the choice, made daily, to respond rather than react, to offer compassion rather than judgment, to be a source of light rather than a mirror for darkness.

Success, by her definition, has nothing to do with titles, salaries, or status. It is measured in how many lives are illuminated by the light you chose to share. It is measured in the footsteps you leave for the generation behind you.

“What legacy are you leaving your children and grandchildren?” she asks. “Let us be models. Individual actions, quietly and consistently chosen, create a powerful ripple effect that can reach the entire world.”

From a life shadowed by fear, loss, and silence, Cynthia Encinas-Concordia has built something radiant. Dream to Rise LLC is not simply a coaching practice. It is a testament to what becomes possible when one person decides, against every internal objection, to rise.

Awards & Recognition

• Recognized by Influential Women as one of the Influential Women in 2025
• Named among the Most Influential Leaders of the Year 2025 by Entrepreneur One
• Best Transformational Life Coach in the USA (2025) – Best of Best Review
• Featured in Voices of Impact – Global Women of Influence 2026
• Local Businessperson of the Year (2022, 2023, 2024)
• Dream to Rise: From Darkness into Light – International Impact Book Award (2025)