Nataniel Turner’s Guide to Intentional Parenting: Nurturing Aspirations and Empowering Children’s Success

Speaker 1: 0:10

Welcome to SpeakUp International with Risa Burr and Elton Brown.

Speaker 2: 0:18

As our name implies, speakup International we are able to chat, to have conversations with people from all over the world. As a matter of fact, we've zig-zagged into Brazil, into South Africa, into England, into the United States several times, and today we are back in the United States with Mr Nataniel Turner. He is one of the most entertaining and captivating people of our day. He is sought after by organizations and individuals worldwide to share the tools, techniques and strategies to live life in the present with joy and with purpose. Nataniel is also an author, a TED speaker and a humanitarian. Today he teaches business schools, not-for-profits, families and how to achieve any goal. Two earlisteners worldwide, mr Nataniel Turner.

Speaker 3: 1:26

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Happy to be here.

Speaker 1: 1:29

It's so good to have you here with us, Nate. Can you tell us what motivates your son? How do you motivate your son to acquire the accomplishments that he's had thus far?

Speaker 3: 1:49

So I'm going to tell you a story a slight story, if it's okay, I don't know from the beginning by saying I don't know that I motivate him as much as my job is to model for him what it looks like when you're motivated. When my son was four and started to first play soccer, he was terrible at it the very first six weeks or so playing. He even when we first took him out to the field, he complained that he was going to be the worst kid on the field and we said you are. So let's just let's acknowledge that you are the worst. You're at the bottom. The good thing is that there's no place to go when you're at the bottom, but up you can't get worse than the worst.

Speaker 3: 2:29

So along the six week of his season it was eight week season we went home after the sixth game. He registered to him that he wanted to do better and as we were driving to his seventh game on that Saturday, I said to him hey, I want to teach you how to do something and it's called visualizing, and I want you to imagine what you want this day to be like when you play and tell me. Close your eyes for a minute. And he did. He told me what he was going to do. He was going to steal the ball from someone and he was going to go down the left side of the field and he was going to kick the ball with his right foot and he was going to score a goal. And, sure enough, that's what he went out and did. And so then he couldn't wait for the following game to play, and he told me about these two goals he was going to score. And he went out and he did.

Speaker 3: 3:15

And it was at that point that I recognized that all he needed from me were tools and strategies to make his dreams come true, that he didn't really need as much as a motivation for me, because what I wanted to make sure of, if something were to happen to me, he wasn't looking around saying what do I do now? I'm not in my father's gun. Instead, he had these tools and these strategies and techniques to still do whatever it is he imagined doing. So that's a long answer. I apologize if it is, but it's the truth. I don't think I motivate him as much as I provide him with strategies and then model what being motivated looks like.

Speaker 2: 3:54

I like that and I hear that loud and clear because it's a part of my belief system that motivation is intrinsic and we talk about motivating people, but it has to come from within. There's no question about that. So you modeled for him what he should do and he followed suit Marvelous, marvelous. Now in your bio, nate, do you describe yourself as a Renaissance person. Please expand on that thought for our listeners.

Speaker 3: 4:27

Sure. So when we typically think about Renaissance people historically as people who do more than one thing, someone could be a lawyer, but that may be all they do. Someone could be a painter, but that's all they do. My academic background and my life experiences are varied. I am trained as a lawyer. I'm trained as an accountant. I have a background in sociology, have a minor in sociology. I'm an author who's now written six books. I started a number of organizations throughout college that were related to the improvement of humanity, I would say, like the university's Black Student Union or starting the university's multicultural affairs department. And now I'm a dad who shares with other families how to get their kids to the colleges of their choice and to raise children that we all can be proud of. By the definition of Renaissance, I think I made the description of that.

Speaker 1: 5:26

Can you tell us about the journey that led you to develop the life template and its impact on your son's remarkable achievements?

Speaker 3: 5:36

Yeah, so I'm a guy from, as I mentioned you all, we were talking before the show began I'm a guy from Gary, indiana, who was told as a 10th grader that the best that I could hope to do with my life was joined the military. My high school guidance counselor, mr Tunk, surprised me of this, that that's all I could hope to do. And he didn't mean I could be like Richard Gere and be an officer and a gentleman. He just meant that I would be lucky even if the military would accept me. When my wife said to me that she wanted to become a parent and I said to her I'm not sure that's what I want to do, and she said my biological clock is ticking, and I said your clock is digital, you can't hear it she said yeah, no, my clock is ticking, we'll have a child.

