Method developed and refined since 2010, across 1,000+ clearance sessions. Training practitioners internationally.
Most coaches know the GROW model. Goal, Reality, Options, Way forward. It’s one of the most widely used frameworks in coaching, and for good reason. The GROW model gives a session structure, it keeps the work moving, and it puts the client’s own thinking at the centre.
But the GROW model has a blind spot, and it sits underneath every single letter.
All four letters of the GROW model depend on what the client can’t see
Start with the Goal, because everything else is built on top of it. GROW takes the goal as given. The client names what they want, and the rest of the model gets to work on delivering it.
But the goal is self-reported, and a client can be entirely sincere about a goal that isn’t actually theirs. It might be somebody else’s goal with their name on it: a parent’s, a partner’s, an industry’s idea of what success looks like. It might be something they wanted at twenty-two and have quietly outgrown without noticing. It might simply sound good. And they won’t know, because nobody has ever asked the question at the level where the answer lives.
I worked with a coach who had spent over $30,000 training in everything going, and had persuaded her husband to remortgage the house to fund more of it. She wanted to leave her job and coach full time. Her coaching business was going nowhere. We spent about forty-five minutes clearing the self-sabotage around that goal until she hit a realisation that changed everything for her. A realisation that had eluded all previous efforts to help her to achieve her goal: she didn’t want to be paid for coaching. She didn’t want a coaching business at all. She loved her job, and what she actually wanted was to coach informally, on the side or within her role. Her story is here in full.
That goal had been in place for years, and every coach she worked with took it at face value, because that is what the GROW model tells you to do. Then they built Reality, Options and Way forward on top of it. All of that work was perfectly sound, and all of it pointed at a destination she didn’t want. Which is precisely why she never arrived: her system was never going to let her build a thing she didn’t want.
So the first letter is already carrying an assumption the model has no way to test.
Take Reality. The model asks the client to describe where they are now. But somebody’s reality depends on how they view the world. Shift what’s driving them beneath the surface and they suddenly see things they couldn’t see before: solutions that were always there but simply weren’t available to perceive. The reality a client reports isn’t an accurate reflection of reality. It’s reality as they currently see it, filtered through their fears, their conditioning, their wounding.
Options, same problem. The options a client can generate are limited by the resistance already in place. There are things they will quietly steer around, avenues they won’t look down, choices they’ll never put on the table because an avoidance pattern is running. And here’s the part that catches coaches out: the client doesn’t know the pattern is running. Neither, usually, does the coach. The brainstorm looks thorough. It isn’t. It’s a tour of the territory the client’s system has already approved.
And the Way forward, the option they commit to? Chosen by the same filtered system that produced the shortlist.
So a lot of what happens inside a coaching session is missing a huge part of the puzzle. Not because the coach lacks skill, but because the GROW model works with what the client can consciously report, and the strongest drivers of behaviour aren’t conscious. They’re locked in patterns and conditioning, driven by wounding, and none of it is immediately obvious to anyone in the room. And unfortunately the GROW model doesn’t help us with it.
The month you lose finding out
Watch how this plays out in practice.
The client commits to actions. Next session rolls around: “I didn’t get around to it.” The dog ate my homework. The coach lets it pass; everyone gets a bad fortnight. Another week rolls around, another check-in, another version of the same excuse, and now the coach is thinking: hang on, something’s going on here.
So now the real work starts. The coach starts probing values, running conscious calculations about what might be blocking the client, trying to reverse-engineer the resistance from its symptoms. By the time the block has even been named, a month of coaching time has gone. Not on progress. On detective work.
This isn’t a failure on the part of the coach, it’s just the GROW model doing exactly what it’s built to do: work at the level of conscious goals and conscious commitments, and discover the subconscious material the slow way, by watching it sabotage the plan.
The reversal: surface it in session one, and clear it
When Head Trash Clearance is combined with coaching, the sequence flips.
The minute a client names a goal, you can run a self-sabotage framework on that goal and surface the subconscious sources of self-sabotage straight away. In the first session. Everything that was going to quietly rear its head over the following weeks and months gets brought to the surface before it has the chance.
And this is the crucial distinction: not just surfaced. Cleared. Awareness of a block is not the removal of a block; any coach who has watched an insightful client stay stuck knows that. The clearance work removes the charge from the resistance itself, in the session where it’s found.
Often what surfaces is bigger than the goal on the table. A pattern showing up in this goal is usually showing up elsewhere in the client’s life too, so the clearance work frequently extends beyond the original frame. We could call that scope creep. But actually, it’s the true work revealing itself, weeks earlier than it otherwise would have.
