Part One of the video
DORIS: Tu-anh Nguyen, welcome. We are delighted that you could be with us today to talk about both your life and your work, so let's jump right in. What is mental imaging? How do you reach the desires to do it? What role does it play in your work and your life?
TU-ANH: Okay. You just sends me a lot of questions so let me start with the first one. Mental imaging to me is first you have to have to have a vision and the second is you have to have belief, and the third is the actions. You know you have a vision what your life is going to look like 10 years from now, 5 years from now. But deep down inside of you, you don’t believe it then how are you going to take action? They are all tie in together. The very first thing is you have the vision, sketch it out. What does it look like? You sit here and just mentally meditate and visualize it. What is that life look like? If you can see that then you have to believe it yourself. When you take action, the next step is really cleaning out your surroundings, outside and inside. You have to work on yourself internally then there are a lot of steps I close into it so it gets a little bit complicated but the very first thing is you have to do an inventory of your external surroundings.
DORIS: What it is exactly is that?
TU-ANH: What it means is if you want a life full of happiness and free of stress and full of prosperity, well are you leaving in a clutter mess? If you take a look at your space, are you happy staying at your house or you just go home and you don’t want to deal with it and then you just leave again. Then the next thing is what kind of people are you surrounding yourself with? I know that there was some sort of study that the three people that you are closest in your life that determines what your life is going to look like.
DORIS: That is a good point. That’s really important.
TU-ANH: Yeah, if you want to be in a happy and productive and loving relationship, you need to surround yourself with people who are in happy and productive relationships. But I think the general thing that a lot of my
clients do is because they are single they start spending a lot of time with other single people because they are thinking, well they are they are single like me and they are in search of the same thing like me but what you’re going to hear is unsuccessful dating histories so all that energy is coming towards you.
DORIS: That’s really happening.
TU-ANH: It really go… yeah. One of the things I did for my career was I made a lot of mistakes, business mistakes and I’ve had a few business failures when I was very young. What I did for myself is no more spending time with struggling artist that are constantly talking about I can’t pay my bills this month, I'm not--. I got to surround myself with people who are very successful so I can learn from them. And I don’t have to hear that negative thing. You hold that into you.
DORIS: Absolutely.
TU-ANH: It gets complicated.
DORIS: Makes perfect sense.
TU-ANH: And also you really have to love yourself and know who you are first in order to attract what you really want. Because then, otherwise you’re living a fake life.
DORIS: Do you think that writing things down and making first setting goals looking away out is like it?
TU-ANH: Yes. I actually, for the longest time I always pull out images that I like and this actually goes way back in my childhood so when we came to this country we really had nothing and my mother would always say we’ll going to make money one day, we’ll going to have money one day and so what I do is whenever I see magazines of big house or a nice car and a nice clothes I just pull it out and as a teenager, I have it all in a little wallet, fashion, nice house, nice everything. And I will just visualize and dream and then I would tell my parents one day I'm going to be famous. I want to be rich and famous. I’m going to go back to Vietnam and help all these people. Then I took my mother’s advice in school she said surround yourself with friends who come from families that are more educated than us. They are more disciplined, more well-off than us because when you’re around that you observe their behavior. Then you see successful people so she had always or even if you have friends that were not wealthy but their lifestyle had it for—you have it. It’ll help you, it’s good for you. With all
about you are, who you attract. You are about what you think about. It’s really common sense.
DORIS: Right. It’s the study of nanophysics which I was in for a long time. It’s basically conceiving things.
TU-ANH: Yes.
DORIS: Remembering about in your life. You’re mother was a really marvelous role model for you.
TU-ANH: Yes she was. I mean we even the several attempts to escape Vietnam, she was the person that actually was in charge of hosting all these escape trucks. The boat escape trucks. She got thrown in a jail several times when she was caught and she just never gave up, she’s just like, I'm sorry never again. She will gather people together and she negotiates. She does always undercover things and I remember at the time she will bring me along and I used to—because she was a very attractive woman and I used to listen to her talk to these prominence guys. I'm thinking, you’re trying to take away my dad’s place I don’t like these men. But my mom was really trying to do her business and then the one thing she said is you have to have faith, we’ll going to make it, we’ll going to get out of here, we’re going to come to the states, life is going to be better. When we came to the states we were poor. We have nothing and she said never ever show people that we’re struggling. When you walk out in public, you hold your head high, you act happy and positive because you don’t need to carry your burden and baggage around and let the world know that you’re struggling.
DORIS: Great life lessons.
TU-ANH: Yeah.
DORIS: Great life lessons.
TU-ANH: I think she was very good at it. Really putting that in my sisters and my siblings.
DORIS: They are lucky to have that at an early age.
TU-ANH: Yeah.
DORIS: Just to thinking it makes you who you are.