Speaker 3: 6:24

When we decided that's what we were going to do, I realized that one of the things I didn't want to happen, two things One, I wanted to be better to my child than my thought my father was to me, and two, I didn't want other people outside my household to limit what my child could do. And so we wrote Harvard and fell upon this idea about this life template and this application from Harvard listed three things that they were asking students to do. We call them intellectual ambition, global and cultural competency and humanitarian drive, and so we decided that we would take those three elements and create this template for his life, so that everything he did would be built around these ideas of being intellectually ambitious, being globally and culturally competent and being driven to serve something greater than himself.

Speaker 2: 7:13

So everything you did, and perhaps everything you do still, is by intention. I'm hearing that it's by intention. I want to hone in on that teacher who wanted to guide you towards the military. How did that feel at the time? How does it feel now? And were you able, were you ever able, to reconnect with that person?

Speaker 3: 7:37

No, I've been. That part is funny. No, I've never reconnected with him. I don't know how excited he would be to reconnect with me. So there's that I did see him, though ironically, I did see him.

Speaker 3: 7:51

I was in law school. I think I was a law student, I don't remember what year was, but the interesting thing to note is that my very best friend was in special ed classes, so he and me was being told that there was no real future for him, certainly not academically. He today is one of the top surgeons in the nation. He is a urologist. His name is and you might wanna talk to him at some point. His name is Dr Willie Underwood III, and he and I were. We told a story about being at the back of our high school graduating class, not just because my name ended with a T and his ended with you, but because we were actually at the back of the class in terms of our academic performances. But yeah, so I haven't seen Mr Tunk since he andI were both Willie was in medical school and I was in law school but we were asked to go back to our high school to speak to some students and we happened to run into him in the hallway and he said this hey, what branch of the service are you in? And my friend Willie turned to him and looked at him and he said oh, Nate's in law school and he's working on his master's in history and theology. And I turned to him and looked at Willie and said and Willie's in medical school and he's working on his master's in organic chemistry and something else. And he just looked at us and walked up the stairs and that was the last time I'd seen his hotel.

Speaker 3: 9:14

How did it make me feel? It made me angry, because I had some friends who were planning on going to college and I didn't quite understand why I couldn't do the same thing. Also, my father told me he'd given me three things to do at that same time, and one of the three things he said I absolutely could not do was go to the military. So I was left with two choices. One choice was to get a job, and I had been doing that. I'd been working since I was a nine year old, so that didn't seem very attractive to me. And then the last thing was, he said, go to college. So I figured all right, better figure out how to get to college.

Speaker 1: 9:51

See, it's funny how your parents gave you options. My parents did the same thing, and it was to A distract or to college. Good, of course you think you should go to college and please. I'm well familiar with the straps, and so I didn't need that any longer. So what role do you believe parents and caregivers play in shaping the future success of their children? This is based on your personal experiences.

Speaker 3: 10:26

Yeah, I think parents are the most important, the most responsible. I think societies are best when they're these four pillars and they work out together. I think societies exist. The four pillars I should say are businesses, schools, community service organizations it could be religious or non-faith based and then homes. But I think certainly for the first six years, seven years of a child's life, certainly in the state, before children go off to school or required to go to school, they are pretty much the sole responsibility of parents. And if parents are able to do this trade a village, they're the responsibilities of the parents and the village. But I do think parents are the most responsible, or should be the most responsible. Regrettably, in the states we ask parents, we teach parents to outsource the responsibility of being a parent to someone else and I think that part is regrettable.

Speaker 2: 11:29

And when you say outsourced, do you mean perhaps the teachers and the schools and those kinds of things?

Speaker 3: 11:35

I think, from the very moment that people have children, we're in the process of outsourcing. So here's what I mean when we learn we were going to be parents. If you say to someone what do we do to be a parent? People, first thing.

