Method developed and refined since 2010, across 1,000+ clearance sessions. Training practitioners internationally.
Let me just be clear about this first: coaching training gives you a powerful framework. The Coaching Academy, the ICF schools, the GROW-based curricula, they teach structure, questioning, contracting, the discipline of keeping the client’s agenda at the centre. I trained as a coach myself. I’m not arguing against coaching. This whole method was built by a coach.
But there are three things coaching training can’t give you, and between them they decide how far your client work can actually go.
1. A way of clearing the unconscious blocks between your client and their goal
Every tool coaching training hands you works in the conscious mind. Questioning, reflection, options, accountability, the whole kit. It’s brilliant equipment for the part of the client that can be asked and can answer.
The problem is that the things stopping them aren’t there.
Ask a client what’s in the way of their goal and they’ll name one thing. Maybe two. Time, money, confidence. Run the same goal through the Self-Sabotage Clearance Framework and what surfaces is typically somewhere between twenty and fifty subconscious blocks, averaging around thirty. Your client wasn’t holding out on you. They genuinely couldn’t see them, and neither could you, because conscious-mind tools only reach conscious-mind material.
So the coach ends up working the one obstacle the client could name while twenty-nine others are holding the whole thing in place. That’s what’s happening when a capable, motivated client keeps not doing the obvious next thing, and it’s why accountability sometimes just produces a more articulate version of the same stuckness.
The Self-Sabotage Clearance Framework, which sits inside the coaching training, goes at that head on. You take the goal the client brought you, run it through the framework, and the hidden blocks come out into the open where they can be dealt with. Then the core Head Trash Clearance method clears them: the resistance to the goal, the fears sitting behind it, the sabotage patterns that have quietly killed every previous attempt.
And here’s the part that matters most for a coach. None of this drags you off course. You are still working on the goal your client walked in with. You haven’t become their therapist, you haven’t detoured into their childhood, and you haven’t handed the session over to something else. You’ve simply removed what was always going to stop them, and carried on coaching. The framework is here if you want to see how it’s built.
2. A way through when you hit a wound
Dig under the surface of almost any coaching engagement and sooner or later you hit a wound. That’s because coaching work inevitably surfaces wounds. And the moment it does, you’re in territory coaches are traditionally trained to stay well clear of, because it looks like therapy. The standard move is to stop, refer out, and wait.
Here’s what that looks like in practice. A wellness practitioner came to me as a business client. His business ran off his Facebook page: good following, and every time he posted, business came in. Each buyer got an individually created PayPal link. He wanted to end the feast and famine, to be able to step away, to build a business where there wasn’t really one yet. The plan was obvious: website, pre-built packages, buy buttons, foundations. He needed to put things in place.
He joined one of my three-month business marketing programmes, where month one is head trash only; we don’t touch the business. And in month one, his chaotic workspace surfaced. Digging into it, out came the story: he grew up in a single-parent household where home was chaos. Piles of stuff everywhere, nothing ever put in its place. The only spot of order in his world was his own bedroom. There was a huge wound around this.
So when his business needed things put in place, he couldn’t go there. Not “found it difficult”. Couldn’t. The thinking, planning and considering that sits behind putting things in place was walled off. Every time he resolved to do it, he hit the wound and bounced straight off it. From the outside it looked like disorganisation, or procrastination, or a client who “wasn’t ready to scale”. It was none of those. It was a force field.
We healed that wound. Afterwards: website, packages, products, his full content and services hierarchy mapped, ten-month programmes on the table. He could suddenly do the thing he’d been bouncing off for years, because there was nothing left to bounce off.
Why “refer out” doesn’t solve this
The conventional answer says I should have sent him to a therapist at the moment the childhood material appeared. But walk that through. A therapist isn’t geared up for the place where wounding collides with business. They wouldn’t have known to dig there, because the wound only becomes visible in context: it’s when you watch a capable adult repeatedly fail to build a product page that the pattern points back to a childhood where nothing was ever in its place. The context lives with the coach.
The same thing appears everywhere once you can see it.
A CEO client came to me with visibility challenges. Underneath: a childhood as the glass child, the sibling who faded from view while another child absorbed all the attention. She had disappeared as a child; of course she had visibility challenges as a leader. To put the visibility work in place, we had to go back and heal that first. Bounce her between a business coach who can’t touch the wound and a therapist who doesn’t know where the wound is showing up, and she makes slow progress with both. Hold the two together and the work moves.
And it isn’t a business-coaching quirk. Relationship coaching, financial coaching, performance, running: every coaching domain has wounds playing a role in it, because wounds behave the same way everywhere. They trip you up on the path. You get up, walk forward, and trip over the same thing again. Until it’s cleared, you’re not getting anywhere, and clearing it needs the full context of how it’s tripping this person up. That context is exactly what the coach has and the referral loses.
What the coach needs, and what coaching training doesn’t provide, is the capability itself: the ability to recognise “hang on, we’ve hit a wound”, test for it, clear it, and get back to the plan. Done with the right method, that healing doesn’t mean trawling through the story, and it doesn’t mean tears. It’s calm, gentle, fast, and then you’re back to growing the business.
The narrative says trauma work has to be delicate, difficult and complex, reserved for a separate room. I’m not shy about saying the controversial part out loud, and I stand by it: it doesn’t. It can be gentle and powerful and quick. And there’s no reason that that capability can’t sit within coaching. It’s what our wound healing training teaches, and it’s why I think every coach should have it. Not to replace therapists; to stop pretending the wound their client just tripped over is someone else’s department.
What I’m not saying is that coaches should now because trauma specialists. But what I am saying is that if a wound is uncovered as part of a coaching, it shouldn’t automatically become off limits for that coaching engagement.
3. Permission to know your client’s world
The third gap is doctrinal. Classical coaching training holds that you don’t need to know anything about your client’s world: you needn’t have walked their path, because the framework works on anybody. You can coach blind.
In theory, great. But in practice, I don’t agree. And the reason is speed. To sense where a fear or wound might be showing, or where the subconscious patterns are likely to sit, you need an understanding of the psychology of the people you support. If you’ve done what they’ve done or experienced what they’ve experienced, or specialise in this particular niche, then you can spot the likely head trash and test for it directly: “you’ve probably got this going on, let’s check.” If it’s not there, you move on. But you had a starting point that the blind framework never gives you, and the more you work with one kind of client, the faster you get.
My tokophobia work runs like this. Much of it is actually coaching: I provide the self-led healing tools, the women do their clearance work in their own time, and I coach them along the path. The results come quickly because I know what they’re going through and what the likely blocks are. And now that I’ve been working with this population for over ten years I know the psychology well. So I test for the usual suspects from the outset instead of bumbling around waiting for each one to surface on its own.
What coaching training builds, plus the mechanism it lacks
None of this discards what coaching training builds. The structure, the contracting, the goal orientation: keep all of it. Head Trash Clearance slots underneath it as the mechanism the framework has been missing: surface the resistance behind the goal at the start, clear the wounds when the work trips over them, and use what you know about your clients to get there fast. The framework tells you where the client wants to go. The clearance work removes what was always going to stop them.
Where to go next
- The Self-Sabotage Clearance Framework
- What the GROW model can’t see
- HTC for coaches
- The Absolute Healing Process: the wound-level work
- The training pathway
- Case studies
If you’re a coach who keeps hitting the edge of what your training covers, 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 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.