I'm an award-winning rapid transformational therapist and coach

Rosalyn Palmer: Award-winning Transformational Therapist and Coach. Clinical Hypnotherapist. Advanced Rapid Transformational Therapist. NLP Coach. Certified Weight-loss practitioner. Inspirational speaker. Emotional wellbeing expert broadcaster and columnist. Best-selling and award-winning author. Entrepreneur and maverick.

My story is your story. We can all change and learn from our stories.

Before I tell you my story, let me tell you why I think it’s worth sharing now. It is because it illustrates how a life can be reinvented and rejoiced time and time again if you are able to dig deep and change the meaning of each event. If you can remove the emotional pain and physical dis-ease that comes from being out of synch with yourself. And this often means going in to understand and change the deepest subconscious beliefs that steer you even when you are trying with all of your (conscious) might to go in a new direction. Indeed, having worked with and for some of the World’s leading thinkers and personal development coaches in the 90s I became frustrated and even depressed at not being able to ‘think’ or motivate myself out of the challenges I faced. I had to discover that permanent change needs addressing issues at both a conscious and subconscious level.

When Psychometrically tested, I come out as an unusual mix of right and left brain. My A-levels reveal much the same: English, French AND Economics. A degree in English Literature, a love of theatre, a career in PR AND also marketing and business and making millions. A sensible maverick. So, I may say that life and synchronicity led me to my present vocation. To my life’s purpose.

Life behind a mask.

My life doesn’t look anything like it did 30 years ago when, newly married, I was contemplating launching my own PR agency. It doesn’t look anything like it did 20 years ago when I was at the height of my PR success in London and on the front cover of business magazines but addicted and exhausted behind the mask. It doesn’t look anything like it did 10 years ago when I had come through cancer, buried my mother from it and was living in the same village as my post-stroke father and had remarried. It doesn’t look the same as it did five years ago when I was newly separated and contemplating ‘what next’ not realising that my life would change that year as I trained in transformational therapy. Many times were hard. Many were amazing. I’ve now learned from them, let go of the hurts, embraced the good and am compassionate and insightful towards those I help.

Power in vulnerability.

The telling of my story over the last few years felt strange at first for I had previously been the power behind the throne. The publicist hiding in the wings. The ghost-writer of other’s testimonies.

Yet after being interviewed by my local radio station about my life and therapy practice I had an immediate offer to be a presenter on the show, then a local newspaper columnist and then the publication of my own semi-autobiographical book. This received an award in its first week of publication and it still speaks to so many. It’s a story of how to triumph over adversity.

Strong trees do not grow with ease
My values were founded in my childhood. An early illness as a baby left me weak as a child so much time was spent at home, reading or creating stories and poems. I won many competitions for my writing and creativity. I also was an expert debater and highly driven due to being born as a grocer’s daughter. My early years were spent living above the shop in a run-down suburb of Nottingham. It was an Aladdin’s cave of food and hardware. My parents knew whose husband gambled his wages away. Women unable to feed their families would come into the shop and I’d see my mother pass them wax-wrapped packages. I remember the women clutching my mother’s hand and the ‘looks’ exchanged. I was taught to look out for the underdog and fight for the marginalised from as early as I can remember.

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A business success story at age 40

My early career was in PR. When I got my first PR job I didn’t even know what the term PR stood for. I soon discovered that it was about writing and speaking but primarily was about how to handle people and also how to turn up and be seen yourself. I wore an effective mask, acting as an extrovert when at heart I was deep thinking and introverted. This led to much self-doubt and yet I worked for THE PR agency of the 80s – Lynne Franks PR (in a world where breakfast with movie stars and launch events with The Rolling Stones were regular occurrences) and then launched my own PR agency – RPPR – aged 29. I built up that agency to win, eight years later, the coveted PR Week Award for Best Small UK Consultancy and a year after, I sold the company for a substantial profit.

Those nine years taught me a lot about business but even more about emotional wellbeing. I handled the PR for some of the world’s leading personal development experts including Tony Robbins, Robert Holden, Edward de Bono and Brandon Bays was exposed to their fascinating methodologies. I sought a greater understanding of human behaviour which led me to train in NLP with its founder Richard Bandler and in hypnosis with Paul McKenna. However, behind the mask and the mindset understanding, I was often exhausted and addicted. My fragile immune system was pushed to breaking point with stress and rich food and alcohol-filled days and the more successful I looked on the outside, the unhappier I was on the inside. I turned to a myriad of therapies – including psychotherapy, hypnotherapy and complementary treatments such as Ayurvedic medicine, acupuncture and kinesiology. Some worked well and others didn’t. What I discovered was that good health is a path we all have to navigate for ourselves.

Thinking that I had dodged a bullet

I thought I had got out with my health and sanity intact, as I retired at 40 to the Bahamas but found myself without status or identity as a mother to two children in a foreign land. My mental health suffered and my physical health had been compromised due to years of stress. After a difficult year, I was hit with an even bigger blow – my father in the UK had a stroke and then became severely depressed. A year later, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Subsequently my mother was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. Two hurricanes and a fractured marriage added to the stress.

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Life imploded and had to be reset

My life imploded and I returned to the UK as a single unemployed mother, completing my cancer treatment just in time to see my mother die of cancer. CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) saw me through the darkest of nights as I went through a divorce and started a new chapter in my life. I went from great business success, with over a million pounds in the bank, to life as a single, unemployed mother.

I reset my life. I became Insight & Innovation Director for a leading Training & Development company and then after a second marriage became Head of Marketing and Communications for International Charity The Leprosy Mission. I spent five years visiting, raising the profile of and funding some of the most marginalised and stigmatised people in the world. I was also a Non-Executive Director for two other charities that got the lives back for ex-offenders in the UK.

Yet during this time, my body – cured of the cancer, went into an early and aggressive menopause and I thought I was losing my mind. It put strain on my new marriage and I lost myself and his support. I know what years on Citalopram feels like when you are misdiagnosed as being depressed. I turned to therapies good and bad. To CBT and psychotherapy. To yoga and mindfulness. To withdrawal and self-loathing. I needed love, understanding and support especially as I lost both my parents and more of myself. Somehow, I got through it.

Synchronicity and finding my life’s purpose

As I considered my second divorce and hitting a glass ceiling in my marketing career, an email popped into my inbox inviting me to train in clinical hypnotherapy.

So I trained in it and added a Weight Loss practitioner course and then undertook NLP coaching (to refresh what I’d qualified in during the 90s when I worked with Richard Bandler, Tony Robbins and others). I was catapulted into a new world as a therapist and found that not only did I have the transferable skills, background, intelligence, understanding and passion to make this new career work but I also had the intuition and compassion born of years of finding my best self to be able to heal others.

For more details via in-depth interviews please go to the ‘In the media’ section of this website. Or read my chapters in the Ignite Book series or my book Reset! A Blueprint for A Better Life.

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Powerful stuff

“My stomach and the ibs (doesn’t deserve big letters) have been absolutely brilliant. No comparison. I have only had one day where I’ve felt bloated since our session and that was yesterday.

My dad and stepmother are over for Christmas and she is a very demanding person to have around, so I think that by yesterday I was getting stressed. But I did your recording twice and have managed to let go of some of the stress by telling myself this time will pass and to enjoy the time that I’m getting with my dad.

I have had a really good talk with my dad about my session with you and he deeply apologised for his part in it all. It was a very powerful discussion and, thanks to you, I was able to be calm and centred whilst still expressing how it had affected me.

Powerful stuff huh? I am listening to your recording daily and am so pleased with how things are going that I’m sending a huge hug right now..”

Rachel W, France