Speaker 3: 11:51

Folks will say there's no manual, there's no book. That's the to me. Can I say this? That's the dumbest thing that I've ever heard of. There is nothing in our house that does not have a manual, except the people. There's nothing that we would buy that's complicated, that wouldn't have an instruction book, but the people.

Speaker 3: 12:11

So it makes no sense to me that people in the age of 2024 would even consider having a child without creating a manual or some kind of instructional book of their own. Even if you say that there's none that exists, create your own for what it is that you want to happen with your own children's life. But we live in a society that tells us time and again that we don't have to do that. So that's. And when a child is born, if you outside of taking a Lamaze class, and certainly if a person is wealthy and privileged, maybe they get a little more help.

Speaker 3: 12:44

But by and large, most people know more, as we do know more about how to put a car seat in the vehicle to drive the baby home from the hospital than what to do as soon as the child is home, the mother and fathers are trying to figure out how to go back to work. We want to do. We want to find somebody to do daycare. We want to outsource the care of the child to somebody else. If you're wealthy, you want to have a nanny come in the house, so you want to outsource the care of the child to someone else, and then we do that when it's time for nursery school and when it's time for kindergarten and when it's time for school. We're always outsourcing our child's the most important time of our child's life to other people.

Speaker 2: 13:23

To other people, and those other people may not have the same values or embrace the same values, and here is the paradox. And here is the paradox Now. You talked to about the template a little bit earlier. I'm curious to know about the tools and the techniques that you share with organizations and individuals. Speak to us a little bit about that, please.

Speaker 3: 13:46

Sure, one of the primary things I ask of parents is I ask parents, to begin with, what are your most audacious hopes and dreams for your children? What are your most audacious hopes and dreams for yourself? I do not think I should say. I think that it's difficult for people to raise dreamers who themselves don't dream. So I'm always interested in knowing if mom and dad still have dreams for their own lives or they settled into this place where they don't have dreams, so to think. There's gonna be a problem if you have a child in your life who really wants to dream and you essentially become the dream killer because you don't have any dreams. So once we're able to establish what those hopes and dreams are, then we start to do this thing called backward design and we look backward and say if the world was perfect, then what If the world was perfect?

Speaker 3: 14:41

And a parent says I want my child to go to college, then we drill deep to find out what exactly does that mean? Cause all colleges are not the same. You want a community college, you want a private college, you want an Ivy League school, do you want a public school? Do you want to go to school in Canada? Do you want to go to school in the state. To be very specific, and if you can tell us exactly what school would be the dream or ultimate school, then we can start working on helping you to make sure your child is prepared to, at least when they submit the application, because there's no guarantee, but at least not be laughed at when the university receives the application.

Speaker 1: 15:18

I think that's very important that the parents have a set goal based on the child, and it doesn't necessarily mean that their child has to actually follow that, because you're just giving them a path. They may initially get on that path but, for whatever reason, they may lean to the left or to the right, but that's okay because you've given them a platform that they can spring from, as opposed to giving them nothing, because the parents are not dreamers themselves. Speaking of dreaming, what about this concept of leaving the planet better than we found it, and how do you believe that individuals can contribute to this goal in their daily lives?

Speaker 3: 16:10

Again, we talked about this a little bit off air. I'm named after Nat Turner. My mother and father intended that I do something with my time on this planet that mattered and that I understood that there were people who paid a tremendous cost for me to be where I am and that I owe those people and thus I had a responsibility, like they did, to leave the planet better than it was when I found it. So I think we all have that responsibility. Whether or not we recognize it or not is a whole nother story. My naming of itself being named after Nat Turner, Revolutionary, and Nathaniel, the Hebrew word for gift of God, I wanna say it gives you a little bit of a burden, but you got a responsibility to do more than just be hanging out on the corner doing something. You gotta do something that matters.

Speaker 2: 17:05

Do you know what, Nate? I wanna go back to your analogy about dreaming and dreamers. And you said that if the parents don't have dreams, then how could they instill that kind of philosophy in the children? So when does a parent stop dreaming? I?

