Episode 121: Designing a Life You Love with Nathaniel Turner
Nathaniel Turner is a TED speaker, author, lawyer, financial advisor, and a college and career readiness Alchemist. He is also the survivor of eight adverse childhood experiences and his challenges led him on a powerful road of self-discovery, providing him the tools to show parents how to rise above childhood trials, tribulations, and low societal expectations to help any child realize their hopes and dreams. Nathaniel does so by sharing The Life Template, a backwards design process that enabled him to raise a multilingual son who left the country at the age of 16 to pursue his dream of playing professional soccer.
Nathaniel talked to me about his life and his son’s success — he went on to earn a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University — and he dove further into his life template. Surprise! A part of it requires parents and teachers working together.
Topics Discussed:
Designing a life “backwards”
Creating a village to support your children
Why your template needs to include a humanitarian drive
Resources mentioned:
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Read the transcript for this episode:
Welcome to Educator Forever, where we empower teachers to innovate education. Join us each week to hear stories of teachers expanding their impacts beyond the classroom and explore ways to reimagine teaching and learning.
Nathaniel Turner is a TED speaker, author, lawyer, financial advisor, parenting and college and career readiness Alchemist. He is also the survivor of eight adverse childhood experiences and his challenges led him on a powerful road of self discovery, providing him the tools to show parents how to rise above childhood trials, tribulations and low societal expectations to help any child realize their hopes and dreams. Nathaniel does so by sharing the life template, a backwards design process that enabled him to raise a multilingual son who left the country at the age of 16 to pursue his dream of playing professional soccer. He received scholarships valued at more than $1.5 million earned admission to 27 of America's best universities, earned fully funded fellowships to seven of America's top graduate engineering programs, receiving MBA offers from four of America's leading business schools, and proudly earning a PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. Welcome Nate, so glad to have you here.
Nathaniel Turner
Thank you for having me. Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you.
Lily Jones
So I'd love to have you in whatever direction you want to take it. Start us off by telling us about your professional journey,
Nathaniel Turner
my professional journey. So by I, for the last 30 years, I've run, I started and now operate and own a financial planning or financial services company. So that's, that's what I've done. I got into financial planning in 1997 officially, I've been doing that kind of work from the time I left undergrad, which was a long, long time ago. I won't tell you what year that was. You might not have been born, but I worked for the US Treasury and a few C and a CPA firm and and so back then, we didn't call it financial planning, but that's essentially what we were doing. But I officially became a financial planner in 97 that's what I've done to sustain and take care of my family. I'm a lawyer by trade, a training and an accountant, and I hold a Master's in history and theology. That's I'm kind of a confused kid that's still trying to find his way,
Lily Jones
a multi passionate person. I identify things I'm like that all sounds great. It fits together to me exactly. So I know you now call yourself a humanity propulsion engineer, yes. Point to us. What is that? What does that mean?
Nathaniel Turner
Yeah. So first off, I have to say this that my son is an engineer. He holds a PhD in Electrical Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon. So when I first started saying I was an engineer, he said, You're not an engineer, quantitative, quantitative math and quantitative physics. No, no, no, no, I get I am not that kind of engineer, but engineers do provide tools, techniques and strategies for people, for buildings, for computers, etc, software and my ideal humanity propulsion engineer is that someone who cares about humanity has to find a way to propel us forward, positively, and by providing tools, techniques and strategies to do that, I most often try to do that by showing people how to be the best versions of ourselves, especially those of us who are parents and why? What? Why? What we do so often is the preeminent mirror from which children use to learn and become whoever they're going to become in the future.
Lily Jones
I absolutely love that. And thinking about the best versions of ourselves, I think can be so powerful. That's a lot of the work we do at educator forever is helping teachers, you know, become the best versions of themselves, so they can help kids become the best versions of best versions of themselves. Or, you know, as you help parents become the best versions like and then it helps kids. So I think it really is like everyone has to do it, like so much in the school system, teachers are like, Okay, we're going to support kids, and we're going to support them to be the best they can be, but don't turn that on themselves. And so I appreciate what you're saying of starting with you, you know, starting with the parents, starting with the teachers, and going from there.
