This is a story about some mentor training and coaching I did for a company in the Chicago area a couple of years ago. The company creates oil seals for the heavy-duty truck after market. They are a three hundred million dollar division of a major bearing company in Sweden.

I remember the first time I did a training for them. There were about fifty managers in the room. I was to lead them through a day long training introducing them to multiple intelligences. I said to my colleagues in my own company, “These are real nuts and bolts people. They are going to hate this!”

But, pleasantly, to my surprise, they loved it! They were literally on the edge of their seats and they gained new understandings of themselves and of their employees.

One of the managers was from the finance department. She frequently conducts training programs for her department on various aspects of accounting and the financial operations of the company. She told me that people usually hated coming to these sessions and they never seem to really understand.

After the training session with me, she said, “What have I got to lose? Let me try conducting the training using the Multiple Intelligence SmartStrategies™ I learned from David.”

Her report to me follows:

I am the Accounting Manager in the After Market Division. I have a group of seven people working for me, one in finance and a group of five in accounts receivable. I have been with the company for a couple of years. I just had my third year anniversary recently.

I took this information that we learned in your training sessions and put kind of a financial swing on it. I realized that I wasn’t getting through to anyone. I was just talking about numbers. I was talking about financial terms and no one was understanding it.

So I started asking people outside the meetings, “What don’t you understand?” At that point, I decided, “Well, I think what I need to do is be a little bit more creative in my approach.”

So we went through your training and I thought, “You know, I better start using some of these multi-intelligence ideas that you presented to us.” The first meeting that I conducted after our session, I was trying to explain a key financial formula.

It was made up of various components. So I broke the formula down into two major parts and I made what I called a scroll. So on each page of this scroll, which was in a different color, I had a key component of that formula.

As I unwound this scroll, I was giving very concrete examples that people could relate to in their everyday work environment. I started seeing people becoming excited about it, at least understanding a little bit more.

Once I completed that, the next month when we had the presentation, I tested them on the information. I was very pleased to discover that the people had not only learned it, but they had retained it.

In fact, the director of marketing, told me that one hundred percent of the people got one hundred percent correct on the test. He told me, “David, this has never happened before!”

What can account for this success? The answer is a system for creating and delivering “multimodal training”. They didn’t just learn the information in their heads; they learned it throughout their entire brain, mind, body system.

When you learn in this way you don’t forget. You deeply understand the information. And you remember it.

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