Speaker 3: 17:24

think a lot of us stopped dreaming a long time ago and we just don't know. We don't dream anymore and I'll use myself as an example, because I don't ever mean to cast disparagements on some other person Like. I'll start with me. My son said to me is a 16-year-old. And then this is and, Mr Brown, this piggybacks on what you said earlier about kids maybe not wanting to do what the parents think the child is doing, but you just wanna set them up for the opportunity to do that.

Speaker 3: 17:55

At 16, my son told me and my wife that he had no intentions of going back to high school. He was getting ready to start his second semester of his junior year and we were standing on the top of the Grand Canyon. With going out to Vegas for a visit. None of us gambled. So he drove out to Grand Canyon and he and I were standing on the edge of the canyon. We had just read the Alchemist Bapolo Cahelo and he and I were talking about, hey, chasing your legend and getting to your pyramid and how much you feel alive standing on this edge, and he said, yeah, this is all great. And you know what, Next year, after I finish this upcoming year, upcoming semester, I'm not going back to high school, it's time for me to leave here and chase my dream. And I'm like, okay, and you gotta get me out of this country because I wanna play professional soccer abroad and I can't do it here in America and we gotta find a way to get me out here. Okay, that wasn't in the template, said intellectual ambition, global and cultural privacy and humanitarian driven. It didn't say anything about going to play soccer in Brazil, but he had learned to speak four languages and one of those languages was Portuguese, so he could go to Brazil. So it fit the template, so he was able to leave and be prepared to do something else.

Speaker 3: 19:18

As we were sitting in the car before he was getting ready to go to Brazil, I'm in the driver's seat crying like a big baby, and he's sitting in the passenger seat looking at me like what is wrong with you, big baby? And I said you're leaving me, I don't know what to do now. And he said, dad, what are your dreams? And I said I don't have any dreams, Like. My dream was to be a good father and to get you to a place where you could do whatever it was you dreamed of doing. And he said yeah, thank you, and I'm here now. Now, it's not too late. This is what he said it's not too late, dad, you still have time.

Speaker 2: 19:59

You can do more, and the children shall teach the adults. Absolutely and the children shall teach the adults. That's wonderful. I find that once you're over 60, society doesn't want you to have dreams anymore. You've plateaued us. That's been my experience, and so I like that. As a matter of fact, I think I will include a question about dreams. What are your dreams when we continue to interview people on this podcast? I like the idea. No, you are an author. I think you've got about a zillion books. Tell us about the books, please.

Speaker 3: 20:44

So I've written the first book I wrote that was published. It's not the first book. I'll tell you about the first book I wrote that I have not published. I don't know if I will ever publish it. The first book I wrote that was published is called Raising Superman, and there's just a collection of letters that I wrote to my son from age two to 16, to the time he left to go to Brazil, and it was those letters that some of them 38 of them that I put in a binder to give to him while he was in Brazil. He was going to be 7,000 miles away. It was in 2012. And there was no way we were going to be able to have communication on a daily basis. So I said I've said everything I want you to know pretty much in letters over the years, so I'll put them in a binder. I'll give them to you. You're grown quote unquote. Your listeners can't see it, but I have air quotes. So you probably not want to talk to me, but at least you have letters, and so I leave them.

Speaker 3: 21:41

I go spend a few days. I stay in the country. I spent a few extra days in Brazil. My wife calls me and tells me I need to go back. I was in Rio and she said you need to go back to the academy where he was. I go out to the academy, I'm expecting him to have his bags back and ready to go. He has the letters and he says did you put them in any particular order? I said no. Why? He said because I reread the first three. I remember my purpose. I'm going to be fine and here's what we're going to do Whenever I return, we're going to publish these letters We'll share with other family and other children, because that when you tell me I can do something, not only do I believe I can do it, but I know it's going to happen.

Speaker 3: 22:16

So that's the first book Raising Superman and it came at his direction. And then since then I've just been writing because parents would ask me questions about how my son got to be who he was. And so then I wrote a book called Stop the Bus, because I think what we do with education in this country is absurd. So I felt like it's a we're like a bus driver who's driving wildly and nobody knows where they're going. So I was like stop the bus and let's reconfigure what we're doing. I wrote a book called it's a Jungle Out there, sort of 10 Lessons About Parenting that I extracted from the Lion King. It is my favorite movie of all time because it made me realize that I, too could be a father. That I saw in Mufasa and Simba a relationship between a father and son that I wanted to have with my child, and there's lessons in that.

