Her words · before
Control worked.
But the control itself was exhausting. She described thinking 20 moves ahead because it made her feel safe.
Human change · functioning · measurement
You’ve done a lot to change.
You’ve changed jobs. Relationships. Maybe where you live. Maybe what you do for a living. You’ve read the books, done the therapy, hired the coach, journalled your little heart out, understood your childhood and you’re brilliant at spotting your own patterns.
Or maybe you haven’t done all of that. Perhaps you’ve just been trying, for quite a long time, not to keep doing that thing.
Because if you’ve changed so much, why does the old you keep showing up?
I’m Alexia Leachman and this question (or versions of it) has occupied a slightly ridiculous amount of my life.
What actually changes a human?
How the hell would we know if it had?
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Got a business, idea, product or complicated Thing? Skip to My Brain on Your Thing →
The cost of functioning
I started noticing something.
Some of the people I work with are visibly struggling. Others absolutely aren’t.
They’re successful. Capable. Self-aware. They make difficult decisions, build companies, manage teams, earn good money, raise families, solve problems and generally give every appearance of having their shit together.
And they do.
But that’s not the interesting bit.
The interesting bit is how much it costs them internally to do it.
I had a client describe how she used to think 20 moves ahead because she needed to feel safe. Like a good chess player, she would run all those possibilities in her head. Functioning wasn’t the problem. But it was expensive.
What you seeWhat it costs
Brilliant in the meeting.Spends two days preparing for it.
Delegates loads.Except some things are delegated because she can’t face them.
Incredibly organised.Has organised an enormous amount of life around making sure certain things never happen.
Great in a crisis.Until something appears that can’t be controlled.
Functioning and functioning freely aren’t necessarily the same thing.
I’m less interested in whether someone can do The Thing than in what it costs them to do it.
Because there is only so much of you available to do The Things.
How much of you is available for the life you’ve built, or want to build?
Identity → operation
This is also why I’m suspicious of identity.
Not having one. That would make filling in forms pretty tricky indeed.
I mean the way we take repeated behaviours and reactions and then turn them into facts about who we are.
I’m anxious.I’m a control freak.I’m terrible with conflict.I’m a people pleaser.I can’t switch off.I’m just not very confident.
If it can change, was it ever you in the first place?
The way I see it, the same human can operate very differently depending on what life throws at them.
Old question
How do I fix myself?
Better question
What happens here? And could something else happen instead?
Availability
What if you don’t need adding to?
What if there’s already a massive amount of you in there, but most of it is being used just keeping you running?
Not how can we build a better human?
How much of the human who’s already there can actually become available?
If you no longer need 20 moves in your head to feel safe, that’s a lot of brain power you’ve just got back.
You don’t have to become superhuman. You just get to spend less of you keeping things going.
Having to spend less of yourself managing being human.
availableA concept illustration
ScanningManagingAnticipatingControllingRecoveringRehearsingAvoiding
Measurement
“It’s just not a thing anymore.”
And I’d think, YES!
But then the other part of my brain would pipe up.
- What does that mean?
- Was it the feeling?
- The behaviour?
- The amount of effort required?
- Did they gain another option?
- What happens six months later?
Was there an actual change in how they were functioning? Or did we change their state for a while?
These are not the same thing. One’s a new baseline, the other is a blip.
I wanted a bloody ruler.
The reading
So I started measuring.
These are the sorts of shapes I now look at. People who look pretty similar from the outside don’t necessarily look similar when you start looking at how they’re functioning on the inside.
Six real Business Owner Profile readings, anonymised. Self-reported, scored 1 to 5.
Business owner01
Same job. Different human. Different shape.
That’s what my assessments give me: an in-depth reading that looks at how you’re currently operating within a particular context.
One reading is a snapshot of a moment in time. The really interesting bit happens when we take another reading later on.
Is it bloody working?
That’s the question underneath almost everything I build.
Start with a reading →Work with me
So, what are we actually looking at?
There are a few ways to work with me, and the difference isn’t about how big your problem is.
It’s about the scope of the work.
Humans are annoyingly interconnected. We need to know where the fence is. This gives us a focus.
One thing
You
You + work
You + work + people
Give me the thing.
We can go deep. We just don’t go wide.
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Upgrade Your OS
Your life, your relationships with yourself and the world.
£10,000four months
Professional OS
Your professional world gives us another whole landscape.
£15,000four months
Leadership OS
Because some problems only exist because there are other humans in the room.
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These aren’t levels. Leadership OS isn’t the posh version. It’s a wider scope with more on the table.
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My Brain on Your Thing
Or maybe you’re not the Thing.
A business. An idea. A body of IP. A product. A positioning problem. A pivot. A pile of things you’ve built over 10 years that you know belong together somehow but currently resemble the contents of a kitchen drawer.
Excellent.
Give me the websites, the offers, the decks, the scribbles, the half-built thing, the 17 ideas, the thing you can’t explain and the thing you’re fairly sure is valuable but can’t quite see yet.
What is this? What’s the common strand? What belongs together? Where’s the value hiding? How does it scale? And what the hell could this become?
You bring me the mess. I’ll look for the shape.
My Brain on Your Thing · from £3,000
Tell me about your Thing →ERBurnout
There is one exception to all of this.
Sometimes we’re not having an interesting conversation about human functioning because someone has already hit the wall.
They can barely function.
This is acute, concentrated work for situations where somebody’s ability to function at work has significantly deteriorated. It can be commissioned privately or by an organisation, and it sits alongside appropriate medical or clinical care where that’s needed. It doesn’t replace it.
Burnout ER · from £25,000
What Changed?
Anyway. Back to the ruler.
Because once I started asking what changed?, testimonials stopped being enough for me.
Alexia was brilliant
tells you bugger all about what changed. I want to know what was different afterwards.
Her words · later
A third way.
She described another option appearing, and needing to work out the next move rather than all 20.
Reading · later
Retake due.
Her second Business Owner Profile reading goes here when it’s in. I’d rather leave the space empty than fill it with a testimonial dressed up as proof.
The rabbit hole
The annoying thing about answering questions is that you just get more.
For me, this all started with fear. My own.
- FearWhy did that work?Fear Free Childbirth
- Could this work elsewhere?Head Trash
- MeasurementBut what is actually changing?
- How would I know?Ladder of Growth
- What happens if we keep measuring?Human Growth Experiment
I don’t know the answers. That’s why I’m doing it.
About
I’m Alexia, by the way.
I probably should have done the proper About Me bit earlier, but you already know far more about what goes on in my head than my CV would have told you.
I spent about 20 years in marketing and business, working with brands, products, markets and companies. I became a business unit director, was involved in a management buyout, raised money, launched things, repositioned things and generally spent a lot of time looking at complicated commercial situations and trying to work out what was actually going on underneath them.
Then I accidentally turned that brain on human change.
Turns out I do much the same thing.
I look for the structure. What is this actually? What are we assuming? What belongs together? What doesn’t? Are these really five different problems, or is there one problem underneath?
Is it bloody working?
Start here