Is It Bloody Working? Podcast

You do the work, you feel the shift and you walk back into your life, but something’s off. The people who were supposed to want the best for you are suddenly making life harder for you. They’re not always doing it on purpose. Sometimes it’s purely subconscious, but the effect is the same. You start to feel yourself being drawn back down into who you were This episode is about something that’s talk...

The personal development industry asks you to trust your practitioner. But what does the evidence say about whether that trust is warranted, and what it's based on? In this episode, JJ and Alexia dig into one of the industry's most uncomfortable findings - that practitioner experience doesn't reliably improve outcomes, and may slightly worsen them. They look at what research attributes to the prac...

This week JJ and Alexia take a detour from the season arc. A research article about water's impact on consciousness came to their attention and they couldn't wait to explore the concept. It begs the question this show always asks: Does water enable long-term change or just make you feel better in the short-term? The evidence for short-term benefits in certain contexts is reasonably solid. Research...

Does the method matter? There's research that says the specific approach accounts for only about one percent of the outcome, and neither host quite buys it. So they take the claim apart. What they land on is more interesting than a yes or a no. The method does matter, but it's one of five things that decide whether inner work moves someone. The other four: whether the practitioner understands the...

Most people approach personal development like embarking on a home renovation without doing a survey. They tidy up the ground floor, polish their goals and values, look at the known childhood stuff and then wonder why nothing holds. The answer is simple. You can’t build up if your foundations are shaky. In this episode, Alexia and JJ unpack the idea of internal emotional architecture. Why someone...

The word "subconscious" is doing too much work. Programming, stored trauma, nervous system memory, ancestral data, past lives, the energy you pick up in a room. We pile all of it into one vague term and then wonder why our change work doesn't land. This week JJ and Alexia interrogate what we really mean when we say "the subconscious says no." Resistance, Alexia argues, is its own force. Not the sa...

Most people who invest in their own development assume the desire to change is always the starting point. It isn’t. This episode looks at a distinction that sits underneath almost all of it - the difference between genuinely wanting to change and wanting to want to change. They’re not the same thing, and the gap between them explains a lot of the cases where inner work goes nowhere. JJ and Alexia...

The word consciousness has been ruined by two camps. The spiritual community made it mystical. The academic world made it inaccessible. Most people now hear the word and switch off. In this episode, JJ and Alexia reclaim it. Consciousness, properly understood, is the lens through which you experience everything. It shapes your outlook, your range of options, your capacity to hold load without brea...

Billions go into therapy, coaching, meditation and wellbeing every year, and almost nobody stops to ask the most basic question underneath it all. If it was working, what would that look like? JJ and Alexia open up the question at the heart of the show. Coping isn’t the same as growing. Functioning isn’t the same as thriving. Feeling better could reflect the sun coming out. So what does real chang...

The personal development industry is worth $4.5 trillion globally. Anxiety rates are rising. Mental health statistics are worsening. Suicide rates are going up. Something doesn’t add up. In this first episode, JJ and Alexia go after the question the industry consistently avoids: why does a sector built entirely around change have no standard for measuring whether change is happening? The Internati...

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 questio...