Imagine learning your husband has committed financial infidelity on a Thursday and your house is set to be auctioned off the following Tuesday. That happened to Lisa Weldon at age 56. But instead of giving in, she got up, put herself and her great talents out there, and made a new, fulfilling, impactful life. She published a book, was asked to give Cindy Crawford Life After 50 Tips with Oprah, and now works with Melissa Gilbert on Modern Prairie. At 70, Lisa Weldon is one very hip and sweet entrepreneur, and her journey to today is truly inspirational. Lisa openly shares how she forged a new path after a life crisis—a journey that is now bringing incredible rewards.

Lisa Stapleton Weldon, a graduate of Auburn University, has spent a lifetime in advertising in Atlanta. Her hobby? Walking cities and sharing the stories she finds. 

    At age 58, Lisa took a month out of her life to learn the new tools of her trade – social and digital media. She sliced of map of Manhattan into 20 pieces with the goal of walking one piece per day until she covered the entire island. At night she pored over instructional videos and blogged about the neighborhoods she’d walked. The following year she replicated that 30-day journey in Paris, and has since walked Shanghai, Istanbul, and several counties in Central America. Oprah’s network Harpo Productions caught wind of Lisa’s reinvention story and invited her to give Cindy Crawford advice on turning 50. HuffPost featured her walk of Paris on the front cover of the “Living Fearlessly” section. And Melissa Gilbert has contracted Lisa to create digital content for her 50+ community Modern Prairie.

Lisa’s first book Twenty Pieces: A Memoir earned awards from 2022 Nautilus Books and 2021American Best Books. She is currently writing a second book, Blood Sisters, a historical novel based in the Civil Rights era.

A fellow of the Hambidge Center and the Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts, Lisa is a featured speaker in numerous podcasts and online shows. 

Her greatest joys in life? Her three grown children and a brand new grandson!

Website: LisaWeldon.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LisaWeldon

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lisaweldon/

Resources

Sign up for the Worth Knowing LinkedIn Newsletter to stay up to date: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/worth-knowing-7236433935503618048/

Lisa Weldon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisaweldon/

Follow Bonnie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bonnie-habyan/

Go to the Worth Knowing website: https://www.worthknowing.show

Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com

The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company

Transcript

Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited

Bonnie Habyan:
Hey there, it’s your pal, Bonnie Habyan, and welcome to the Worth Knowing Podcast. If you like a real-life story that features grit, grace, and a whole lot of gumption, then you’re in the right place. Get ready to hear from some courageous women who talk about how pivotal, teachable, aha moments have reshaped their confidence and delivered opportunities they never imagined. It didn’t happen by chance, of course. They figured out new, sometimes uncomfortable ways to put themselves out there in a way that shouts, they get it. You’ll hear intimate stories with actionable takeaways and some very secret sauce. Because everyone has an important story worth knowing. And you know what? The world needs it, and you deserve it. Hello friends, and I want you to meet one of my friends. Her name is Lisa Weldon, and Lisa and I met through a book. We both wrote a book and then we crossed paths promoting them. So I am so happy to have her on because her book is a little different than mine. Hers is a documented pivotal transformation, one that has really landed her in a lot of places and has landed her here today. It’s a story and it’s a story that I think has a lot of elements that so many of us can relate to. It’s a story of heartbreak. It’s a story of reinvention, courage. financial infidelity, which I had never heard that word until you and I had chatted a little bit. And I say a whole lot of grit and tenacity. So I am really happy to have you here today. She ended up, Lisa, making this radical left turn after her world blew up. And she’s going to share with us some actionable steps that will absolutely help our friends who are listening to do the same. So I want to get right to it. Lisa, I want our friends here to get to know you right away. and feel a little bit of your journey. And, uh, I know it’s painful, but I also think it is hugely triumphant. So you are a marketer, a designer, you’re in the creative field for many years. You put everything on hold to raise three beautiful children. I want to learn a little bit about you, a little bit about your earlier years, where you started out and how your life kind of evolved until that one day we’re going to talk about. So share a little bit of your life’s journey with us.

Lisa Weldon: Thank you so much, Bonnie. This is so fun. It’s such an honor to be on this talk with you. A little bit about myself. Let’s see where I started. At birth, I was born an Air Force brat. I started first grade in El Salvador in Central America, speaking Spanish. I think I counted six different schools before I graduated Mobile, Alabama, where I’m from. I went to Auburn University where I got a degree in graphic design and upon graduation, landed in Birmingham, Alabama in advertising. Not really knowing much about advertising, it ended up being the dream career. I just loved it. You know, back then, all my friends were getting engaged and getting married in the early 20s. And I was so much more interested in my career, the creativity. I just loved it.

