Meet Sylvia Toense.
Sylvia Toense spent 35 years building brands and driving growth at high levels of corporate America. Then, in 2024, she did something bold: she walked away from full-time corporate life to ask a harder question: not "what's next," but "who do I want to be now?"
She calls it "The Shift." It's the deliberate work of re-evaluating post-career life and figuring out what comes after the title, org chart, and calendar full of meetings are gone.
Our society talks a lot about the financial side of retirement. Sylvia is more interested in the rest of it: identity, purpose, the rhythm of a day that no longer runs on someone else's schedule. She writes about it in “The Shift Playbook,” her newsletter on Substack, and she's currently writing a book by the same name to help you navigate your own pivot with intention.
My Approach
Sylvia still shows up in leadership roles, as well. She serves as Senior Advisor for Fellowships at the World Trade Center Institute in Baltimore, where she also sits on the Board of Directors and helps select the International Business Leader of the Year.
In her corporate career, Sylvia was Head of Global Brand at T. Rowe Price, where she led enterprise brand strategy, advertising, and social media, capping a run that included ten years growing the firm's marketing outside the U.S. and five years chairing its Global Marketing Executive Team. She also led the team behind the award-winning "CONFIDENT CONVERSATIONS® on Retirement" podcast. In her earlier chapters, she played vital roles at Legg Mason, Dynex Financial, and the Nasdaq Stock Market.
Sylvia holds a degree in communications from the University of Texas at Austin, an MBA from Johns Hopkins, and a certificate from the Securities Industry Institute at Wharton.
Sylvia believes the second act deserves as much intention as the first. She's living proof.