What Is RTT? A Plain-English Guide for Midlife Business Owners

Masters degree in marketing, a whole career spent helping other people promote their businesses, and I still stayed hidden. I had a handful of paid clients. I created courses I never launched, tools I only shared with my closest circle, a coaching package I put together and told nobody about.

If you read that post, you might have been nodding along, thinking of your own half-built bridges. And you might also have been wondering: okay, so what actually fixed it?

That's what this post is all about...

I want to be upfront about something. I didn't fix this with more discipline, setting bigger goals, finding an accountability partner, reading another book or joining another program on visibility and marketing.

I'd already tried all of that, in one form or another. I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on courses, coaches and programs over the years. Many of them genuinely excellent. But I didn't follow through properly on a single one.

I used to think that meant something about my work ethic or my ability to see something through.

It doesn't. I was just trying to solve a problem caused by a subconscious pattern using conscious tools, and conscious tools simply don't work if your subconscious mind is pulling against you.

The method that actually shifted it for me is called Rapid Transformational Therapy, or RTT.

It's a hypnotherapy-based technique developed by renowned therapist Marisa Peer, and it blends hypnotherapy, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). I trained in it myself, and I now use it with my clients to help them rewire the subconscious patterns running the show underneath their business.

I know how that paragraph might read if you're sceptical of anything that sounds like 'woo'. So let's go through it properly.

We often turn first to willpower to make change. If there aren't any subconscious fears or beliefs pulling against us, the conscious use of willpower is a powerful tool. But if we're trying to pull against the tide of the subconscious mind, it's going to be an exercise in frustration.

The other route many of us try if we realise something deeper is going on, is using repetition to affect our subconscious patterns. Affirmations, journaling, visualisation. Say the new thing to yourself often enough, write it down enough times, picture it enough times, and eventually your brain believes it.

This genuinely can work. I'm not dismissing it. But it comes with a catch: it takes months, sometimes years, of consistent repetition before those new thoughts filter down into the subconscious mind and start producing new, automatic behaviour.

And most of us don't stick with it for anywhere near long enough to get where we want to go. Life gets in the way. Motivation dips. The habit starts to drop off.

RTT works differently. Instead of trying to layer new thinking on top of an old pattern and waiting for it to eventually sink in, it goes underneath the pattern and addresses it at the root, usually in just a couple of sessions.

Think of it like this. If your subconscious mind is like an iceberg, your conscious thoughts are the small visible bit above the waterline. The other 95%, sitting below the surface, is what's actually driving your day-to-day behaviour. You can spend years rowing hard on the surface. If the current underneath is pulling the other way, you're rowing the iceberg against its drift. Exhausting, and you don't get anywhere.

RTT works with what's below the surface, not against it.

Here's the plain-English version, no 'woo' or mysticism required...

Under hypnosis (which is like a state of deep relaxation and focus) an RTT practitioner guides you back to the specific experiences earlier in your life that created the belief or pattern currently holding you back.

This is the part people are often most sceptical or wary of, so I'll say it directly: you are not unconscious, you are not under anyone's control, and you can hear and respond throughout. It's closer to a very focused daydream than anything you've seen in a stage hypnosis act.

Once we've found the root, you're guided to reinterpret it. Together we look at those earlier experiences with fresh eyes, and your mind recognises that the conclusion it drew back then, whatever it was, isn't true or useful anymore.

Then we interrupt the pattern. Once a limiting belief has been named and understood, we actively challenge it, which breaks its emotional grip and allows your subconscious mind to actually release it.

While you're still in that relaxed, highly receptive state, we install something new. New, supportive beliefs and suggestions go in while your mind is most open to them, giving you a new default to start thinking, feeling and acting from.

That whole process happens inside one 90-minute session.

The process doesn't stop when you leave the session. For the first 24 to 72 hours afterwards, your subconscious mind is actively laying down new neural pathways around the changes we've made. You'll get a personalised recording of part of your session, and you listen to that for 21 days to help embed the new beliefs.

Around three to four weeks later, we meet again for a follow-up coaching session. This is where we look at what's actually shifted, and build a simple, practical plan so the change translates into real action in your business, not just a nice feeling that fades.

Altogether, that's the full Seven Circles Circuit: Identify, Investigate, Interpret, Interrupt, Install, Integrate, Implement.

I hear this a lot, and it's a fair question. We're conditioned to believe that meaningful change has to be slow and effortful, or it doesn't count.

But think about how the beliefs got there in the first place. Most of our deepest patterns were formed in a single moment, or a handful of brief moments, usually in childhood. A single embarrassing experience. One offhand comment from someone whose opinion mattered to us.

It didn't take years of repetition to install the belief. It just took an emotionally charged moment landing at the right time, in the right conditions, for it to stick.

If the belief could be installed that fast, it can be uninstalled that fast too, when you're working with the right method in the right state.

One of my clients, who'd never done hypnotherapy before and was fairly sceptical going in, was genuinely stunned by what she noticed in the days afterward. She started remembering names she'd forgotten and hadn't been able to recall in ages. She found items she'd lost. She described a new feeling of simply 'knowing' things, a clarity she couldn't quite explain but could absolutely feel. That's not something I promise clients. It's just what can happen when something shifts at that level.

The shifts themselves often feel subtle to begin with. It's the kind of work where you look back in three, six, twelve months and barely recognise how you used to think and behave around something that used to trip you up constantly. Not magic. But it can genuinely feel that way.

If you've tried the discipline route, the strategy route, the 'just be braver' route, and something in you still resists at the exact moments that matter, I want you to understand that this is not a failure on your part. You were just using a conscious tool to try to shift something that was holding you back at a deeper level.

If you want a first, gentle way to start experiencing this kind of subconscious work for yourself, I've put together a free Visibility Activation hypnosis recording, designed to start shifting the pattern of playing small. You can download it here.

And if you're curious about whether this could help with what's happening in your own business and want to learn more, book an initial consultation with me.