Bonnie Habyan: I loved it. Wow. And, you know, and there’s something to be said about really, I mean, that’s one of the things I tell all women. If you love our people in general, if you love what you do, it’s, it’s success will come. So I, you know, I, I kind of feel the same way as you do advertising, marketing, all of that creative stuff just really is something special.

Lisa Weldon: Yeah, at my age, I’ve been doing it for 50 years and I still find it exciting. It’s changed and all that, but I’ve loved it. In that first job, I watched my bosses go to New York and Madison Avenue and They went up there to shoot their commercials and to work with the world’s best photographers and illustrators. And as the peon in the group, I just stood in awe. And I decided early on in my early 20s that before I died, that I was going to work on Madison Avenue, that I was going to live in New York City. And I was in Birmingham for a couple of years. And then the next stepping stone was to Atlanta. And we used to call it New York of the South. Right, right. After two years in Birmingham, I moved on up to an ad agency in Atlanta, where, you know, I grew and I had budgets big enough a little bit to go to New York here and there. And it was just on my mind. I never made it to New York. Here I am at 70. I never made it to New York. But I found every excuse to go there on vacation from then on. And of course, going there for business, I got to do that a lot more.

Bonnie Habyan: Well, it is the city. It’s a city that never sleeps. And I have that same affinity for New York, too. New York City, there is just something I’m right there with you. I was a born Maryland girl and I ended up living and working in the New York area and there is just something magical about that place. So I get it. Especially for weak creatives.

Lisa Weldon: And so I step off the airplane in LaGuardia and my heart beats harder.

Bonnie Habyan: Is that because you were free or is that because you’re excited?

Lisa Weldon: Yeah, exactly. Shortly after I got to Atlanta, one of the ad agencies I worked with, highly creative group, lost two big accounts and they closed and all of us were on the street. And by that time I had gotten a little portfolio and had won some pretty good awards. So I started picking up. freelance accounts and it went pretty well. I never really thought I would become an entrepreneur, never even dreamed about it, but there I had to. And I got so busy, I hired a person to help me and then I hired another person to help me. And at age 30, I found myself where I needed to get office space. I’ll never forget signing that $75,000 three-year commitment.

Bonnie Habyan: Wow. That must have been, what year was that? What year was that?

Lisa Weldon: in the early eighties.

Bonnie Habyan: Okay. That was a big nut. That’s a lot of money.

Lisa Weldon: Well, I looked it up the other day. That’s equivalent to a quarter million dollars. As a 30 year old, I had no clue what I was doing.

Bonnie Habyan: And that was, you know what? And thank goodness. I say the same thing. I look back at some of the things and I’m like, that’s because you just didn’t know any better and that’s okay. So you end up starting this ad agency, right? Yeah. And now were you married at that time or no?

Lisa Weldon: I got married shortly thereafter. And by this point, I had five employees. My husband, Jim, rented one of the offices, not rented, but he used one of the offices in the back. And, you know, everything was going good. I did get pregnant shortly thereafter and lost that baby. She was born too early. But shortly thereafter, my three-year lease was up for renewal. I always knew I wanted to be a mother. At the same time, I loved my career. I loved my staff.

Bonnie Habyan: I understand.

Lisa Weldon: Yeah. I had to make a decision whether to sign another lease, be responsible for five people’s salaries and welfare, and I was just too scared I’d lose another baby. So I found all my employees other jobs. closed my office, my husband and I moved into the basement of our house where we built two little rough offices. And that’s where I worked for the next couple of years until I got pregnant again. And I tell everybody, it’s one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make because I wanted both.

Bonnie Habyan: I know. And I know. I know. And when you do have both, you certainly wonder, you know, you feel like you’re doing a lot, but can’t give a hundred percent to everything. So take me a little bit forward. So you have three children eventually, correct?

Lisa Weldon: I have three children, two boys and a girl, and I am still freelancing a little bit on the side, but I’m working probably at 50 or 60%. And this time I’ve kept the same clients that are easy. They didn’t care if I walked in, had spit up on my shirt or had crayons on my presentation boards. They didn’t care. And these were clients that had smaller budgets or didn’t get to go to New York and stuff like that. But, but it was a very comfortable living.

