The Spotlight: Vicki Thomas on Aging, Reinvention, and Purpose
- Flori Meeks Hatchett
- Apr 4
- 7 min read
Vicki Thomas is all about encouraging people. In fact, that’s the mission of her organization, My Future Purpose LLC, which specializes in helping people create meaningful journeys for themselves after retirement. But that doesn’t mean that the Connecticut resident will hesitate for a moment to call out shortsighted attitudes about people in her clients’ — and her own — age bracket.
Thomas, 79, recently had a personal encounter with this when a man questioned her decision to enroll in a course about becoming an online influencer at her age. She told him that assuming she was too old was a clear case of one of the “isms,” ageism.
After she shared the experience in a LinkedIn post earlier this year, nearly 200 people commented to voice their support and share their own perspectives on aging. You could argue that her encounter with ageism only accelerated her path to becoming an influencer.
“Ageism only holds power if we allow it to,” Thomas wrote in her post. “Instead of framing older adults as victims, let’s focus on what we can do and the value we continue to bring to the world, regardless of our age.”
That’s certainly what she’s doing. Thomas isn’t letting misguided attitudes about age stop her from learning, trying new things, or helping others through My Future Purpose.
Trailblazing Woman
A life as an entrepreneur, advocate, and influencer wasn’t even remotely on Thomas’s radar when she began her career in the 1970s.
“I had no idea I was a trailblazing woman,” she said.
When Thomas got her start, she was a writer for the Credit Union National Association (CUNA, now America’s Credit Unions). Early in her time with the trade organization, a new CEO took the helm. He was a visionary, Thomas said, who recognized the need for credit unions to market their services. He launched a marketing and advertising program and put Thomas in charge.
“I was 24, 25 years old,” Thomas said. “I had no experience, really. It’s called learning on the job.”
Thomas made the most of that learning opportunity and thrived. And there were perks. Because CUNA was a sponsor of the Olympics, her role included attending the 1976 and 1980 Winter Olympics as a wined and dined guest. During the 1976 games in Innsbruck, Austria, Thomas befriended a lot of the top brass of the ABC television network, including its president at the time.
The ABC president couldn’t help noticing that by the 1980 Winter Games, a far more somber version of Thomas was attending. By then, the visionary CUNA CEO who had recognized her potential was gone, and her relationship with his replacement was far less harmonious.
“We got along like oil and water,” Thomas said. “And typical to my personality, which runs hot, I resigned.”
CUNA’s advertising agency, which had been working closely with Thomas at the time, was global powerhouse J. Walter Thompson. Word of Thomas’s resignation quickly spread within the advertising industry. And, apparently, word got to the execs she’d befriended at ABC.
The network called with an advertising position for her. They started her in Chicago to jolt her from the charmed life of working for a nonprofit and earn a few battle scars in corporate advertising.
“And boy, did I get them,” Thomas said. “It was so different. You lived by Nielsen numbers (audience measurement by age range); you lived by weekly sales projections. It was a tense time for me, because I had to learn a whole new style. I was no longer the big fish in a big pond. I was a minnow in a vast ocean struggling to survive and make it.”
She did make it, though, and did quite well until the mid-1980s, when ABC was purchased by Capital Cities. At that point, Thomas went from being a chosen employee to an inherited one, and it became clear she would not be at ABC very much longer.
“I had no idea what I was going to do. Companies were merging, dumping, merging, dumping in the ’80s. It became a badge of honor to be forced out by a company.”
‘Life Does Not End at 50’
Fortunately, Thomas got the right advice at the right time from her accountant, who tossed a Nielsen pocket piece (a booklet summarizing TV audience ratings and demographics) at her.
“He said, ‘Look at this. When does life end according to Nielsen?’ I said, ‘50 or 54.’” (Back then, network television and advertisers largely focused on the 18–49 or 25–54 age brackets, often sidelining older viewers.)
“He said, ‘Do I look like my life is over? There’s a whole new world out there for you; go discover it. What is that world? Aging. Go become an expert and an authority at something in the field of aging, because life does not end at age 50.’”
Thomas, in her late 30s at the time, followed his advice. She joined the American Society on Aging and the Area Agency on Aging and started building expertise in the issues of aging. Then she launched her first company, a PR and marketing firm, and capitalized on her broadcast and advertising backgrounds. And her talent as a storyteller.
