A Conversation with Third Act Quest Founder, Diana Place

Diana Dunbar Place is the founder of Third Act Quest, which helps people design their “third act” life plans or to work through specific challenges and important transitions in life or work.  Her 35-year professional career includes: a decade in Boston with a leading international marketing & ad agency; ten years with America Online (AOL-Time Warner) in the exciting early days of the internet that culminated in a role as senior vice president.  She has also started three entirely different entrepreneurial ventures.  She co-founded Dunbar-Hunter & Associates, a cause-marketing firm (bridging corporations and nonprofits around a range of issues from aids, to homelessness, domestic violence and breast cancer),  launched WonderBlink Photography, a dream she'd had since she was fourteen, and The Global Design Post, an online platform for designers. Though each of these experiences was fascinating, remarkable and expanded her life and my mind, it is what happened around her business career — the little breadcrumbs that I followed — that have driven her, and were “calling” her all these years.  Throughout her life, she has taken on mentor/advisor roles to a range of women, as well as started several organizations including an angel network to serve and connect women.  For a variety of reasons, she never put this personal passion front and center.  Until now. In her fifties, she found herself at powerful transition point.  Despite the coinciding emotional challenges surrounding a cancer diagnosis, closing  her latest entrepreneurial venture, and becoming an empty nester, she was filled with deep gratitude, joy and reignited passion for this next phase of her life.  Third Act Quest is her way of living my passion to support, inspire and connect people as they create their “third act” of life, and helping to empower optimism versus fear and dread, and respect and collaboration versus disregard and disfavor in our culture.  Through retreats, courses, group and private coaching, and a special event series, she can help reframe the experience and perceptions of aging among people of all ages.  Third Act Quest  is working to shift the experience and perception of aging for individuals, in the workplace and in our culture in general; inspiring people to reimagine what it means to grow older.  Importantly as well, she wants to help bridge understanding, connection and mutual support between generations. Email [email protected] and connect by checking out https://www.thirdactquest.com/