The green screen client
A client came to me for help with visibility: her podcast, her marketing, getting a book out. She’d done her homework. She’d bought a green screen. She’d spent serious time researching microphones, cameras and backdrops, and she was pleased she’d found the best kit for her.
She’d never pressed record on any of it.
I was working with her as a business and marketing coach, and the conventional next step was obvious: content planning, strategy, a publishing schedule. Instead, we identified the block and did a clearance on it.
The day after our session, I opened Facebook and found her going live. She’d just finished a run. Still in her running gear, hair a mess, red-faced, still breathing heavily. Something had come to mind on the run, so she’d picked up her phone and gone live to talk about it. No green screen, no microphone, no camera, no backdrop.
Going live was never in the plan. It couldn’t have been in the plan, because her system was never going to allow it while the blocks were in place, so it never even made it onto the table as an option. That’s the Options problem in one image: the avenue didn’t exist for her until the resistance was gone. Twenty-four hours after the clearance, she was doing the thing, authentically, and it landed with her audience precisely because it was unpolished and true.
We never had the content-planning conversation. We didn’t need it. Much of coaching is scaffolding: structures built to help a client take action in spite of their resistance. Remove the resistance and the scaffolding becomes redundant. The client is off to the races, and your job changes from pushing action to keeping up with it.
Goals change too
The coach with the $30,000 of training is not a one-off. Work at the level of the resistance behind a goal and the goal itself often moves, and what the client then pursues carries a natural energy the borrowed version never had. Faster progress is the visible part. The bigger change is that they’re now heading somewhere they actually want to go.
Fears and doubts also create foggy thinking. Clear them and clients get a clarity they didn’t have before: they know exactly what they’re doing, the resistance is out of the equation, and they move.
Sometimes the resistance isn’t to the work. It’s to the destination.
There’s something else here that I need to shine a light on, because it catches experienced coaches out as often as new ones: sometimes a client isn’t afraid of the steps between here and the goal. They’re afraid of arriving.
Someone sets a goal to earn significantly more. On the surface, nothing’s wrong: it’s a sensible, well-reasoned target. Underneath, a part of them associates money with pressure, visibility, or the fear of losing people who knew them before. So the goal and the resistance to the goal sit in the same client, at the same time, and the coaching plan built around the goal keeps hitting a wall that has nothing to do with strategy.
Clear the resistance to the destination, not just the resistance to the process, and the whole thing stops fighting itself. The client isn’t more disciplined. They’re no longer working against their own goal.
What it changes for the coach
Incorporating clearance work changes how sessions run. My own rhythm shifted from 30, 45 or 60 minute sessions built around mapping and reviewing action, to 90 minute sessions where the clearance work happens live as we hit it. The trade is not close: the progress made in one of those 90 minute sessions is roughly what a month to six weeks of conventional coaching used to produce. The whole timeline shortens, which means clients get better results in less time, and you can price the work on the value of that compression rather than on hours in the chair.
This is also why the method behaves so naturally in coaching contexts. Head Trash Clearance was developed by a trained coach, not adapted from a therapeutic tradition, so it’s goal-oriented out of the box: the work always runs toward what the client is trying to do, not away into archaeology for its own sake.
Coaching frameworks aren’t wrong. The GROW model does its job. But it was built to work with what the client can see, and the material that decides whether the plan survives contact with Monday morning lives underneath that. Work with the blocks behind the goals, rather than the goals alone, and the face of the coaching changes: faster results, truer goals, and clients who no longer need to be scaffolded into action because nothing is holding them back.
Where to go next
- How the Head Trash Clearance method works
- The Self-Sabotage Clearance Framework
- HTC for coaches
- Subconscious sources of self-sabotage: how coaches can use HTC
- $30,000 chasing the wrong dream
- The training pathway
- Case studies
If you’re a coach and this maps onto what you’re seeing in your clients, book a fit conversation and we’ll look at whether HTC belongs in your practice.
About the author
Alexia Leachman trained as a coach before she built any of this, which is why the Head Trash Clearance Method is goal-oriented rather than adapted from a therapeutic tradition. Refined over 16 years and more than 1,000 clearance sessions, it gives coaches an operation for the layer that frameworks cannot reach. Author of four books, host of the Fear Free Childbirth podcast (2M+ downloads), and founder of Ladder of Growth. Her work begins where accountability runs out: clearing what was always going to stop the client.