Method developed and refined since 2010 across 1,000+ clearance sessions.
This is the story of how Alex cleared business fears that were costing her £650k a year – and what happened to her revenue, her calibration, and her life when she did.
Six years ago a woman messaged me out of nowhere. She’d been following my work in the birth world – the fear clearance work, the tokophobia programmes. And she had a question.
That method you use for clearing fears around childbirth. Does it work on business fears?
Yes. Obviously yes. I’d been using it on my own business fears for years. That’s half the reason I continued to develop it.
Alex was the CEO and co-founder of a fast-growing tech company. Two children under three – one still breastfeeding. Seven members of staff. Husband as co-founder, supportive, present. By any external measure, things were working.
At the time we started working together her projected year-end revenue was £350k. But something wasn’t moving the way it should.
She came to me wanting marketing help. She knew my background – twenty years in consumer marketing, brand director, the whole corporate history. I said yes, I’ll do marketing with you. But only if we do Head Trash alongside it.
She agreed. We started.
Within weeks, she noticed something. The marketing conversations were fine. The Head Trash sessions were where things were actually moving. So we dropped the marketing. And we went deeper.
In this post:
The delegation problem
She had a to-do list that never got shorter.
Every time she delegated a task to a member of staff, it came back. Not completed – returned. Which meant she’d spent time explaining it, handed it over, and then had to do it herself anyway. The net result: more work than if she’d never delegated at all. So she’d stopped trusting the process, stopped handing things over, and was drowning in her own operational detail while trying to lead a company and raise two children under three.
When we got underneath that, we found a conflict.
She hated wasting time. Efficiency was a core value – almost a compulsion. And briefing someone properly, taking the time to explain a task thoroughly, felt like wasting time. So she’d give quick, incomplete briefings. The staff didn’t have what they needed. The work came back wrong.
Her hatred of wasting time was creating waste. The conflict was costing her more than it would have if she’d just spent the time in the first place.
We cleared it.
The next week she briefed a task properly. Took the time. Explained it fully. The work came back done.
And then something she didn’t expect: she went home and played Lego with her kids. Not efficiently. Not with one eye on her phone. Just – played. Because the compulsion to be efficient had lifted, and Lego was suddenly just Lego again, not time being wasted.
One session. One cleared conflict. Her to-do list, her delegation, her presence with her children – all of it shifted at once. The first of several cleared business fears that would compound over the months that followed.
The sales coach she couldn’t execute for
At the same time we were working together, Alex was enrolled in a programme with a high-profile sales coach. Expensive. Well-regarded. She understood the strategy completely.
She couldn’t do it.
Not because the strategy was wrong. Because every time she got into a sales conversation, something happened. She’d start discounting. Offering special prices before anyone had asked for them. Preemptively making herself cheaper, easier, less of a risk – before the prospect had even hinted they might say no.
When we looked at what was underneath that, it was rejection. She was abandoning herself before they got the chance to. Rejecting her own value before they could reject it for her. So she’d undercut her own prices to avoid the moment of potential no – and in doing so, was leaving significant margin on the table in every single deal.
We cleared it.
She stopped discounting. Started letting the value of the product speak without subsidising it. Margins went up. Deals got bigger. The sales coaching she’d been paying for suddenly became executable – not because the strategy had changed, but because the internal block that had been preventing her from acting on it was gone.
She said it herself: if it wasn’t for the work I was doing with Head Trash, I wouldn’t have been able to action any of the sales coaching. The emotional resistance was too strong.
The data
The calibration readings from this programme are modest by the standards of what I track now. I hadn’t yet developed the wound healing process at the depth I work at today – this was earlier in the methodology’s evolution, and we were doing a blend of business coaching and Head Trash work. The numbers reflect that.
The day she signed up: 206.
December 2020: 311.
Our last session: 315.
Start: 206. End: 315. That’s +109 points.
Hawkins says five points in a lifetime.
109 points is still more than twenty lifetimes of movement by that measure. But compared to the current dataset – clients moving 250, 300, 380 points – it looks modest.
And yet her projected year-end revenue went from £350k to £1m in the first three months of the second programme.
That’s the point I want to make with this story. You don’t need to move 300 points to transform a business. You need to move the right things. The delegation conflict. The sales discounting. The imposter in the CEO chair. Those specific cleared business fears – relatively targeted, relatively contained – created an outsized result.
What she said
When I asked her what the biggest thing was that she’d got from our work together, she didn’t give me a revenue number.
She said: You’ve activated this part of me – this power to create. I know now that I’m going to be able to create that revenue any year I want. You’ve given me the ability to turn that on whenever I need it.
I’ll be honest: I’d always resisted that kind of language. “Activating your power” sounded like something from a goddess retreat, and that’s not my world. But hearing it from a CEO of a tech company, in those words, about her own capacity to generate revenue – it landed differently. It’s not mystical. It’s accurate. Something that wasn’t available to her became available. She could feel it as a resource she now owned permanently.
That’s the real ROI of this work. Not the revenue jump in the year you do it. The permanent expansion of what you’re capable of.
The thing nobody in business coaching will tell you
The floor sets the ceiling.
Clear the right things, and the ceiling moves. Leave the foundations untouched, and eventually the ceiling comes back.
This is the bit that conventional business coaching skips. Strategy work, sales scripts, mindset reframes – all of it sits on top of an emotional operating system that’s been running in the background since long before any of it arrived. If the operating system is set to discount, defend, hedge, control, over-explain – the strategy can’t override it for long.
You can scaffold over the conflict. You can’t out-perform it.
Alex knew that.
She came back.
What cleared business fears unlocked
The work I did with Alex was an early version of what’s now The Ascent – my three-month deep clearing programme with measurement at every stage. Back then, I hadn’t yet built the Absolute Healing process at the depth I work at today, and I wasn’t tracking calibration data with the precision I do now.
If Alex had come to me today, the same business shifts would have moved deeper, faster. Not because she would have needed to. Because the methodology has moved. The clients I track now are moving 250, 300, 380 points – and we’re doing it with structural wound work, not just clearing surface conflicts.
What hasn’t changed: the principle. Clear what’s actually generating the limit, and the ceiling moves.
If Alex’s story resonates
If you’re reading this as a founder or leader thinking: I know there’s a ceiling I can’t seem to break through – the ceiling is rarely about strategy. It’s almost always sitting in the operating system underneath. And once you’ve cleared business fears that have been quietly costing you, the ceiling moves.
There are a few ways to take this further, depending on where you’re at:
- The Ascent (£5,777) – my three-month deep clearing programme with calibration measurement at every stage. The current version of what Alex did, with the depth and precision I’ve built since. Best fit if you want structural change with the data to prove it.
- The Leadership OS – a bespoke programme for leaders who want to clear their business fears and conflicts to unlock revenue and growth.
- The Emotional Architecture Scan (£1,650) – a one-off diagnostic. I map your internal architecture and tell you what’s holding the ceiling in place before you commit to anything bigger. The right place to start if you want clarity before depth.
- See all the ways to work with me – the full 1:1 menu, including The Foundation for the deepest work and One Thing if you want to clear a single specific block.
If you’re not sure where to start, let’s have a chat and find the best way forward.
By Alexia Leachman · Method developed and refined since 2010 across 1,000+ clearance sessions
About the author: Alexia Leachman is the creator of the Head Trash Clearance Method and founder of Ladder of Growth – the consciousness measurement framework that maps where someone is on the path of becoming. She’s worked with clients to raise their calibration 200+ points on the Hawkins scale, and built The Ascent, a three-month deep clearing programme for people who want measurable, structural change. More about Alexia
Read next: