This is the rare post that won’t dwell on Landmark Education, the Landmark Forum, or any other thoughts about personal development. Like many others, I’ve been highly entertained by the action in South Africa, even though the Socceroos didn’t quite make the knockout stage after Ghana won out on the goal differential tiebreaker. Despite this disappointment – I had hopes of avenging the travesty of the last-second penalty in the Italy game four years ago – I thought the Socceroos were valiant after the early four-nil disaster versus Germany. They tied what has proven to be a very resilient and difficult-to-score-upon bunch from Ghana and defeated a solid Serbian squad, but it was not to be.
My Kiwi friends seemed quite delighted with the result – despite not advancing – since a team regarded as lucky to even be in the tournament managed to tie all their games. The same goes for the Americans, whom I also rooted for, who were inspired by their teams play (though the loss against Ghana was a bitter pill to swallow). The English seem quite disappointed, on the other hand; the draw with Algeria, the goaltending gaffe, and the complete defensive breakdown against Germany (glad it wasn’t just us) seem to have them particularly morose.
This despite making the knockout stage – it points to the fact that, indded, context is decisive, and high expectations generally lead to disappointment (some Landmark notions seem to have slipped in here). There’s always 2014…
One of the things I find most interesting about human nature is our ambivalent relationship with predictability. Do we want our lives to be predictable? Some people would say yes, some would say no, and many would say we want it to be predictable in some ways and not others. The Landmark Forum makes a case for the unpredictable, saying that breakthrough results and performance are only available in the world of the unpredictable.
I think this perhaps reflects a source of tension people find around Landmark Education and their programmes – they become interested, but they are nervous about their sense that taking the Landmark Forum might turn their lives upside down! And this is often the case, not because the Landmark Forum ‘does something’ to people, but it allows them to see that the predictability of life is actually their own creation, and that they could take it in entirely different directions if they so chose. Having the option to get completely out of your cozy routine can be disconcerting.
I summarize the internal conflict this way: the mind craves predictability. In fact, it wants this certainty far more than it wants happiness and fulfillment. With certainty and predictability the mind can strategize how to get through life, even it’s not fulfilling, if we survive, that’s for the mind. The mind is about survival, and if it sees a predictable path for survival, that’s enough for it, regardless of whether it’s particularly gratifying.
Our higher selves, one could say, don’t really care about predictability. Our higher selves want to learn and grown and flourish. Predictability actually tends to be a barrier to these things. This creates a natural tension in people. You can see it when someone comtemplates a serious life change sometimes – a new career, going to school, marriagen/divorce – the current circumstance can be miserable, but people are still loathe to change the routine – they are caught in between their desires for predicatability on hand and their desire for growth and happiness on the other.
None of this is to say that predictability is inherently bad or unpredictability inherently good – in fact, in the realm of survival, quite the reverse it true, in the sense that predictability is quite a good thing for an aeroplane engine or finding one’s auto keys.
But for me, after having done the Landmark Forum, nothing could quite beat the experience of life as an adventure, desiring to meet new people because I didn’t know what they were like – it was certainly more gratifying than night after night in front of the television! In this way, unpredictability has been a good thing for me. If you read reviews of the Landmark Forum, I’ll bet good money that you’ll notice a trend – those saying positive things about it are talking about the excitement of unpredictable experiences, while those criticising it are operating on the precept that unpredictability is a bad thing. Until next time…
I thought I’d go a bit off topic from Landmark Education and write about something near to my heart – the environment and our global responsibilities regarding it. More accurately, I thought I’d put up a video from Australia that I saw on a Landmark Education Facebook page about choosing to be responsible for the environment.
This video is rather brilliant, in that it invites people to take on the point of view that not only are they responsible for the environment, but that we as human beings actually fully chose to be responsible for the stewardship our planet as part of the price of our free will. It dovetails nicely with Landmark views of choice, of selecting freely, not because we have to, but because we can (I have no idea whether the man in the video has done Landmark, but it sort of sounds like it). Here it is:
I think that the biggest thing I got out of the Landmark Forum was the real power of acknowledgment and acknowledging people. It might seem pretty obvious that acknowledging people is important and worthwhile, but I think our culture has a limited view of acknowledgment that prevents most people from having it be as difference-making as it could be.
I just saw an incredible video which illustrates this principle perfectly. It’s not directly about Landmark Education or the Forum, but it could have been. If you don’t want to read all my philosophizin’ then just watch the video below:
Mostly, how we view acknowledgment is that we judge people on how effective they are at something, or how much they helped us, and if they are really effective or did a really good job helping us, then we acknowledge them. If we give more acknowledgment than that, then either our acknowledgment is cheap, or worse, phony. Have you ever notice that it means more to you when you get an acknowledgment from someone who rarely gives it than when we get one from someone who acknowledges or thanks everybody?