Speaker 3: 23:05

My son and I, and a young lady named Kiva Richardson, authored a book, a series of books Now, two of them called the Amazing World of STEM. It's about a third grade African-American male who was a budding engineer and has decided to solve the 17 problems that the UN suggested that make the planet unsustainable, and so far we've tackled two of them, one of them being energy and the second of them being housing. And I think and I, oh, and in the last book we've written it's called Journey Forward, which is a process that I learned from teaching my son that I didn't do myself. So each day I spend the first 20 minutes of my day writing my life as I'd like it to be, as opposed to how it is so some people. It's an extension of the visualization that I was asking a four year old to do. Now I do it myself, I write it and then there's an audio version of it that appears on all of the podcast platforms like Spotify, apple Music, et cetera.

Speaker 1: 24:05

I like your approach to personal development. Are there any other methods that you use? Because what you're telling me it reminds me very much of journaling of sorts, where you're putting your thoughts down so that you can see the, so you can track your progress or not. Or maybe you're going in a different direction based on what you've written about over the past, say, two weeks. So are there any other methods that you use?

Speaker 3: 24:45

So there's a lot of things that. So there's a lot of things I do. So there's a system that we first created for my son and this is not me using profanity, I respect you all greatly it's called the ASS. So it's not that yeah, it's not that mule, it's the academic success strategy. What we did was my son's first year as an undergrad, studying engineering. He said I don't know if I can do this, made me very nervous. Here it is We've prepared this young man. He's always done academically and tested and so forth, but spent a little more than a year and a half away from school and needed to be reacclimated, spent most of his time being an athlete and figured we should create a system that was a little bit like athletics but would allow him to succeed academically and ask the academic success strategy. So with athletes, there's a series of things athletes do in preparation for a game. We wanted to give him a series of things he would do to prepare every day to be a scholar. So amongst those things are affirming who he is. So each day there's an affirmation, a series of affirmations that I make about who I am, and it's who I am seen from the lens of who I want to be when my time on this planet is over, when, if Rita and Elton are the last two people that I talk to on the planet, I want Rita and Elton to be able to say the very same things about me that I hope my wife and son and other people who love or adore me or care for me would say. So that affirmation is to remind me to treat you all in a particular way. So that's what you feel about me. When I'm no more.

Speaker 3: 26:27

I write. Yes, I journal, but I journal differently, because I'm not journaling about what happened. I'm journeying about what's to come. As a person thinketh. So are they. I'm writing about what I want to happen in my life. I'm writing about, I've written about hey, I want to go speaking for the 10,000 people. Hey, I want to one day just wake up and hop on a plane in Florida, hawaii. Hey, I want to publish this book. Hey, maybe I wanted to be here with you all. You might not know it, but it's probably there's a journal somewhere that I'm going to talk to some people about a particular subject.

Speaker 3: 27:00

But that's what I do every day. I don't write about what's been. I write about what's to come. And then I also have a vision board that is I call my North Star. You're in Canada, mr Brown, and so I think about Harriet Tubman. And how did Harriet Tubman get slaves from America? They looked at the North Star.

Speaker 3: 27:20

I think too few people have a North Star in their life. So I have a North Star. I have a vision board that I can look at every day, that has all the things that I hope to still accomplish. That becomes my North Star. So I don't wake up saying what can I do? No, it's easy. I got a vision board. It's on my computer, it's on my wall, it's on my bedroom wall, it's on my office wall, it's on my bathroom mirror, it's on my laptop screen, it's on my phone screen, it's everywhere. Because, like my ancestors who were trying to find their way to freedom, they were always trying to find that North Star. And too few of us have a North Star. So I could go on and on. But I eat a particular kind of food. Like my diet is a certain way. I get a certain amount of exercise. These are all the things I do intentionally so that I can be the best version of myself possible.

Speaker 2: 28:10

We're talking with Mr Nate Turner, who is an author, he's a dreamer, he's an educator, he's a parent. On Speak Up International, our goal is to inform, to educate and to inspire, and there's no question that your story, mr Turner, will do that for our listeners. Now I want to hear a little bit about your childhood. Tell us a little bit about Natalya Turner when he was growing up.

