The Alchemist | Lillian Diaz | Legacy Talks EP 0.2

Behind the impressive career and the thousands of leaders she has transformed, lies a story that most people have never heard.

Lillian Diaz has lived in four countries. She has survived things that would have stopped most people in their tracks. She has walked through some of the darkest places a human being can walk. And every single time, she found a way to turn the pain into purpose.

She calls her journey the path to becoming an Alchemist. And in this conversation, she explains exactly what that means.

Katarzyna and Lillian talk about faith and what it truly means to choose yourself when everything around you is falling apart, what it costs to build a life of meaning, the moment Lillian finally decided to stop being loyal to everything except herself, how over 25 years of senior leadership across the world's most respected global companies shaped her view of transformation, and why the darkest chapters of a life can become its greatest teachers.

This is not a conversation about a perfect life. It is a conversation about a real one. And it is one of the most powerful stories Legacy Talks has ever told.

If this episode moved you, subscribe. Every story on this channel deserves to be heard.
Guest: Lillian Diaz, Leadership and Transformative Coach, 25 years of senior leadership experience.
Host: Katarzyna Krawiecka, author, founder of Legacy Architects.

Ready to write your own story? Join the Legacy Community: linktr.ee/kasiakrawiecka

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

We all know we're going to die. Most of us never think about it, what we leave behind. Um, and so we keep going, we keep pushing, we tell ourselves one day I'll sit down and I'll tell my story. But the story has a habit of never arriving. Welcome to Legacy Talks. I'm Kasia Kravitska, and I'm a legacy architect. Every week I sit down with someone who has lived a real life. Not a perfect one, a real one, full of hard moments, big changes, and quiet courage. Today's guest is one of those people. She lived in four countries. She survived things that would have broken most people. She has lost someone she loved more than anything. She had been knocked down again and again and again by life, by people, by circumstances. She didn't she didn't choose. And every single time she got back up, she calls her story the path of becoming an alchemist. And when you hear what she what she has been through, you will understand exactly why. This is Lilian Diaz, and her story deserves to be heard. Welcome to Legacy Talks. Lillian, welcome. Thank you for saying yes to this conversation. I know that it takes courage to sit down and say, yes, I'm ready to tell to tell my story. Before we go anywhere, I want to give you space to introduce yourself. Not your job title, not your CV, just you.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Who is Lillian? Thank you, Casia, for this invitation. And thank you for your audience for giving me this opportunity to share my story with them. I would say that Lillian is a woman in constant evolution. I'm a mother, I'm a daughter, a sister, a friend. But I think over all of those things, I am a seeker. I'm a person who understood at some point that I was meant to transform something. I didn't know it was going to be myself, but I was meant to serve and help transform a reality. And I think, as I said, I didn't know it was going to be myself. And I turned into someone who stopped trying to prove her worth to the world and started choosing from alignment instead. And we can say that very quickly, but actually it is a very intense process. So when I look back, I think that at my core, I am a woman who decided that all of my life experiences, including mostly the painful ones or the dark ones, were not going to go to waste. I was going to build something out of that and hopefully inspire, with my example, the people around me to do the same. Fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 2:55

Thank you. I already can hear so much. So much life when you describe yourself. You seem to be a woman who has clarity. And it came through a lot. And and it came out of on the other side of the light with something very real to share. So let us begin. You called your story The Path of Becoming an Alchemist. Yes. I really love the title. My most favorite book is called The Alchemist. So that's Yes, absolutely. Alchemist, in my opinion, is someone who takes something bro, something rough, sometimes very broken, and turns it into gold. In your opinion, what does the title mean to you? Why did you choose Alchemist?

SPEAKER_00 3:43

I think you just we were connected because I also I love that book, The Alchemist. I read it at a time where I didn't have the level of clarity and awareness that I have right now. But as I said, I think something inside me new. Call it intuition, call it, you know, your true or higher self. It's like something new. And actually, when I looked back at my life and I had a turning point in 2019, I started to look back and say, okay, I have been going through all of these experiences and patterns of ups and downs. What am I going to do with this? How am I going to transform it? And that's when I decided that I would not let those experiences or even the story that I was telling myself about those experiences destroy me. I would turn that toughness, that sadness, pain, trauma, betrayal, whatever it was that I burnout that I went through, and say, what are these let what are these experiences here to show me? And how can I transform that into a path or a journey of recovery, of resilience, of self-love and learning and growth? I think it's not about thinking, positive thinking. It's about taking responsibility of the choices we made, even though I didn't know I was making those choices. Um, because they were unconscious, rooted out of limiting beliefs and just early childhood experiences. But I said, I'm this is not going to define me. So I'm going to transform my life into what I want and take that fuel, take those stories and turn them into fuel. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

