Live Beautifully: Stories of Reinvention, Resilience, and Becoming

Lacey Alexander
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Live Beautifully is a podcast exploring the stories of ordinary people who made extraordinary choices and the moments that changed the trajectory of their lives. Through conversations with real people I’ve met around the world, Live Beautifully explores the experiences that shape us. Across differences in gender, race, nationality, religion, language, and circumstance, we discover just how much of the human experience we share.

Episodes

  1. 2d ago

    The Courage to Choose Yourself: Sanae Alikouch on Freedom, Education & Breaking the Cycle

    Growing up in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, Sanae Alikouch learned early what was expected of girls: follow the rules, protect the family’s reputation, marry, and build a life that fit within the boundaries society had created for you. But even as a child, Sanae felt something inside her resisting. She imagined another kind of life. One shaped by education, independence, freedom, and the ability to decide for herself who she wanted to become.  In this deeply candid conversation, Sanae shares how those expectations followed her into adulthood and ultimately influenced her decision to marry at 21. What followed were five difficult years in a marriage marked by control, emotional abuse, infidelity, and the growing realization that the life she was living was not her own. Motherhood brought that truth into sharper focus: she began asking not only what kind of life she wanted for herself, but what kind of example she wanted her daughter to inherit.  Choosing divorce became Sanae's turning point. She found work, secured childcare for her daughter, rebuilt her financial independence, returned to learning, invested in her career, and began the much deeper work of accepting herself without needing permission or approval from anyone else.  Today, Sanae is an English teacher, author, mother, traveler, and advocate for education and opportunity—especially for girls whose lives may still be constrained by the expectations she once faced. And perhaps one of the most beautiful parts of her transformation is watching her intentionally raise her daughter with something Sanae had to fight to discover for herself: the freedom to have a voice, express her feelings, and know that her worth does not depend on someone else's opinion. This is a conversation about breaking inherited patterns, the power of education and financial independence, learning to stop living through other people's expectations, and the extraordinary freedom that can come when you finally decide: I am allowed to be myself. And Sanae's story carries an especially beautiful generational message. As she describes it, the work isn't simply about blaming the people who came before us; it's recognizing what we inherited, changing what we can, and refusing to pass the things that hurt us on to the next generation.

  2. Aug 26

    Loubna: The Courage to Begin Again

    What happens when reinvention becomes more than a career decision and becomes a way of approaching life? In this episode of Live Beautifully, I sit down with Dr. Loubna Erraji, a neuroscientist by training, management professor, executive and career coach, school managing director, and author of Career Reinventors: From Stuck to Soaring: A Guide to Career Reinvention. Having built a life across France, Morocco, and the United States, Loubna knows something about change. Her journey has required resilience, adaptability, curiosity, and the willingness to begin again. We talk about the experiences that shaped her, the choices that changed her trajectory, and her belief that people have the capacity to grow beyond where they feel stuck and create lives that more fully reflect who they are. This is a conversation about change, but even more, it's about identity, possibility, and the courage to keep becoming. Continue Loubna's story:Loubna is the author of Career Reinventors: From Stuck to Soaring: A Guide to Career Reinvention, a guide for those ready to move beyond feeling stuck and begin imagining what's possible next. Purchase here: https://amzn.to/4r4zPtn

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About

Live Beautifully is a podcast exploring the stories of ordinary people who made extraordinary choices and the moments that changed the trajectory of their lives. Through conversations with real people I’ve met around the world, Live Beautifully explores the experiences that shape us. Across differences in gender, race, nationality, religion, language, and circumstance, we discover just how much of the human experience we share.

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