Leaving Toxic Relationships and Being Brave-ish with Lisa Niver

LEAVE YOUR MARK: Freshly Brewed Career Advice with Aliza Licht

Although Lisa Niver has traveled in far-off locales from Vanuatu to Nepal, received numerous accolades as an award-winning travel expert who has explored 102 countries and six continents, and is the founder of the website WeSaidGoTravel, what people don’t realize is that this began fromthe wreckage of a rotten romance. As a newlywed, Lisa was on the adventure of a lifetime. She had quit her job, rented her condo, and traveled around Asia. To the outside world, Lisa was a woman living out her dreams of exploring ancient ruins in Cambodia and seeing orangutans in Borneo. She kept a dark secret in private: an abusive relationship. But, when she found herself lying on a sidewalk in Thailand, looking up at the sky in severe pain, she knew things had to change. At age forty- seven, Niver found the courage to set course on a new life. Feeling like a failure, pushing fifty, and moving home to her parents' house to start again from scratch, Lisa began taking one tiny "brave-ish" step at a time to take her life far away from the old one and into the adventurous world of travel writing. These small hurdles led to the challenge of trying fifty new things before turning fifty. From diving into shipwrecks, swimming with sharks, bobsledding at 3Gs, indulging in wild escapades, Lisa found herself traversing the worldon a journey of reinvention, personal growth, and discovering what it actually means to be "brave." Her new book Brave-ish chronicles Lisa’s inspiring expeditions to distant corners of the world, including Myanmar, Cuba, Morocco, Kenya, and Mongolia, but this is more than a travelogue. Brave-ish inspires readers to dream big, take risks, and embrace the unknown to create a life filled with wonder and excitement, even when courage seems elusive. In this episode, Lisa shares how she saved herself, took risks, embraced the unknown, and pressed the reset button when she fell off track. She also shares how she taught herself to rest, not quit. Lisa's story is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the power of perseverance.