There’s a moment I’ve encountered many times, and it always looks the same.
Someone has done real work. Serious, committed, often years of it. They’ve changed, they can feel it, and yet they’re frustrated. They want more.
When we speak they say some version of the same thing: I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Nothing’s moving anymore. I’m doing everything I’m supposed to be doing and I just feel stuck.
The assumption underneath that – the one they’ve usually already made before they’ve finished the sentence – is that they’re the problem. That they’re resistant, or not committed enough, or somehow doing it wrong.
And I understand why. When you’ve been doing the work and something stops working, the most available explanation is that something has gone wrong with you. It’s right there. It’s familiar. It fits.
But it’s often not true.
Here’s what is actually going on, and why it matters more than most practitioners are willing to say.
Methods have a range. Nobody tells you this.
Every intervention method – therapy, coaching, somatic work, mindset reframing, energy work, whatever it might be – has a range. A stretch of the development road that it’s genuinely built for, where it does brilliant and sometimes remarkable work. And a point at which it runs out of road.
The way I think about it: imagine travelling from London to Moscow. You can do it in stages. Drive to the coast, ferry to France, trains across Europe, changing at stations. Each vehicle gets you somewhere real. Each one covers ground. But the car doesn’t cross the Channel, and the train to Berlin doesn’t go on to Moscow. To keep moving, you need to change vehicles.
The method isn’t failing. You’ve just taken it as far as it goes. Now you need something different.
Traditional talking therapy is the example I come back to most often, because it’s the one most people have experience of. It can take you a significant distance. If you’re carrying things you’ve never examined, patterns you’ve never named, experiences you’ve never spoken out loud – it’s the right vehicle for a real and important stretch of the road. I have enormous respect for what good therapy does.
But it has a ceiling. There are places where it simply cannot take you. And the practitioners who are honest about this – who will tell you, with care and clarity, that you’ve taken this as far as it goes and here’s what you might need next – are, in my experience, rarer than they should be.
Most of the time, when you hit the ceiling, nobody names it as a ceiling. The work just continues. More sessions. More of the same. And you absorb the plateau back into the story about yourself.
The map most people don’t have
What would change this is knowing two things.
1. Where you actually are.
Not a felt sense, not a rough guess – a real picture of where your baseline sits, what you’re still carrying, what’s stable and what’s still reactive.
Most people navigate their own development without this. They know they’ve moved because they feel different. They know they’re stuck because they feel stuck. But feeling is not the same as knowing, and it’s a lot harder to make good decisions about what you need next when you’re working from feeling alone.
2. Can the method take you where you want to go?
In other words understanding what the method you’re using is actually capable of. Its range, relative to where you are right now.
If you’re already at Berlin, a method that’s excellent at getting people from London to Paris isn’t going to do much for you. That’s not a failing on anyone’s part. It’s just a mismatch between where you are and what the vehicle can do from here.
I built Ladder of Growth because I needed a way to show people this clearly. Not as my professional opinion – opinions are easy to dismiss, easy to argue with, easy to absorb into the ongoing story about yourself. But as data. Scored. Visible. Trackable over time.
When your scores shift, something has moved. When they plateau, you have information – not a reason to blame yourself, but a signal to ask whether the vehicle you’re in still has ground to cover, or whether it’s time to find a different one.
The question I’ve always wanted people to be able to answer – is this actually working? – deserves a real answer. Not a feeling. Not a guess. Actual data that shows you whether the needle is moving.
If you want to see where you are right now, the free Ladder of Growth assessment is the place to start: https://ladderofgrowth.io/my-ladder/