Experience Is the Seed; Practice Is the Growth - Nurturing True Peer Work
“Lived experience” seems to be popping up everywhere lately. Open any jobs board or skim a conference programme, read a LinkedIn post and you’ll likely trip over the phrase. When every other bio has this added in, the boundary between simply having a story and working with that story on purpose starts to blur. And once that line’s gone, peer roles are at risk of being diluted to just another feel good story, nice to have on the brochure, instead of the evidence‑based, life-changing support that people often are looking for. This dilutes its power and risks minimising the voices of those who truly understand what supports help, what systems work, and what causes harm.
5-minute read
“They’re doing a psychology degree; they really understand mental health challenges”
“They’ve been a counsellor, that makes them understand even more.”
“They’ve volunteered on a crisis line; they’ll bring transferable skills.”
If you work in mental‑health, Disability, or social‑care settings you’ve probably heard a hiring manager say some version of this. I certainly have, more times than I can count.
Yet here’s the uncomfortable truth:
Disciplines aren’t interchangeable: a peer worker with twenty years’ practice and two psychology degrees still wouldn’t be hired tomorrow as a Senior Psychologist, no employer would appoint someone solely on the strength of that “adjacent” experience, and nor should they. In the same way, adjacent professional experience alone shouldn’t qualify someone for a peer role.
When the Seed Is Planted but Never Cultivated
Last year, I worked on an evaluation of a peer‑support service. As a warm-up to conversations with staff, I opened each interview with a simple ice‑breaker: “How do you weave your lived experience into your day‑to‑day work?”
One worker blinked. “Sorry, what do you mean by lived experience?” Another nodded enthusiastically, then admitted she’d never set foot in a mental‑health ward or faced any mental health challenges herself, but had “a passion for helping.” Both had been hired as peer staff.
They weren’t at fault; they genuinely had no idea, and no one had explained that the foundation of their role was personal, reflective expertise, that this was the baseline credential for the position. The job description and interview had made reference to it but never placed any real emphasis on it. Someone (or a number of people) had treated “lived experience” as a vibe rather than a core competency. The result? A peer programme whose own team couldn’t define the term that anchors the discipline.
If staff in a peer programme can’t define the term, something went wrong long before the induction: the recruitment brief, the job posting, the hiring panel composition, or all of the above.
This story is not an outlier; it is the predictable outcome of conflating generic empathy and passing struggles for cultivated peer practice.
Lived Experience ≠ Lived‑Experience Practice
Almost everyone has some lived experience of hardship: break‑ups, illness, grief, burnout. It can even have knocked us sideways. That alone does not turn a person into a peer supporter. In peer contexts we mean something far more specific:
A life-altering condition or crisis: this can be, but not limited to, mental‑health, substance‑use, chronic illness, Disability.
Substantial and direct experience of being ‘in the system’: inpatient wards, community treatment teams, residential rehab, places where power imbalances are obvious and unavoidable.
First-hand encounters with coercion or ‘we know best’ fixes: and learned first‑hand how systems can disempower and harm as well as help.
Serious reflection that turns raw memories into useful and intentional disclosure: so it can be shared purposefully, and intentionally for the benefit of others, without re‑traumatising ourselves or the people we walk alongside.
Sharing that story in the service of someone else’s recovery: rather than dropping it in the room and hoping it helps.
Miss one or two and you’ve still got experience, but you don’t yet have practice. That reflection‑into‑action is what transforms experiences from having to practicing lived experience work. Supervisory or strategic peer roles should ideally demand this depth of personal history, because leading peers without having felt those power dynamics in your own body is like directing a movie you’ve never seen: you might hit the plot points, but you’ll miss the heart.
Without those ingredients, a role titled “peer” quickly becomes “general support with a good attitude.”
Spot the Difference: Two lenses, one frequent mix‑up
Both of these voices deserve airtime:
Peer Supporters / Lived‑experience workers draw on their own personal insight and stay accountable to the community that’s still living it. They typically sit outside or alongside mainstream services, translating personal insight into change efforts on purpose to support and advocate for others with similar journeys.
Professionals who also have lived experience such as nurses, psychologists, managers, who use their stories to enrich and deepen their clinical or professional duties. They typically work inside the system and are primarily accountable to the organisation they represent.
Both groups add value. The trouble comes when the second group is invited to speak as if they are the first. A nurse in uniform may have walked the patient path before, but when called on stage to speak, they stand for the hospital, not the person on ward in the next bed over. Clarity here, keeps the accountability clear, too.
Once we’ve separated real seeds from look‑alikes, the next question is how to help those seeds grow.