Nathaniel Turner
Yeah, I often say to people, and maybe I'm getting off track, but I often say to people that what I'm most interested in finding out and helping you to figure out is who you are. Because I believe who is the most important word in in human language, and also the most underrated word I said, Who defines who you are on in your obituary, it'll define who you are. When someone says something at your eulogy, if they give you the eulogy, it will be the last words that appear on your tomb. If you have a tomb or urn, who is who you will be forever. And I say we who we are is determined by who we help, who we serve, other than ourselves, and who knew their life mattered other than the people that we care about.
Lily Jones
Mm, so powerful. I love that and absolutely. And I think like who we are also can evolve, right? Like, who we are is a constant question. It's not like, Okay, who I am now is also who I was when I was a little kid, and also who I'll be when I'm a lot older. But it's also not right.
Nathaniel Turner
But it's your core being, though it's your core being, hopefully who you are remains true, which is the challenge is to get people to figure I call it a PvP, which is your personal value proposition. What is it that when Lily is over, that people will universally say about. Absolutely, because that's who you are at your core. I consider myself. I could tell you, as I only told anyone, I'm the greatest father in the history of the world. The only father close to me is Mufasa so and then you could say, well, what does your son think? And I'd say, My son says we're pals, just like Simba said to Mufasa that I'm the greatest father in the history of the history of world, and then you might meet my son. He say he's a jerk, and then who am I? Right? Because my I've identified myself as a father, but the only person who can tell what kind of Father, Father I am is the child. And so I tell people all the time, you're not who you think you are. You're not who you believe others think you are. You are exactly who those you choose to be in relationship with no use being.
Lily Jones
Mm, hmm. And so I know, in thinking about how you support people to really get clear on who they are and move forward in their life with purpose, you use something called a life template. Can you explain what that is?
Nathaniel Turner
Yeah, so I we stumbled upon this before my son was born. I was a law student and did not have a job, proposed to this woman, and she agreed to marry me. She twisted my arm and convinced me that we should have it was time to have children, and I didn't have and I had no job, and given my history as a child and my father being unemployed a fair amount of time, the last thing I wanted to do was Mirror model my father in any way. So we I started asking myself, well, how did I get here? How did I get to a school where I don't have a job? How do I do that? I do all the things that everyone said I should do, and still I'm essentially no better than I was. I'm no better than my father was. I'm unemployed, the guy that I complained about all the time. I am just like him right now, and what I what I would dawn on me at that moment, that if I go into a different law school, perhaps I wouldn't been unemployed. So if I go into Harvard, of course I'd have a job. Who wouldn't hire a Harvard attorney. I was like, Well, why didn't you go to Harvard? Well? And you didn't do well enough in undergrad. You didn't go to the right undergrad. And so you backtracking. And finally, you like, oh, this all began before, before I had a chance to have any say in this. So before I sentence another person to that life, why don't I figure out how to get an unborn child to Harvard? And so we've wrote, Harvard got an application. An application listed three things, of course, the academic portion of it, but also two other more important things. The second was that Harvard was looking for world citizens. And the third thing they said they were looking for people who care for something greater than themselves. And that became the template today. We call those three elements intellectual ambition, which is above, which is goes beyond grades and test scores. I have to tell parents that all the time that that there's so many people with great grades and test scores. Look at the elite schools. Every year they admit 3% of people. There are lots of people with great grades and test scores. You had to be more than that. The second part is we now call global and cultural competency. I think it's more important now than ever. We live in a huge world that oftentimes feels small, but we don't understand anybody else's issues, and we don't know how to connect what we go through with connections of people all over the world. We could, we'd be better. And then the last part is the humanitarian drive, which is to say, when your time is up, how would you have left the planet better than it was when you got here?
Lily Jones
It's so interesting. And I think that, I imagine that people could create their own life templates, too, of like what category is aligned to their values, or what they're hoping to create, and getting clear on those helps you kind of backwards plan in very teacher language, right? Like you have a goal, and then you're like, backwards planning it
Nathaniel Turner
Absolutely., I would say engineers call it reverse engineering, but you're right. We use the same, same educational ideology, which is backward design, to to help a child succeed and now show other people how to do the same thing.
