Month: December 2025

For more than a decade, I’ve worked in nonprofit branding – the business of shaping how a product, person, or service is perceived by an audience. It’s a process that’s both strategic and deeply intentional, rooted in understanding what people want, how they feel, and what sparks connection. I’ve spent years mastering analytics and, equally important, honing my intuition. I can read a room and a market, navigate a communications crisis, and build a vision that aligns with an audience’s needs.

And yet, while I help organizations and entrepreneurs present their most polished, purposeful selves, my own personal brand has suffered from a serious lack of attention. Somewhere between raising kids, navigating career climbs, managing a household, and squeezing in the fun side hustles, my personal identity became more accidental than intentional. I stopped asking the foundational branding questions that are second nature in my profession: What’s unique about me? What do I value? What do I want to showcase with the world?

Stepping into all the shifts – some gentle, others massive – that come with a new chapter helped me realize that hitting 60 is the perfect time for a personal rebrand.

Your 60s Are Prime Time for Personal Reinvention

Something rare and wonderful happens when you enter your 60s. Obligations begin to shift. The 9-to-5 is likely winding down or fully behind you. The kids are launched, the calendar opens up, and suddenly what lies ahead looks less like routine and more like possibility.

This stage of life isn’t about hustling for approval or bending toward expectations. It’s about embracing long-awaited autonomy, leaning into curiosity and embracing adventure with both arms. It’s a time when you can pause to evaluate who you are now and who you want to become.

Are you finally freeing your spirit with a creative hobby, linking arms with a nonprofit that lights you up, grabbing your passport for bucket-list travel, or entertaining the thrill of new friendships and relationships? This decade is not a decline. It’s a redesign.

Your New Brand: No Audience Required

Traditional branding is audience-centric. But personal branding in your 60s? That’s self-centric – in a soul-expanding way.

Thankfully, this rebrand isn’t about what the corporate ladder dictates, who your kids need you to be, or how culture and community expect you to present yourself. It’s about who you want to be now, freed from decades of roles and responsibilities.

Here are a few questions to anchor your next-chapter personal brand identity:

• What parts of myself did I sideline to meet everyone else’s needs?
• What lights me up now – creatively, emotionally, socially?
• What do I want my days to feel like?
• How do I want to show up – style, energy, presence?

Your answers become your brand pillars – the foundation for your reinvention.

A Simple Framework: How to Rebrand Yourself After 60

If you love clarity (and who doesn’t?), here’s a framework to guide your rebrand:

1. Audit Your Current Brand

Take inventory of your routines, commitments, style, habits, digital presence, and social circles.

What feels outdated? What feels like “you” from 20 years ago? What no longer supports the woman you are now?

2. Define Your Core Values

What matters most in this chapter? Is it freedom, relationships, creativity, health, connection, adventure, peace, contribution?

Let these become your new North Star.

3. Craft Your Personal Style and Presence

Rebranding includes the visual you:

Clothing, hair, energy, body language – not just what you wear, but how you wear it with pride and purpose. It’s about more joy, more expression, fewer rules. Evolving your style doesn’t have to be drastic or expensive. Viewing a menu through signature reading glasses or lacing on bright colored trainers for the gym can create a vibe that’s all about the updated you.

4. Curate Your Calendar with Intention

Fill your weeks with experiences that reflect your new brand: travel, volunteering, classes, community, spiritual growth, fun. And don’t forget connection. Staying in touch and expanding your circle is so important in the later years.

5. Tell a New Story About Yourself

Share it in conversations, social media, your journal, or simply your daily choices.

This is who you are now, so own it boldly, and most importantly, enjoy the story to tell.

6. Fuel the Journey

When I was contemplating my own rebrand, what I wanted more than anything was a steady stream of inspiration to fuel the process. When I couldn’t find it, I decided to create it myself. That’s how Spark 60was born, a weekly email that presents a one-minute dose of inspiration, clarity, courage, and a spark of delight. Each week’s Spark delivers an idea, a shift in perspective, or a tiny action to keep the midlife momentum going.