Speaker 3: 28:43

What would you like to start? All right, so I was born in 1965, as we talked about earlier, I'm from Gary, indiana, which, at the time, there are some very I think there's some very unique things that happened for me, having been a product of a place like Gary having the name Nat Turner, being in a city that was, at the time, comprised of a lot of professional black folks who had migrated from the South to either work in the meals or were teachers. I had teachers then who, some of them had PhDs that were teaching in the schools, because schools were different it was just shortly after schools were integrated, et cetera, and Gary's was 97% is 97% black. Everywhere I went as a child, we had real villages, so people were always holding me responsible to be the name my mother and father gave me. My father, I always tease my father probably would have wanted to be in the nation of Islam. That's his mindset. My mother, on the other hand, was having no part to that. My father wanted to initially name me Malcolm In 1965, in July. Malcolm had passed in March. She was having no part to that. So my mother is a woman of faith and so her Christian faith wanted her to give me this name, nathaniel.

Speaker 3: 30:08

So that is the backdrop for everything that's ever transpired in my life. There are people who expect me to behave in this very responsible, respectful, christian fashion, and then there's other folks who expect me to live up to this revolutionary, no-holds-barred approach to life. And that's me in a nutshell. That's what I've attempted to do everywhere I've gone, and the examples in my childhood are like that. My father once put me on punishment and made me spend the summer. I'll save you some of the stuff you said earlier, mr Brown, about the switch. Was it the switch or the strap you said? I'll save you the parts about the straps. There's a lot of straps in my life. But he made me spend the summer in the house and I had to read encyclopedias and books on black history. That was that, and there were times when my father would make us come home and write book reports about who we were. So that was common.

Speaker 3: 31:06

As a nine-year-old I tell people the story about I wanted my parents to buy me a bike for my 10th birthday and my father walked me to the garage and pointed to a rake, a lawnmower and a shovel and he said if a man wants to eat, a man has to work. If you want a bike, you buy the bike. I don't want the bike, and I'm. So, dad, I'm nine, how do I buy a bike? He said, I don't know. You figure it out. There's the lawnmower, there's the rake and there's the shovel. And so what he taught me at that time was how to become my own entrepreneur, how to market. So I wrote little flyers and, wouldn't you know it, within a couple of months I had the $100 that I needed to buy my rich, man-tinted speed bike. But there's a lot of stories like that in my life because of my parents.

Speaker 1: 31:51

I find US stories to be inspirational, so where can individuals who are inspired by your message and work find more resources or support to help them with their own journey of growth and fulfillment? Do you have your books online through Amazon? How could people get their hands on your books?

Speaker 3: 32:16

Yeah, my books are sold everywhere and I was told to say this the other day everywhere buying books are sold, because someone told me there was a. There's some places that won't sell your books and we don't want to get them credit for that. So we say everywhere we're smart people or loaded by books, or we're fine books. Yes you can find my book on Amazon and Barnes Noble and Apple Books and those kind of things. We also have a website which is pretty simple as NathanielTurnercom N-A-T-N-I-E-L-A-T-U-R-N-E-Rcom.

Speaker 2: 32:51

So let's suppose you had a gig, you had an assignment where you had to talk to a group of parents. Tell us about three tips you would offer those parents so that their children would come out to the other end like your child.

Speaker 3: 33:13

All right. So one of the things I would want to talk to your parents about is the word who. But I want to talk to anybody about the word who, and I would tell parents that who is the most important word in the whole human language, and it is important that they know who they are. And I describe it to them this way If you ask me who I am, I could tell you that I'm the best father that the world has ever known. And then you might say who does your son say you are? And I'd say I believe my son thinks I'm the best father in the whole wide world. And then, when you talk to my son, he could say my father, he's a jerk.

Speaker 3: 33:53

And I'd say to parents who are you? Are you who you believe you are? Are you who you think someone else believes you are? Or are we who the people we're in relationship with see us as being? And so I tell parents that one of the things you must do is to see who you are through the lens of your children, not through your own lenses, because your lenses are not clear. We again we have. We oftentimes are delusional.