Lily Jones
So I'm curious how this worked out with your son, and also I imagine that as he got older, you know, thinking about these goals from the beginning, how did you integrate like, his goals for himself? Like, were these his goals? Or were you like, this is your path?
Nathaniel Turner
Yeah, no, it's an excellent question. It's the question I get all the time from people: did you twist his arm? Did you beat him at the submission? No, what we what we did was that we didn't, we didn't assume he would be admitted to Harvard. The idea was to make sure he met the academic qualifications department. So that part, if you know, thinking about if Harvard is the the peak well, and you want to climb to the peak, well, you need to take all the tools that you can get if you're going to get to the to get to the you may not, you may not want to get to the peak. But so the idea was, can I just get him prepared that he they don't laugh at his application that they highly would consider so that that was the first thing. So life then became sort of a buffet table, because then the second part of his global and cultural competency. How do we help give a child a rich enough life so that he has a respect for for all life forms, that he respects other people, that he respects himself, that he understands his his past, he understands where he wants to go in the future, to understand that it's his life, it's not mine, it's your life. I just want to give you the tools, techniques and strategies to make your life a. Whatever you want it to be. So at no point in time did I ever suspect my son would be an engineer. Never in a million years. And I don't know that he suspected it either, until at 16, he decided he no longer wanted to go to high school. So when I think about that, he said, Hey, I've done everything you asked me to do. I started high school as a seventh grader. I'm just wasting my time taking classes that I don't need. I've already gotten all of the high school curriculum I need, all the credits I need. I've got 33 college credits. I want to, I want to chase my dream playing professional soccer, and I can only do that when I'm when I'm young. So he left. He moved to Brazil. That was not that was not in the original plan, but because the global cultural competency piece was a big thing, he was he was doing it for languages. Mm, hmm. One of those was Portuguese. Amazing. He was able to move to Brazil, speak the language, learn a new culture, spend time around people who had different hardships than he had experienced in America. And it was that time there in Brazil where sometimes the young men he played with were from Brazilian favelas without running water, without electricity, etc, that he said, Oh no, that's unacceptable. When I return, we're going to become an engineer and use science and technology to help people whose lives have been historically and geographically underserved and underrepresented live a fuller life,
Lily Jones
So powerful. And I love how thinking about how his journey changed, you know, and you said tools, techniques and strategies, and I think that's the most important thing you know, whether it's a teacher, whether it's parent, whether it's for you as an individual, having those like competencies and skills and approach and mindset can help you really learn anything, right? And you can help make those turns and twists and go in these different directions. And I think that what I hear you saying with when you describe the life template, but also with your son, is this extreme sense of purpose, you know, a bigger sense of the why, of why I might become an engineer, oh, to help these people, you know, I have this experience, and now I can actually have some agency and try and help and change,
Nathaniel Turner
Yeah. And I would say, and I always say, I love Simon Sinek, and Simon says it's a wonderful game to play. But I tell people who listen to Simon Sinek that Simon is wrong, that we should not start with why we should begin and end with who that's like. So, so that's so using your your backward design piece from education, that's exactly we did. We said, Okay, listen, backward design education, first and foremost, talks about familiarity. So how much stuff can we make sure he's familiar with? Because one of the things we've learned is that if you meet a child who knows who's a familiar with a lot of stuff, you're really engaged in that child. Oh, my God, your son or daughter, so precocious, mister and missus Johnson, okay, so let's get him familiar, because being a jack of all trade is a good part. The second thing we said was, or the second part of that is that is mastery. What things must he master well as a student, he has to master reading, writing, math and science, without question. We have to make sure you master that. But he also has to master humanity, civility, respect, those kind of things. And then lastly, it's the to borrow, again, from the backward design and education is the core. And so well, when your time is over, who will people say you were at your core? And so that game that went into us, how we named him, it went into how we picked the people to be a part of his village. It goes into everything, even today.
Lily Jones
Amazing. I love that intentionality, too, and the power of that, of being like, All right, then what does that mean? Like, we can always ask these further questions. I'm like, Yeah, well, then who needs to be around him? You know? Well, then what is he doing every day? Like, what are we doing? You know, all those things lead from that core vision. And so I know you started this with your son, this life template, and I'm curious now, after doing that with your son, like how that evolved to using it with other people.
