How to Know Your Strengths – Part 1

In January of 2000, Bette Mandino called me and shared that the person who owned the film rights to The Greatest Salesman in the World was not going to renew due to a serious illness in the family. She asked, “Would you be interested?” It took a moment to realize the magnitude of this moment and then responded, “Bette, is this a rhetorical question?” She chuckled.

We spent the next two hours working out the details with her attorney in New York, our attorney in LA, and the publisher in Florida. In the end, we decided that I would leave the film industry and we would start a new Og Mandino company. I would take the reigns as the CEO and we would focus not only on making the film but also on bringing Og’s time-tested principles into the 21st century.

First, I wanted to find a science that could help us measure how people think so we could tie Og’s time-tested principles directly to specific challenges. If successful in doing so, we could focus a person’s time, energy and resources to maximize results.

We found the science. It was called the formal science of axiological mathematics, developed by a Robert S. Hartman, Ph.D., at the Hartman Institute in Tennessee. It was powerful but very complicated.

We spent the next fourteen years and thousands of hours perfecting how best to use the science and present the results. We can now measure with laser accuracy how someone thinks—not what they think, but how they think. We can now go into that place where few people ever invite another human being—below the surface of personality, behavior, and aptitude—and identify their habits of thinking. These habits impact every facet of our lives—the decisions we make, the actions we take, and ultimately the results we create.

Out of this work came the Intentional Creation Assessment and Coaching Program.

The IC Assessment is very different from personality tests and behavioral assessments such as the Myers/Briggs and the DISC Profile.

Interestingly, when we take five people who share the same labels from an inductive assessment tool, we discover that they all got there through very different habits of thinking. We discovered that some behaviors were based on natural strengths and some are over-compensations for unhealthy habits—all are different.

If success requires change, and it most often does, we will want to go below the surface of personality and behavior and measure the thoughts that are driving the behavior.

James Allen writes in his little yet poignant book, As a Man Thinketh, “Let a man radically alter his thoughts and he will be astonished at the rapid transformation it will affect in the material conditions of his life.” This is simple yet powerful advice—but is it simple to do?

Since we started development, we’ve gone through several iterations for presenting the Assessment results—human thought is quite complex. On December 30, 2008, we started focusing on ways to bring this powerful instrument to the masses via the Internet.

Previously, it took a highly skilled coach to do this and would cost $300.00 or more—very difficult for an increasing number of networkers. We felt compelled to find a way for someone to have a valuable experience online without the need for a skilled coach. We are getting very close.

The latest version of the Assessment is being used with business owners, sales teams, network marketers, and most recently with athletes including a quarterback being prepared for the NFL draft. The Assessment is intuitive and people can go as deep as they want to go—even without a coach. What people know when they review their results is this: The Assessment has measured how they think. The most common comment we here is, “How can you know so much by such a simple process?”

The second part of the article tells more about the assessment.   Take the Assessment.