Some callings announce themselves early. Others reveal themselves slowly, through years of accumulated experience, until the path backward and the path forward suddenly look like the same road.
For Cynthia Encinas-Concordia, that road began in 1999 when she joined the World Bank as a Program Assistant, entering an institution whose 189 member countries brought the full breadth of human culture, struggle, and aspiration into a single workplace. What she discovered there went far beyond organizational operations. She discovered what she had always been drawn to most: people.
Over a career that spanned multiple Vice Presidencies and departments, Cynthia developed skills that most professional environments do not name directly but every effective leader depends upon: empathy, cross-cultural communication, conflict resolution, and the capacity to help others find their footing during uncertainty. A promotion to HR Analyst six years before retirement aligned her role with what her heart had long known. Human connection was not a byproduct of her work. It was the work.
When retirement arrived, it brought with it what retirement often does for people who have spent decades genuinely invested in others: clarity. The skills she had built, the passion for human development she had cultivated, and the life she had lived through, including chapters of profound darkness, had prepared her for something she had not yet fully named. That something became Dream to Rise LLC, her transformational life coaching practice, and a mission she now carries to audiences around the world.
THE QUESTION THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING
Cynthia defines a life of purpose with a question rather than a declaration, and the question is disarmingly simple: what would I love?
Not what is practical. Not what others expect. Not what the circumstances currently allow. What would I love to do, to have, to create, to be, and to give?
That question, she believes, is the gateway to everything. When individuals align their actions, goals, and values with what truly matters to them, something shifts that cannot be manufactured through discipline or ambition alone. Joy arrives. Peace arrives. A sense of meaning that sustains people through difficulty rather than dissolving at the first obstacle.
Her vision, articulated with the warmth that characterizes everything she does, is simple: “Spread sunshine and happiness to all so this may create a ripple effect of positivity and hope to this world.”
It is not a corporate mission statement. It is a personal covenant, formed in the furnace of her own experience.
THE WEIGHT WE CARRY
To understand what Cynthia teaches, it helps to understand what she has lived.
For 23 years, she was married in a relationship marked by domestic violence that began when her daughter was only five months old in the Philippines. The family relocated to the United States seeking better opportunities and a chance to repair what was broken. Neither fully materialized. Two restraining orders followed. And then, four months after their children’s graduation, her husband died of a massive cardiac arrest.
What followed was six years of anguish that Cynthia describes with the honesty of someone who has fully processed what she once could not face. Guilt consumed her. She withdrew from friends, stopped engaging with her community, and fell into a depression that affected every dimension of her wellbeing. She feared judgment, experienced rejection from mutual friends and her husband’s family, and reached a point where life itself felt like too heavy a burden to continue carrying.
What saved her was a conversation with her son.
He told her he wanted to attend the Culinary Institute of America. In that moment, something cracked open. She had a son who needed her to show up. She was a single parent with a dream to fund and a life to rebuild. And she realized, with sudden and clarifying force, that she could not keep allowing the past to decide her future.
“That was the moment when my perspective shifted,” she reflects. “I had my son’s dreams to think about.”
From that pivot point, everything changed. She focused on her health, rebuilt her confidence, and watched as a different kind of momentum began. She was promoted. Her salary increased significantly. Grants and scholarships reduced her son’s tuition so dramatically that she paid only 20 percent of his first year. He graduated debt-free. And they celebrated in Barcelona.
“The struggles and pains I experienced made me realize these are a necessary part of my life’s journey toward becoming a new and better person,” she says. “I became stronger, smarter, more creative, and more resilient.”
That story is not a footnote to Cynthia’s coaching work. It is its foundation.
WHAT DREAM TO RISE ACTUALLY DOES
The 12-week transformation program at the heart of Dream to Rise LLC is built on a precise understanding of why people remain stuck despite wanting desperately to move forward. It is not lack of desire. It is the accumulated weight of what Cynthia calls heavy baggage: past pains, unforgiveness, fear, limiting beliefs, and paradigms carried silently from childhood into adult life.
The program moves clients through four essential phases. First, learning to apply their best thinking to create a life they would truly love to live. Second, repatterning the limiting beliefs that have kept them feeling not enough. Third, retuning themselves to the frequency of abundance so that opportunities begin arriving in ways that feel almost effortless. And fourth, reclaiming the confidence to pursue their biggest dreams faster than they believed possible.
“You will learn the essential principles to set your dream, remove the blockages, and discover the best gift you will receive,” she says. “Your new self.”
Among the barriers she addresses most consistently are fear, which she meets with her F.E.A.R. framework: Feel it, Embrace it, Act on it, Repeat. Limiting beliefs, which she dismantles by helping clients examine what they are nurturing in their thoughts. Lack of clarity of purpose, which leaves people unable to make meaningful decisions. And unforgiveness, which she identifies as one of the most quietly destructive forces in human life, creating emotional burdens that block personal growth and keep people anchored to pain they did not deserve.
“Forgiveness is about you,” she says with directness. “When you learn to forgive, you release yourself from resentment, anger and sadness.”
LEADERSHIP LEARNED AT SCALE
The leadership philosophy Cynthia brings to her coaching was shaped in part by what she witnessed at the World Bank: collaborative leadership, characterized by shared decision-making, open communication, empowerment, and the genuine inclusion of diverse perspectives. Not management as control, but leadership as connection.
She witnessed firsthand, through social networking events and international conferences, the struggles faced by people across cultures: domestic violence, economic inequality, mental health challenges. Those observations, combined with her own lived experience, produced a leader whose empathy is not theoretical.
“Each one of us is a leader,” she says. “We just need to be models for the younger generation. Each one of us has a gift and talent given to us by God. We just need to discover and develop it so we can be light warriors for others.”
Success, by her definition, has nothing to do with money, status, or title. It is measured by how much of your own light you are able to share, so that others can find and share theirs.
THE RIPPLE EFFECT IN REAL LIFE
Perhaps the most vivid proof of Cynthia’s philosophy is what happened to her children after she found her purpose.
Her daughter Nathalia, moved by the memory of the volunteer firefighter who tried to save her father, became a volunteer firefighter herself, serving for eleven years while also working as a Deputy Chief of Staff in a Virginia government agency. Her son Gabriel, whose dream of culinary arts once catalyzed his mother’s transformation, now manages 15 schools in Fresno, California, training cooks to prepare meals from scratch and educating children and parents about farming, food systems, and sustainability.
“The transformation I experienced when I discovered my WHY or purpose impacted not only my children but the people they have engaged with,” Cynthia says. “That is what I call being a light warrior for others.”
THE FIVE QUESTIONS WORTH ASKING
For anyone standing at the threshold of meaningful change, uncertain whether the dream forming inside them deserves their time and energy, Cynthia offers five questions as a compass.
Does the dream give life and make you feel alive? Will it help you grow into a better person? Is it aligned to your core values? Does it require help from a power greater than yourself? And does it do good for others?
“If you have answered yes to all five,” she says, “that means your dream has the YES factor and deserves your time and energy.”
It is the kind of guidance that sounds simple until you sit with it honestly. And then it becomes the most clarifying exercise a person can undertake.
Cynthia Encinas-Concordia has lived through the dark and found the light on the other side. She has turned that journey into a methodology, a mission, and a movement. And she is not finished yet.
