Method developed and refined since 2010, across 1,000+ clearance sessions. Training practitioners internationally.
Most of the healing and personal development world runs on faith. You do the work, you feel different, and you can’t point to anything. The practitioner believes it’s working, the client hopes it’s working, and the only instrument anyone brings to the question is a feeling on a good day. Nobody can actually measure change.
I’ve spent years refusing to accept that, and this piece explains what I do instead: how we measure change in my client work, where the numbers come from, what they’re for, and what their limits are. It’s also the origin story of the Ladder of Growth, because the measurement problem is exactly why that company exists.
Where the scale came from
In 2017, in my book Clear Your Head Trash, I mapped what I’d been observing in people as they cleared their head trash: a journey through distinct states, which I described as balls. Conker, Washing Ball, Bouncy Ball, Snooker Ball, Glitter Ball. Prickly and easily triggered at the bottom; flowing and magnetic at the top. That model came purely from watching clients change, and I called it the Head Trash Clearance journey.
Much later I discovered Dr David R. Hawkins’s work on the Map of Consciousness, and reading Power vs Force I recognised the state changes I’d already described. Here was a huge body of work with a numerical scale attached, and a method (muscle testing) for calibrating people on it. So I adopted the scale for measuring my own clients, and the ball journey I’d mapped in 2017 became what is now the Ladder of Growth model.
One housekeeping note on the numbers: the Hawkins estate objects to others using their calibration numbers, which strikes me as an odd position for a scale built to measure consciousness, but fine. So our unit has its own name: Moxie. I like it because it speaks to what the number represents: the life-force energy available to you. What you can spend on attention, on staying healthy, on thinking, on living life fully. For baseline measurements I cap the scale at 600, because in the context of this work, if your baseline is above 600 it isn’t Head Trash Clearance (HTC) you need; but a different kind of path altogether, outside what I do here at Head Trash. Ceilings can sit above 600, and that’s fine.
How I measure change: the protocol
When I start with a client, I take three readings: their baseline level of consciousness, their floor, and their ceiling. Baseline is where they generally live. Floor is where they drop to. Ceiling is what they can touch.
Then we re-read on a cadence matched to the programme: monthly on a three-or-four-month programme, weekly on a one-month intensive, because those clients are doing far more work between sessions and things shift very quickly.
The readings themselves are energetic testing: muscle testing and dowsing. This is the same skill I use constantly inside clearance sessions, because hidden emotional charge is energetic, and my dowser tells me when I’m near it. I’ve described it as my Ghostbusters meter: in the films they have a handheld device whose arms lift and flash when a ghost is close. Mine does that near charge. It’s how I know to keep digging, and nothing gets ticked off a clearance list until the charge is gone and I’m no longer getting a read. I’ve worked this way for over fifteen years, and I trust it implicitly.
The corroboration that surprised me least
Of course, there’s an obvious objection here: this is me doing an energetic read, and the client has to trust me, and buy into the idea of energetic testing. Fair enough; that’s a big leap for some people. Two things are worth knowing.
First, clients who can do their own energetic reads get results that corroborate mine, usually within plus or minus 10 points. On a scale of one to a thousand, that’s nothing.
Second, my favourite accidental blind test. A client of mine couldn’t find where he’d written down the previous month’s reading, and neither could I, so I simply re-read him on the spot. In the time it took me to do it, he found his note (but he didn’t tell me). The two numbers were identical. He sat there staring at it, and after that the question of whether to trust the readings was closed for him.
The boardroom problem, and why Ladder of Growth exists
Here’s the big problem with all this: you can’t take a dowser into a boardroom. An energetic read requires trust in how energy and fields work, and if someone doesn’t have that framework, the unit of measurement doesn’t stand up, no matter how well it corroborates. For this work to get the traction it deserves, the way we measure change had to become something anyone can take a reading with, not just people who can dowse.
That barrier is what led to the Ladder of Growth assessments. Over the years I had documented, on one enormous spreadsheet, how people observably change as they clear: how they conduct themselves in a board meeting, in their relationships, in going live on Facebook. How they see the world, what they think, how they react, what they get triggered by. When you move up a level on the ladder, you behave differently from how you behaved a level below, and that behaviour is identifiable. People can pinpoint it: yes, that’s how I respond to that; that’s what I do in that situation. Map those anchors across enough questions in a given area of life and the responses locate a person’s level without anyone needing to tune into anything. That’s what the assessments are: a psychometric tool in the same family as DISC, StrengthsFinder or VIA, applied to the architecture of the emotional operating system. The result is a reading that reveals a depth that is not found elsewhere.
