There is a question I keep coming back to. I’ve become so preoccupied with it that it’s also the name of my podcast.
It is not that sophisticated and it’s definitely not academic. Nor does it require a new psychological theory.
It is just this:
Is it bloody working?
We have built an enormous industry around changing ourselves.
Therapy. Coaching. Healing. Personal development. Trauma work. Courses. Retreats. Journalling. Meditation. Breathwork. Somatic work. Hypnotherapy. CBT. EMDR. Shadow work. Nervous-system work. And an ever-expanding collection of proprietary methods, including my own.
People spend extraordinary amounts of time, money and emotional energy on their inner world.
But there is one question I don’t think we ask nearly enough:
What is actually different?
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Not what did you learn?
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Not what did you realise?
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Not how powerful was the session?
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Not did you have a breakthrough?
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Not do you understand your childhood better?
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Not even, necessarily, do you feel better today?
What changed?
Because if we’re going to call something change work, I think eventually something should probably change.
We have a definition problem before we have a measurement problem
I’ve spent much of my professional life in business, marketing, coaching and methodological design.
In those worlds, one of the first questions you ask is: what are we trying to achieve?
You define the objective. Then you choose what you’re going to do. Then you establish how you’ll know whether it worked.
This isn’t revolutionary thinking.
If I run a marketing campaign, I don’t decide afterwards what I hoped it might achieve.
If I’m trying to improve conversion, I establish the conversion rate before I start.
If I’m trying to increase retention, I measure retention.
If I’m trying to reduce something, I need to know how much of it existed in the first place.
And yet when it comes to our inner worlds, we seem remarkably comfortable cracking on without this clarity.
We start therapy.
We hire a coach.
We begin working with a practitioner.
We embark on a healing journey.
And often the objective is something magnificently vague like:
I want to work on myself.
What does that even mean? And, how will you know when you’ve done it?
What is the job?
This has become the first question in everything I’m developing through Method + Measure.
Before we discuss the method, define the bloody job. Because perhaps you don’t actually need change.
Perhaps you need support.
Perhaps you’re grieving and need someone to hold you for a bit.
Perhaps you’re lonely.
Perhaps you’re living in circumstances that are just awful and what needs changing isn’t you.
Perhaps you need to understand something that happened to you.
Perhaps you need somebody to witness your experience.
Perhaps you need practical skills.
All of those are legitimate. And if that’s the job, let’s say so. Because the problem begins when we don’t distinguish those things from change.
If I need to be heard and I leave feeling deeply heard, something valuable happened. The Thing worked.
If I wanted an automatic fear response to stop and I leave understanding it beautifully but still experiencing exactly the same automatic fear response, we have a different situation.
The insight may have been valuable. But did we do the job?
We need to be clear on the difference.
Inner work is really good at generating evidence of activity
This is where things get messy. Because inner work produces lots of things that feel like evidence of change.
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Insight.
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Language.
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Emotional release.
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A powerful session.
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A new story about ourselves.
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A sense of possibility.
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A breakthrough.
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An explanation.
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A profound conversation.
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A new framework.
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A journal full of revelations.
None of these things is worthless. Some may be part of the mechanism through which meaningful change occurs. But they’re not necessarily the same thing as the outcome.
I’ve met people who can explain themselves with extraordinary sophistication.
They know their attachment style.
Their trauma responses.
Their triggers.
Their wounds.
Their childhood dynamics.
Their nervous system.
They know exactly why they do what they do.
And they still do it.
At some point it becomes obvious that the real question we need to be asking is this:
Is knowing more about the problem actually changing the problem?
Sometimes the answer will be yes. Sometimes it won’t. But we have to ask!
Feeling better isn’t the same as functioning differently
This is the bit I’ve become slightly obsessed by. How do we know when somebody’s internal world has actually changed? And what would we expect to see externally if it had?
Because surely meaningful psychological change should eventually show up somewhere in how a person functions.
Perhaps they recover more quickly when something goes wrong.
Perhaps uncertainty doesn’t destabilise them in the same way.
Perhaps criticism no longer produces the same reaction.
Perhaps they stop avoiding something.
Perhaps their boundaries change.
Perhaps they make decisions differently.
Perhaps the situation that once produced an enormous emotional response now produces a much smaller one – or none.
Perhaps they have more capacity.
Perhaps they require less reassurance.
Perhaps they take action where previously they froze.
Perhaps they stop repeating a pattern they’ve understood for fifteen years.
Something should be different. This doesn’t mean every piece of inner work needs a spreadsheet attached to it. Human beings aren’t marketing funnels.
But the fact that psychological change is complex doesn’t mean we should abandon any attempt to measure it.
This question has changed my own work
I started out primarily interested in methods.
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How do we change anxiety?