Bonnie Habyan: And you had flexibility and things of that sort. So, so here, here you raise your children to a certain point. Okay. You stayed home for a certain amount of time or did this freelancing, but then you get to a certain point, which we would call, I guess, midlife or whatever. So you’re like 56, 57. When, when does like, you know, things were going well there for a while and then your life changes. So take us to that moment.

Lisa Weldon: Well, let me back up a little bit. I guess I was about 56, 55, 56. My husband was also an entrepreneur. So life, you know, had a lot of ups and downs for us, but we had weathered them. But at about age 56 or 57, there was a paradigm shift in the advertising marketing business. I had been doing newspaper ads, billboards, you know, brochures and stuff like that. Oh, yeah. That’s where everything was going digital. Oh, yeah. And it was such a paradigm shift as an art director. I knew that I had to, I had to start keeping up.

Bonnie Habyan: You had to keep those, brush those skills up. You had to just, yeah.

Lisa Weldon: I looked around and, um, I know you won’t be surprised to hear this. I found a school in New York City called Parsons, the new school, that offered 30-day intensives in the summer. And they were for adults like us. And I could go up there for 30 days and learn how to design websites, learn about social and digital media and all this and everything.

Bonnie Habyan: There’s like a crash course intensive 30-day, we will get you up to speed so you can now be more marketable.

Lisa Weldon: Right, right. Every November when those catalogs would come, or they came twice a year, I don’t know, whatever, I would go through with my little yellow mark and go, Not this one. Yes. This one sounds good. Oh, this one sounds good. And it was like the Sears catalog. A child with a Sears catalog.

Bonnie Habyan: The Toys R Us Christmas toy catalog. I remember those.

Lisa Weldon: Yeah. And my kids were getting more and more independent. They were in high school. One or two of them had already left for college. But every year I would throw that thing away because going away for 30 days to New York City, and the cost. Family, and that’s tough. It sounded so irresponsible, you know, it sounded, I felt like it was being greedy and it was expensive, you know, getting an apartment in New York City for a month.

Bonnie Habyan: No, you know how you should be looking at it as an investment, right? And we look at it as greedy. So that’s another, we need to shift that mindset at the time.

Lisa Weldon: That’s a woman thing that we saw.

Bonnie Habyan: I know, we take care of everybody else, right? I totally get it. So anyhow, so you finally commit to this?

Lisa Weldon: So in 2011, it was New Year’s Eve, we always went to the same party as a family. And I went to my husband, I said, I just can’t go to this party. And my family left, I sat at my desk, I reached back in that trash can and pull that catalog out. And I looked at all those courses. And I went online and And I hit enroll. Awesome.

Bonnie Habyan: Well, well, let me tell you, I mean, did you panic a little bit, sweat a little bit afterwards?

Lisa Weldon: I just didn’t tell anybody because at the time my husband had lost a venture that he was doing. There was absolutely no way I could pay even the course fee for this thing, but I hit enroll. Well, I didn’t tell anybody because it sounded so foolish. I didn’t tell anybody. Until I attended a women’s group, we were doing those visionary boards. And each one of us stood up to tell what our vision was, vision boards. And I said, I enrolled in a class in New York City and everybody clapped. It was I went, Oh no, now I’ve got to figure out how to follow through. I’ve made it public. So what I did was I broke the next six months because I enrolled six months ahead of time. I broke all of the things I had to do into small pieces. I thought, okay, if I save a hundred dollars a week, I’ll have enough. And oh, the other thing I did that night, I almost forgot this. is I took a map out of Manhattan and laid it on my wooden drawing board. And I took my X-Acto knife and a ruler and I sliced it right down the middle of it. And then I sliced it 10 ways horizontally until I had 20 pieces. And I said to myself, This may be my only chance to live in New York. This may, this may be only chance to realize my dream. So after class, I’m going to walk one of those pieces per day till I have walked the entire island because this may be my last chance.

Bonnie Habyan: Well, okay. So now let’s, let’s bring our friends up to speed here because you were able to do that, but not anyway. in the way that you had first envisioned, correct? Right. So, all right. So you’ve now enrolled, you’ve told people that this is what you’re going to do, but you haven’t told your husband yet. Well, I had told him by that point. You had by that point. Okay. So now you’re like, I’m committed. I put it out there. I’m doing this.

Lisa Weldon: Yeah. Once I told the group, which was about a week after it happened, I had to come home and tell him. And then, then I thought, There’s just got to be a way. There’s just got to be a way for me to do this. So I broke the next six months into little steps. OK, if I’m going to walk the city, I got to get in better shape. So I took a map and said, I’m going to walk this many steps up until my trip. I took my finances. This is how much money I had to raise to pay for all this. I’ve got to save $100 a week. So I broke it up into weeks. this is some of the basics I need to learn before I go. And I broke that up into little pieces. And I thought, if I can do all these little pieces, the big picture may come together. But if I let the big picture, keep staring at the big picture, then I won’t be able to, you know, I’ll shut down. And, you know, back then there was Facebook and there was Twitter. No Instagram, no TikTok or anything. And so I started putting it on TikTok. And all of my friends became cheerleaders, my accountability partners. And it was, yeah, it was great.

Bonnie Habyan: All right. So, so you’re excited about this and then you get some news about this class, correct?

Lisa Weldon: Yeah. Well, about a month before I was supposed to go, I got a phone call from the school registrar and she said, We were canceling the course due to under enrollment.

Bonnie Habyan: You must’ve been so disappointed.

Lisa Weldon: Oh, Bonnie. Oh my goodness. To me, it was a relief because I was nowhere near being able to pay for it. Okay. All right. Okay. I was relieved and I didn’t want to blame it on me. So I went out to Facebook and I said, well, shoot, they canceled the class. I’m not going to be able to go. And, you know, I’m embarrassed to say this, but I blamed it on them. When I knew I should have blamed it on me, I couldn’t afford to do it. Anyway, first my cousin, my sweet cousin said on Facebook, well, what’s plan B? And the next person said, you’re going.

Bonnie Habyan: We’re going to figure out a way that you’re going to at least go there and do those 20 pieces. Right. So that was kind of the thought like, all right, let’s forget about the class. This was a dream. This was a dream. This was an issue. Yeah. This was not really about the class at all. You know, it became something different.

Lisa Weldon: Yeah. Here it was a month before I was supposed to leave or two or three weeks before I was supposed to leave. And the only place to stay that I could, envision being able to afford is a NYU dorm room that they rent to other people during the summer. But I just couldn’t stomach sharing a bathroom with another person, you know, and so I just never dealt with the housing part of it. Well, here, all of a sudden, I realized that I was going to get my tuition back, my deposit back, and that would be enough to rent an Airbnb in New York City. And I thought, you know, I can go. Now, I don’t have any extra money. I can’t go out to eat fancy places or anything like that. But it’s enough money to get an Airbnb in New York. And I found one that day and was going at that point.

Bonnie Habyan: Okay. So let me, let me, so your mind is like, okay, now my, I pivoted, but let’s bring in the situation of what happens with, with your husband. And he, he comes and shares some news and I need to understand if that was a pivot to push you in a completely different direction or to just continue to push you to say, I am really now.

Lisa Weldon: Yeah, I, um, well, it was a Thursday evening, just weeks before I was supposed to go. I was up in the kitchen putting dishes in the dishwasher. And I heard his feet come up the basement steps and he was walking particularly slowly. And he opened the door and he said, sweetheart, at the tone of his voice, I turned around. I said, what’s wrong? I knew something had happened to one of our children. I mean, I just immediately panicked because I could hear he said, our house is going to be auctioned off on the court. courtroom steps on Tuesday. And this was Thursday night.

Bonnie Habyan: How does your mind even process, like, I can’t imagine getting that news and having to get my head around that.

Lisa Weldon: Well, I sort of had an out-of-body experience. All of a sudden I saw myself, I just remember this as clear as day, I saw myself at the head of a mahogany conference room table with my children lined up on one side and my husband on the other. And I delivered the news that we needed to sell this corporation and it would be to their benefit. And then I flashed, it was my head on somebody else’s body, an old haggard woman begging at the courthouse steps, please don’t take my house, please don’t take my house. And then, I mean, this just happened I guess when trauma hits you, you go into another whatever. But those two things happened to me. And then I kind of got myself together. I told him to be out by the next morning. I said, I need for you to be out tomorrow by noon. And I went upstairs. we had a house with porch on the top and I went up and sat in the brocken chair and just looked out over the city and just, um, how, how long had you lived in that home? Oh, we were there 20 years.

Bonnie Habyan: And how long had you been, you were, how, how long were you married at that point?

Lisa Weldon: Uh, probably 26. Okay. So you’re, you’re thinking at 20, then Well, we were there longer than 26. Yeah, we were married 26, and we bought the house shortly after we were married. So.

Bonnie Habyan: So now you have the loss of your home. And I imagine at this point, your husband.