Her first project? Creating and promoting Dancin’ Grannies workout tapes “for the body that wasn’t born yesterday!” It was the era of Jane Fonda exercise tapes, and Thomas found a way to create a product that targeted an older audience. Each woman in the Dancin’ Grannies videos had a unique personality for viewers to get to know, and her own unique challenge. One woman was coping with loss and depression. Another struggled with arthritis.
Thomas managed to get four of the Dancin’ Grannies on the then wildly popular syndicated talk show “The Phil Donahue Show” a couple of days before Thanksgiving, and they were a hit. Shortly after that, Thomas was inundated with Dancin’ Grannies workout video orders. Then she put the grannies on the road. They got more national publicity.
Even after interest in the Dancin’ Grannies waned over time, Thomas was landing major clients for her firm. With Merrill Lynch, Prudential Securities, and American Express Financial Advisors, for example, she created highly successful personal finance training programs geared for women.
At first, these achievements were exhilarating. Over time, Thomas found she was burning out.
And if she was being honest with herself, she was bored.
So she found other outlets to energize herself, including volunteering. And that would lead to an even more demanding, albeit rewarding, project.
Adapt and Overcome
The idea to throw her support behind veterans’ nonprofit Purple Heart Homes hit while Thomas was cooking and listening to TV.
“I heard this voice, and it sounded like Matthew McConaughey, and it was this Iraq vet. He said, ‘Hey, I’m Staff Sergeant Dale Beatty, retired.’ The camera panned up, and you could see he was sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and he was a double amputee below the knees.”
His story drew in Thomas. Beatty and long-time friend John Gallina nearly died in 2004 when their Humvee hit two antitank mines in Iraq. Beatty lost his legs, and Gallina suffered a traumatic brain injury, a damaged back, and severe post-traumatic stress disorder. A few years after returning home to North Carolina, the friends founded a nonprofit to provide accessible housing for disabled and aging veterans.
Thomas called Purple Heart Homes that day, and a couple of weeks later, she met Beatty and Gallina and committed to helping them grow their organization. In the year that followed, Thomas got them national news coverage and helped them raise millions of dollars in both financial contributions and material donations.
And for her, working with Beatty and Gallina was transformative.
“I’ve never walked in their shoes, but working with those two men taught me so much about adapting and overcoming. I have to do that now as I’m aging, the things that I’m sometimes dealing with on my body. You just adapt and overcome, and you do it purposefully.”
Purpose certainly became key to Thomas’s next chapters in life. For one thing, because of her impact on Purple Heart Homes, she was the 2013 winner of The Purpose Prize for Future Promise, a $100,000 prize sponsored by life insurance company Symetra.
And for another, purpose became the focus of Thomas’s current career.
New Chapter, New Purpose
About five years ago, Thomas started noticing the word “purpose” emerging in the news. She saw it in an article about President Joe Biden and creating a purposeful life after loss. She saw it in an article about a man who left behind his career in law after concluding it wasn’t fulfilling his purpose. There was something there.
Thomas called her friend Joyce Cohen, who has a talent for creating workshops. Thomas shared the articles she’d noticed and her hunch that there was opportunity in purpose.
“I said, ‘There are a lot of people who are in transition, who are stuck, who are burned out. I’ve been there. You’ve been there. There are people nearing retirement who want to figure out what’s next for them.’”
Cohen agreed, and in January 2020, they launched My Future Purpose.
Together, Cohen and Thomas have developed multiple programs and workshops for individuals and organizations. One, Pathways to Purpose, has identified a group of buckets for people searching for purpose after retirement to consider:
· Advocacy, for themselves or a cause
· Entrepreneurship
· Volunteering with or starting a nonprofit
· Diving into a hobby or a special interest
· Going to work for a company with a purpose that aligns with theirs
Another successful workshop challenges participants to write their own obituary with a touch of humor. As My Future Purpose’s website says, the two-part workshop is an opportunity to “explore your achievements, values, and the impact you aspire to make in the world.”
My Future Purpose also offers discussions, book recommendations, and videos featuring guest speakers.
“I had loved all my jobs,” Thomas said. “I loved my credit union job. I loved my ABC job. When I ran my own ship, I loved doing that. But this is my greatest joy because it gives me purpose.”
But, being Thomas, running the organization with Cohen isn’t her only focus. She also has launched a blog series about aging. It includes the thoughts on ageism she shared on LinkedIn, but the topics run the gamut from knee-replacement surgery to feelings of invisibility. Eventually, she wants to publish the collection as a book.
“That will be — I don’t know. I don’t know if it will be my final gift, my legacy. And who knows what comes after that. What will be next?”
There’s no telling, but without question, it will be something Thomas approaches purposefully.
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