Speaker 3: 34:21

So I would say, if you're going to be a parent and you're going to judge who you are as a parent, then don't. You can't just judge it from your lens. You have to take the time to look at that. The second thing I would say to parents is more of my grandmother was to tell me all the time is that every tree is known by the fruit that it bears. And while you, while parents, like to criticize children, we also have to acknowledge how children got to be whoever they are. I've never seen an apple tree with a pear on it, and I've never seen a peach tree with an orange on it. The tree grows, it produces the fruit that it intends to produce, so maybe we should be more intentional about what we produce.

Speaker 3: 35:05

Then, lastly, as I mentioned earlier, I would ask parents to make sure to have drinks, because our children are going to model that, and the only way communities, particularly communities like ours, are ever going to do better is that we take a reminder from my ancestors' page, who found a way to dream when it seemed impossible or youthless to do that. I'm not suffering as a slave on anyone's plantation today, and yet many of us still behave like we're still on somebody's plantation, as if we're not free to dream as if we're not free to make efforts to do stuff. We're always looking for obstacles where our ancestors were looking for ways to triumph. We're always talking about the tragedy. That's not what they did. They were looking for pathways to be successful. So that's what I would encourage parents to do.

Speaker 1: 35:55

So what do you see as examples of individuals or organizations that more or less have the same line of thought that you have from implementing, say, similar strategies or principles? Good, question.

Speaker 3: 36:11

I don't know any other organization that consistently I would say, functions by the ideal of backward design, except for engineers. But in terms of like parenting organizations or academic organizations or school systems, I've not met a school system that does that, that says, hey, we're going to start with the end. At the beginning I've been advocating here that gynecologists, that obstetricians, that medical professionals begin with expecting new parents, teaching a process whereby those parents can start thinking about what they want to happen towards the end. I don't know any organization is doing it. I would love to find someone who was doing it, that I could be a part of that organization, but I haven't met anyone who's doing anything like that.

Speaker 1: 37:00

Do you think that you could actually come up with a design and organization that would help individuals using backward strategy?

Speaker 3: 37:11

Absolutely. I couldn't tell you anything other. I have been on here with you all. This time I certainly can say no, I can't do it. I've been saying I could do it with the impossible. Yes, sir, I believe I could show anyone how to do it. In fact I've shown grown people. There's a young lady I know some of this is anecdotal, but I have a young lady who now calls me pops that I met when she was, I want to say, 35. She said I don't essentially like what I'm doing in my life right now. I want to do something different. And we did that. We backward designed where she wanted to go and was able to help her to get into a PhD program. She finished her PhD and her goal was to become a superintendent of a school system, and now she's on her way to making that a reality.

Speaker 2: 37:54

So to some degree, would you say, you're also a coach.

Speaker 3: 37:59

Yeah, I guess there's a way to there's certainly that I would like to think. Maybe I was a strategist, but yeah, a coach fits as well. What I'm not is, I think what I'm not is I'm not a motivational person Because, again, I don't, I just don't. I think that's a cross to carry, and the last person who carried the cross, it didn't work out too well for him, so I'm going to don't pass on carrying any crosses I got it, I got it, I got it.

Speaker 2: 38:27

So is there anything you want to share with our audience that we have not asked you?

Speaker 3: 38:32

No, I want to tell your audience that I'm grateful that you all took the time to reach out to me and thought me worthy of having a conversation with you, so I'm appreciative and I'm so grateful for your time.

Speaker 1: 38:44

It's important that we get an opportunity to talk to individuals from all walks of life. It is so important that individuals do not see us from this one set of lens, as you mentioned earlier, because there's so many of us. We all have educations in different areas, we specialize in some, we help each other. We actually have helped the US design and build a lot of things that we did not get credit for. So it's really important for us to find these silent giants, to find these individuals who have really contributed to the betterment of Black lives and to have some light shine on them because of the wonderful things that they created. And you happen to be one of those individuals. That is definitely you may not think it, but a motivational speaker.

Speaker 3: 39:50

Thank you, I appreciate it. I appreciate it.

Speaker 1: 39:53

Now remember what you said. Now, as you have already said, it's not what you think, it's not what I think it's what I think. Absolutely, absolutely.