Nathaniel Turner
So I tell everyone for the last He's 29 now. So for the last 30 years, everything that I've done and learned has been done primarily for a child, and I've learned it through the through the lens of a child. So as when he's when we started this, people laughed at us when you can imagine you bring home a baby with no name. So he came home he had no name. We were like, Okay, well, the our ancestors, and many people's ancestors, used to wait the name with baby. Part of it was because they didn't know the baby was going to live and they didn't want to give a baby a name and be attached to it. The other part of it is they ask people to we wanted to see who the baby is before we give the baby a name and give a name that means something they'll live into. So Lily, have I known you? You would have gotten this letter from us just said, Hey, Lily, we're having a baby. We don't know we're having a boy or girl. Want you to come over and see what this child is, and spend time with this baby, because we want you to be a part of the naming process. And we've got 10 names we think we want to have for male, and 10 names we think we have a female, but we don't know, and you would have been part of that. And you can come over on Eighth Day, we gave the baby a ceremony, and we get a baby, we gave a baby name. So everything so that. Child 16 years later, when he's getting ready to go to Brazil and his daddy is in the car crying like a big baby, he turns to his father and says, Hey, man, you've been talking to me about dreams all my life, and I'm getting ready to go live my dream because you've made this possible. He said, But what are your dreams?
Lily Jones
chills, yes.
Nathaniel Turner
And I said, I don't have any my dream was for you to have the best life possible. Now you get ready to leave me. Hey, man, come on, dude. He said, listen, here's what I want you to do. I want you to take everything you've done for me, and I want you to show it to other parents. So I'd written them letters. I this is sort of where it started, and the evolution of taking that statement before he goes to Brazil. So when he gets to Brazil, I've written him letters over his childhood. I thought it was going to mess up as a father, so I wrote him letters, and I put him in a binder, and I gave him to him, and I went to Rio for a few days. My wife told me stay in the country, that I didn't know how it was going to work out. So I went to Rio, and that she calls you says, not going. He's in this place called Puerto Felice, Brazil. I gotta go back. I'm expecting him to have his bags, and he's ready to go home. He had a big smile on his face when I get there. I said, Hey, what? What's going on? He said, Oh, no, no, I got a question for you. I had a question for you. I just paid four $15 for a cab ride. Yeah, whatever. Um, did you put the letters in a particular order? And I said, no, why? He said, I read the first three, and I remember my purpose. I'm going to be fine, but Dad, whenever we come, whenever I return, you're going to take these letters and you're going to publish them and you're going to share with other people. And I said, Well, why? He says, because when you tell me I can do something, not only do I know I can do it, I know it's going to happen. And I think other parents need to have this so they can share with their children. So when he returned, like, 18 months later, he had a concussion, he went about the process of putting the book together. I did this book called Raising Superman. And it is that book that sort of launched for whatever people know me to be able to say, well, well, you know, what is, why did you do this? First it was, what's the big deal about your son? And then I'll say, Great. How much time do we have? And then people start saying, Well, can you do this for other people's children? And I said, Absolutely. So that's, that's where it began, and that's what I'm working towards now,
Lily Jones
okay, that's the best. And I think thinking about him as a 16 year old, you know, I have a 12 year old and a nine year old, you know, but just him as a 16 year old being able to say, not only like that moment of you in the car and him asking you, like what your dreams are, it's so powerful and shows so much care and awareness on his part to and also the fact that he just valued, which as he should, right? But not all 16 year olds do but he, like, he valued the letters that you wrote him, and that he saw, like, all the effort that you put in, I think that, you know, sometimes kids don't realize, or anybody doesn't realize, like, how people help them until after, way after, and so that he was able to kind of, in the moment, have that awareness and then also Want to share it with other people. Is so powerful. And I think going back to like, I'm curious, how did that change for you when he asked you what your dreams were?
