Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Dr Daniel Kimbley. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Dr Daniel, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s start with education – we’d love to hear your thoughts about how we can better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career

So much. What many people following along may not know about me is that I taught high school English for six years before transitioning into getting my doctorate to become a chiropractor and then opening my own practice. Here’s why I did that.

While I was teaching I was continually asking myself the question: “How could I get better results with the students in my classroom, and how does the brain actually learn?” What I discovered along the way was that almost everything that makes someone in school successful, every skill/trait, is housed within the pre-frontal cortex of the brain. What all of the research up to this point shows is that kids with more stress when they are younger can be predicted to have lower quality of life in almost every area you could think of. They make less money, they have higher risk of developing chronic disease, higher instances of drug and alcohol abuse, higher divorce rates, earlier death rates etc. This is from the ACE Study if you’re curious, look it up, it’s an interesting long-term study. So what fMRIs show is that stress shuts off the frontal cortex of the brain.

So what does this have to do with the educational system? Almost all of what the educational institutions in America are teaching are content-based curricula. Meaning that our schools aren’t teaching skills, the very non-cognitive skills that we KNOW will predict how successful someone is later in life. Instead we force feed more content earlier on our kiddos. This creates stress because our students never have the chance to develop the skills and part of the brain that would actually allow the strategies and tools to learn the content better. So I started making up my own teaching strategies that would teach skills housed in the frontal cortex. And I was getting excellent results. But going back to the ACE Study, I kept asking myself, how could we get better results faster rather than it taking an entire school year? That led me to learn a ton about the neurology associated with learning and what things could shut off stress in the brain (specifically the HPA-Axis) and allow students to advance and learn skills more quickly. Time and time again, everything led me back to the specific neurology of how chiropractic care can positively influence someone’s brain. Eventually I got to the point where I had to become a chiropractor because I kept coming back to the thought “what if I these kids could have chiropractic care in conjunction with the teaching strategies I was using, how much more quickly could they get results?”

My practice up to this point has proved that everything I believed to be true was correct, chiropractic care can get better results faster and influence the frontal cortex immediately versus taking a year of training via the teaching strategies I was using.

So why does this matter? Because if we want to better prepare our students and future leaders for a more fulfilling life, school in my opinion should be much less content focused and all skills-based. Kids should be taught how to build their grit, willpower, determination, curiosity, determination of good versus bad and right versus wrong, how to set long-term goals and stick with them, and emotional intelligence. If someone has these skills, we KNOW they will be more successful in life–regardless of how we define success. I think the other aspect to this is that every kid in every school in America should have access to regular chiropractic care. The benefits on the frontal cortex are massive and it would ensure we are truly setting kids up for success both cognitively and neurologically.

Dr Daniel, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

In December of 2008, I began my journey as a high school English teacher working in a very diverse school district in Indianapolis, Indiana. As I grew as a teacher, I was fascinated with learning about how I could potentially help students even further in my classroom, so I began researching the brain’s role in learning. What I discovered along the way was that learning and the skills that make someone successful (grit, willpower, curiosity, motivation, emotional intelligence, determining good v. bad, determining right v. wrong, rational thinking, and higher levels of consciousness) were all functions on the pre-frontal cortex of the brain. As I learned more and more about brain function, I began to implement teaching strategies that addressed the brain and were not content-specific. And I started getting results with my students where other teachers and administrators were starting to take notice. Eventually, I was asked to get out of the classroom and begin teaching other teachers the strategies I had been developing.

Simultaneous to the research I was doing to see how I could further help my students and get them results even faster inside of the classroom, I got under chiropractic care for myself. It took my wife an entire year to convince me to see a chiropractor and it changed my entire world. I became more motivated, I saw my athletic performance increase dramatically, my motivation to learn and connect more with her and take a bigger interest in exploring my own Soul Purpose skyrocketed. As I continued my journey with chiropractic care, I noticed that there were things in my life I was unhappy with and that I knew there was more. The best way to explain it is that the chiropractic care I was receiving allowed me to realize that teaching wasn’t actually my Soul Purpose and that there were ways that I could make a bigger impact for entire families, not just for my students inside of the classroom. I began wondering HOW chiropractic could have made these changes in my life, my mindset and my physiology so I started digging into the science behind why and how these changes were happening with me. Here’s what I learned: chiropractic adjustments, done in a very specific way, stimulate and influence the pre-frontal cortex of the brain.

The more I learned, the more I started asking the question: what if my students in the classroom had chiropractic care in conjunction with the teaching strategies I was using. The unequivocal answer was that I could get results in a fraction of the time than if I were using teaching strategies alone. I got to the point where I felt like in order to impact more families and more people, I had to quit teaching and get my Doctorate of Chiropractic.

In October of 2014, my wife and I moved to Marietta, Georgia where I would attend Life University and obtain my Doctorate of Chiropractic. My first year in the program, my wife and I decided there was zero chance we would return to Indiana so we started exploring places where we could be near the water and enjoy summertime year round. We quickly ruled out Florida and decided to explore the West Coast. We traveled into LA and drove up the coast hitting every beach town we could all the way to Half Moon Bay. We decided it was too cold North of LA so we traveled south and fell in love with this tiny, surf, beach town Dana Point.

Knowing no one here, we decided to take a huge risk and open Nexus Family Chiropractic to help create more health, happiness and longevity in the community. In February of 2018, I opened my first practice where we see whole-families, entrepreneurs, and lots of pregnant mommas and kiddos.

We live by 4 P’s in our office. Posture. Presence. Productivity. Profit. Through our use of chiropractic care, we can very specifically stimulate the frontal cortex of the brain and allow people access to more Presence, Productivity, and Profit.

Just over four years later, we are making a huge impact in the community, helping people truly heal themselves and live out a lifetime of doing what they love. We have been voted Best Chiropractor in Dana Point four years running. |

By definition, Nexus means “connection linking two or more things or the central most important point or place”. Your nervous system is not only the most important organ system in the body but is also your connection to life. We are a chiropractic team committed to connecting you to an active, results-based lifestyle. One that connects you to the community, to family, and to presence, productivity, and profit by ensuring optimal brain and nervous system function.

We provide high-end chiropractic care to entrepreneurs, whole-families, pregnant mommas and kiddos.

We specialize in brain-based chiropractic care that addresses each individual’s ability to perform optimally. We are not a pain practice, we are a prevention and performance-based practice. We assess each client on an individual basis and tailor our care to the exact needs of each person.

What sets us apart is how different of an experience we create for clients in our office. We set the precedent for our clients to feel at home in our office. We are also set apart by the results we get with clients. Unfortunately, we end up being a last resort for many clients when nothing else has worked, but we always give them hope and get results. From clients who were told they would never run again, to getting off of medication clients were told they would be on for their entire lives, to seeing kids who were told they would never read or speak doing so. We get uncommon results because we take an uncommon approach to care and create and entire experience and atmosphere around it.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

Hands-down the best strategy for growing my clientele has been doing my best to create an experience like no other. I think that with how fast our world moves, most people just feel like a number everywhere they go. In our office we make every effort possible to not make that happen. We have crafted an environment in our office where the joke is that “the outside world goes away”. All the time we get clients telling us that they feel like the can just take a breath from the world when they step into our space. Why? Because we crafted it that way. The music, the decor, the way someone is greeted when they walk in, the conversations and level of intentionality behind every detail of what we do is crucial. There are things we don’t talk about or engage in inside of our office. It’s ALL uplifting, it’s all empowering, and it’s all pushing people in the direction of living out their Soul Purpose. Most business owners are constantly searching for the next new client. It’s no secret that we are going to do everything we can to make people feel like family (because they are) so that we never need to chase anyone and we can focus on the person in front of us.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Growing up we didn’t have money, like at all. We weren’t the poorest family by any means, but we also never grew up with air conditioning or central heat in our home. It was a window unit in the summer and space heaters in the winter, just to give some idea. So I was always raised with this mentality that “I don’t have enough money”. I only have this much and I need to scrimp and save every penny. The problem with that is that as an entrepreneur sometimes taking all of our extra money and investing into more knowledge and skills is the most important thing that we could possibly do. Growing up I could have never imagined spending $25k cash on anything that wasn’t a car or part of a down payment on a house. As a business owner, $25k may or may not be a lot of money, but if you could make $100k with the skills you will gain from that $25k investment, would you do it? My answer was “not a chance” for many years. Now it makes way more sense. There is nothing that will give you a return on investment like investing in skills for yourself and then massively implementing those skills that you’ve learned. I’m not saying you have to spend money to make money, sometimes it’s simply the speed at which those changes happen are accelerated with spending more money. Long story short, instead of scrimping and saving, invest in skills that will allow you to make infinitely more impact. That impact will grow your income. Something that I had to learn way too late in life.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.nexusfamilychiropractic.com
• Instagram: @nexusfamilychiropractic @drdanielkimbley
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nexusfamilychiropractic/
• Other: Free full-length documentary: www.nfchiros.com/bydesign The Nexus Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-nexus-podcast/id1463329496 Business Inside Out w/ Dr. Daniel Kimbley: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/business-inside-out-w-dr-daniel-kimbley/id1650160871

Image Credits
Together Creative, Royale Kuljian