TU-ANH: And I really think it’s very important because parents play a major role. I think that we are who we are because of our parents. Because they help us when we’re younger and they are role models and they gave the strength.
Part Two of the Video
DORIS: Tell us about the recent using art show, the Art of Fashion that was held in Artisphere in September.
TU-ANH: Okay.
DORIS: How did you plan the show and what was your inspiration for doing it?
TU-ANH: I have been involved with Goodwill probably since 2005, 2006 and it was an annual fundraising that Goodwill host and they basically put me on the project to their creative director and the stylist and choreographer for the show. I work together with Brendan, who’s the VP of marketing and Shanna and the rest of the team and we brainstorm and then we’ve come up with the theme and from there I just sort of visualize, okay this is what the food looks like, the furniture, the music, so they all kind of tied in together. Then my team and I go out to all the different retail stores and then we just go shopping.
DORIS: Tell us more about that.
TU-ANH: We call it styling but I just call it shopping. What we do is we just go to all the different retail stores and I gave them very specific instructions I said, if it doesn’t have sex appeal and it’s not stylish and it doesn’t enhance a woman, make a woman look good, don’t pull it. If it’s not unique don’t pull it. I remember we added on two new stylists this year and I didn’t go with them. I give them the assignment and I turned down 70% of what she pulled and then I would hold it up I said, are you serious? You want me to put this in the show? This is normal.
DORIS: How many stylists do you work with?
TU-ANH: It depends on the event and shows that usually have maybe 5 to 10. Really 10.
DORIS: But they follow your philosophy. Tell us what lessons have you learned in the long road to becoming as successful as you are.
TU-ANH: Well, a lot of lessons but I'm going to narrow it down to three because I believe you always do something with three’s so people can remember. I will say the first lesson is to have some sort of the spiritual faith. I was brought up very Catholic and even though along the way, I'm not so much of a Catholic right now because I have a lot of different principles with other religions, but I have not stopped praying every single night since I was three as long as I can remember. By praying to God for just something it gives me some sort of strength and just everything is going to be okay. I should have brought it today but I still have the picture of my Patron Saint Theresa that a nun gave me. Because I told you I wanted to be a nun when I was younger. That I carried on the escape truck like the boat, on the boat floating at sea to the sink of where refugee camp and here. It’s still in the original frame and I was 9 years old. I still have that and I still pray to her.
DORIS: Is that Saint Theresa of Avila?
TU-ANH: Yeah.
DORIS: Okay.
TU-ANH: That’s number one. It’s have some sort of belief whether it’s belief in mother nature, belief in God, belief in Buddha, it doesn’t matter but it really gives you that strength. Number two is probably don’t give up. Whatever belief, whatever visual life, or visualization that you see for your life don’t give up. You’ll going to face a lot of failures, you’re going to taste a lot of mistakes but you’ll learn from it and be persistent and don’t give up. I would say the last thing and I learned this is believe in yourself and listen to your gut instinct and intuition. I think that some of my past business mistakes were that I didn’t know how to use people’s feedback properly because I was so young so basically if I have that vision and idea I wasn’t confident in myself. If somebody was more experience gave an idea or feedback, I will jump on their idea and feedback and I ignore my underlining vision or intuition.
DORIS: I think that’s the lesson we learn as we go through life. We don’t really start up like that. But eventually it’s good if we come to this, to trust our gut.
TU-ANH: Yeah. I think under that same line where I get a lot of feedback but I always stick with what’s in the gut.
DORIS: Exactly.
TU-ANH: Maybe it’s something about turning 40 or about over 40.
DORIS: Maybe so.
TU-ANH: I feel more confident and more secure than ever.
DORIS: It becomes more like that.
TU-ANH: Yes.
DORIS: It does.
TU-ANH: Yeah.
DORIS: You get more comfortable in our own skin and you get to trust your own intuition more than when you were younger, I think.
TU-ANH: Yeah. I learned that. Before I used to get worry and care about what other people say about me especially if it’s negative and then I start to take actions to change it so that I avoid that. But I realized that no matter what, you’re going to get people who do not like you, there’s always going to be somebody out there who’s going to say something about you but as long as you been true to yourself then it doesn’t really matter.
DORIS: Exactly true.
TU-ANH: Yeah.
DORIS: Great lessons. Great lessons, thank you. Tu-anh how would people actually reach you?
TU-ANH: They can email me tuanh@tu-anh.com, T-U-A-N-H @ T-U hyphen A-N-H .com or they can just Google me, they can find me on Facebook.
TU-ANH: Oh, thank you. I hope I have the opportunity to interview you next time because you have a wealth of information and knowledge. The topics that we discussed about women, education, pinups?
DORIS: Pinups.
TU-ANH: Maybe that will be the next one.
DORIS: Maybe so. Thank you.
TU-ANH: Thank you so much for having me.
DORIS: Thank you.
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