Getting Naked Is A Good Thing

“Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.”

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Author of The Little Prince

I love this quote from the early 1900s because when you replace the word "body" with the words "heart and mind", it is an articulate summary of my Naked Principle. As a success coach and transformational speaker, my goal is always to help people shed their layers of perception, personality, what they know, and socialization to get to the core of who they are.  The Naked Principle is very simple: To achieve your best and to feel most successful, you must strip away all the stuff you’ve become and realign yourself with who you truly are (your authentic self).

From the day we are born, we go through a transformation. We are nurtured by our parents, educated by our communities, and guided into adulthood by the people around us. Most of us are taught to be respectful to elders, obey adults, and listen to teachers. Our person is significantly defined by our environment (people, opportunities, experiences...), which creates layers that can start to hide, crush or alter who we are. More importantly, because it starts at childhood, most of us don’t know it has happened—or how far away we are from our authentic selves.

How many people do you know, including yourself, fall into these categories:

• They have good jobs with good salaries and they are respected, but they are miserable at work.
• They have a handsome husband or beautiful wife who seems to treat them well, but they are unhappy and don’t really like their mates.
• They feel trapped in their lives. Generations of their family were born and raised in the same hood. Their house, friends and possibly their jobs are all within a 10-mile radius. When you see them, they repeatedly express a deep desire to leave or do something different, but they never do.
• They are entrepreneurs with profitable businesses. Their work consumes most of their life. They don’t seem to have much going on besides making money, and they don’t seem to have many deep personal relationships outside of their families. 

Most of us know quite a few people who fit the examples above. Despite the appearance of success or contentment, their is real discomfort or angst about were they are because their lives or decisions don’t align with their true needs and real desires. Like many, their authentic self has been hidden, blocked or ignored for so long that it is unrecognizable until they hit a breaking point (also called a decision point) that leaves them to two choices:

• Continue on the current path despite the nagging feeling that something is not quite right.
• Search for the something that is missing or the something that will fulfill them.  

When the person makes the decision to search, that's when my Naked Principle helps them understand what they really need because it helps strip away the layers of film, mud, and residue they've accumulated since birth. Let's start with the present:

• First, write every single thing in your life as a noun in a list.  Example: my house, my job, my wife...
• Next describe each one of them as they currently exist with great detail.  Example: I have a blue 3-bedroom house with a beautiful lawn in a quiet neighborhood surrounded by tall trees. 
• Then write exactly how you feel about each noun you listed.  Use descriptors and adjectives like happy, hate it, excited, depressing...  
• Ask yourself why you feel this way about each one.  Be honest and descriptive. Write your response next to each noun.
• Now ask yourself if each noun listed, as it exists today, is good for your well-being.
• Next ask yourself why? Write down your response.

There are more steps to the process.  But, as you start to go through the exercise, the introspection that it takes to complete each part will reveal the layers you have on top of your authentic self.  You will start to see the things that feel good to you and don't as well as dive into why.  Your feelings and emotions are the keys to helping your navigate deep inside to pull out your true self and help guide you toward true success. 

Contact me at getstarted@theturnerconsulting.com for the rest of the steps to peeling back your layers to get to a naked you.