Steven Rudolph
As the Multiple Natures (MN) Theory enters its third year, I spent some time reflecting today on what life was like before it existed. Doing so was like imagining what life was like before the advent of mobile phones or the Internet-tools that have become indispensable and that have reshaped the way we live and work. We accept these technologies as part of our everyday lives, and despite their occasional drawbacks, we recognize how much they have helped us by connecting us to our families, friends, customers, and colleagues, as well as to important information of every kind. The emergence of Multiple Natures is very much the same for me – an indispensable tool that helps me help people understand themselves better, enter the right career paths, and get along effectively in whatever work environments they encounter.
To begin, I recall how we at Jiva used to counsel children for careers: it was an extremely random and inaccurate process, where everyone – parents, teachers, and students – was lost guessing about the child’s future. We grasped at straws – perhaps looking for a sign or interest that the child displayed or for an area where they showed some aptitude. Yet in most cases, parents ultimately took the safe route, encouraging the child to follow in their footsteps. In the end, we would just pray that the child would work hard and succeed.
When it came to hiring people for our institute, there was never any type of assurance that the candidate would work out. Even if the person interviewed perfectly, it would still take three months for us to know if he was going to turn out to be well-suited for the position or would become a liability, leaving us with the difficulty of having to fire him – as well as with the strain of having to go through the process again to find his replacement – for whom there was also no guarantee.
And with our existing staff members, when they faced problems with work or became resistant due to one reason or another, we typically blamed it on the employee’s attitude. For instance, if there was a teacher assigned to manage a particular event and she took no interest, it was because she was lazy and unmotivated.
Now we know better. When it comes to guiding our students and staff, we are equipped with a powerful tool for diagnosing personalities: Multiple Natures. MN serves as an x-ray machine, or perhaps more, an MRI device. It provides us a detailed view of what’s going on inside people’s heads so we know how to guide them effectively.
On the career front, it has enabled me to understand the inherent strengths inside each child, and to systematically and scientifically determine which occupations would be ideally suited for them. So, for example, we can understand why students strong in Adventurous Nature have consistently displayed behaviour that inclined them toward doing risky things, and can point them in the direction of jobs that would harness that quality such as share market investing, working in the military, or even becoming research scientists. We have also been able to identify children with prodigious Entertaining and Educative Natures, and direct them toward professions that respectively tap into their capacities to amuse or teach others.
Next, our human resource team has been able to hire employees with a higher degree of accuracy. When each person applies for a post, he takes the MN Test, giving our team a much clearer idea of whether his nature would align with the type of work that he would be undertaking. A small 30-minute test has enabled us to filter out candidates who would have surely failed to live up to the expectations we set.
And when it comes to handling difficulties exhibited by our existing staff members, we can instantly map the causes to people’s natures rather than pin the trouble on a flaw in their character. For instance, we can now identify how problems arise due to a non-administrative person being given highly administrative tasks, or why a person low in Providing Nature becomes quickly stressed when assigned a duty requiring him to excessively tend to people’s problems.
Imagine what doctors had to do before the days of blood tests, x-rays, and MRIs. They surely had to rely more on guesswork and experimentation. And as could be expected, there was a much greater rate of failure in addressing and correcting health problems, only because doctors were not able to get the information needed to make a correct diagnosis. Once modern tools and tests were created, much of the guesswork was eliminated; they could directly see the cause of the problems and take the courses of action that would best remedy them.
Now that MN is here, I can’t imagine what I’d do without it. My only disappointment is that so many people still have no idea of its existence. They are still stuck in the dark ages; it is as if they have no access to cell phones, the Internet, X-rays, or MRIs. They are struggling in numerous contexts in their lives, without an inkling that there is a tool which could easily solve these problems. The wasted time and money – and the wasted lives of those who end up suffering in the wrong careers is, to me, a matter of tragedy.
Of course, all new ideas and new technologies take time to reach the masses. But, I am hoping that this year will see a much wider awareness of MN, and that people across the country will discover its incredible power in helping children get on the right careers, and helping their colleagues get more out of their professional activities. It is, therefore, my sincere request to all our readers to reach out this year and share the Multiple Natures concept with your students, staff and colleagues so that we can bring everyone up to the cutting edge of learning and working. Once you do so, I am sure you will also marvel at how life used to be in the days before MN.
The author is an American educator, TV personality, public speaker and bestselling author based in India. He can be reached at steve@jiva.com.