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Lived Impact Guide 02
Boundaries in Lived Experience Work.
Practical strategies for protecting your wellbeing when your work involves sharing personal experience, including how to say no without guilt.
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Practical scripts
Real language for real situations — how to say no, redirect extraction, and hold your line without burning bridges.
Written from experience
Not a clinical framework. Written by someone who has done this work and learned the hard way where the lines need to be.
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Lived Impact Guide
Boundaries in Lived Experience Work
Written for advocates, peer workers, and lived experience leaders who are tired of giving more than they can afford to give.
Contents
What's inside
Your Story Opened the Door — It Doesn't Have to Stay the Job
Your story may be what introduced you to this work. Your thinking, your systems knowledge, your leadership — that's what keeps you here. This chapter explores the shift from storyteller to expert.
You Are Allowed to Keep Parts of Your Story Private
Authenticity isn't measured by how much you disclose. You never owe anyone access to your trauma — not an audience, not an organisation, not a manager. This chapter gives you the language to hold that line.
Learning to Say No Without Feeling Guilty
Lived experience workers often become the person everyone asks. Every invitation feels like progress — until suddenly you're exhausted. Practical scripts and frameworks for protecting your capacity.
Your Trauma Is Not a Resource to Be Consumed
When systems become so focused on hearing lived experience that they begin consuming it. How to recognise extraction, name it, and redirect the conversation towards genuine expertise.
Protecting Yourself During Meetings
Not every trigger comes from telling your story. How to prepare, plan your own grounding strategy, and know that stepping out is a professional — not a personal — decision.
The Weight of Being "The Lived Experience Voice"
No one person represents everyone. You don't need to carry that burden. How to speak from your experience, acknowledge diversity, and invite other voices without losing yourself.
From Lived Experience to Lived Expertise
Experience asks what happened to you. Expertise asks what we can learn from it. This chapter marks the shift — and why it matters for your career and your wellbeing.
Building a Career, Not Just Surviving the Work
The sector needs people who are still here in ten years. Healthy, curious, growing, still willing to contribute. Long-term strategies for making this work sustainable.
The Boundaries Nobody Talks About
The personal questions after presentations. The colleagues who treat you like their therapist. The pressure to always appear recovered. The organisations that only call when they need your story. This chapter names them all.
Your wellbeing is not the price of admission. You are allowed to do this work and still protect yourself.
— Hayley Brown, Lived Impact
Audience
Who this is for
This guide is for you if...
You do lived experience work, paid or unpaid, and you're starting to feel the cost of it
You've been asked to share your story in ways that felt extractive, but didn't know how to say no
You want to stay in this work for the long term, not burn out in the first few years
You're a peer worker, advocate, or lived experience consultant navigating complex organisational dynamics
You believe your wellbeing matters, and you want practical tools to protect it
About the author
Hayley Brown
Hayley is a lived experience leader, consultant, and the founder of Lived Impact. She has worked across domestic and family violence, child protection, mental health, disability, and community services — both as a person with lived experience and as a systems-level strategist. She writes from both sides of the table.
Your wellbeing is not the price of admission.
Written by someone who has done this work, and learned the hard way where the lines need to be.
Secure checkout via Stripe. Instant online access after payment.
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This guide is licensed for individual use by the purchaser only. It may not be copied, forwarded, printed for others, shared with clients, or distributed within a team or organisation without a multi-use licence. View licence options →
USING THIS WITH CLIENTS OR TEAMS?
This guide is available for individual purchase, client-use licensing and organisational use.
Please do not purchase one copy and distribute it. For client packs, team access or program use, contact Lived Impact for licensing options.
View licensing optionsThis guide is licensed for individual use by the purchaser only.
You are welcome to use the ideas, prompts and reflection points in your own practice. However, the guide itself must not be copied, forwarded, uploaded, printed for others, shared with clients, or distributed across a team without an appropriate multi-user, client-use or organisational licence.
If you would like to use this guide with clients, groups, teams or programs, please contact Lived Impact for a multi-use licence. View licence options.
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