Their words
Their description.
The client’s own description of what was going on and what changed.
What Changed?
I have a problem with testimonials.
Don’t get me wrong. If somebody wants to tell the internet I’m bloody brilliant, I’m not going to stop them.
But “Alexia was brilliant” tells you bugger all about what changed.
The useful bit
So this is where I keep the useful bit.
The cases here look at what was happening before, what we could see or measure, what we worked on, what the person reported changing, and what happened in real life afterwards.
Where we have a reading before and later, you’ll see that too.
- Before
- What we saw
- What we worked on
- What changed
- What happened next
The labels
The labels matter.
I want to keep different kinds of evidence separate. A change happening after we worked together doesn’t automatically prove that I caused it. Where the evidence only supports an observation, that’s what I’ll call it.
Reading
The data.
Structured self-report assessment data, before and later.
Observed
What I saw.
Something I directly observed within the work.
Real world
What happened.
An outcome or behaviour outside the session that we have enough information to describe.
What I’m looking for
Patterns.
Not in the sense of turning three client stories into a universal law, but because repeated observations create better questions.
Individual client → observation → repeated observation → question → model → measurement → more observation.
That’s how a lot of my work has developed. I notice something, try to describe it properly, look for it again, build a way of measuring it where that makes sense, and then see whether the idea survives contact with more humans.
The cases
The cases.
Four in full. Each one keeps the kinds of evidence separate, so you can see what’s their words, what’s a reading, what I observed and what happened in real life.
Burnout ERSenior executiveUntetheredFounder
He wasn’t the person who left.
A senior consultant in burnout, measured before, at the end of our work, and two months back in the job. His prediction was cautious. The reality beat it.
11 of 12capacities moved up a stage
From untouchable to inner circle.
She’d done everything. An ancestral wound nobody had cleared, a lost job, and a hire in four days.
+386points in 13 months
The money was there the whole time.
Stuck in a life that wasn’t quite hers. Six weeks from decision to done, then a forest nobody had noticed.
+227points in 5 months
Revenue jumped $650k.
A tech CEO, a boomerang to-do list and a sales block. You don’t need to move 300 points. You need to move the right things.
+109points in 3 months
The readings
Six clients. Six datasets.
I’ve been tracking client readings for three years. Taken before we start, at regular intervals throughout, and after we finish. Average, floor and ceiling: how someone is operating day to day, how far they drop when things go wrong, and how high they can reach when everything’s working.
| Who | Start | End | Change | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Laila | 226 | 612 | +386 | 13 months |
| Hanna | 319 | 546 | +227 | 5 months |
| Kris | 205 | 451 | +246 | 2 months |
| Alex | 206 | 315 | +109 | 3 months |
| Rachel | 206 | 485 | +279 | 5 months |
| Charlie | 183 | 512 | +329 | 8 months |
Average movement: +263 points. Average time: 6 months.
And that’s just the average. The floor is where the real story lives. Across these six clients, the floor moved up by an average of 172 points. In practical terms, the worst days got far less extreme.
I use David Hawkins’ scale for these readings, alongside other measures. It isn’t proven the way a clinical measure is, but it helps me enormously, and it’s a big part of how I zero in on the things that matter.
More stories
Two more, in brief.
Kris
She knew her wounds well. She just couldn’t get rid of them.
Two decades of therapy. Still carrying a shame that turned out not to be hers. It was her birth mother’s, absorbed before she had words for it. Floor from 115 to 254. And by the end, a relationship she finally believed she could hold.
+246points in 2 months
Rachel
The floor that needed lifting.
Years of therapy. A glass child wound running quietly in the background for decades. Floor from 159 to 363. By the end she could talk about the hardest things in her life without being pulled under. The sadness was still there. The weight had gone.
+279points in 5 months