Lisa Weldon: My husband and my third child was within a month of going away to college. So.

Bonnie Habyan: You still had a child. You still had a child in your, oh my goodness.

Lisa Weldon: Yeah. Yeah. So I knew I had to wake up the next morning and tell the kids, well, my youngest son had It was upstairs and he heard it and he had gotten on the phone and already told my kids, oh, the guilt. I’ve not talked to my kids. The guilt. Oh, you can, you can just imagine.

Bonnie Habyan: Yeah. Yeah. No. And, and just to, so people know he lost that, you, you lost the home probably, I am assuming because after reading the book was an entrepreneurial venture that didn’t go well.

Lisa Weldon: Yeah. He was a, he was a very creative entrepreneur. You know, I have since learned the word financial infidelity, but I have since learned that men feel so responsible for the financial health of their family, especially in my generation. Valid point.

Bonnie Habyan: Valid point.

Lisa Weldon: Yeah. Oftentimes men will lose a job. I’ve heard several incidences of where men lose a job. And they get up and get dressed every morning and leave the house so they don’t have to tell their wives. And so the fact that he lost his business is one part. And he had lost two previous businesses, and we got through it. We talked through it, you know, whatever. But the fact that I was not told until really one business day.

Bonnie Habyan: So you have to pack within that amount of time? Or do they give you a little time after that?

Lisa Weldon: Well, I called my mother, which was really the last person that I would have ever called, and asked her if she could wire me some money and if she could give me two months to get it back to her. And she did. She wired me the money. We saved the house. I went to New York and when I came back, I packed up, we put it on the market and we sold it very quickly. Oh my goodness.

Bonnie Habyan: Yeah. But your marriage was over at that point.

Lisa Weldon: Our marriage was over at that point.

Bonnie Habyan: All right, so you now have to somehow figure out, you know, you didn’t have a full time job at that point. You want to get your skills back up to speed. You all of a sudden pivot and say, okay, I am now going full force ahead. And you have, and that’s what I want our audience to listen to, this journey. you have now been on since that moment that has brought you to where you are to, I would say, it has released all of your creativity, has probably given you a tremendous amount of autonomy, and you are able to help others by having gone through what you’ve gone through. So let’s talk about that. You now go on this walk, right? And you decide to do what during that walk?

Lisa Weldon: So I get to New York and every morning I close my eyes and I pick up a piece of the map. And I say, okay, today I’m walking Harlem. Okay, today I’m walking the West Village. And I would take off and walk all day and take pictures and write notes about what I saw and smells that I smelled or whatever details. And I really love details. So I kept a little notebook with me on my walks. And then I would come home, I would take a nap. I would watch online videos on how to, number one, write, how to do a blog, how to do Facebook properly, and there’s a professional way to do Facebook, and how to hashtag, and how to do all these things, and how to tweet, and then I would implement them. So after I’d finished these lessons, these tutorials, then I would do the day’s blog.

Bonnie Habyan: So let me ask you, wait a minute. So you weren’t really a writer before this? I know you were in advertising, but writing wasn’t your thing?

Lisa Weldon: No, I was an art director.

Bonnie Habyan: Oh my goodness. So that’s something new. I did not realize that you didn’t have like a, I mean, obviously I would say most likely you’ve always had a talent. You just didn’t know because you just don’t one day wake up and start to write. You developed it.

Lisa Weldon: If you go on my website and you see those 30 days worth of blogs, you will say, yeah, you, you’ve learned to write a little better.

Bonnie Habyan: That’s amazing. So that, that to me is a, that’s a scary thing for some people, you know, like speaking, writing. So good for you.

Lisa Weldon: Not only writing, but what I found on my very first two or three days, I started writing about deep thoughts on my heart. And again, a child of the 50s and 60s, we didn’t talk about dirty laundry. We didn’t talk about really anything that was deep. Everything’s pretty and nice and all this. Well, I saw some things and I felt some things and I was going through some things on my And there were several times that I’d put them in my blog post and then say, oh, I’m not sure and hit the publish button. So I’d wait till the next day and I would take them out. About the third or fourth day, I just went, screw this, publish. And you know what? I got more responses to that first, honest, from the heart blog post.

Bonnie Habyan: Then I learned a huge lesson. People want to connect. They want to learn. They want to see vulnerability. They want to understand. the real you. They don’t want to see it filtered. So that’s amazing. So, all right. So you start, you start publishing these things regularly and you get a little bit of a following.

