Why Willpower Can't Fix a Visibility Block (And What Can)

Kristen Melville: Welcome to Invisible Upside. I'm your host Kristen Melville, a hypnotherapist, business coach and RTT practitioner from Sydney, Australia. This is a place for the midlife business owner who wants to harness the power of their subconscious mind to grow the business they've always dreamed of. Welcome, I'm so glad you're here. If you've ever bought the course, set the goal, told yourself this is the month I finally show up properly, and three weeks later you're right back where you started, quietly pulling back, hiding again. I want you to know something before we go any further. That's not about your discipline or work ethic or lack of strategy. Stick with me because today I'm going to explain exactly why. So welcome back. If this is your first time here, last week I told you the embarrassing truth about my first four years as a coach. More than 25 years in marketing, a master's degree in the subject, and I still hid my own coaching business for more than four years. I had half-built bridges everywhere, courses I never launched, a package I never told anyone about. If you missed that episode, I recommend you go back and listen to that one. And then come back here. It sets up everything I'm going to talk to you about today. So last week I talked about my years of staying invisible in business. Today I want to answer the question that might be on your mind after listening to that episode. So, what actually fixed it? I'd like to start with this. Let me guess a few things about you. You've bought marketing courses, maybe more than one, like me. You've set goals for being consistent with social media or other marketing activities. You might have written them down, maybe even told someone about those goals to help you stay accountable. You've tried the just post more advice, the just be braver advice, the fake it till you make it advice. And perhaps it worked for a couple of weeks. And then without really deciding to, you've pulled back again. If that's you, I need you to hear this clearly. That wasn't a failure of willpower. If this is a repeated pattern for you, it's likely there's something deeper at play. You've been trying to move against the tide of your own subconscious. And conscious tools, no matter how good they are, just don't have the power to overcome the strength of that subconscious pull. Last week I introduced the idea of Rowing the iceberg against its drift. So quick recap for anyone who missed that. Picture your subconscious mind as an iceberg, your conscious thoughts, the stuff you're actively aware of and trying to control, that's the small bit above the waterline, the 5%. The other 95% sits below the surface, and that 95%, your subconscious mind, is what's actually driving your day-to-day behaviour. So when you try to force change purely through willpower, discipline, more strategy, you're rowing hard on the surface while a current underneath is quietly pulling you in the other direction. So you can row yourself into exhaustion and barely move. That's just what happens when the tool that you're using can't reach where the problem actually lives. Now, to be fair to willpower. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that brute force never works. We can always make ourselves go against the grain. For some of us that might last a short while. For our real brave hearts, perhaps it's a longer term thing, you can stick with it. But regardless of how long you're able to stick with the behaviour, it's always going to feel crunchy and hard if you're working against your subconscious patterns. So the other angle people try if they realize they have a subconscious issue is repetition with the aim of retraining the subconscious. So when I talk about repetition, I'm talking things like affirmations, journaling, visualization. These techniques can be genuinely effective for creating change in the subconscious mind. But here's the catch that nobody really talks about. For those new thoughts to actually filter down into your subconscious mind and to become new and automatic behaviors, you typically need months of consistent repetition, sometimes years. And most people, myself included, don't stick with anything for that long or consistently enough to get the payoff. Life happens, motivation dips, you get busy, that habit. Quietly falls away before it's had the chance to actually rewire anything and make any change in your subconscious thoughts. So coming back to my own story, what did work for me? So the technique that worked for me is called rapid transformational therapy or RTT. I mentioned it briefly on last week's episode. It's a hypnotherapy-based method. That was developed by renowned therapist Marissa Peer, and it blends hypnotherapy, cognitive behavioural therapy, and neurolinguistic programming. Instead of trying to lay a new thinking on top of an old pattern and hoping it eventually sinks in, RTT goes underneath the pattern and works with it directly. Now I know how this might sound if you're the sceptical type. So let me talk you through what actually happens plainly because I think a lot of the hesitation people have comes from not knowing what's really involved and thinking it all might be a bit woo woo. I get it. So let me talk you through this in really plain terms. So under hypnosis, which is really just a state of deep relaxation and focus, it's certainly nothing like what you'd see in stage hypnosis, you're guided back by the RTT. Practitioner to the specific experiences that created the fear or belief that's currently running the show underneath the surface. Once we've found that route, the RTT practitioner helps you to reinterpret those