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How do we change fear?
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How do we work with persistent emotional responses?
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How do we shift the stuff that somebody knows isn’t serving them but can’t simply think themselves out of?
Those questions eventually led to Head Trash Clearance and much of the work I’ve done over the last sixteen years. But developing methods created another problem.
How do I know whether they’re working?
And the more seriously I took that question, the bigger it became. Because it isn’t enough to ask whether one fear disappeared. If somebody is doing substantial inner work, I’d like to know whether something broader is happening.
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Is their relationship with uncertainty changing?
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Their sense of agency?
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Their reactivity?
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Their resilience?
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Their capacity?
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Their relationship with themselves and other people?
Are they actually functioning differently?
That question has informed an entirely new body of work in our company and, eventually, the development of the Ladder of Growth and our assessment work around human functioning.
And it’s also the question behind my podcast:
Is It Bloody Working? Is the Inner Work Working?
Because I’ve become fascinated – and increasingly frustrated – by just how much stuff we’re all doing to ourselves.
We’re therapied. Coached. Healed. Journalled. Breathworked. Meditated. Somatically regulated. Traumatised and de-traumatised. We’ve identified our attachment styles, found our inner children, worked on our nervous systems, learnt our triggers and unpacked our childhoods.
But is any of it bloody working?
That’s what I want to explore on the podcast. Not whether an intervention is fashionable. Not whether someone had an amazing experience doing it. Not whether a practitioner believes passionately in their modality.
I want to know:
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What were you trying to change?
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What did you do?
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And what is actually different now?
Those are the same questions driving Method + Measure. The podcast asks them through conversations, stories and lived experience.
Method + Measure gives me somewhere to pull them apart – to interrogate the methods, the mechanisms and, increasingly, the measurement.
And the Ladder gives us something else again. A way of taking a reading.
The Ladder doesn’t tell somebody who they are. It gives us a reading of how they’re functioning. Which means we can take another reading later.
Because growth isn’t what somebody says happened in an amazing session on Wednesday afternoon. Growth is what we can observe changing across readings over time.
And yes, my stuff has to survive this too
It would be very easy for Method + Measure to become a platform where I poke holes in everybody else’s methodologies while conveniently exempting my own.
Nope!
If I’m going to ask therapists what their intervention is supposed to change, I have to answer that about Clearance.
If I’m going to ask coaches how they know their clients are progressing, I have to answer it about my work.
If I’m sceptical about claims made for established modalities without adequate measurement, I don’t get to make grand claims for something I’ve developed without evidence either.
Nothing gets a free pass because I happen to believe in it.
That’s the bloody point.
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What do I think happened?
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What can I observe happened?
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What can I measure?
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What does the evidence allow me to claim?
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What am I merely hypothesising about the mechanism?
Those are different things. And I want to get much better at distinguishing between them.
Perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong question
A lot of psychological research and professional debate revolves around whether a particular therapy or modality “works”. But what does even mean?
Works for what?
For whom?
What was the starting state?
What was the intended outcome?
What exactly was done?
What changed?
How much?
How quickly?
Did it last?
Did the person simply experience fewer symptoms, or did something change in how they function?
And if nothing changed, at what point should we have known?
Because there’s an ethical dimension to this too.
Time matters.
Money matters.
Hope matters.
If somebody spends two years trying to change something using an intervention that isn’t changing it, the cost isn’t merely the money they spent. It’s two years in which they might have been doing something else.
For a woman whose body clock is ticking loudly, this matters more than you realise. And it’s why I’m so focussed on this. This is who I’ve been working with for over a decade.
Maybe the breakthrough isn’t another method
This is where my thinking has changed. For years, I was fascinated by methods.
I still am.
But I’m beginning to think one of the most important advances in psychological work might not be another intervention at all.
It might be better measurement. Because measurement changes the conversation.
It forces us to define what we’re trying to accomplish and it allows us to see whether movement is happening.
It gives the client information rather than asking them simply to “trust the process”.
It allows practitioners to learn.
It allows methods to improve.
It allows us to discover when something isn’t working.
And potentially, it allows us to stop confusing activity with progress. We’ve become very good at doing inner work.
I’d like us to become much better at knowing whether the inner work is working.
METHOD + MEASURE
THE JOB: What are we actually trying to change?
Before beginning any piece of inner work, can we describe the desired outcome clearly enough that we would recognise it if it happened?
THE METHOD: What are we doing that we believe will produce that outcome – and what is the proposed mechanism by which it should do so?
Not: what is the modality called?
What is it actually doing?
THE MEASURE: What would be different if it worked?
Can we observe it?
Can the person experience it?
Can we measure it?
Can we take another reading later and establish whether something actually moved?
And if the answer to all of those is no, there’s one more question worth asking: