Method developed and refined since 2010, across 1,000+ clearance sessions. Training practitioners internationally.
Ask someone what’s stopping them reaching their goal and they’ll usually name one thing. Maybe two. Time, money, confidence.
When I run a goal through the Self-Sabotage Clearance Framework, the typical count of subconscious blocks behind every goal is somewhere between 20 and 50. The average sits around 30.
Thirty distinct sources of subconscious self-sabotage around one goal, in an ordinary, capable, motivated person. Not because they’re a mess. Because that’s what goals are like: anything worth wanting has fears, conflicts, old decisions and avoidance patterns wrapped around it, and almost none of them are visible from the inside.
What the framework does
The Self-Sabotage Clearance Framework is part of the Head Trash Clearance method, and it’s the piece that works specifically on the goal. I’m deliberately not going to lay out the mechanics here; this is one of the frameworks we teach inside the training. But the core idea is very simple. You work on the goal. You identify the subconscious blocks behind the goal, every source of self-sabotage around it. You clear them. Then you review the goal. If it’s still the right goal and there’s nothing left in the way, the client just cracks on, and anything new that surfaces along the way gets handled as it comes up.
In practice I put two to two and a half hours aside for this. Sometimes it’s all done in an hour. Sometimes clearing everything that comes up takes two sessions. And sometimes the process identifies bigger patterns that extend into a larger piece of work, because a pattern wrapped around this goal is usually wrapped around other parts of life too.
What the subconscious blocks behind every goal are made of
The blocks mostly fall into two camps. Some are straightforward fears: fear of what success brings, fear of what people will think, fear of the rejection that comes with putting prices up. But most self-sabotage isn’t a single fear at all. It’s conflict: two values that can’t sit alongside each other and play nice. Family versus success. The desire for more money versus a belief about what rich people are like. When one value butts up against another, you hit resistance, and it works like braking and accelerating at the same time: heat, noise, no forward motion. In a person that shows up as flip-flopping, procrastination, and going all in on something before pulling straight back off it.
And these patterns don’t operate in silos. One client’s value conflict (efficiency fighting impatience fighting a hatred of wasted time) was sabotaging her ability to delegate: rushed briefs, work bouncing back to her, a growing conviction that delegation itself was a waste of time. We cleared the conflict and her briefs became clear, her team could run without her, and she got her time back. Then she noticed the same pattern had been running through playtime with her four-year-old, rushing through jigsaws to get to the Lego. Clear the pattern in one place and it releases everywhere it was operating. One business owner reported tripling her revenue in the six months after her self-sabotage cleared, a goal she’d been chasing for years. Her result, not a promise of yours.
Why front-loading changes everything
Most coaching and goal-oriented work meets resistance the slow way: the client commits, stalls, makes excuses, stalls again, and somewhere weeks down the line the coach starts investigating what’s really going on. The blocks reveal themselves one at a time, each one costing sessions.
The framework flips that. The subconscious blocks behind every goal are surfaced in advance, at the start, and cleared. The heavy lifting happens before the plan is even built, which is why it saves so much time: you’re not waiting for the client to stumble over each block in the wild, you’ve already removed them from the path. This is the reversal I keep pointing to across this work: the material arrives at the beginning, on purpose, instead of leaking out over months.
The really important bit: reviewing the goal
Clearing the sabotage does something else, something I consider an ethical obligation of goal work: it lets you find out whether the goal was ever the right one.
People regularly arrive with goals that aren’t really theirs. Goals that sound right but sit misaligned with their values, with no conscious awareness of the misalignment. Clear the noise around the goal and the truth of it becomes visible, sometimes brutally quickly.
One woman came to me having already spent around £30,000 on coach training, with more training being recommended to her. In 45 minutes with the framework we uncovered that she didn’t actually want to be a coach. She liked coaching, and she could quite happily do it inside the job she already had. She’d seen who knows how many coaches by that point, and nobody had spotted it; they were still taking her money to train her further toward a goal that was never hers.
That’s why the goal review sits inside the framework rather than being optional. Working this way means working with the client’s values, not shoehorning them along toward whatever they said in the first session. It has integrity, and it occasionally costs you revenue, which is rather the point.
Inside a coaching practice
Put this framework inside a coaching engagement and the shape of the work changes. The first session isn’t goal-mapping and action-planning built on top of unexamined resistance; it’s the clearing of that resistance, followed by a plan that can actually survive contact with the client’s real life. The client executes with clarity, on a goal that’s genuinely theirs, with nothing waiting in the shadows to trip them up in week four.
This is the framework we teach in the Head Trash coaching training, and it’s one of the reasons coaches who train in HTC find the pace of their client results changes so dramatically. I’ve walked through what this looks like in a real client session, including the kinds of blocks that typically come up, in this podcast episode. Have a listen:
Where to go next
- What the GROW model can’t see
- Subconscious sources of self-sabotage: how coaches can use HTC
- The Self-Sabotage Clearance Framework page
- How the Head Trash Clearance method works
- HTC for coaches
- The training pathway
Want this framework in your own practice? Book a fit conversation and we’ll look at the route in.
About the author
Alexia Leachman trained as a coach before she built any of this, which is why the Head Trash Clearance Method is structurally 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.