The Bottom Line: Your 60s Aren’t a Sunset – They’re a Spotlight

Reinvention doesn’t belong to the young. It belongs to the brave. And women in their 60s have never been braver, wiser, or more ready. Your next chapter is calling – and it’s finally, beautifully, unapologetically yours.

Let’s Chat!

Have you wondered who you are today? Are you different from your 40-year-old self? How do you show yourself to the world?

Photo: @madisonlecroy

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Originally posted at: Madison LeCroy’s Black Mesh Dress

I inherited a stack of exquisitely written love letters that my mother had received from her paramour in the South Pacific in WWII. The pages are neat and the care in each swirl of an S or loop of a Y is evidence that love had been injected into every letter. A secret stash she kept her entire life, I can’t help but think she wanted me, a writer, to discover them one day.

Now, personal letter writing by post has gone the way of the Pony Express in the advent of email. Once considered a beautiful art form in its own right, rife with fine penmanship and loving details etched on crisp stationery, we now tend to communicate as a society through text messages and emails rather than take the time to handwrite and pay to mail a letter.

Many of us have stuffed envelopes from our younger days that are held with ribbons in perpetuity, like relics. First love, fun friendships, and recountings of history itself are spelled out within each sheet. Stacks of old letters fill library archives across the world, tempting us to touch and read them. Those who still use the medium do so artfully, a special note card or holiday card capturing the swoops of cursive.

Evans’ Epistolary Journey

Virginia Evans revives the art of letter writing in her debut epistolary novel, The Correspondent, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. Lauded by author Ann Patchett and others, Evans’ ability to relay the intricacies of a life through Sybil Van Antwerp’s purpose-driven letters is remarkable in its breadth.

The reader is taken in by the variety of this former lawyer’s correspondents as her relationship to each person is reflected in the tone and demeanor of the letters she pens. She writes to friends and family as well as a company representative, a college dean, and a troubled teenager, among others. In each string of letters, connections develop despite culture, age, or position.

The complexity in Evans’ writing goes further. Subtle references to Sybil’s personal views and unveiling of her vulnerabilities creates a compelling, hard-to-put-down read. Layer upon layer of complication is added through every missive.

Discovering Vulnerability

Sybil, at 73 years old, is losing her vision and as a result has a terrible car accident that she downplays to her family. Her fear of being placed in a nursing home couches the reality of the totaled car into a forgettable fender bender. Throughout this book, Evans shapes what Sybil writes into a form of honesty that often supersedes the truth.

Also among the recipients of Sybil’s letters are famous authors and a wide variety of her colleagues. Not everyone is a fan of Sybil and her lifelong work with a local judge has not always added positively to that image. She’s made mistakes, regrets particular actions, and pines over missed opportunities. For example, Sybil and her best friend have shaky times but their bond is deep. I thought about my best friend while reading through these letters and how easily precious moments can slip away if we don’t capture them. Evans’ use of these plot points create relatability with the reader.

Older Lovers, Family Roots

Sybil finds herself in a love triangle, one that lays bare her reluctance for intimacy. Adopted, she dreams of her birth mother coming to claim her. In addition, her relationship with her daughter is captured as delicate and strained in its boundaries but through the letters, she discovers a path to healing and self-acceptance.

The Layers Deepen

Sybil also carries a deep grief with her and the source of that pain is revealed through one series of poignant letters. The Correspondent is relevant to anyone who has lived a life filled with friends, foes, associates, and a variety of experiences, including painful losses. We all yearn for connection and Sybil goes to extremes to find it through writing. She uses the letters to build walls between the recipient and herself and says what she wants because you cannot interrupt a letter.

I admired Evan’s word choices and her writing style that pulses life through the book. At times I had to stop and re-read passages because I was lost in their beauty the first time and wanted to read deeper for the meaning the second. The epistolary style stands out, and the prose is crisp, propelling the book forward with an enjoyable cadence. The Correspondent was one of my favorite reads of 2025.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

What are your favorite books of 2025? What themes did they explore? Have you read an epistolary style book before? Do you think The Correspondent would make your stack?

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Photo: @madisonlecroy

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Originally posted at: Madison LeCroy’s Blue Suede Zip Up Jacket