 Brain Power Wellness provides mindfulness training, social-emotional learning, brain training, holistic wellness, and team building to about 500 schools around the country. We've been really honored over the last 12 years to work with up to half a million students at this point and about 25,000 teachers. Before Brain Education, I was a stressed out elementary school teacher and after Brain Education, I am a hopeful and passionate leader for holistic health and wellness in education. My name is Dave Beale. I am from Long Island, New York, and I'm the executive director for Brain Power Wellness and the author of the Brain Power classroom. So I first found Brain Education through my wife. I was trying to deal with the stress of being a new teacher in a really challenging elementary school, actually the fifth lowest performing school in all of New York City, and I was a new teacher and also a new father. My son was about two years old and just all the experiences of stress of the job and parenthood really started to wear on me and I started developing some physical problems from headaches and insomnia to chest pain and when I started developing chest pain and explained that to my wife, she got very concerned and the line that I like to tell is she looked at our son, our two-year-old son, and then she looked at me and she said, if you die, I'm going to kill you. And that was her loving way of telling me that I needed to take better care of myself. So then she invited me to take yoga and Tai Chi at the studio that she was practicing at. So that's how I first learned about Brain Education. Brain Education has changed me in many ways. So I think the biggest thing is that it's given me tools to manage my stress better. So I've always been a very passionate person, but also have been quick-tempered. And so Brain Education has really helped me to manage my emotions more evenly and just given me tools to decompress when I have stress from work or from my personal life. Just given me some tools to lead a healthier lifestyle. The other thing I think the biggest thing for me is it's helped me kind of rediscover my life purpose because all the changes that I went through really inspired me. And as I've shared this over the last 15 years with students and teachers, it's just really inspired me about my life's journey. And I always knew, you know, as an adult, I knew that that would involve education and teaching, but I didn't know it was going to be involving teaching Tai Chi and wellness and meditation and things like that. So it's actually given me, I think, a really cool kind of path in life to share and connect with people. So it's given me a lot. Favorite Brain Education exercise probably is chi gam energy ball and danmu energy dance. So just kind of letting go of all the stress and just feeling energy pulsing through my body and just connecting with the essence of life inside me. I think my favorite brain education principle is either where your mind goes energy follows or if when you choose it will happen, which are pretty similar to me. So that was kind of a very new concept for me just about tapping into my manifestation power and the power of not only positive thinking, but just persistence through positivity until the result that you're shooting for is manifested. Brain power wellness provides mindfulness training, social emotional learning, brain training, holistic wellness and team building to about 500 schools around the country. And we've been really honored over the last 12 years to work with up to half a million students at this point and about 25,000 teachers. And what we do is really simple. So we offer four levels of professional learning for teachers. But what's pretty special and unique about our system is in addition to that professional development, we also push into the teacher's classrooms because it can be really hard for a teacher first learning about this to feel confident to actually use the techniques that we've given them in the PD. So the step of us pushing into the classroom and introducing those exercises and routines to the students is really impactful not only for the kids, but also for the teacher as well. And we also do some pretty amazing student leadership programs in the schools. One of my favorite things that we do is the student leadership program. And we train 25 student leaders in a given school. And these are kids who have natural leadership ability, but maybe have fallen through the cracks of the traditional system and are using that leadership maybe in negative ways. And so we do a really great three day self development workshop for those students and get them to buy into being a positive force in the school. And we continuously mentor them throughout the year. And at the end of the year in May, we have a huge celebration this year, we're going to have 3000 student leaders from over 100 schools have all those students come together upstated Honors Haven Resort in Ellenville, New York for a three day student leadership celebration. So that's one of the most inspiring things that I get to participate in each year, because I get to see the future leaders of our country really tap into who they are and connect with nature and connect with with their fellow students that they get to meet from all over the city and all over the country. So some of the benefits from brain education in the classroom range from social emotional benefits, such as fewer negative incidents because students are self regulating their behavior in a more productive way, and just a more confident attitude, more kind of positive affect to more cognitive outcomes. So we have some great research on our website that shows the impact of our training on things like learning efficiency on memory and recall and on sequential and quantitative reasoning. So the combination of stress management and meditative techniques also combined with the really cool neuroplasticity and brain training exercises that we do create a pretty powerful impact that's not only good for us emotionally and socially, but also cognitively and academically. So the best way to get involved with Brain Power Wellness is to visit our website at brainpowerwellness.com and you can connect with us on all forms of social media and please follow us. We've sent a lot of videos and pictures of the great work that our teachers are doing every day in the schools and message us and see how we can connect. Before Brain Education I was a stressed out elementary school teacher and after Brain Education I am a hopeful and passionate leader for holistic health and wellness in education.