I think that's such a beautiful way to look at life, because most of people, when they look at hard times, they see pain and they see loss, and sometimes they see things that they wish had never happened to them. But you are describing something different. You are describing the process, the transformation. And for me, that changes everything. Um have walked through some of the darkest places a human being can walk. And I'm not going to ask you to go back through all this in detail, but I do want to ask you one thing. What these moments gave you that nothing else could have given you.

SPEAKER_00 6:08

I think um when I look back at, I call it the beginning. That was when I was setting the perfect storm. I didn't know it, but as I said, you know, I've had some time to go back and reflect. What it gave me was awareness, becoming conscious. And I remember clearly I had this conversation with my sister. And um I was going through a divorce. I had decided to divorce my husband, and she said, she told me something like, Oh my God, you've had such bad luck with men. And at that moment, it's I just kind of heard it, the statement, and I said, Have I had bad luck with men? Or am I choosing men that are teaching me things through pain and sorrow? Wow, that's possible. That are that are men that are reinforcing something that is not true, but I keep choosing them to demonstrate that. So I just I didn't answer anything. I just I just kind of sat with with the statement, and then I realized, no, this is not bad luck. I am choosing this. So that awareness led to accountability to say, okay, if I'm creating this reality, where am I creating it from? Why am I creating it? And what can I do to change it? I I remember that clearly. It's like, okay, I don't want this anymore. So how can I move towards what I do want? Yes.

SPEAKER_01 7:31

That's very powerful because many many people think that things happen to us. But as you mentioned, if we start having the perception that things happen for us, so we can notice, because the person just show us an unhealed part of us, that changes so so much. In your form, you mentioned that COVID changed something for you, that something which had always felt distance. The distance suddenly became very close and very real. What was it that you finally saw clearly during that time? And maybe and what did COVID show you that you hadn't been able to see before?

SPEAKER_00 8:16

So it actually enhanced during COVID, but it started a little bit before. So I said the perfect storm was set for me. I was going through that divorce. I was in a I was 49 years old, I was in a foreign country, doing a job with a lot of corporate pressure. I was having a hard time, I was struggling, having a hard time adapting to that culture. So there was a lot of migration stress for me, for my family. I was a single provider, and things started to happen. So my mother became ill. My mother had a long history of illness for more than 20 years, but it ended with cancer, three types of cancer. She was going 19. The second type of cancer was diagnosed. And I just I had that realization that these things were happening. And I was asking myself why. And then I said, no, why is not the right question? It's what am I supposed to learn from this? And I started looking at my identity. And COVID gave me that opportunity to just slow down because 19, I lost that job. I came to terms with my employer. I decided to get divorced. My mother had her second tumor removal. And my son was diagnosed with depression. And I got a call from school, and they said, We need you to come and pick him up. And I was in a meeting and I wasn't picking up the phone, but my husband called me. I was still married, and he said, Hey, the school is calling and they need you to go pick your son up. And I said, Why me? Can't you go? And they he said, No, they asked that you go. I can't go. Because my my that husband was not my son's father. I was like, okay, I went in the middle of this meeting with uh an executive from the company, and I said, Okay, I have to go. I have to go pick up my son. And I remember clearly it was a 48-minute drive, and I just felt this chill, this cold chill running through my spine, and my mind was crazy thinking about scenarios, what could it be if this had happened, you know, and I was just in overdrive. And um, so I got to school and they asked my son. He was with a uh school psychologist and his academic coordinator, and they asked him to tell me why I was there because I was freaking out. And he told me, he said, I have had thoughts about ceasing to exist. And for me, it was, you know, that that shock that broke the whole illusion that I was living. It was everything that I had done, everything that I was proud of, everything that I had achieved became completely meaningless. And it was confronting that reality when I was, it stopped for me. Something broke there. Something really started to shift there. And COVID gave me the opportunity to take care of that and confront those things. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:24

Sometimes it seems that sometimes the world has to stop for us to start seeing things. And it looks that life was had been whispering something for you for some time, and then everything went quiet uh so you can could finally hear it. Lillian, what did you do with with your realization that things are not the way they are?

