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: it gives a session structure, it keeps the work moving, and it puts the client’s own thinking at the centre.
But GROW has a blind spot, and it sits underneath every single letter.
Three of the four letters depend on what the client can’t see
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 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.
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.
That’s not a coach failing. That’s the 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. That’s not scope creep. That’s the actual 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 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
There’s a subtler effect underneath the speed. People often arrive with goals that aren’t really theirs: goals that sound right but sit misaligned with their values, without the conscious awareness of the misalignment. Work at the level of the resistance behind goals and the goals themselves change. What clients then pursue is more aligned, more authentic, and carries a natural energy that the borrowed goal never had. They don’t just execute faster. They execute better, on truer targets.
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 a specific flavour of this worth naming separately, 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. 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 built by a trained coach, not adapted from a therapeutic tradition, so it’s structurally goal-oriented: 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. GROW 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
- HTC for coaches
- Subconscious sources of self-sabotage: how coaches can use HTC
- 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.