Experience & Impact™ Deep Dives

What do you do with a feeling about yourself that you can’t explain?

Before the assessments and the frameworks, there was a name.

Lysa Greer was born Blanche Coutu, named in grief by an eighteen-year-old mother who had just lost her own mother. Two days later, she became Lysa. Then Lysa Coulombe. Along the way, even the spelling of her name was inconsistent. Years later, freshly divorced and carrying a feeling she could only call fraudulency, she began uncovering the experiences beneath it.

In this first episode of the Identity Series, Lysa revisits that story through the lens of experience and impact: noticing the feeling, tracing the experiences that shaped it, separating what happened from what it meant to her, and holding loving intentions and real impact together without needing a villain.

Along the way: why you can know a fact about your life for years before understanding its impact, how impact builds through small, ordinary moments, and why names have always mattered.

Something to sit with: Think of something you carry that you've never been able to explain. Instead of asking what's wrong with you, consider asking: What might have happened that shaped how I experience myself?

Continue exploring: This episode is part of Experience & Impact™ Deep Dives, where we look beneath the surface of identity, relationships, business, and the experiences that shape us.

Read the original essay: My Name Was Not My Own

Explore more episodes, articles, and resources at ExperienceandImpact.com.

Welcome to Experience & Impact Deep Dives.

Every experience leaves an impact. Sometimes it's exactly the one we intended. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes we don't recognize it until much later.

We tend to see the impact first - it's the result, the part that shows up, the part that finally gets our attention. So that's where we go to work. But the impact didn't come from nowhere. Something led to it, and most of the time nobody goes back to look at that part.

That's what this series explores: my long-form writing, in my own voice, on business, work, identity, and the experiences underneath all of it.

Because whatever you're standing in right now didn't come from nowhere. And whatever comes next won't either. 

Learn more at experienceandimpact.com.