Lisa Weldon: Yeah. And so then while I’m in New York, they used to have meetups, you know, things like that. And I would go to a meetup and I’d learn about video and different things like this. And there was a, there was another little class. It was just a two hour class on digital media. And I, I’ll never forget. I go up, up to the building to the classroom and I am the oldest person in there by 30 years. I felt like grandma with a bunch of kids and they and we went around the room and what do you do? I’m in a digital dot dot dot. I do digital. I do websites and I’m like oh great. She came to me and she said, what do you do? And I said, well, I’m up here walking the city and they all went, wow.

Bonnie Habyan: They liked that. They thought that was cool.

Lisa Weldon: Yeah. Yeah. So, so I got through it, but you know, I got real used to being the oldest person in the room and you know what? After that initial fear, it was great. It was great.

Bonnie Habyan: One day everybody is the oldest person in the room. I, my mom used to tell me that and she’s absolutely right. So, all right, so you get through this. when do you decide you’re writing this book? Like, when do you say,

Lisa Weldon: I come back from New York, I pick up everything because all the CEOs and all the people at C-suite are my age. And everybody that knows this stuff is young and they don’t trust the youngsters. So I walk into a new business pitch and I pick up everything. It was magic. And within two years, I have to put together a staff of three people and I’m sailing.

Bonnie Habyan: All right. So you’re saying you come back after New York and you start You’re an agency again, a small business again. You start a marketing agency.

Lisa Weldon: Yeah, it just gets bigger and bigger and I need to get people to help me. So I go back to New York for another conference, a blogging conference. And in this conference, we’re around a circle table. There are all these bloggers and one agent. And she goes around the table and, what’s your blog about? What’s your blog about? She gets to me and I tell her, she said, you got to write a book. And I said, I said, ma’am, I don’t write. Well, two things you never tell a literary agent, definitely don’t call her ma’am. Don’t tell her you write, you don’t write. And then I followed it up with, you know, ma’am, I don’t even read that much. Oh,

Bonnie Habyan: Are you friends with this literary agent today?

Lisa Weldon: You know, but that’s funny at me and she handed me her business card and said, well, then get a ghostwriter. Your story needs to be told.

Bonnie Habyan: Oh, that’s what I mean. Do you know that’s such a golden feeling? I mean, how many literary agents, you know how difficult that is, right? To get a book published, right? an actual agent, but that is just amazing. All right, so go ahead.

Lisa Weldon: I had no idea. At that point, I didn’t even think about being a writer. It was a crazy idea. Then I was invited to walk Paris And my friend, she said, if I get the house, will you walk Paris with me? And so I spent 30 days walking Paris. And then Oprah’s network, you know, of course I was putting it on social media. Oprah’s network called me and said, will you come to one of our recordings to offer your help with Cindy Crawford turning 50? And I went, Okay. Which one of my friends is playing a joke on me?

Bonnie Habyan: Not funny.

Lisa Weldon: Not funny. One of her producers. And then Huffington Post saw it and they said, will you chronicle your walk of Paris? And they published my very first submission on their front page of living fearlessly. And things just started happening.

Bonnie Habyan: See, but you know what? Let me just say, this is right here is this money shot. You started putting yourself out there. Yes. Yes. And that’s what I’m saying. When I’m talking about people being worth knowing, it’s you have decided and realized that you have more to give in life. And so at an age which was tough, you put yourself out there and look at the floodgates opening up that you now have these opportunities of a lifetime. Right. Who gets to go on Oprah to talk, to tell Cindy Crawford how to age well? I mean, it’s amazing. So you eventually decide to publish this book. Yeah.

Lisa Weldon: I still was not a good writer, so I hired a writing tutor at this point. At this point, I was making enough money I could hire a writing tutor. That’s amazing.

Bonnie Habyan: I had no idea about that part.

Lisa Weldon: Yeah. When I talk to book clubs, I tell the backstory, and it’s as crazy as the book story, but she worked with me for four years. Not being a reader, she had to start from scratch with me. I wrote my book over four or five years. And you know, Bonnie, it was so therapeutic because I started processing what had happened to me and what I needed to do. And I found peace doing it. But I never, ever, ever intended to really publish it because I wasn’t really an author. Yeah.

Bonnie Habyan: Well, we’re here talking about the book, and I don’t think I’ve ever said in one, we haven’t even said the title of the book. properly named 20 pieces a walk through love loss and midlife and That is what we’ve been talking about this entire time and the whole 20-piece analogy I don’t think people really maybe they’re listening now and get it. That’s where the book kind of came from but it was much more about Walking to me. It was like this dream came true that you were able to do New York in a way that you’ve always wanted, but then it helped you transition and almost come back with different glasses of what you’re going to do with life. So you, you published the book.

