About Me

Hi, I’m Liana!

Welcome to my little corner of the internet 🙂

In this blog I hope to inspire you to explore our beautiful world and give you information that will allow you to explore all of the places that light me up!

Some quick facts about me:

  • I was born and raised in Seattle, WA. Here I found my love for the outdoors, I can thank my family for that 🙂
  • I currently live in Maui, HI with my boyfriend of 3.5 years
  • My favorite animal is a dolphin, my second favorite is a grey jay (alpine birds!)
  • I am a Libra/ Scorpio Cusp, an ENFJ an enneagram 3 and a manifesting generator (I love personality tests if you can’t tell)
  • I currently work full time as a content creator/ professional photographer
  • My favorite way to make money is through selling my prints! I love the idea of people having my art in their space
  • My all time favorite book I would recommend to everyone is You Are A Badass by Jen Sincer

 

 

 

My Story

“So….Who is Liana Haugaard?

Born and raised in Seattle, WA I was introduced to the outdoors and creating at a very early age. I remember leaning my head out the window during long road trips, gazing up at the mountains, and trying to replicate their beauty on my small sketch pad.

As I got older I tried to figure out who and what I wanted to be when I grew up. At eleven I decided I would become an Interior Designer. I had grown up watching my dad design products and hearing of my grandpa’s life as an architect and so it became obvious that I would follow in the family path and create for a living.

 

On To College

 

I went on to attend Washington State University where I got my Bachelors degree in Interior Design and a minor in Psychology. I loved design school. I loved the process of creating a vision in my mind and then turning it into physical reality. In my final year, I won third place in a national competition and felt as if I had found my calling. 

During the summers away from school, I began to find myself drawn to the mountains more and more. I discovered freedom there and became obsessed with finding the most beautiful hikes to go on. I brought with me my camera I had purchased years before.

Feeling frustrated that I could not capture the beauty I was seeing outdoors I turned to my father for help. Since he was into photography himself, we started going out and taking photos together, learning the basics of all of my different settings. Soon enough I began to convince my friends to do photo shoots with me and we would laugh as we dressed up in pretty outfits and posed in the woods.

In my final year of college, I embarked on a study abroad trip to Florence, Italy. I lived in the city for four months and traveled all over Europe. While I loved learning about design my attention was pulled ever more strongly to the outdoor locations I could adventure to and photograph. It is here in Florence that I started “Seeking The Now”. It began as a blog  (different than this one) but quickly morphed into a personal brand. Around the same time, I began to read and invest in personal growth and psychology books. Books that would soon shape my life.

 

Learning to Adult

 

After graduation, I quickly got a job at a large Architecture firm in downtown Seattle. It had been my goal the entire time throughout design school to land a job like this and I was ecstatic. That ecstasy slowly slipped away as I learned most of the job involved endless work on construction documents and paper documentation.

I felt blindsided, in school I had been told to go to the farthest extent of my imagination while now the most creative thing I did was create renderings of an office or pick out carpets. Add to the fact that I was not used to sitting at the same desk 8 hours a day and I began to yearn to travel and to escape the box I felt I had landed myself in.

During this year at my job, my photography and modeling began to take off. After being invited on a last-minute trip to Mt. Rainier with some established photographers in the area I was thrust into a world of freelance creators I didn’t even know existed. My weekends began to be filled with hiking trips with other photographers, modeling for friends I met through social media, and growing my Instagram account. I got to showcase at my first gallery and it slowly began to take over my life.

Now I had to face the fact that my life as an Interior Designer was nearing its expiration date. My motivation dwindled as I was assigned more and more paperwork. After a meeting with a mentor to ask how long I would have to work through this, I heard 10 years as the answer and promptly decided it was time for me to leave, and so I did, without so much as a plan.

The Aftermath

 

After a confusing first couple of months, I found myself back at a restaurant job, not unlike the ones I had used to get myself through college. I had plans for expanding my brand into a business but no way of knowing exactly how to execute. I was lost and so I turned to my books. I read through tons of books on self-development, positive psychology, and finding your path. These books brought me back to my days in Florence, days when I was traveling, writing, reading, and creating. Days when I felt the most alive, the most me.

I initially started “Seeking The Now” as a way to express myself. Now, I realized, I wanted to do something that allowed me a life of freedom, one that would contribute to others in a positive way and allow me to create from the greatest depths of my imagination. I decided to go back to what I had started years before in Florence, to give it another shot.

Life Now

 

It has now been 4 years since I started this blog in June of 2020. Four years of creating, photographing, traveling and growing.

In those four years since I began this journey I have gone trekking through the Andes Mountains, climbed mountains in Washington (Baker, Glacier, Shuksan, Stuart and more!) hiked through Northern Norway, explored cenotes in Mexico, road-tripped all over the United States and learned so much about myself as a person and a creator.

In July of 2022 I was finally able to go full time in content creation. I was essentially forced to make the decision between a 3 week brand trip through Norway or keeping my job as an Interior Designer (at a new firm I was working at). Of course, I chose Norway (duh!)

I moved to Maui, Hawaii in March of 2023 with my boyfriend of 3.5 years where I have been learning to free dive and surf. I have grown my audience online and learned how to take and edit videos- which is a new passion of mine!

I am still learning how to navigate this crazy world of running my own business, learning my value and figuring out how to be a full fledged adult, but I can say without any doubt in my mind that quitting my corporate job in 2019 and trusting myself to figure it out was one of the best decisions I have ever made.

There have been up’s and down’s in this journey but it is one that I wouldn’t trade for the world- having control over my own schedule, my own process and getting to work with other amazing creators has been a dream come true.

If you are here and are wondering if walking your own path is worth it, I say 100x over to just jump. You can always get another job (I did, multiple times on my journey!) you can always move back home and you can always change your mind- but if it’s something you want I believe you will figure it out, just like I did!

Thank you for being here- I hope these blog posts help you find new adventures that spark joy. If I inspire just one person to get out of their comfort zone and explore this stunning world then that will be more than enough for me 🙂

With lots of love, Liana.

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