Nathaniel Turner
It was interesting. So, so two years, three years prior, very good friend of mine committed suicide. So I, to be honest, I had been sort of wallowing for three to four years. He's my friend. His name's Terrell. Dunbar. Died on September 15, 2008 so as an advisor, someone working in the market, you know, the market crashed also in 2008 so life was like bleak. People were mad at me all the time about the economy. My friend had passed. I felt responsible. Wondered what else I could have done. And so and and his birthday to Rose and my birthday are the same day. So every year is my son's birthday is June 27 when his birthday passed, it was almost like this dark cloud to set in, and my whole disposition would change. And so he just said, Hey, His birthday is June 27 and we had just returned from Brazil, so we were sort of celebrating him, and he's in the car, and he says that. And I thought, Okay, you're right. I need to stop thinking solely living my life, not vicariously through him. That's not what I was doing. But my my intention and focus was solely on getting him to a particular place. And he's telling me now, yo, I'm here. I'm at this place where I need to be for now, go take care of yourself. Finally. So you know, it was, it was inspiring, encouraging, and I've been doing my best to do what he asked me to do ever since,
Lily Jones
Wonderful. And so I'm curious with teachers, how they might be able to use this approach of like a life template with their students.
Nathaniel Turner
So can I say this first? One of the things I think that we have to do in education is when we say teachers, we have to talk about teachers holistically and. Parents. Mm, hmm, everyone until my wife is an educator. She's a dean, and she teaches in school education, and often times she she likes me better now than before, but early on, she didn't like me very much. Because I would say this. I said you all think that you are the only teachers, but on the one hand, you say to people all the time, the children's first teachers are their parents. And so you think what you do is profession. And yet, the people who are responsible for children in some states as early as as long as the first eight years of their life are not professionally trained. Why don't we train parents, coach parents, educate parents, whatever word that people won't be offended by, so that we can prepare our own children such that like we're, you're the baker, Lily and I and you, and you are known for your Marie calendar, and you're known for making the best fruit pies. Well, your fruit pies can only be as good as the fruit that's delivered. And if I'm the farmer or the tree and I My job is to produce grape fruit, and I keep producing rotten or spoiled fruit, and I keep sending it to you, Well, you can't bake a great pot. So I think that that's one of the things I would love to see us do a better job of in this nation, which is to stop putting so much onus on teachers. Because I wouldn't want to be a teacher. I wouldn't encourage my child to be a teacher. I would hardly encourage anybody, because by and large, the fruit that the baker gets is spoiled and rotten before it gets to the baker, and they're asking you to put extra sugar and cinnamon and other kind of stuff to make it taste better. But it's not. It's not a better, a better pie at all.
Lily Jones
Yeah. I mean, I think the partnership with parents or families or community, like you were even saying of like, Who are you going to bring in for your son? Yeah? And so thinking about learning doesn't just happen in schools, like, not at all, right?
Nathaniel Turner
My best friend is the former chair of the American Medical Association, and his name is Dr Lily Underwood the third so I I say to him all the time, when I ask him, all time, when will Obstetricians and Gynecologists begin to offer coaching for parents, the same way you do Lamaze, you can teach someone childbirth, but you won't teach someone child rape?
Lily Jones
Sure, absolutely. And that's the really hard part.
Nathaniel Turner
So, so you're asking to your answer to your question is that I don't know. I don't want to say how teachers can be more effective, without saying that parents and society at large had to be more effective. Mm, hmm. Instead of asking you to repair stuff, because that's what it feels like teaching is, in some some cases, a repair shop. Why am I always sending you something that's broken and asking you to fix it? And maybe one thing you have in the room is really great. You got this really engaged, this super intelligent child, which I would surmise that most children are very intelligent. They just have been broken. What if we could just send everybody to you? Or if you just had a barrel full of great apples now you don't spend your time so much trying to help a child who's struggling and the child who's doing really well suddenly feels bored because you spending all your time with the child who struggles. I think the job teachers have is normally difficult because we only think about teaching in the lens of the people at the schools,
Lily Jones
And there's so many structural changes, right? That would, that would be more beneficial for everyone, like, whether it's parent education or giving, you know, so many parents be have to just work all the time and be able to, like, put in all this effort just to put food on the table, and then it's like, well, then when do I have time? Right? Like, and so building in the time too, of like, all right, how about part of your work day? You know, is some parent education or whatever it might be, right? Like, I think some kind of structural changes also are so needed, both for families and for teachers. And I think going back to what we talked about too, with like the parents and the teachers and caregivers, like so often it is about like, sacrifice, you know, or like, putting everything first for the kids, but then, as you said before, like that doesn't really work so well.
