How Kath Clarke unstuck her agency, her leadership and her home life in a single 90-minute session.
One conversation. A ceiling removed. How Kath Clarke unstuck her agency, her leadership and her home life in a single 90-minute session.
the situation.
Kath Clarke runs a personal brand and marketing strategy agency and co-leads a women’s network. She had hit the same ceiling more than once and assumed the answer was more people, so she scaled her team. For a while it worked. Then, as clients grew, things began to break. Conversations turned repetitive; she was saying the same thing over and over with nothing landing, and every problem routed back to her. “If I’m the origin and the solution point on everything, how am I ever going to scale beyond where I’m at?”
the cost.
The strain wasn’t hers alone. A team member of nine years was being pushed into a project-manager role he had never wanted, because the work kept falling back to him. Kath spent whole days explaining, re-explaining and getting nowhere — "like talking to a brick wall." The frustration didn’t clock off; it followed her home into the time she wanted with her son. It was costing the business revenue, and costing her far more than that.
why ssc?
Kath is no stranger to development: mindset and business coaching, retreats, energy work, the full gamut. Two things drew her in this time — the promise of resolving it in one session, and a more unusual idea raised on the discovery call: that the thing holding her back might not be hers at all. As a self-described control freak, she didn’t believe it. But, good for her, she gave it a crack anyway. “I thought, this is rubbish — you can’t break through this in one session. Therapists sell you years of this stuff.”
the shift.
The whole session ran online. Working directly with Ben Wickham, Kath mapped out her system, laying the moving parts in front of her and surfacing what was really at play. It narrowed to a single root cause: a pattern of proving she was worthy. The turning point came when that pattern was named as not hers — it sat in her family system. Years of therapy, she realised, would never have reached it. Just bringing it to the surface lifted the weight. “That moment where we recognised the root cause was transformational in itself. I could have spoken to therapists for hours and never got to it.”
the ripple effect.
What followed moved fast, then kept unfolding for months. Almost immediately she felt lighter, and knots at work loosened:
On a family trip to Texas, long-standing tension eased — stepping back let her partner step up, and it reset a relationship that had been stuck.
With her business partner she simplified the model and raised the level of leadership.
She refined her ideal client and stopped trying to be everything to everyone.
She put her prices up — and a client dropped in at seven times her usual rate. Fewer clients, higher value, more room to breathe, and more of herself available at home. “I don’t have to prove I’m worthy anymore, because I just am. There’s not this neediness that comes along with me as a person anymore.”
the surprise.
The biggest surprise was the ripple that keeps going — and being able to trace each new shift back to that one session. One root cause, collapsed, resolved a whole cluster of symptoms she might otherwise have chased one by one. “Collapse the one problem and the symptoms solve themselves. You could get busy solving symptoms for years.” “Why wouldn’t you throw a bit of coin at solving the actual root cause? Spend the money implementing the new behaviours instead of Band-Aiding the crappy ones — the return is exponential.”
who is it for?
Kath’s take: it’s for anyone circling the same drain without realising it — sensing they have more capacity but unable to name what’s constricting them, especially after other approaches haven’t landed. And for teams: when the same problem recurs no matter who’s in the seat, the issue is rarely the person.
Kath Clarke — Personal Brand Strategist, Business Mentor & Keynote Speaker · kathclarke.com