In fact, I would say that we seek acknowledgment from those least likely to give it, because to get that particular acknowledgment would indicate that we had been truly successful in something. In this way of looking at it, acknowledgment is basically a positive evaluation of someone’s performance – a judgment on how they did.
In this paradigm of acknowledgment, someone who does a consistently average job at something will never get acknowledged. And if we see someone who consistently gives out acknowledgment without any evidence of extraordinary performance, we actually become contemptuous of the acknowledger – it’s like when we’re children in school and there’s a big race and afterwards every child is given a medal, even those who came in last, because we don’t want anyone to feel bad that they didn’t win. In this model of acknowledgment as performance evaluator, freely given acknowledgment reeks of condescension or rewarding mediocrity.
But there’s a different way of looking at acknowledgment – viewing it as an act of creation rather than an act of evaluation? What if you acknowledge people in such a way that it actually has them be bigger, happier people just out of getting the acknowledgment? What if you acknowledge people without worrying whether the acknowledgment is “true” in most people’s eyes? Inside the model of acknowledgment = evaluation, this is positive thinking, namby pamby self-esteem boosting at its worst, having people feel better rather than confront reality.
But in the acknowledgment = creation way of looking at things, having the lots of evidence for your acknowledgment isn’t the most important thing. What’s important is the actual impact your acknowledgment has on people. What’s important is that people actually step into being who you acknowledge them as, not from a phony, inflated sense of self-worth, but as a fully authentic, honest expression of who they are. If this doesn’t make sense, watch the video above. I can attest to the miraculous difference acknowledging people as a creation can make – it can heal wounds, create joy and love where it wasn’t there before and actually make the kind of positive difference with people that we all desire to make.
Acknowledgment = creation is something I took from the Landmark Forum, not as a concept that was taught, but as something I realized was true for myself. Enough said, watch the video!
When I occasionally see someone on the internet say that the Landmark Forum ‘brainwashes’ people – usually in an anonymous post somewhere with no evidence as to what that actually means – I tend to wonder, where was I? There was nothing in my Landmark Forum but a frank conversation about what people are dealing with in their lives. If the course leaders exhort people to do something, it’s do go make a difference with people, help make the world work (see my last post).
But a blog I recently read gets more to the heart about what people can find uncomfortable about Landmark Education programmes. You see, in one Landmark course, I think it’s the Advanced Course, you do an exercise wher you really have to be with people. Like, actually look in their eyes. I would assert that for many people, this is quite scary. They say that public speaking is the number one fear of people (slightly ahead of death), which basically indicates we fear embarrassment more than death. I think the fear of public speaking is simply the fear of being with people we don’t know – lots of them.
In this blog, Ted’s Transformational Tips, Ted talks about an exercise he says is from the Landmark Forum (I actually think it was in the Advance Course, though that’s not really the point here). In it, you take on simply being with another person, looking into their eyes, not saying anything, for about five minutes.
Simple, right?
Well, as Ted points out, not really, for many people. Many people discover how uncomfortable they are truly being with others – they feel forced to laugh nervously, or look away. But when people actually take the time to get out of our own head and be with another, I think many people get in touch with something they may have forgotten – how magnificent people can be, how moving, how powerful.
I think that for some people, hearing about such an exercise can actually be quite threatening – threatening to one’s fears, that is. I think sometimes what alarmists on the internet are most scared of is people giving up their fears. Then they might have to give up their own…
I was recently sent a finance textbook which appeared to contain the ideas of Landmark Education in its text as applied to growing wealth in a business. Although Landmark isn’t mentioned by name, the book’s discussion of integrity had to have come from Landmark’s ideas, as anyone who reads it would attest. It points out to how mainstream these supposedly radical, new-age ideas have become.
Specifically, it looks at integrity in terms of workability, and how a lack of integrity within a business organisation invariably affects its performance negatively. Here’s a brief excerpt:
“…integrity is required in order to gain workability and the trust of others that in turn opens up the opportunity for high performance. In other words, the absence of integrity relegates the firm to no better than average long term peformance.”
That integrity matters is obviously not a revolutionary idea – what’s specific to Landmark here in my view is the idea of viewing integrity solely through the lens of workability and performance, rather than as a moral issue.
This can be quite controversial with some people, who thinks this view abandons moral responsibility, but I think the opposite is actually true. Moral responsibility is obviously important, but by focusing on performance, it allows the costs of a lack of integrity come into focus, which go beyond moral fault. Let’s face it, many businesses unfortunately don’t care about moral responsibility, but if they saw that their lack of integrity was actually impacting their bottom line – this would move them into action faster than any moral argument probably ever would.
