The story behind Ladder of Growth.

“Is it bloody working?”

That's the question we kept asking. Quietly at first, the way you ask difficult questions about your own work when you're not sure you want the answer. Then more and more openly as we realised there was no way of answering it.

Personal development is a sector where billions of pounds change hands every year. Coaching, therapy, courses, retreats, books, apps, supplements, programmes. People are doing the work, working hard at it, paying for it, hoping it's making a difference, and they have no way to know.

That's the gap LOG fills.

Alexia spent 16 years running Head Trash Clearance, an anxiety and emotional clearing system she developed through direct work with thousands of clients. She watched people change in front of her, week after week, year after year. People who arrived stuck and left clear. Patterns that had been running for decades, gone in months. The work was real. The change was real. What she didn't have was a way to measure it.

She'd describe what she'd seen and people would nod politely. Testimonials only carry so far. Without measurement, there's no difference between a system that genuinely works and one that just makes people feel temporarily better. Both produce nice quotes. Only one produces real change. And from the outside, you can't always tell which is which.

JJ's early career in journalism gave her a respect for the facts, for evidence. As she transitioned into coaching, training and wellbeing, she started to notice a pattern both within herself and in others. It was this: not all personal development programmes stuck. You could feel euphoric after a weekend retreat but come crashing down days later. Interventions might work well in the short term but didn't always last. There was no way of fully understanding why. No hard evidence.

She would hear colleagues in the corporate world complain about how hard it was to win contracts in a sector that required measurement and proof of ROI. So much evidence of improvement was subjective, based on "How do you feel?" When the question should be: "Is this moving the needle, and can we track it?"

In 2024, JJ met Alexia.

JJ had spent her whole life with tokophobia, a debilitating anxiety disorder around pregnancy and childbirth that's almost unknown outside the sparse clinical literature on it. She'd lived with it. She'd managed it. She'd built a successful career in spite of it. All without even knowing that was something she had. You don't know what you don't know.

Then she met Alexia, heard the word tokophobia for the first time, recognised that was her story, and cleared it. The change was profound. The difference between managing and resolving an anxiety disorder was huge. And the more JJ learned about Alexia's clearance work and measurement framework, the more convinced she became of its necessity and value.

We're not the people who would normally build a measurement company. We don't come from a quantitative psychology background. We don't have a research grant or institutional backing. We're two co-founders, no external investment, building this with what we know and what we've seen.

What we have is 16 years of direct observation of what changes when people do the inner work, and what stays stuck. What we have is decades of watching what gets taken seriously in this field and what doesn't. What we have is one founder who's lived through the difference between managing and resolving an anxiety disorder, and one founder who's helped thousands of others through the same difference. What we have is a model that came out of all of that, refined through thousands of practitioner hours, that maps how growth happens in stages we can name and measure.

In 2025 we co-founded Ascendrix Systems Limited and built Ladder of Growth.

We're still asking the question. Out loud. Every week on our podcast, Is It Bloody Working?