experiences. So your mind gets to look at those old experiences with fresh eyes and recognize that the conclusions that it drew back then just aren't true anymore. From there, we interrupt. Pattern. Naming a fear or belief that's been limiting you and actively challenging it breaks its emotional grip. And then while your mind is still in that open receptive state of hypnosis, we install new thinking, fresh, supportive beliefs that give you a different default that you then begin to think and act from. So all of that happens in one session over about 90 minutes. But it doesn't stop when the session ends. For the first 24 to 72 hours, your subconscious mind gets busy laying down new pathways around the shift that is initiated during that session. And you get a personalized recording that's made from part of the 90-minute session, and you listen to that recording daily for 21 days to help embed those changes. Then three to four weeks later, we come back together for a follow-up coaching session so that the internal shift can actually be turned into a practical plan for your business. I want to address now a couple of things that I get asked quite a lot. One of the first questions that I often get asked by clients is: will I lose control? And the answer is no, absolutely not. You're not unconscious. As the client, you're always in control. You're not under anyone's power, and you can hear and respond the whole way through the session. It's not like what you see in this stage hypnosis where you know the practitioner will have people barking like dogs and doing all sorts of silly things. It just doesn't work that way. This is much closer to a deeply focused daydream. So it doesn't feel like an altered state of mind, it just feels like a relaxed one. So without getting too technical about it, under hypnosis, we're actually going into either the alpha or the theta brainwave state. So alpha is the creative state that you're in when you're really engrossed in something that's relaxing and deeply engaging. It's a very open state of mind. It's very different to the active thinking state of beta brainwaves where we spend much of our waking lives. Theta is a deeper state of relaxation again. And that's one that we transition through on our way to sleep. It's also highly creative, like Alpha, and it opens a bridge between the conscious and subconscious mind. So another question people often have about this process is, isn't this just too fast to actually work? And I get it. I get why it feels that way. We're conditioned to think that real change has to be slow. And hard or it doesn't count. A lot of us feel that way. But think about how most of these patterns got installed in the first place. Usually one moment or a handful of moments from childhood or from earlier in life. A single embarrassing experience, a one, you know, offhand comment from someone whose opinion really mattered to you that lands sort of at exactly the wrong time. In the early years of childhood, from around two to seven years old, we spend much of our time in the theta brainwave state. This means that for most of these years, our mind is acting like a subconscious storage device. We're just laying down, thinking that will drive our behaviors throughout life, and it's why these memories can have such a strong pull on us even if we don't remember them. From the ages of seven to twelve, we're living predominantly in the alpha brainwave state, where our creative imaginations are dominant. So it's no wonder that many of the memories that come up during these sessions are from these early experiences. Now it doesn't take years of repetition for these fears and beliefs to form, and it doesn't need years to take it out either, when you use the right method. I had a client recently, first time doing anything like this. I would say she was open, but fairly skeptical and a little nervous coming into the session. But despite her skepticism, she had a huge shift in the session. And in the days after her session, she was genuinely stunned. She was suddenly remembering names she hadn't been able to recall in ages, finding things that she'd lost, or remembering where she'd put things that she hadn't been able to find for months. She described in those first few days after the session feeling like she had superpowers. Now, of course, I'm not promising you that specific experience. Everyone experiences this differently. But I'm telling you because it's a good example of how quickly things can shift when you work at the level of the subconscious mind. So if you've tried the discipline route and the strategy route and something in you still quietly pulls back at exactly the moment it counts. It's not that you lacked discipline or weren't trying hard enough. Perhaps you were just using the wrong tool to solve the problem. So if you want a gentle first taste of this kind of work, I've put together a short visibility activation hypnosis recording. It's designed to create a shift in the pattern of playing small when it comes to your business visibility. You'll find the link to that in the show notes and it's completely free. And if this is resonating and you're curious what it might look like for your own business, there's a link to book a call with me to find out more about this methodology. So thanks for being here for episode two of Invisible Upside. Next time we're moving into a different pattern altogether. These last two episodes have been all about visibility in business. The next couple of episodes are going to be all around money. Undercharging, under-earning. and all the other money gremlins that we face as midlife business owners. I hope you'll join me for the next episode of Invisible Upside. Bye for now ⁓