Peer Work: More Than a Vibe
Peer work emerged from civil‑rights movements and the insistence that “nothing about us without us.” Over time it’s developed its own toolkit and ways of working: mutuality instead of hierarchy, intentionality in disclosure - not blurted out, boundaries that flex but don’t snap, and a stubborn focus on hope even when everyone else is counting bed numbers. These aren’t traits you pick up by sitting near a peer supporter. They’re learned in reflective practice, during debriefs after messy shifts, in the awkward moment when a colleague says, “Hey, that share sounded a bit heavy, do you want to chat?”
What Gets Lost When Peer Roles Are Only “Adjacent”
Blind spots around power: If you’ve never had your shoelaces confiscated “for safety,” you might downplay how even small rules can echo restraint.
Misaligned data points: Without lived‑experience insight, success gets reduced to clinical throughput (“How many patients/clients did you see?”) on dashboards; real peer work keeps an eye on changes in self‑advocacy, community connection, and hope.
Paper promises: Well-meaning policies about “safe disclosure” rarely hold water unless designed by people who’ve depended on them.
Retention free‑fall: Peers hired for their stories and experiential insight but left without peer leadership (like-minded leadership that backs them) often burn out fast. The most common exit‑interview line from peers is, “I loved the work, I just couldn’t keep fighting the system alone.” Informed leadership turns that fight into collective problem‑solving rather than individual burnout.
The “Transferable Skills” Fallacy
Transferable skills like empathy, crisis line hours, counselling skills are all useful, they just aren’t sufficient. We’d never put an ICU nurse in charge of a maternity ward just because “both jobs involve patient care.” Peer work deserves the same respect for specialisation.
Recognising the limits of transferable skills brings us to the real task: cultivating the people whose lived experience forms the seed of peer practice.
So how do we grow the garden?
Start with clear soil. Entry‑level job adverts should name lived experience as a must‑have, not a nice extra. Set out the basics: mutuality, disclosure, hope, boundaries, and make sure the interview panel includes experienced peers who can spot the difference between genuine insight and well‑meaning interest.
Offer sunlight and water at the right times. As people grown in their roles, layer in narrative practice, co‑reflection groups, and mentored hours with senior peers. When someone is ready for team‑lead work, look for evidence they can supervise from a peer perspective, not just support: reflective‑practice logs, maybe, or examples of how they’ve handled a tricky boundary situation.
Pay for pruning and feed. Reflective supervision isn’t an indulgence; it’s protective gear. Fund it properly and tailor it to role level: group debriefs at the frontline, strategic coaching further up. This approach creates clear on‑ramps for new peers and structured growth toward senior, system‑shaping roles, protecting the integrity of peer practice while seeding the next generation of lived experience and peer leadership.
Measure the blossom, not just the headcount. Track outcomes that matter to each side. At the frontline level: hope, self‑advocacy, connection, at the leadership level: reduced coercive practices, policy shifts, staff retention. Hand those numbers and inisghts back to the peer community, healthy gardens thrive on sunlight. This keeps both pipelines accountable to the people they serve, not just organisational throughput.
A Quick Self‑Check for Hiring Panels
Before the interview room empties and everyone nods along to “they feel like a good fit,” pause for a moment. Peer roles hinge on more than warm rapport or generic helping skills. Use the questions below as a quick litmus test that separate genuine, practice‑ready peers from well‑intentioned professionals who may be better suited elsewhere:
Can the candidate name a moment they used personal experience purposefully, and the guardrails they put in place?
Do they distinguish between having a story and practising peer support?
Have they experienced significant power imbalances from the service-user side/inside secondary services? And have they reflected on them?
Do they reference recognised peer practice frameworks (e.g., Intentional Peer Support, CHIME)?
If the answer is largely “no,” you’re looking at an adjacent professional, probably a strong ally, but not a peer. They may be brilliant, just brilliant elsewhere.
The Call to Action
Experience is the seed; disciplined practice is the growth. Peer work isn’t an add‑on or a vibe. It’s a developed, values‑driven practice rooted in the wisdom of those who have navigated the very systems we aim to transform from the inside. Protecting the integrity of the term means keeping people with lived experience at the decsion making table, shaping policy, designing services, and guiding reform.
If services are to shift from clinical dominance to genuine recovery orientation, then the people who have lived those power imbalances must be allowed to lead the change.
So next time someone says, “They did crisis calls; so the skills transfer,” push back. Ask how that person plans to use their own story and personal experience, how they’ll stay accountable to the peer community, how they’ll protect hope when systems get heavy… and how they translate that into safer spaces for others. If they can’t answer, or the answer’s unclear, keep looking.
Because lived‑experience practice, not just lived experience, is what keeps peer support genuine, grounded and is the engine of authentic transformation.
At Habitus, we have developed and designed successful community programmes for various charities, health organisations and businesses both in the UK and internationally.
We are accomplished in peer research, co-production, action-based and anti-oppressive research and evaluation. We are experts in helping organisations to engage wider community participation in their projects so that their work is more inclusive and impactful. Through this approach we are dedicated to increasing lived experience leadership.
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