This is about a mentor training and coaching system based on multiple intelligences – The 8 Kinds of Smart. When you incorporate multiple intelligences into your mentoring, coaching, or training you’ll suddenly find you’re reaching everyone, everytime!

And what is more, you’ll get actual transfer of the information you’re teaching from the training situation to both participant’s personal and professional life beyond the training itself. Participants will remember the information you’ve taught or presented for the rest of their lives. They’ll understand it at deep levels of their being. And, they know how to integrate it into their lives.

If you think this sounds too good to be true, let me tell a story about how I discovered the power of multiple intelligences. A number of years ago, before I launched my own company, I worked for a large training company in the Chicago area. I was the director of marketing and sales as well as a full time consultant for the company.

Part of my responsibility was to conduct mentor training for all the employees of the company on certain topics which would have company-wide benefit. Since many of the employees had frequent contact with our customers it was deemed important for them to receive customer service training. I was assigned this task. It turned out to be my nemesis!

I would conduct the training, which covered such topics as active listening, assessing customers’ dominate information-processing modalities, understanding the “social skills” needed when communicating with other people, and knowing how to effectively discern a customer’s needs and address their concerns, questions, or problems.

Invariably, after my fine training session, I would hear people on the phone doing the exact opposite of what I had just spent a couple of training them to do. I was obviously distressed (as was my boss!).

For some reason the training I had delivered didn’t stick. In fact, not only did it not stick, most people, when informally asked about the points covered in the training, couldn’t remember, what in my estimation, were the key points I’d taught.

My first response was to blame the participants for not paying attention during the formal training sessions. But when I was honest, I realized I had their full attention while I was talking. In fact many of them even took notes! My next response to blame the schedule. Our company trainings usually occurred right after lunch, and everyone knows that people can’t focus on a full stomach!

However, after several more unsuccessful attempts to explain and rationalize why the training was less than effective, there was only one other explanation – the trainer (yours truly!) had failed to get through to everyone.

“But”, I said to myself, “I did a really good job of presenting the information. My explanations were clear and they seemed to be with me. What went wrong?”

It then hit me like ton of bricks. I had only presented the information in one or two ways at best. I had made the fatal mistake that I’m always telling others about in trainings I conduct and in presentations I make. I had, by my actions, assumed that everyone learns the same way.

I had given them a handout containing the information I was to cover and I proceeded to walk them through the handout, in what I thought was an interesting and entertaining way. The problem? I had only used one intelligence – WordSmart – to get my concepts across. Those who learn best is this way, got it. The others heard me talk about it, but they didn’t get it!

Needless to say, the next time I conducted a company-wide training it was “multimodal” training. What this means is that I used a wide variety of teaching and learning strategies to get the concepts across that I was assigned to teach; in fact, I made sure that I included teaching and learning strategies from all of The 8 Kinds of Smart.

The results were quite different. Not only did people thoroughly enjoy the training session, but weeks later they were still talking about it and they were practicing the concepts I had taught on-the-job. The training had indeed transferred from the training room to the workplace.

WHY? Contemporary brain research has discovered several very interesting and powerful things about “multimodal” learning:

• The more different ways a person learns something, the more they really learn it.
• The more different ways a person learns something, the more they genuinely understanding it.
• The more different ways a person learns something, the more they will remember it.
• The more different ways a person learns something, the more it becomes part of their being (as opposed to information they read about in a handout).

That day I resolved to require of myself to ALWAYS teach in a multi-modal way and to help my participants learn about the multi-modal teaching and learning approach.

For more about how to use multiple intelligences to transform your mentor training and coaching subscribe to my newsletter below. I’ll also send you a free video about The 8 Kinds of Smart.