If you’re trying to get a clear picture of what the 6-Layer Block Model actually is — not as a piece of jargon, but as a working map you could use on a Tuesday morning when something in your business has stalled again — the question itself tells me you’ve probably already collected a lot of frameworks that almost worked. You’ve read about limiting beliefs, mindset, identity, somatic healing, shadow, lineage, nervous system. Each one gave you something real. And yet the blocks keep coming back, sometimes in slightly different costumes, and you’re tired of being told the answer is “go deeper” without anyone showing you where deeper actually is. It’s not you. The problem is that most teaching gives you one layer at a time and never shows you how they sit on top of each other.
The short version
The 6-Layer Block Model is a map of where a block can live inside a person. It says that what looks like one stuck pattern — under-charging, hiding from visibility, dropping the ball right before launch, freezing on a sales call — is almost never sitting in just one place. It usually has roots in several layers at once, and the reason previous work didn’t fully resolve it is that you were treating the layer you could see while the deeper layers kept quietly running the show.
The six layers, working from the surface down toward the root, are: Behavioural, Narrative, Relational, Somatic, Ego, and Essence. Each one has its own logic, its own evidence, and its own kind of intervention. A block that’s only been worked at the behavioural level will keep coming back, because the somatic and relational layers underneath haven’t been touched.
What each layer actually holds
1. Behavioural. The visible stuff. What you do and don’t do. Skipping the follow-up email. Spending three hours on a logo instead of writing the sales page. Saying yes to the discount before the client even asks. This is the layer most business coaching lives at — habits, systems, accountability. It’s a real layer. But if you only work here, you’ll feel like you’re white-knuckling your way through a pattern that keeps reasserting itself the moment you stop watching.
2. Narrative. The story you tell yourself about what’s happening. “I’m not the kind of person who’s good at sales.” “Money is complicated in my family.” “People like me don’t get to charge that much.” These stories aren’t random — they were installed early, often before you had language for them, and they now act like operating instructions. The narrative layer is where most traditional mindset work lives.
3. Relational. Who you’re unconsciously in conversation with when you make a decision. A pricing block isn’t usually about price — it’s about an invisible audience: a parent who would have called this greedy, a sibling who’s struggling, a former community that would have rolled their eyes. Relational blocks show up as flinching at being seen by particular kinds of people, even when those people aren’t in the room. For conscious entrepreneurs with adverse childhood experiences, this layer is often louder than they realise.
4. Somatic. What your body does when success, money, or visibility gets close. The chest tightening before you press publish. The fog that descends right before a discovery call. The strange exhaustion that arrives the week a launch is supposed to open. The body is keeping you inside a range it learned, very young, was safe. The somatic layer is where a lot of inner work quietly stalls, because no amount of journalling reaches a nervous system that hasn’t been spoken to in its own language.
5. Ego. The identity structure you’ve built to stay coherent — the self-image, the roles, the way you’ve learned to be lovable, useful, or safe. The ego layer holds the deals you made early on: “I’ll be the helpful one.” “I’ll be the one who doesn’t need much.” “I’ll be the one who’s spiritually advanced.” These deals once kept you safe. Now they cap what you’ll allow yourself to receive.
6. Essence. Underneath all of it, the part of you that was never actually damaged — the original signal. Most blocks aren’t problems at the essence layer; they’re distortions in the layers above it that distort what essence is allowed to express. The essence layer is less something to fix and more something to clear a path back to.
Why the model has six layers and not three
Three-layer models (behaviour, belief, identity) are common, and they’re not wrong — they’re just incomplete for this audience. If you’ve already done substantial inner work and the block is still there, the missing pieces are almost always the relational and somatic layers. Conventional mindset work talks at the narrative layer in a voice the somatic layer can’t hear. Conventional somatic work releases sensation without touching the relational ghosts driving it. The six-layer version exists because trying to solve a six-layer problem with three-layer tools is one of the quietest, most expensive forms of stuck.
How it gets used in practice
The model isn’t a personality test. It’s a diagnostic. When something is stuck, you walk down the layers and ask, gently, where the charge actually lives. A pricing block might surface at the behavioural layer (you keep discounting), but the diagnostic might reveal the real weight is relational (an imagined parent) and somatic (a freeze response when the higher number gets typed). Once you know which layers are loaded, you know which kind of work the situation actually needs — and you stop spending another year journalling at a block that needed to be met in the body.
This is also why the model pairs naturally with the CLARITI framework for identity work and with the broader inner-game pillar. The six layers tell you where the block lives. CLARITI gives you a route through it.
If you want to sit with this
You don’t need to do anything with this map today. You might just notice, over the next week, which layer your most familiar block actually lives in — and which layer you’ve been working on instead. That gap is usually the most useful piece of information a person can get.
If you’d like to learn this map alongside other conscious entrepreneurs with adverse childhood experiences who are using it on real business blocks — pricing, visibility, launching, receiving — you can come and look around the community here. No pressure to stay. Just a door, if it’s useful.
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