Nathaniel Turner
No. So I think the interesting, like the in terms of the structural piece, one of the things I share with families is I said you should try to create for your child a starting five. So we, we're, we're, we love to talk about it takes a village to raise a child. And the question is, well, how does a child get a village? How do we get a village? It's not just village idiots, like, how do we how do we get a great Village? And I'm like, well, the intentionality behind that is to do something like a basketball team. So I imagine Naim is the coach even today. Names the coach. He and He says, Hey, we want to win. Great. Now you gotta put five people on the on the floor. You gotta, you need a point guard. You need a shooting guard. You need a power powerful. You need a small four. You need a center. And in life, I think we all need those. So point guard, someone who points you in the right direction. Guards all your hopes and. Dreams shooting guard, someone who tells you to shoot for the moon if you miss, land up on the star if someone's always aspirational, small forward, someone who tells you you can do better than that, not that I cross those T's will not let you miss the small details, because missing the small details make you miss the larger goals. A powerful someone who, who often has to tell the collective I know you tired of Lily. I know you tired of your children. I know they're working your nerves. Don't worry. Send them over to me. We're going to push through Lily. We're going to power forward through the situation. It's not just about you gotta keep moving forward. And then lastly is a center of influence that we all need, somebody who knows somebody, or can make the kinds of connections to someone or to something that would help benefit the the life of the child, or, in the case of an adult, the life of an adult. But that's the starting five. I don't think we can do things in isolation. I think we're better served when we do things as a collective.
Lily Jones
I absolutely agree, and I've heard it talked about before. I was like, your own advisory board, yeah, thinking about, like, who you're going to go to for what information, for what kind of encouragement, for what kind of thing that you're looking for, right? Like, it's not going to be one person, and I think sometimes we expect that one person to be, maybe one person, or all ourselves, right? Like that's not working.
Nathaniel Turner
I don't say it's a burden, but it is. It is a heavy responsibility to be the sole person for someone's everything. It's a lot you so and you want to then try to figure out how to work. I always tell parents that there's no such thing as having it all. You you can't, you will not have it all. You can be great at work. You're not going to be great as a parent. You can be great as a parent. You're not going to be great at work. Nobody makes the Hall of Fame in two things.
Lily Jones
And that's okay, right? Like, I think some of it too is being like, going back to the intentionality and thinking about, Well, where do I want to be great, or where do I want to put my effort, or what aligns with my values? And then letting go of like, perfectionism and being like, All right, well, I'm going to be an okayfriend or whatever. And thinking about prioritizing a little bit
Nathaniel Turner
For now, right? You may come back later on and be the best friend in the world, but right now, in this moment, I can't, like there's no such thing as multitasking in life. I know we like to believe we can multitask, but the brain indicates, brain science indicates there's no such real thing as multitasking yet. And yet humans try to multitask all the time.
Lily Jones
Absolutely and so thinking about our audience, which are educators who feel overworked and frustrated by being part of this, in my opinion, dysfunctional system, and they want to stay in education. You know, they have big dreams and things that are important to them. What advice would you give them about living a life of their own design?
Nathaniel Turner
So I do something that, that that asked my son to do years ago, and I asked him to write his life as he'd like it to be, not how it is. So each day, I do this thing called journaling forward, and that's why I would encourage your your teachers to begin today. Because we begin, we have, every day we have 60 to 70,000 thoughts, and on most days, 90% of the thoughts we had were about whatever we thought about yesterday. So I figure if I can wake up the first thing in the morning is a thing called the reticular activating system, something defined it differently, but it's the part of your brain that allows you to envision something beyond where you are, because your brain doesn't know the difference between reality and imagination. So I say, wake up in the morning and imagine the life that you want. At least do that for yourself. Take first eight. I do 20 minutes to first eight to 20 minutes to write how you want your life to go. For your own mental health, I also say you have to take care of your own you don't your own health to infrequently. Do we do the things that we would ask a child to do so, brain health, drinking water. But I can walk into a room with teachers and see a teacher with no water, and I'm like, Well, you do know the first thing that gets dehydrated on your body is your brain, so you're dehydrated, trying to teach other people who dehydrated, this not going to work out too well. So there's, they're like, a list of 20 things that I do every day that started from things that I ask a child to do as parents, that's what tell teachers. What's your vision for your life? What's your North Star? Do you have a vision of your life? Is there a vision board that you could share with someone when you say, Hey, Lily, where you going? And you say, I'm going such and such a place, but if you can show them where you going, yeah, they might want to go with you. So I you know, so say, Yeah, start with those things. Start with writing about where it is you want to go. But then also have a vision of your north star so you can make sure that no matter what has happened, you can keep moving forward.
