It was 6:00 AM on a cold, gray, windy, and rainy day in Kansas and the rolling hills that surrounded the Lansing Correctional Facility were brown with winter. I will never get use to the noise of the gates as they CLUNK shut behind you when entering the enter courts of a maximum-security facility. After 30 minutes of passing through numerous security checks and locks, we were finally in the 3^rd floor classroom that would host the 20 inmates and 6 staff for the day.

“I have never experienced anything like this”, said Rodney Cox, Founder of Insights International. “What happens if this invisible ink stamp gets washed off the back of my hand?”, he asked. With a rapid quip Phil Good, one of my colleagues, said, “If you don’t glow, you don’t go!”. You could see by Rodney’s face that he was not going to wash that hand all day.

In March 2008, Rodney visited this InnerChange Freedom Initiative (IFI) faith-based facility and presented the Leading From Your Strengths message to twenty inmates participating in the in-prison program. It was truly a day of transformation for these men, some serving life sentences, others hoping for parole in 18 months or less. All were mesmerized as they learned about the perfect design God had for their lives and the strengths He had placed in them. As Rodney began to share and unpack the Leading From Your Strengths assessment you could see the men move from their independent, isolated little world to an open forum where the inmates were sharing at levels not seen before – behind the walls. Words cannot express the transforming power this program had on these men.

I realized that long before I had become a Christian, God had designed me with a combination of strengths when problem solving, influencing people, responding to pace and change, and responding to rules and procedures. I didn’t know it at the time, but God would put those strengths to use at Prison Fellowship Ministries (PFM) to influence the leadership development of its staff throughout the United States. After taking the Leading From Your Strengths® Assessment in 2004 I knew I had to integrate it into the PFM Leadership Institute. Over 200 PFM leaders have experienced the transformational power of the Leading From Your Strengths Assessment. God’s plan didn’t stop there; He went far beyond what I could see by orchestrating the use of Leading From Your Strengths Assessment with inmates at the Lansing Correctional Facility in the InnerChange Freedom Initiative unit where Prison Fellowship operates a faith-based program.

You may be asking – what was the inspiration for taking Leading From Your Strengths “behind the walls”? As strange as it may sound, God used my family. I grew up in a family, where five of my immediate family members had been incarcerated for crimes ranging from burglary to drug solicitation and prostitution, it was indeed a miracle that I would come to know Christ and eventually go into full time prison ministry.

As I studied the Leading From Your Strengths assessment, I realized that in spite of my dysfunctional heritage, God had designed me to be a Conductor, and if I could be amazed and transformed, simply by knowing how He had designed me, what could it do in the lives of others with similar backgrounds? I knew I had to talk to Rodney and invite him to go – behind the walls. If he could see the reaction of inmates who had taken the Leading From Your Strengths assessment, and for the first time were beginning to understand God’s design for their lives, it would transform their lives and his life and bring glory to God.

The outcomes of using Leading From Your Strengths have been amazing at PFM but what happened – behind the walls – at the IFI facility warms my heart. Don Raymond, the Lansing IFI Director tells us his perceptions: “The Leading From Your Strengths training that my staff received has given us, as a team, a greater sense of unity. It has opened new ways of communication. Each of the team members has a greater sense of worth and belonging on our team. The inmates in our program learned from Leading From Your Strengths that they have strengths that can be put to constructive use and because of this training have a greater anticipation for their future.”

To God be the Glory.