We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Christian Nelson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Christian, so great to have you sharing your thoughts and wisdom with our readers and so let’s jump right into one of our favorite topics – empathy. We think a lack of empathy is at the heart of so many issues the world is struggling with and so our hope is to contribute to an environment that fosters the development of empathy. Along those lines, we’d love to hear your thoughts around where your empathy comes from?
Of all the topics, I picked this one because of a Maya Angelou quote that people never forget how you make them feel. Human connection is really the way forward, I believe, so that’s why I picked this topic – If I can save someone else my mistakes or help them know where to look, then I believe that the world will become a much better place.
There were several sets of experiences that really formed my ability to empathize and connect with others.
The first set of experiences that helped me develop my empathy are kind of two-fold. I grew up on the land, working closely with animals, particularly horses and dogs. They can communicate and sense their emotions pretty well, way more, I think, than other animals and so I learned to read what someone was feeling early on from them. As I got better and better at reading non-verbals I was able to read body language better on other animals and on people as well. I started to recognize avoidance behavior. I also read a lot as a child, and that helped me be able to see the world through someone else’s eyes and walk a proverbial mile in their shoes.
The second set of experiences has been around my family. When I was younger and met my wife I was still learning and integrating what I had learned in my childhood. My wife is quite the introvert, so I had to learn to watch her closely and be able to infer what she was feeling. Early on I was not super accurate, but I was accurate enough and that made a big impact on her. Later on I was able to put those skills to good use as we got to know our children better and better. Early on I used to be frustrated and angry with my children that they weren’t able to tell me what they were feeling. Now I can see it expressed in their bodies and I can connect with them. I remember the day that I realized it’s very silly to be mad at an overwhelmed child for being unable to communicate to us, the adult, the emotions they’re still learning to identify themselves. Just because we weren’t taught to do it by our parents doesn’t mean it’s our kids’ responsibility to give us all the info we need to parent them. And if you’re still learning to ID emotions and empathize and sit in that discomfort it’s hard to have to learn it on the fly, so I want to offer a lot of grace to people out there who are convicted by that statement just like I was. If you want a better life you have to learn what you don’t know and experience can be a powerful teacher, but experience is also a brutal teacher, so I won’t shy away from speaking plainly, but hopefully, folks listening can receive it with the grace it is intended.
The third set of experiences came from treating patients. I’m a doctor of chiropractic and I’ve had some amazing teachers that have helped me be able to help hundreds of patients dealing with severe problems. It’s an incredibly rewarding experience and I’m so humbled and excited to show up to work now, but it wasn’t always that way. I had to learn to seperate their feelings from my feelings, to vent off my feelings with breathing, and to help them move through their feelings. There’s a whole psychological set of skills to physical medicine that they don’t always get a chance to teach you about when you get into the profession, but it’s so crucial to making patients feel at ease, helping them relax, helping them be able to listen to and trust recommendations, and to know how much their doctor really cares about them. If a doctor is brilliant and knows exactly what is wrong, but can’t communicate the caring to the patient, the patient will feel a coldness and a disconnection and might seek the advice of a “warmer”, less credentialed doctor. Some people might say that that makes humans fickle, but I think it means that the more highly credentialed doctor failed to account for the human need for connection and is the less-qualified doctor for that patient, regardless of how many certifications are on his or her wall.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
My brand is centered around this phrase: We make it easy to get better faster and stay better longer. Everything we do and offer is geared around that statement of empowerment, of inspiring hope, and of creating healthier, more resilient humans.
I have been blessed to be in private practice in Keller, Texas for almost 5 years (I started in April of 2019)! I love helping people get relief from complex and severe pains, especially of the head, neck, and shoulders. I find helping with neurological cases very rewarding, and that could be migraines, peripheral neuropathy, fibromyalgia, chronic pain syndromes, complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), and more. I love watching the hope rekindle in patients’ eyes when they realize they’re not completely broken, that they can heal, that they are not fated to the same sickness and dysfunction that their parents might have gone through, and that more and better is available to them and to their children and grandchildren. The core values of the practice are Empathy, Trust, and Results, and we really strive to embody those values every day at the office. It’s fun, it’s open and bright, we use low-level lasers, essential oils, chiropractic, myofascial therapy, and a couple other therapies to decrease inflammation, decrease pain, and speed up healing. One of my favorite things about the clinic is what we call our “Wall of Fame”, where we invite patients who have canes or wheelchairs or walkers to hang up part of them as a trophy when they are confident that they don’t need them anymore. So far we have three canes, a wheelchair, and a tennis ball from a walker on the wall and we’re looking to fill it up!
I wrote a book about essential oils and neuroscience and am almost done with the second edition (it should be out in March!). It’s called “Making Sense of Aromatherapy” and can be purchased on Amazon. I’m really excited for that update because the first one was pretty nerdy and the next one will be even more nerdy, but my wife taught me to translate all the crazy details into plain English and one of the most consistent pieces of feedback that I get that brings me so much joy is that the book is really easy to read. The patients that read it say it’s like sitting down and having a conversation with me and that just adds to my happiness.
