The personal development industry is worth somewhere between $40 and $60 billion a year. The wellness industry is $4.5 trillion. And the most sophisticated measurement tool most practitioners use is asking someone how they feel on a scale of one to ten.

This is Episode 0 — the one where JJ Stenhouse and Alexia Leachman introduce themselves, introduce the show, and make the case for why the question Is it bloody working? has been largely, and conveniently, unanswered. Alexia comes from business and marketing, which made her suspicious the moment she crossed into coaching and therapy. JJ comes from broadcast journalism and energy work, and kept running into the same problem from the other direction. Between them, they’ve co-founded Ladder of Growth — a measurement framework built to answer the question that nobody in the personal development world seems to want to sit with. This is the starting point. What you’re working on, why you’re doing it, and whether you actually know if it’s helping.