Harvard-trained as a psychologist, Paul Nelson started developing appliedempathics after working for several years in psychiatric settings: "As a graduate student I learned about stimulus-response theory, right brain/left brain dominance, motivation...But it wasn't until I started working directly with clients and families that I saw, first-hand, how therapeutic outcomes can be so effectively achieved using empathic methods. I also learned that behavioral choice is largely driven by emotion, not reason. As neurologist Donald Calne describes it: 'The essential difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to action while reason leads to conclusions'." "When I began consulting to large healthcare organizations on consumer behavior and customer relations, I discovered that an empathic orientation had as much to do with predicting the behavior of large groups of people as it did with a single person. I also discovered that conventional marketing was often too limited in its scope to fully realize the benefits of empathy as an applied discipline for generating response and building loyalty. That's when I started developing applied empathics." --Paul Nelson, M.Ed. Principal