Lily Jones
I appreciate that, and absolutely agree about the the clear vision and being able to. Articulated, and being able to see it and feel it and like be in it before it even happens. And I appreciate too, the like thought work, you know that you are sharing about that also, we have to kind of retrain our brains, right? That it reminds me of how you when your son was born, you're telling that story of being like, Wait, how did I end up here? How do I get him there? You know, like that changed your thoughts, right? Of like what was possible for him, and then that made it happen. But it starts in our own brains, right? It starts by articulating what we want and believing it and thinking about what thoughts support us to get there. And
Nathaniel Turner
When you have a village like they, if they have a village and they have a village and the village knows where they want to go, then interesting enough. You know, people start momentum, rather than inertia starts to happen, and people start helping you to I'm here with you today because of momentum. Someone once told me at, you know, 16, you need to dream here do these things to tell me what he thought should do. I like great. He had to point his own father in the right direction, which is a very interesting thing to think about, but I'm here with you today, because now the momentum of that is, yeah, you are right. I do have something to share that's different than what other people are sharing. And I thought about it just about how to raise a child in education. It turns out this is about something much larger than that.
Lily Jones
And that momentum piece is so key too, because sometimes when you feel stuck, it can feel so far away from what you want. And once that momentum builds, it becomes so much easier, like, the hardest part is just getting unstuck. And then once you take a little step, and it's like, all right, I can keep doing this and oh, it leads to something else, or somebody tells me something, or I make this connection, or whatever it might be. But getting unstuck is really the first step, and then the momentum takes you forward.
Nathaniel Turner
And when you see it bigger than you, I tend to think especially we're now at the end of, almost end of January, where most people set their New Year's resolutions. Quit them a couple weeks ago. But my point is that I say all the time, the reason we don't, I don't believe we succeed at New Year's resolutions, because our New Year's resolutions are too small and they're about us. Mm, hmm, if I say, Lily, Imma quit smoking this year, chances are I'm not going to quit smoking. But if I said to you, Lily, I you, you got lung cancer. We got to get you to help I would do everything I could to help you, but I won't do the same things for myself. So I think, and then when I quit counseling, I go to counseling, and it's with one person, but if I'm alcoholic, I go to a group session where we sit in a circle and nobody's better than the other, and we're all trying to work with each other to get through it. So I think that is key, not to try to do it where we're small and it's about you, but then to surround yourself with people who are also trying to get to become the best version of themselves.
Lily Jones
Yes, absolutely. And I think intentionally, you know, making an effort to be part of these groups that lift each other up and that can really work together, and that you can see possibilities in other people sometimes that you can't see for yourself.
Nathaniel Turner
So yeah, and people will see more in you than you will ever see in yourself. And then they'll they'll be there to remind you, oh no, no, come on. You can.
Lily Jones
Mm, hmm, absolutely. Well, so powerful. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story. Can you tell folks how they can connect with you?
Nathaniel Turner
Me my absolute president. So I'll send you my phone number. You can reach me anytime. I’m like everybody else, I’m on all the social media sites, although I'm not great at it. I have a website Nathanielaturner.com. We have a YouTube channel that we're revamping. I've got a few coaching sessions with parents that are now available for folks to see. We have a five day challenge to encourage folks who are trying to figure out a way to be better than they are today. That's on the website as well.
Lily Jones
Wonderful. Well, thanks again.
Nathaniel Turner
Been my pleasure, and good luck with those with the nine and 12 year old.
Lily Jones
Thank you.
Nathaniel Turner
Fun times.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai