A CEO sat opposite me and shuddered.
I had just asked her how she felt about responsibility.
“Oh god,” she said. “The whole idea of having to give people things to do and having people reporting into me just sounds horrific. That’s why we’re just trying to keep the company small. Just me and my co-founder.”
I let it sit for a bit. Then I said: “You’re the CEO. Do you hear what you’re saying?”
She heard it.
Half an hour later – after we’d done a clearance on what was actually underneath that shudder – I asked her the same question again.
“It’s so exciting! I get to build shit! I can’t wait to get my teeth stuck in.”
Same person. Same question. Half an hour apart.
That distance – between shudder and I can’t wait to get my teeth stuck in – is what I’ve spent fifteen years measuring. Now I have a tool that measures it on day one.
Back up
Last week in Lost in Awareness-land I argued we don’t have maps. The natural next question lands: a map of what?
Of that.
What I just described.
One specific thread of how this CEO was meeting her own role – and meeting it badly, by the way, without knowing she was.
From the outside she was a founder building big things with big ambitions. From inside her own head, she was a founder who wanted to keep things small in case she needed to hire anyone.
Underneath that story was an actual internal architecture we could see, name, and shift in under an hour.
That’s the unit of measurement. I call it a mini growth journey.
What a mini growth journey actually is
A mini growth journey is one specific thread of how you currently meet a particular thing.
Responsibility is one. Loss of control is another. Being criticised is another. Being praised is another. (Yes, that one. You’d be surprised.) Confrontation. Asking for money. Being seen. Saying no. Being told no. Being wrong in public. Letting somebody down on purpose. The list runs on and on.
Each one has – bear with me, I haven’t found a better word – a range. At one end, the version of you that gets undone by this thing. At the other end, the version of you that meets it cleanly. Not “loves it.” Just – meets it. Doesn’t go offline. Doesn’t lose access to themselves. Handles it.
You can move from one end of that range to the other on a specific thread. My CEO did it in half an hour on responsibility. Not because she became a different person. Because the bit of her that was reacting to responsibility had cleared.
And then there’s the problem of how many you have
You have hundreds of these threads running through you. Probably thousands.
Every trigger you have is a mini growth journey waiting to be cleared.
Every avoidance pattern is one. Every recurring “I don’t know why this keeps happening to me” is one. Every relationship dynamic you’ve been puzzling over for fifteen years is one. They are not infinite. But they are numerous enough that you cannot hold them all in conscious view at the same time, and you are certainly not going to map them in your head.
You can, however, map the ones that matter.
Bundles
This is the bit that makes the whole thing useable.
You bundle the mini growth journeys by what’s actually relevant.
The bundle that matters for someone with anxiety is not the bundle that matters for someone trying to be a better founder. The bundle that matters for ADHD is not the bundle that matters for a therapist learning to hold a client. The bundle for perinatal fear and anxiety – which is my Perinatal Inner Readiness Profile – is twelve internal territories across three tiers, because that is what’s diagnostic for that journey.
We have built bundles for: anxiety, ADHD, business owners, therapists, perinatal fear and anxiety. More are coming.
Each bundle returns a structural picture. Not a single score. Not “yes you have anxiety” or “yes you are stressed.” A map of which threads are firing, which are settled, which are doing the most damage to the journey you’re actually on, and where the highest-leverage work is.
The Big Bong recognition moment
My CEO did not know she had a responsibility issue.
She is not unusual. I have had successful founders who didn’t know they had a control issue. Therapists running thriving practices who didn’t know they had a being-seen issue. People who’d been in therapy for years and never had anyone name the actual driver underneath the thing they kept presenting.
Smart, capable, accomplished people, doing the next thing on the list, with zero visibility on the layer underneath. And then they see it written down – in language more precise than the language they’ve been using about themselves – and the response is the one I’ve seen for fifteen years:
“Oh. Yes. Of course.”
Recognition. Not surprise. The chord-of-truth bong landing in the chest.
After that, the work moves fast. Because they are no longer working on a vague sense that something is off. They are working on a specific named thing.
The CEO went from shudder to I get to build shit in half an hour because by then we knew exactly what we were clearing. We weren’t sitting around trying to “understand her relationship with leadership.” We had the thread. We pulled it.
What this is not
I’ve got to be clear here because people get confused. This is not skill measurement. It is not knowledge measurement, and it’s not competency measurement. This is not about how good you are at something.
It is measurement of your internal response to the world. The layer everything else runs on top of.
Your skill, your knowledge, your strategy, your therapy, your meditation – all of it runs through this layer.
Two founders with identical strategies and identical credentials will produce wildly different outcomes depending on what’s happening here. Same for two therapists. Same for two people trying to clear their anxiety. Same for two people walking into the same birth room.
Nobody has had a tool for this layer. Now we do.
That’s what Ladder of Growth measures. The threads, the bundles, the actual internal architecture – finally visible.
That’s the map.
Alexia Leachman is a founder, methodologist, and the creator of Head Trash Clearance. She is co-founder of Ladder of Growth, the measurement engine for personal development, and host of Is It Bloody Working? with JJ Stenhouse.
This is her personal Substack. The ranty one.