To make this point, the author, Bartley Madden, gives the fascinating example of IBM developing personal computers. The best technologies all existed with IBM for making personal computers; however, there was a lack of integrity and trust within the company that had different departments not trust each other to deliver on various aspects of a product. As a result, IBM’s personal computer group farmed out two aspects of their computers – the operating system and the microchip – to Microsoft and Intel. In so doing, they gave away perhaps the two biggest business opportunities of the last fifty years – all because of a lack of integrity. A company may not think of “workplace culture” as essential to the bottom line – examples like this prove how erroneous this view can be.
Note that integrity here again is workability issue, not a moral one – there may not have been any moral issues at IBM, but the lack of trust and communication between departments lacked structural integrity as far as the company went. And it obviously paid dearly.
Anyhow, I’m not expert, but it seems a very interesting book to me – it gives many more examples of how a company’s integrity impacts the bottom line – here’s the Amazon page for Wealth Creation.
Those who are well acquainted with Landmark Education may know that Jerome Downes died a few months ago from heart disease. Downes both led the Landmark Forum, and headed up Landmark’s operations in Asia and was extremely well known by many people I know who took Landmark’s programmes in the Pacific Rim.
I didn’t know Downes, but I did have the opportunity to read comments posted on his website that were apparently the very last things that he said while leading the last course that he ever led (the Landmark Forum in Thailand, in November 2009). His comments were basically a charge to go make the world work. Here’s my favorite part:
“Here is your homework assignment. Go make the world work. Get your family to work. Get your company to work. Get your community to work. Get your country to work.
If it’s not you, who is it going to be? If this is not it, when is it going to be it?“
I know for myself that is that it is quite easy to pursue the illusion of being happy someday when the rat race is won, as opposed to realizing that in the present moment, real satisfaction mostly comes from making a difference for other people.
I strongly recommend that readers read the whole thing on Downes’ website, which powerfully expresses the urgency of making a difference now.
Based on some of the sinister nonsense one can come across when researching Landmark Education and other personal development companies on the net, I’m sometimes surprised anyone ends up doing these courses at all. This blog post I read perfectly shows some of what people have to wade through to figure out if a course like the landmark forum is right for them.
One footnote: this interesting blog post talks about many of the ‘reviews’ one reads out there about such programs – most aren’t ‘reviews’ at all – they’re more along the lines of ‘I’ve heard bad stuff like it’s a cult so stay away’ or ‘or I went to a brief informational session about it and it was weird so stay away’. Many (though not all) are by people who never actually did said course – kind of like reviewing a film based on rumours rather than actually watching it.
All right, since I’m feeling rather lazy today I’m going to simply direct you to a blog post that gives the experience of three people regarding the Landmark Forum. It’s a great post, particularly since it doesn’t indulge in the kind of intellectualizing I’m often guilty of – it simply shares the impact the course had on the day-to-day lives of three people in concrete terms.
One person shares about how they had opinions about everything in the world but never actually bothered to do anything about it; another about how they were in about to quit taking flying lessons because they didn’t like the instructor; a third that they believed they were unwanted by their parents. In all three stories, the people shared about taking a different action based on something that made a huge difference for them in the Landmark Forum. Read the whole thing at Solid Gold Creativity.
I’ve heard a lot of talk about “the human potential movement” over the last few weeks, and sometimes I hate the term – it’s used to describe everything from corporate motivational seminars to firewalking to Tony Robbins to meditation on a mountaintop. In other words, it’s a term that often doesn’t really mean anything, since it lumps so many unlike things together.
So when a woman recently blogged about taking both the landmark forum and franklin covey’s 7 habits of effective people, and saying that they were both essentially pointing to the same thing, I was initially skeptical. I also winced a bit at her suggestion that each course was essentially that the barriers to success are in our own minds – it sounded a bit like the positive thinking thing that is often rightfully criticized. But after I read it over, I got what she is trying to say, and I think it’s pretty accurate, which is this:
‘Integrity and character form the heart of everything…the reason for all our misery is our compromise on these.” Sounds a bit like an obvious homily, but I think it also captures the heart of “the human potential movement”, if there really is one!
Said another way, who one is being and how one is acting ultimately determines our satisfaction and the results we produce in life, not just the circumstances. We spend a lot of time worrying about stuff that’s out of our hands (the circumstances), and probably not enough dealing with our end of the deal – how we react to those circumstances. And this is why “The human potential movement” is inward looking – not out of narcissism, or any inherent interest in the self, but because the self is the thing we actually have power over – we can’t change the world, or we can only by changing ourselves as the conduit to that change.
As the famous Tolstoy quote goes: “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