I grew up in the country like I mentioned earlier and learned hard work, resilience, love of the land, and love of people. My dad taught me so much about nature and science and physics. He’s an acoustical engineer and does sound quality work, environmental noise engineering, and has worked with some really big companies like Coke and NASA in the past. I’m super proud of him. My mom was a children’s cancer nurse and has a heart the size of Texas. She just loves to love on people and is always working hard to be helpful. She taught me a lot about empathy, too.
I’m focused on helping bring a good genetic testing solution to my patients that preserves their privacy and also gives them detailed and actionable insights for what they need to do in their lifestyle to offset any defects they might have inherited that isn’t completely overwhelming. I think I’ve found that and I’ll be talking a lot about that soon!
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
The three things that I think helped me survive in business as a master clinician and a rank amateur in business are these:
1. Relationships are way more important than dollars and your relationship with the community, your reputation, is exactly what brings you dollars. You cannot allow yourself to forget that, otherwise life will teach it to you rather harshly. I believe it was Warren Buffet who said, “We can afford to lose money, a lot of money, but we cannot afford to lose reputation” and he’s so right. Reputation just comes down to this: How can the community trust you to behave? If you consistently break promises you’ll have a bad reputation. If you consistently keep promises, you’ll have a good reputation.
2. Be wise about what you promise. I used to think that you had to promise results, but you really don’t and in fact I would not recommend anyone promise results unless you can actually guarantee it. In the world of healing there are no guarantees, so what we promise is to apply our protocols with excellence, to take pateints’ feedback and always strive to make it better, and if at any point we feel like someone else is a better fit for what they need to tell them exactly who that is. It’s not nearly as final as I think people might like to think life can be, but it’s actually far better than that: It’s real and it’s something I can promise to everyone with absolute conviction.
3. Be humble enough to grade your results often and critically with an eye for how you can improve them. The customer or the patient experience is the only thing that truly matters. That’s the only thing you truly offer the public. You’re not actually offering yourself (that’s what you offer God), you’re not offering your time because if you do it faster it’s actually more valuable, not less. Seth Godin says that a brand is the promise of an experience a customer can expect over and over again. If you want a stand-out experience with your brand, with you, with your company that people will refer for (that’s the best marketing strategy ever) and come back for, then you have to be third standard deviation if not fourth standard deviation. To let you know how EASY it is to be a third-SD experience, look at this: The difference between 2nd and 3rd SD is only 4 percentiles… (95th percentile to 99th percentile). The details matter. The consistency matters. Accuracy matters. Make promises and keep them. Keep the promises you make and, if you can’t keep them, make a new promise and keep that. The promise isn’t truly broken until you’ve completely dropped the ball AND neglected to pick it back up again. That’s when people get pissed and your reputation takes a BIG hit. Avoid that and your reputation will consistenly grow.
I’m still making mistakes and falling down and getting back up and making apologies and fixing things when I fail to keep promises, but these are the lessons I’m learning and I hope they help someone else turn around their business or avoid some of the mistakes I’ve made. That would be super cool.
Awesome, really appreciate you opening up with us today and before we close maybe you can share a book recommendation with us. Has there been a book that’s been impactful in your growth and development?
I learned the most about rapport building from these four books that I would recommend anyone who deals with people read.
1. Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss – if you can learn to negotiate with hostage-takers, you can deal with terrorists or toddlers or bullies and everyone in between without losing your cool.
2. The Like Switch by Dr. Jack Shafer, Ph. D. – if you can have a pleasing and attractive personality you’ll find it much easier to make friends and influence people and be able to achieve what you want to. People will work with jackasses if they have to, but only as long as they have to.
3. The 7 Principles of Making Marriage Work by Dr. John Gottmann. A lot of hard working people accidentally neglect their relationship with their favorite person and try to earn money to impress that favorite person and then lo and behold, they’re getting divorced, they have to donate half the money they made to the attorneys and another chunk to the person that became a stranger because they didn’t know how to connect, what alarm signs to pay attention to in their marriage, and how to reset things if they’re currently busted. This book is not just an amazing read, it’s an honest-to-God field manual for a thriving relationship with anyone. True gold.
4. The Speed of Trust – fi you want to repair or build trust with yourself, with your community, or with anyone you need to understand it. Stephen M. R. Covey stands in his own right as a master of this topic and it dovetails amazingly with the work of his father whom I think most everyone has heard of, Dr. Stephen R Covey (not confusing at all, I know!)
Contact Info:
- Website: keller-chiro.com
- Instagram: @advocatewellnesstx
- Facebook: @advocatewellnesstx
- Youtube: @advocatewellnesstx
- Other: Those are the big four where people can find us!
Image Credits
Image Credits are all Jordan Long at Red Family Photo. I have full rights to all of them.
