A big week for me! this week. My app, launched. THANK GOD!!! I can't believe I did it. Here's a bit more about the whole thing... Five years ago someone offered me seven figures to build this And it went nowhere. They lost interest as VCs do, and my app brief sat there gathering digital dust. Until I discovered Claude Cowork. We're all bored of "ooh look what I built with AI " stories by now, so I won't go there. Using AI to write code is one thing, but this project was so much more than the code. The code turned out not to be the hard part The first proper hard problem was the content. Writing over 700 sets of change-scripts wasn't that much fun I have to admit. But I wanted to be able to provide bespoke ones on tap. AI, right? I've spent over 3 years training AI models to write out my clearance scripts. THREE. For some reason it really struggles with the methodology, and it took that long to get it to a place I'd put my name on. But I think I've finally cracked it. We shall see. That's what Milo is, my glorious Border Collie's twin, who's now in the app. Milo is a little AI bot that fetches your scripts on demand (he behaves a lot better than the real Milo!) And the week I decided to 'do security'. That ended up being weeks of work that took me way outside of my comfort zone. Then icons. ICONS!!! How long did I spend going through icons?? The Club includes 18 head trash/life themes that needed icons, as well as the usual app icons. And they all needed to sit well alongside each other. I think I may have overdosed on icons that month. The bit I'm really proud of though is the assessments. A lot of personal development apps (ALL?) don't show you if using them actually changes anything for you. Mine does. All the work I've done developing the @LadderofGrowth model, is inside the app. This means that you get to do two types of assessments; 1 - The Onboarding Assessment which gives you an in-depth read on where you're at when you join. This one tells you where to start and what to focus on inside. It's completely personalised. 2 - the Theme checkins - let's say you decide to tackle your control issues. Well, you start by doing the Control Checkin assessment. Then once you've done all the clearances, you do the assessment again - AND SEE HOW YOU'VE CHANGED! How bloody brilliant is that?? Getting these to work took a lot of brain power let me tell you! And testing. Oh the testing! So yes. That's what I've been hiding in my shed doing since February! Well, not the only thing, obvs.

People still look at me weird when I say I'm building tools that measure your internal architecture. They're like WTF is that? Well let me explain it like i would to a 5 year-old. 👇

The best business decision I've made isn't a strategy. It's having a co-founder who's done their inner work. What I love about my relationship with @jjstenhouse is that we're both Glitter Balls. If you know the Ladder of Growth, you'll know exactly what that means. If you don't (see 1st comment) - the short version is that we've both done so much inner work (that actually worked!) that we just don't get triggered by anything. We can be who we are, say what we need to say, without any of that background noise of ... will they take this the wrong way... will they react... will they go quiet and stew on it for three days. We can just say what needs to be said. And everything is just so easy going. That might sound like a small thing. It really isn't. What's also brilliant - and this is the bit that I love - is that we can call each other out on our crap... just like you might tell someone they have a stain on their top (who gets offended at that? No-one.). And we can actually do the healing on each other if something comes up that we can't do on ourselves. So if either of us hits a block/fear/sabotaging pattern, we can spot it, tune into it, and help each other move through it. If one of us needs the morning to work on something internally, that's just... fine. Completely fine. Because we both understand that the inner work IS the work. It's not a detour from it. It's always been a vision of mine to have a board/co-founder/team like this... from the early days of @head_trash when I was concocting my business vision. I've worked with people (as you have I'm sure) where so much of my energy was going into managing their potential internal responses. Constantly running this background calculation of... how do I say this... what if they think that... how do I position this so they don't take it the wrong way... And then dealing with the fallout when they did anyway. The stewing. The festering. The conversation you then have to have about the conversation you already had. It's EXHAUSTING. And it's such a waste. Of time, of energy, of focus that should be going into the actual work. None of that shows up with JJ. Not because we're some kind of perfect partnership - but because we've both worked on our shit. And that changes everything about how fast you can move and how much you can actually get done. People keep asking me how JJ and I are moving so fast with Ladder of Growth. And yes, AI is a big part of it - we're building things with Claude and Cowork that would have taken a team of ten a year ago. But honestly? The bigger factor is that we're not wading through each other's crap. We're not losing mornings to emotional fallout. We're not tiptoeing. We're just... building. That's not nothing. That's actually enormous. I think about my CEO and business owner clients and how much of their days get eaten by exactly this. Having to rejig how they say something, manage the emotional weather of the room, deal with a member of staff who derailed an entire meeting just by reacting - and the actual agenda item that needed doing didn't get done. I had a client tell me about exactly this recently. A manager whose emotional response to something fairly minor just swallowed the whole meeting whole. My client spent the rest of the day on the fallout instead of the work. That's not a performance problem. That's a head trash problem. And it's so common that most leaders just absorb it. Accept it as the price of having people. Build it into their mental load without ever quite naming it. It doesn't have to be like that. I'm aware not everyone gets to choose a co-founder who's a glitter ball. Or hire a full team of Snooker Balls. The world doesn't quite work like that yet. But the fact that it's possible - that working relationships can genuinely be this clean and this easy and this productive - feels worth saying out loud. Because most people don't know what they're missing until they've experienced it. I didn't. More on the Bouncy Balls, Snooker Balls and Glitter Balls in first comment - because if you're a leader dealing with the emotional weather of your team, there's a framework for that.