How the two work together in practice
Here’s an example so you can get your head around it. A business owner starts my deepest programme, which is built around wound healing. She completes the business owner profile, which highlights where the hidden charge sits in her business self and therefore points at wounding, and the anxiety assessment, which pinpoints her big anxiety drivers. Alongside those, I take my energetic readings. Multiple lenses, one internal world: we can measure change, track it, and manage what’s happening as the work proceeds.
Which lens leads depends on the programme. On the deep wound-hunting work, energetic testing is the main protocol, because it’s how I track down the heaviest wounds. On an anxiety programme, the assessments are the client-facing measurement, and I use the energetic testing privately, as a practitioner tool: it helps me hunt behind the scenes and ask the right questions.
The assessments earn their place twice over, because they don’t just track change; they pinpoint where to start. A client completes their profile before we ever sit down, and instead of several sessions of exploratory questioning while material surfaces, the profile presents it. You read it, they read it, and you’re off to the races.
The same logic applies to practitioners. I train HTC practitioners to do energetic testing themselves, and it takes time to trust your own readings, which is entirely normal. Until that trust is built, the assessments fill the gap completely: a practitioner can measure change, track it and manage it from day one without relying on a skill they’re still developing.
What the numbers actually do for the client
Here’s the bit that surprised me. The numbers give people permission to trust their own change.
If you broke your ankle and spent two months on crutches, and the doctor looked at the x-ray and said you’re fine, you don’t need them, would you hand the crutches straight back? Most people say: “Can I hold on to them for a bit, just in case?”. Until you trust the foot, you keep the crutches. You lean a little less each day, you test it, and only when you trust it do you let them go.
Healing and inner work work the same way. Clients feel different, but they file it under “just a good day” and keep their crutches. When the reading lands, and it reflects exactly what they’ve been feeling, something changes: they stop waiting for the improvement to be revoked. The number is the x-ray. It grounds the growth and locks it in, and they start living from the new level instead of testing it nervously for months.
The honest limits of how we measure change
Let me deal with the objections head on, because practitioners evaluating this method deserve a straight answer.
“This is self-report.” The assessments are self-report, yes, anchored to observable behaviour rather than to how someone feels in the moment. And it’s worth being clear about the company that puts us in: SUD ratings, the GAD-7, and near enough every outcome measure used across therapy and personal development are self-report too. The difference is the anchoring and the model behind it, and I’d put our instrument against any of them.
“Who validated the scale?” The scale is Hawkins’s, sitting on his body of work, and you’ll find the lineage laid out on the Science page. The energetic readings are corroborated in the ways I’ve described: independent reads agreeing within ±10 points, and blind re-reads landing on the same number. That is not a randomised controlled trial, sure. It’s also considerably more than the nothing that most of this field measures with.
“It’s woo.” is something I might be accused of. The reading method is energetic, and I’ve stopped apologising for that: this is an energy-based modality, and measuring the thing you work with is the obvious thing to do. But you don’t have to take my dowser’s word for anything, because that’s exactly why the assessments exist. If the energetic layer isn’t for you, the behaviour-anchored psychometric layer stands on its own.
And the deepest validation isn’t the numbers at all. It’s that the numbers travel with the stories. If clients’ readings climbed while their lives stayed stuck, the data would be worthless. What actually happens is the reverse: the readings shift, and alongside them the anxiety resolves, the visibility work starts happening, the business gets built. Years of data, and the stories corroborate the numbers every time. That pairing is the evidence, and I’ll stand behind every number I’ve published.
Where to go next
- The Ladder of Growth
- The Science behind the method
- Case studies, with measurement data
- The Method overview
- The training pathway
If measurable change is what’s been missing from your practice, book a fit conversation.
About the author
Alexia Leachman is the creator of the Head Trash Clearance Method and founder of Ladder of Growth, the measurement framework behind every case study on this site. She has spent 16 years insisting that emotional work should be measurable, and built the instrument when nothing existing would do the job. Author of four books, host of the Fear Free Childbirth podcast (2M+ downloads), and trainer of HTC practitioners internationally. She publishes the limits of her own data alongside the results.