About Lisa Liang

Lisa Liang, known formally as Elizabeth, with a Z - is an intercultural storytelling coach, solo performer, and TCK who grew up across Central America, Southeast Asia, and the United States. She has spent decades helping globally mobile people do one of the hardest things there is: turn a life lived between worlds into a story that actually lands. She works with memoir writers, keynote speakers, and anyone who has ever felt that the people back home simply couldn't understand what their life abroad had been. Her warmth and precision in equal measure make her one of those rare guests you want to listen to twice.

What You'll Walk Away With

Lisa introduced me to a concept she calls story archaeology and I have been mulling this over since we recorded. The idea is that the emotional threads running through our expat lives are often traceable to a single moment in early childhood, sometimes as far back as age five. That moment of needing to feel seen, safe, or guided doesn't disappear, it simply resurfaces every time life gets big again. Like, say, when you move to a country where you don't speak the language and can't find a pharmacy.

We also got into the storytelling mistake that almost every returning expat makes, and it's one I am guilty of myself. Lisa's reframe is so simple it's almost embarrassing, but it works. And if you've ever had someone's eyes glaze over mid-story, you'll want this one in your back pocket.

There's a beautiful moment too where we talk about telling your story not just backward but forward, using hindsight to project foresight, and arriving, somehow, at present-moment insight. It's a idea that sits close to my heart, because it's one I've wrestled with in my own writing.

In Unsettled, my book on repatriation, I explore how the stories we carry from our global lives can actually become a compass for what comes next, not just a record of where we've been. Lisa brings that same thinking to her storytelling workshops, and hearing her articulate it so clearly reminded me why this matters. For those of us cooking up the next chapter of our nomadic lives, this conversation hits differently.

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You can map the move. You cannot map the metamorphosis. Nomadic Diaries explores the interior journey of expat life — the belonging, the identity shifts, the repatriation, and everything that travels with you that can't be packed in a suitcase. This episode may be part of our Re-Entry Series (30 episodes on coming home) or The Belonging Project (29 episodes on belonging across cultures). Browse the full catalog at nomadicdiariespodcast.com and please share or leave a review if this episode resonated.