Bare Metal Protocol

The person you’ve become is not the limit of who you can become.

Most people spend years trying to improve themselves — books, seminars, coaches, new habits.

Sometimes it works.

More often, they become better at managing the same limitations.

The Bare Metal Protocol starts somewhere different.

Instead of trying to improve your identity, it helps you experience that your identity is something you built — not something you are.

This is for people who have reached the point where effort is no longer the problem. They don’t need more motivation. They need to remove the invisible constraints that effort alone cannot overcome.

Why exceptional people choose the Bare Metal Protocol

Almost everyone has acted against their own interests at some point — knowing what they should do, and hesitating anyway. Avoiding the conversation. Repeating an old pattern. Accepting a limitation.

Most people treat these behaviours as simply part of who they are. The Bare Metal Protocol challenges that assumption. Many of the behaviours shaping your life are expressions of an identity that developed unconsciously over years — not permanent characteristics of who you are.

When identity becomes visible, it becomes something you can consciously change.

Beyond mindset

Mindset matters, but it’s one layer. Beneath your confidence, your habits, your fears and your beliefs sits something deeper: identity.

Most personal development improves the identity you already have. The Bare Metal Protocol examines the identity itself.

Instead of asking “How can I become more confident?” it asks “Who is the person that believes they are not confident?” That shift changes the conversation.

A friend of mine had done more personal development work than almost anyone I know — genuinely elite at it, someone who believed he was fully alive and awake to what was possible for himself. We’d been talking for a few months when, in one conversation, he said something that stopped us both: "I never realised I died 22 years ago. Something happened, and I died psychologically that day — and in all my years of personal development, I never saw it." Years of work, and the identity built on top of that day had never once been questioned until it was.

What actually happens

The Bare Metal Protocol is a structured, guided process — not motivational speaking, not therapy, not coaching. There is nothing to memorise and nothing to practise.

You are guided through observing the assumptions, stories and labels that have quietly shaped your decisions for years.

For many participants, it’s the first time they realise what they believed to be permanent was never permanent at all.

What changes

When identity changes, behaviour changes naturally. People commonly describe:

  • Greater clarity when making difficult decisions
  • Less fear of failure or judgement
  • Freedom from repeating old behavioural patterns
  • Greater confidence without pretending
  • More authentic leadership
  • A stronger sense of responsibility for their future

This isn’t about becoming someone else. It’s about becoming free to consciously decide who you want to become.

Someone I worked with saw, for the first time, that they had spent their whole life making the people around them wrong — their staff, their spouse, almost everyone they knew — while believing the entire time they were doing the right thing. Seeing it didn’t make them a different person overnight. But it changed what they were willing to look at next.

Who it's for

Founders. Business owners. Executives. Leaders. Athletes. People whose ambitions have outgrown the identity that got them this far. It isn’t designed for everyone — it’s designed for people serious about becoming exceptional.

Why it's called Bare Metal

In computing, bare metal is the hardware beneath the operating system — everything else is software layered on top. People are similar. Over time we accumulate beliefs, labels, habits, fears, successes and expectations until we mistake them for who we are. The Bare Metal Protocol strips away those layers — not to remove your personality, but to reveal that beneath every identity is the freedom to consciously choose who you become.

Why I created it

For more than 25 years I’ve worked with founders, executives, elite athletes and business owners across mining, technology, manufacturing, professional sport and finance. One pattern became impossible to ignore: the biggest limitations people faced were rarely technical. They were rooted in identity — the unconscious beliefs about who they were and what they believed was possible.

The Bare Metal Protocol was built to address that directly.

My daughter once asked me something I didn’t have a good answer for: how do you tell someone they’re being a dickhead, and they thank you for it? It’s a fair question. That matter-of-fact way of speaking — no softening, no managing how it lands — has been with me since before any of this had a name. It’s part of what made the early businesses work.

People kept telling me they’d never experienced a conversation like it. Eventually I asked a coach I respected — someone who had worked with over 3,000 coaches professionally — whether what I had was actually unusual, or whether I was imagining it. She told me she’d never experienced anything like it, that the conversation was life-changing. She then asked me to have the same conversation with a friend of hers, also a coach. Her friend was blown away too.

That’s when the calls stopped being something I did on the side and became something worth building properly.

Two ways to work with this

The Protocol is delivered two ways, depending on how much of yourself you want to bring to it.

Entry point

Bare Metal Group

$50 USD / week

Experience the process in a live group before committing further — participate at your own pace.

Bare Metal Group

Personalised

Bare Metal 1:1

US$10,000

A private process built around your identity, decisions, and constraints — worked through directly with Nathan.

Bare Metal 1:1

Not sure which is the right starting point? The Group is built for people who want to experience the process before committing further. The 1:1 is for people who already know they want a personalised process built around their specific situation.