Lisa Weldon: Well, I found a publisher. I signed a contract. He started typesetting the book, putting it all together. And I called him one day and I said, how much would it cost me to break the contract? I’m not sure I can put all this out there. It’s a lot in that book. It’s a lot of… Raw stuff. Raw stuff. Yeah. And I went back and told a good friend of mine what I had done and she said, Lisa, if it will help one woman, isn’t that worth it?

Bonnie Habyan: Scary though. You probably didn’t sleep sometimes. That’s a scary… I understand. I truly do.

Lisa Weldon: Yeah. So when she said that, I thought, absolutely, if I can help one person. If I can help just one person, it’s worth it. So the book’s been put together. I happen to be in New York. I got the first copy from my publisher to approve so I could start the presses running. I told him to go and got an email. He says it’s up on Amazon and the panic starts sitting in. A friend calls and she said, mine just arrived at the front door. More panic. Tara starts sitting in and then somebody else says, I’ve just finished the first chapter. I can’t put it down. And Bonnie, again, all I could, all I felt like was I was running through the streets, buck naked.

Bonnie Habyan: Yeah, I know. I know. And we do that as one too. What are they going to think of me? What if they say something bad? What if I said something I shouldn’t say? What if they’re all talking about me? Who cares anymore?

Lisa Weldon: I mean, and within days, I start getting emails from people that said, Oh, I had a similar thing. I received an eight page single spaced letter from a woman who went through a similar thing. I still receive notes or gifts and things like that. And I just received a note to come speak to a group. My life is just, blossomed from this book. Now, we all want to be New York Times bestseller. We all want to have our book be a movie and all. Of course, that’s a pipe dream. But the gifts that have come out of this book have been so much bigger.

Bonnie Habyan: I know. I know. And I think, you know what, and that’s where I want to say, okay, you have now, I know that you’re doing some other work with an organization, if you would tell me just quickly about that. And then I want to get to the points of what what advice would you give to people, actionable steps to be and kind of do what you did. So let’s give them a little bit of an update of where you are now.

Lisa Weldon: Okay. So I still have a couple of clients. I’m still working at age 71. I’m still working.

Bonnie Habyan: You don’t look anything like 71. What is 71 supposed to be looking like? You are just, you look wonderful. So go ahead.

Lisa Weldon: Thank you. I still have a wonderful real estate client and I have just recently, Melissa Gilbert of Little House on the Prairie is Somebody on her staff read the book and she invited me to be interviewed. She has started a community of older women and has now hired me, 10 of us, to be trusted prairians. It’s called Modern Prairie. I do content development for that organization. plan events for and, um, yeah, it’s, it’s really fun. It’s really fun. I’m just having a blast. You know, I do a lot of volunteer work. Um, I love speaking to book clubs. That’s my favorite thing because you can actually talk to your readers and get feedback and stuff like that.

Bonnie Habyan: No, that’s just, you’ve come full circle. You’ve come full circle.

Lisa Weldon: Yeah. Quite honestly, I’m looking for my next gig. I feel like you asked me three things.

Bonnie Habyan: Don’t ever stop learning. Oh, so let me go back because these are the three things that we want to give takeaways or like, you know, definitely what are things that you feel have helped you in your process that we need to tell other women to do actionably and that is really kind of fueled your journey post kind of crisis.

Lisa Weldon: You know, I have an open marriage. Now that sounds wild. But Jim and I operated our marriage, I’ll take care of this, you take care of that, and we never worked together. You have got to be open with each other about finances, about everything. If you’re married, be open with each other. A lot of people say, you didn’t realize that was about to happen? No. And part of the reason is we hadn’t learned to talk to each other about hard things or everyday things and everything. So live your life openly with other people, whether you’re married, whether you’re single and dealing with clients or whatever, even if it’s hard. But specifically, as a woman, keep your finances within your own reach and with I don’t mean control them.

Bonnie Habyan: Have transparency. You need to have transparency, right? You know, I mean, what would you give in terms of like steps for people, women to really think about to get themselves more comfortable, put themselves out there? What are, you know, to position themselves if they have something bad happen or just to position themselves for success? What are some of the keys do you think are important?