Speaker 3: 40:01

Absolutely, and you are a motivational speaker.

Speaker 1: 40:05

I think you have all of the design, you have all the basics there and you have podcasts, right, I think you're a podcaster as well. I have a, yeah.

Speaker 3: 40:17

I have a. I call it an audio cast. I saw it and encourage you to take a listen. It's the journals that I write each day, and so they've been engineered by another Canadian. Actually, His name is Dave Campbell, and Dave engineers it, puts the music to it, cleans it up and it makes me sound like I make a little bit of sense. But now those things come out on Tuesday, Thursdays and Saturdays, and it since the 1st of January. There's a version, new version, three times a week.

Speaker 1: 40:44

And how do you feel about that? How do you feel about delivering your message using that platform?

Speaker 3: 40:50

Honestly it's a little bit. At first it made me a little bit nervous because here's the thing Not everybody subscribes or understands this process and not everybody believes in the same things other people believe in. But here's an example. I wake up in the morning, I sit quietly and I wait and I receive something, and sometimes it's a song, sometimes it's a quote, sometimes it's an ideal, it could be a scene from a movie. I see it. Sometimes it's really clear like a vision, and then I just write about it. Just come in, I sit down and I write about it and it's just a stream of consciousness.

Speaker 3: 41:31

So I'm not intentionally trying to say something that I think will matter to anyone. I'm just trying to say what I received and say it from the lens of me in the future, talking to me in the present. So the future, me saying, may say, hey, remember how things were difficult. But now look at you, you're walking on the beach and there's sand between your toes and you live on the ocean. I just told you I live in Indiana, so there's no ocean. You live on the Pacific Ocean, or you're on this plane or you're doing whatever. That's what I do Now.

Speaker 3: 42:07

To some people that just seems will seem obnoxious Because, like I said before, some people don't understand dreaming, but that's part of what I do each day. Yeah, there's a bit much it feels like you sharing stuff that maybe you should keep to yourself, but the flip side of it is that I've met people who've heard it and said, hey, this is really helpful to me. So I just take the advice that my father gave me, which is to say, if I give you something that works for you, use it, and if it doesn't go the way, but that my job is not to worry about whether or not you use it or not. My job is simply to provide it in case you can use it.

Speaker 2: 42:46

Well, I am very happy that we've had the opportunity to have this conversation with you today. I've learned a lot. I've been reminded of the importance of dreaming, I've been reminded of the importance of parents in a child's life, I've been reminded of the importance of going after one's dreams, and so this has been truly wonderful, and I want to thank you sincerely for joining us and Speak Up International and, as Elton would say, we're always here. If you want to come back, if there's anything new happening in your life, don't hesitate to give us a call and say I want to be your guest again, and I'm sure we will agree to that.

Speaker 3: 43:38

So thank you, thank you Thank you, thank you. And I want to come back. So there it is, I want to come back, so you can have me back anytime. I'll keep you posted about the stuff that's going on too.

Speaker 1: 43:47

I was going to say that I got a funny feeling that there's another book on the way and especially if there's another book or if you're in some type of community based activity and you're looking for platforms where you can amplify, please let us know. You have all the information, I think, yeah, and it will be wonderful. I really appreciate that Absolutely. You have a great morning Still in the studio. I have a great morning and when the podcast is ready and you know how all that works, you will definitely get a link and please, if you are free to do whatever you wish with the link, you have a lot of work.

Speaker 3: 44:33

I will share it with everyone Absolutely. Thank you, thank you.

Speaker 2: 44:36

Thank you so much.

Speaker 1: 44:40

Thank you for listening to Speak Up Exclamation Point International. If you wish to contact Mr Nathaniel Turner, please be prepared to submit your name, your email address and the reason why you wish to contact Mr Turner to Nathanielaternercom. Are you interested in the opportunity to be interviewed and have your costs promoted by Speak Up Exclamation Point International? We invite you to connect to us, sending a message that includes your name, company or organization name, the valuable service you offer to your community, and your email address to info at speakuppodcastca. Worried about your confidence as an interviewee? Don't fret.

Speaker 1: 45:34

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