SPEAKER_00 11:48

Yes, I I love what you said about whispering because my my body had been whispering, and my own life had been whispering things, you know, the bad relationships, chronic stress and fatigue, burnout, you know, dealing with these identities of being the perfectionist, the caregiver, the pleaser, the survivor, the rescuer. So, you know, that led to burnout, facial paralysis, pulmonary distress. But it was my body. So I just had learned to push through. I had learned that that's what warriors do, and that's what strong people do. You push through that. But my son's pain screamed at me. And then I said, I can't ignore this because I had normalized and tolerated so many things, but I could not normalize or tall or tolerate my son's cry for help. So I understood that if I wanted to be there to help him and support him, I had to take care of myself first. I had to prioritize myself first. And it was a hard look at the mirror and say, you know, what model of adulthood am I being for this child? And how can I guide him through this process if I am disconnected from myself, if I have been neglecting myself?

SPEAKER_01 13:13

Absolutely. There's a saying that children, when they get poorly, they look somewhere the parents are unable to because it's too hard to face it. Yes, it was. Was there a moment when you almost lost your faith? When you when it felt so hard to believe that anything good was still possible?

SPEAKER_00 13:36

And if so, what brought you back? Those years, 2019 and 2020, made me felt made me feel alone, like God had abandoned me. And I also lost faith in myself. I I wasn't in that moment, I didn't realize that you know I'm I'm a child of God. I'm not a religious person, but I do believe in God, and I believe we are all children of God. So I said, God abandoned me, but it was really me who had abandoned herself. So yes, my mother was very ill, my son was depressed, I was going through divorce, I was unemployed during COVID, the pandemic, and I felt really alone because when you're healing, well, in my in my case, my healing made me withdraw. So I looked for support, I did therapy, coaching, and and other things, but I kind of created this shelter or this guarded place for my son and I to heal together. And then my mother passed, and I felt like God had really abandoned us, even though I knew it was her time. Um, yeah, I felt that God had abandoned us. And it was living here in Spain, because I was living in Mexico at that time, when I moved to Spain, um, I started doing uh, how do you call it? Like it's called biodiscotification to identify my ancestor patterns and heal those patterns and loyalties. And then I felt that strong connection with that divinity. It was like all my lineage came to show me that God had always been with me. And it was during those dark, difficult times that I couldn't feel the presence because he was holding me. So I always saw him as something external of me, but I was actually integrating with my real self, my real divine self, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 15:26

That's really interesting what you said, because we can take, we can inherit traumas from our ancestors, but also, and not many people think about it, we get strength from our ancestors as well. So and what you said, I think it's one of the most honest things a person can say. That faith is not very easy, and there are moments of real darkness, and this is where actual life starts, because anyone can have faith when things go well, and it takes a different kind of person to do it again after after a loss, after losing everything, as you mentioned, after losing your mum, after losing your job, and after losing losing a certain identity. You said something in your form that really stayed with me. Um you described a moment where you had to make a choice between being loyal to your family, to your clan, to the people you have always tried to belong to, uh being loyal to yourself. Um that is not a small choice, and for many people that is the hardest choice of their life. Linia, now how did you find the courage to finally choose yourself?

SPEAKER_00 16:43

I think it was during that healing of my ancestors. Each one of them during that process gave me messages. Even though before that, when my son was diagnosed and his dad and I were in the decision of having him hospitalized or taking care of him at home, because my mind was still on operationalizing what I had to do to fix the problem. I was still in fixing mode. That's when you do when you're you're on survival mode. You start to fix things. You want things to make things right. But at that, at some point, it became very clear to me that, as I said, if I want to be there for my son, I have to be there for myself. So what can I do to take some burdens off my back? Because yeah, I was the rescuer, I was the provider, I supported my parents, I supported my siblings, and I said, I need and my husband. So I said, I need to take the weight that is non-essential out of my life. And that means making my parents be responsible for their lives. My siblings take care of themselves, and my husband take care of himself and his daughter. So that was the point where it was out of survival. I said, I only have energy right now to heal myself, to recover my health, and help my son through this dark moment because I know that he came here to do great things too. So it was tough. I actually haven't spoken with my dad since that time. So it's been six years, and it's okay. It's a huge price, but I finally understood that if I don't prioritize myself, no one is going to do it for me. So it's a tough lesson, but it's a very valuable one because the first relationship that I need to strengthen and build was the relationship with myself. And the first form of unconditional love is the love that I have towards myself. And it was an act of self-love and of sovereignty with myself.