Lisa Weldon: Stay current, stay current. So when I was coming along, I would say maybe 50% of women my age stayed at home to raise the children, which I agree is a much harder job than going off to an office every day. But I would say 50% of the women stayed at home. In 2008, we had the housing crisis. And a lot of those women, and they were attorneys, they were accountants, they were highly educated women. had not learned how to do Word or PowerPoint, and they were applying for jobs that were hourly wages.

Bonnie Habyan: Never stop learning. Never stop learning.

Lisa Weldon: Never stop learning. And even when you don’t have a goal, just never stop learning. It just broke my heart to see some of these powerful women just crumble at that time.

Bonnie Habyan: Yeah. Yeah. What else would you say? So, I mean, I agree with you that in that respect, but what are, what are, you had two, three things I would love to hear the other two.

Lisa Weldon: The other thing I would say is be selfish. And I’m saying the word selfish, but I mean self-love. Take care of yourself. We women tend to take care of the kids, take care of the house, take care of the schools, take da-da-da-da. and they may have a chance at the very end of that to take care of themselves. You have to take care of yourself, whether it’s exercise, whether it’s mental health, whether whatever it is. Put yourself first and your marriage second, and then the kids. So many of us think we have to give ourselves up for our children. And I heard one time that if you and your husband, or if you as a single mother aren’t healthy, nobody below you in the ranks, your children, for instance, are healthy. And this was the first time that I did anything of the sort when I hit that enroll button. It felt selfish. It felt foolish. It felt people are going to make fun of me. They’re going to talk about how ridiculous I am. But no, I was taking care of myself by enrolling in this class. And so it’s a mindset shift.

Bonnie Habyan: Oh, I totally, totally agree. And what was the number three?

Lisa Weldon: Well, it’s keep an open marriage, be financially stable, stay educated, and take care of yourself. So it’s three or four.

Bonnie Habyan: Okay. I need to ask this. Two questions I have, and then we’re going to have to say goodbye. But what happened to your husband? Where is he now?

Lisa Weldon: So I waited four years before I filed for divorce. We loved each other dearly, but I had to continue taking care of myself financially and legally. So I filed for divorce, hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Jim and I became friends. We stayed in touch. We celebrated all the birthdays together. He moved to Alabama to be around the kids. We remained friends and good friends. I even took the manuscript and got his approval on it before I published it. That’s how much I cared about it. But he passed away from cancer about three years ago, and I took him to all of his chemo treatments. It was hard. It was harsh. But we had been apart for 10 years at that point. And I had my life of my own. He had his life of his own. And But I was with him, the night he died, and it’s still hard to talk about. Of course.

Bonnie Habyan: Of course. Let’s go to something happier then as well.

SPEAKER_00: Okay.

Bonnie Habyan: Let me ask you this. What do your kids think about this new you and this kind of journey you’ve taken? How did they… Did they say, hey, Ma, this is amazing, or Ma, you were just out of your mind?

Lisa Weldon: I think they sort of think I’m out of my mind, but nothing surprises them at this point. My daughter’s now in the same field I am, in marketing. A lot of her friends will say, you have the coolest mom, and she’ll just roll her eyes. I think all of my kids, I have a really good relationship with all three of them. And now my sons are beginning to, well, both of them are together trying to start a new business, and they call me about how to do digital ads. digital ads, they’ll tell you just the numbers, but also they got to be creative, you know, and so I felt, I felt useful to them, you know, and I think they still think I know a little something.

Bonnie Habyan: No, I think, I think it’s wonderful. And I, I just, you know, I tell so many people about your story just because it’s, it’s interesting how we met, but it’s so motivational for me. And just spending this time with you now has been so incredibly motivational. I think you give so many people hope, you give them encouragement, you give them a real life story of pain, hope, love, loss. And at the end of the day, that’s all any of us really wants is to have a connection with others, learn from them, feel like we can relate and also, you know, be able to take something away that we can put into action. So for that alone, um, you’ve given back so much and I certainly have enjoyed my time with you here today. So thank you so very much.

Lisa Weldon: Well, this was such an honor. Thank you, Bonnie. Thank you.

Bonnie Habyan: Thank you for joining us on this episode of Worth Knowing. If you’d like to learn more about our guest story or connect with them, you’ll find their details in the show notes. Remember, the path to worth knowing is paved with courage and insight. Stay inspired, keep striving, and continue to make a difference. Then, you must make sure to share it with others. Until next time, keep chasing those aha moments, my friends. You know, the ones that deliver results and motivate and teach the world. Worth Knowing is produced by Missing Link, a Latina-owned, strategy-driven, creatively-fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging, and informative content.