Melanie du Plessis — RTT Practitioner & Kids Life Coach | Geelong, Surfcoast & Online Australia

Who I Am:

My name is Melanie du Plessis. I’m a certified Rapid Transformational Therapy® (RTT) Practitioner and Clinical Hypnotherapist, a certified Kids and Teens Life Coach, and an Ashati Reiki Master. I work with children, teenagers, and the parents who love them — helping families move from exhaustion, worry, and overwhelm into calm, connection, and lasting change.

I’m based in Mount Duneed, Geelong, Victoria, and I work with families in person and online via Zoom, making my support accessible to families across Australia and around the world.

Over the past five years, I have worked with numerous families, trained over 70 students in child and teen coaching, delivered talks at schools, and spoken at the Calm Minds Healed Hearts public symposium. I am an assistant trainer at the Helping Kids Academy (UK) and a proud member of the International Institute for Complementary Therapists (IICT).

My Story:

My journey into this work didn’t begin in a classroom. It began with a decision to stop playing it safe.

In 2019, I made a deliberate pivot — away from the career I’d built, toward the work I was born to do. I began my training in hypnotherapy and RTT, driven by a deep knowing that helping people heal at the root was where I was meant to be. That same year, my son was born, and something shifted in me even further.

As he grew, I watched him struggle with social anxiety and confidence. I didn’t just want strategies. I wanted to understand what was happening beneath the surface, at the level where real change lives. So I kept studying. I deepened my training specifically in child and teen psychology, nervous system regulation, and subconscious reprogramming.

The work I did with my son changed him. It also changed me.

I began working with other children experiencing the same struggles — anxiety, school refusal, emotional dysregulation, a desperate need to belong. And as I sat with family after family, something became clear: the children were not struggling in isolation. Woven through almost every case was a thread of inherited patterns, emotional responses, nervous system states, and unconscious beliefs passed quietly from one generation to the next.

That’s when my work expanded to include parents alongside their children. Because when a family heals together, the change goes deeper and lasts longer. That is the heart of everything I do at The Happy Thoughts Co.

What I Believe:

I believe that every child is born whole. That anxiety, dysregulation, and emotional struggle are not character flaws, they are signals from a nervous system that hasn’t yet found its safety.

I believe that it is never too late, for a child, a teenager, or a parent, to rewrite the story the subconscious mind has been running on.

And I believe, with everything I have, that the children and teens I work with are not broken. They are brilliant, sensitive, deeply feeling humans who simply need someone to help them find their way back to themselves, so they can grow into the confident, grounded adults they are absolutely meant to be.

Qualifications & Credentials:

• Rapid Transformational Therapy® (RTT) Practitioner & Clinical Hypnotherapist (RTTP Cl. Hyp) — trained directly under Marisa Peer
• Certified Kids and Teens Life Coach — Helping Kids Academy (UK)
• Ashati Reiki Master — energy healing practitioner
• Mental Health First Aider
• Member, International Institute for Complementary Therapists (IICT)
• Assistant Trainer, Helping Kids Academy (UK) — training the next generation of child coaches
• Speaker — school talks and Calm Minds Healed Hearts public symposium
• Featured in The Natural Parent Magazine

How I Work:

I combine the most effective elements of Rapid Transformational Therapy, hypnotherapy, NLP, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, psychotherapy, and energy healing to create sessions that work at both the conscious and subconscious level. This integrated approach means we are not just teaching coping strategies, we are finding and resolving the root cause of the problem, often within one to three sessions.

For children and teenagers, sessions are always age-appropriate, child-led, and delivered in a warm, safe, non-clinical environment. I work with children from age 5 through to adulthood, in person at my Mount Duneed, Geelong practice or online via Zoom.

Neurodiversity is welcomed and respected here. I understand that children who think, feel, and process differently are not problems to be fixed, they are people to be understood.