SPEAKER_01 18:36

So once you made the choice to choose yourself, how did it feel? Was it a relief? Was the grief? How was the mixture at the same time?

SPEAKER_00 18:47

I would say it's a mixture because it's a process, right? And the process is never linear. You go through ups and downs, there are hills and valleys, you move forward, you go back, because that conditioning was very deeply rooted in me. Those beliefs, those identities, those patterns that I was repeated were deeply rooted inside me. So at the beginning, it like I was standing in my power, but then shame, guilt started to crawl in, um, especially as my family's realities, not having my support anymore, started to crumble. It was hard to see them struggling, but I said, it's it's them or it's me. You know, again, it's survival and it's it's them, my siblings, or my son. And my son is my responsibility. I chose to be a mother and I dreamt about him before he was even conceived. So I knew that there was a purpose for him and I. You know, there's something that we have to transit together. So there was a lot of emotional, different emotions there. But right now there's a sense of peace. People say, Well, are you happy now? I think we happiness is a choice, and we choose to look at things from a perspective, and we can be grateful and happy about it, or feel peace, experience peace. We can continue to let the guilt and the shame and the anger and the pain get the best of us.

SPEAKER_01 20:17

Oh yes. I think that the people who are listening to the recording will recognize this feeling. The feeling that we know what we need to do, but we are afraid of what it will cost us. And as you mentioned, you saw the struggles, but as you said, you had to make choices. Who is your immediate family and who needs them with the support the most? Um, yeah, that that requires really big courage. You build a career in a world that was not always kind to you. A male-dominated world. You experienced discrimination, you experienced harassment, and you were let go three times, and not because you were not good enough, but because you refused to compromise your values. Yeah. Most of people after the first time would have changed. They would they would become smaller, and they would they just would give up.

SPEAKER_00 21:17

Um, what kept you going? I built a career in human resources. I always hated the term resource, but it was what it was called that time. I always knew that people are at the center of everything. It doesn't matter how much development evolution we have, scientific evolution, industrial revolution we have, it's all about the people. People are the ones who make it possible. So I knew that I was there to transform that reality. Even though I I I moved because you adapt. As human beings, we adapt to our environments, and that's expected. So I I I had shifted between being that male role, that identity that I felt that. I had to perform with my having the North Star of my values guiding me. So I used my skills and my vision and my values to help me shape the kind of culture in those companies that I wanted to. And that's what I think if I reflect and say what kept me going, I think it was purpose. The purpose that I knew and I felt at my core that things had to change for humans to not be considered a resource like a computer or a building or a software. We are the capital that moves organizations. We are the capital that moves the world. And that's where I wanted people to be.

SPEAKER_01 22:43

Wow. I think that's something I I would I would like people to read here because in what you say, there's a vision of this story. And some people may come become bitter and they can give up because of the values and because of keeping the values costs too much. And keep you haven't done it. You kept going and you kept being who you are. And then especially now with AI technologies being implemented and overtake it to some extent. That's really, really important that people have the values and they keep going. And as an executive, as a coach, as a corporate trainer, that's that is that it requires resentless as well. What do you know now about people and about leadership that you could only that you could only learn through the experiences you went through? What what lessons did you get from that part?

SPEAKER_00 23:43

I think the lessons, one is that people are a product of their learning, their learning experiences, their upbringing, family and social conditioning. So we are a product of our environment, especially if we haven't done self-development work. And if we don't know ourselves, one of the missions that I have right now is to, because I went through that process of really knowing who I was out of, you know, the identities that I had bought and acquired and put on. It's like, who am I really? And especially why am I this way? So why as not to justify, but why as to understand? Because people, they're a product of their upbringing and learning, but they're also living in their own story. We are all living in our stories. And there's conflict because my story isn't like your story. And I think your story, and we think that our stories are reality and that they define us. So if I hear a story from you that I don't like because it confronts my story, I'm going to get into conflict with you because I need to defend who I am. So we're always trying to protect and to defend the story that we're living on. But it's just, it's that, they're stories. So awareness for me is key. As a leader, it's about having that awareness of who we are, what our strengths are, how is our ego conditioning our behavior? Um, and understand that life will eventually, as you said, confront you with some experiences. And it's going to repeat the experience until you identify the pattern, until you identify the root cause of your choosing this and hold your and hold you accountable for fixing it. And if you don't fix it, if you don't, you know, you don't go with courage, and remember that courage is not the absence of fear, it's the decisive action in spite of the fear. If you don't go with courage to confront those patterns, you're eventually going to repeat them until you cease to exist. And you're going to call it luck or bad luck or you know, whatever. But it's it's in our hands to create the realities that we want. And as leaders, we have to become conscious leaders of that so that we can really serve from the highest place that we can serve humanity, our teams, our families, whoever.

