Igor HERES never intended to become a coach, teacher or supervisor, nor to create a personality diagnosis.

Born in Saint-Jean-de-Luz to a Basque family of Spanish descent, he grew up in a region marked by the violence of ETA and GAL—he himself escaped attacks, assassination attempts, and kidnappings. From this experience arose a question that would never leave him: how to understand the other, and how to work together, even in what divides us most profoundly?

The son of a doctor and a psychomotor therapist, he discovered the books of his family home during his adolescence—Sigmund Freud and his Psychopathology of Everyday Life, then Henry Mintzberg and his Journey to the Center of Organizations (with whom he would later discuss his management models). These two readings, without his yet realizing it, laid the foundations for what would become PERS6NɅ: understanding how a person functions, and understanding how people function together.

After a career in audiovisual marketing, he trained as a coach in 2014 with Coach and Team, a leading school in France founded by Vincent Lenhardt. Like many young coaches, he then discovered the world of personality tests — Process Communication®, TTI Success Insight®, MBTI®, 4D Clarity®, Clifton Strength Finder®, Monkey Tie 5D®, and more recently Mindset Map®.

None of them truly convinced him until his encounter in 2018 with Isabelle Jarniou Contal at the Maieutis Institute: for the first time, a model—the Process Communication Model®—became truly understandable to him. At this school, he was first a student, then an assessor to support the training of future coaches.
He then trained in PCM with Gérard COLLIGNON and Isabelle JARNIOU, then deepened his practice through training and regular supervision of Process Therapy Model with Patrice DUBOURG.

This encounter raises a new, more demanding question: where do these models really come from, and how were they constructed? This question gives rise to a research project of more than five years — exchanges with peers (Philippe COUDOL, Isabelle JARNIOU, Vannina MALEKZADEH, Mélanie LE VAN CAU), publications, supervision by figures of Transactional Analysis (Daniel CHERNET, Philippe DUCATTEEUW), collection of hundreds of articles and rare books (Eric BERNE, Claude STEINER, Ian STEWART, Michael BROWN, Taibi KAHLER), until finally finding, at a bookseller's in Chicago, a rare signed copy of Transactional Analysis Revisited by Taibi KAHLER.

This exploration leads him to an observation: many personality tests may have a more solid scientific basis, or have never been updated since their creation.

Those who rely on a clinical basis most often do so through psychoanalysis or the study of behavioral disorders—and Transactional Analysis itself is, ultimately, just a way of translating personality types. He then delves into the DSM-5-TR (2022), the ICD-11 (2022), and then the PDM-3—the current classifications used by physicians, psychiatrists, and psychologists.

From this encounter between a personal quest and a scientific requirement, PERS6NɅ was born: a model tested on more than 25 people in cross-tests with other personality tests, then validated by more than 300 clients before its launch — with a deliberate methodological requirement: to classify the 6 personality types together rather than evaluate them separately, to avoid overly hasty answers that undermine the reliability of a result.