SPEAKER_01 26:11

Absolutely, especially when uh when uh people in high positions have higher that have more tools to operate and different techniques and programs to navigate with. I liked when you said that it's like we are the people who meet us are like mirror. And they just they're just a reflection of what we what we have. And it's easy to say, oh no, that person is toxic, just get rid of the person. You will not be able to change the reflection of the mirror if you vibrate in a certain way, if you have a certain pattern, if you have a certain belief. So I under I fully understand what you what I understand what you're saying, and that's I'm really amazed with this. Lillian, what would you say to the person who is listening to to this right now, who's in the middle of the own that dark moments, maybe somewhere in somewhere in isolation, us in silence, the person who's struggling and cannot see the way through yet. What would you what would you say to this person?

SPEAKER_00 27:17

I would say that this is not a random moment. You have chosen this or you have created this moment or this phase that feels like destruction, but it's actually deconstruction. You know, it's there to light a path for you of healing, of improvement, of confronting conversations you've never had, beliefs that you don't know. So it's it's there for you, it's happening for you and not to you. So do something with it. Have the courageous, connect with that courageous self that asks that powerful question of, okay, what is the lesson here? What am I intended to learn here? Because if you're willing to face that with courage, instead of denying it or victimizing yourself, if you're willing to do that, then you can reconnect with the lesson, with the learning, and with your true self. I think sometimes we forget who we are through social conditioning, upbringing, etc., we forget who we are. And then we have that sensation that we're broken. No, we're not broken, you know. We're whole. We're whole, we're perfect, we are enough as we are. And it's just maybe that dark moment is there to teach you and to guide you back to your true self, to your authentic self. It's an invitation to awaken.

SPEAKER_01 28:40

I ask every guest on Legacy Talks the same final question, and and I want to I would like you to take your time with it. Uh there's no rush. We all know we're going to die. Most of us just never stop to think about what we leave behind. When you are gone and the noise of daily life has settled, what do you want to remain? Um, not a career, not the titles, not not even the work you've done, just you, Linnean, as a woman, as a mother, as a human being. What is your legacy?

SPEAKER_00 29:17

I I now think of my legacy as just having the courage to live with integrity, guided by my own values, coming from a place of truth and and understanding that truth is not individual, it's universal or or collective truth. Um it comes from a place of love, living with more kindness and love that I used to. And when I look at my family or or my immediate circle, for me, my legacy would be not repeating the patterns that made our lives hard. So having, again, the courage to learn the lesson and free my son, the future generations of those limiting patterns. And as a as a human being, also, right? So it's about teaching people that there is a way because I've gone through it and bringing more clarity and light and love to the world, I guess, leaving it a better place than the one that I found.

SPEAKER_01 30:16

Wow, that's amazing. Thank you. Thank you very much, Lillian. Um, this is exactly why this podcast exists, because that answer deserves to be heard, and I believe that now it will be heard. Wow. Uh Lillian, thank you very much for being here with me. I've been sitting with uh everything you you shared today, and the thing that stays with me the most is that you're the woman who had every reason to to give up, every reason to become hard, bitter, close. Um you lost your safety and you lost you lost the life you had built. Yeah, it happened more than once. And instead of giving up, you opened up and you became an alchemist. It takes a courage to take the darkest materials, the heaviest ones, and turn them into something that shines. Like when we have when we have diamonds, when we remind ourselves how diamonds are created, they need pressure and they need to realize because it's a very complex process, and during the healing, this is what happens with us. Ladies and gents, if you are listening to this right now, and if you are in the middle of your own hard time, I want to hear. Uh I want you to to hear. Uh I want to hear your story um uh as well. And I would like you to learn from Linion's story that there's something better. It is there's always a way that the change is possible and it can be real, and that you are never alone. I think that's that I would like to I would like people to to remember. I would like you to remember as well. We are never alone and we are always guided. Um, and there's always a way to find a solution. And this is Legacy Talks. I am Kasia Kravitska, and thank you very, very much for your time today.

SPEAKER_00 32:14

Thank you. Thank you to your audience as well. It's been a pleasure.