What The Landmark Forum Cultivates
As a cutting-edge personal development program, The Landmark Forum cultivates a kind of self-awareness in people, so that they can become aware of their own self-imposed limitations and blind spots. Specifically, graduates of The Landmark Forum examine where they have made decisions about life, other people and themselves. These decisions, while they may have been a useful way of dealing with the world at the time, don’t necessarily give people maximum effectiveness in the present moment.
When one has an awareness of where one has limited oneself based on past decisions, people can create new possibilities in their lives, their careers, and their families beyond just a pipe dream. One could say that The Landmark Forum cultivates the ability to invent a future distinct from the past, and to be able to design actions that powerfully fulfill that future such that people get the results and the sense of satisfaction that is important to them.
In terms of self-awareness, one thing that The Landmark Forum cultivates is recognition where one is blaming others, blaming the world and blaming oneself for those areas of life where one lacks happiness and true fulfillment. Rather than this blame being incidental to one’s efforts in these areas, The Landmark Forum asserts that a pattern of blame is a fundamental reason that that one is unsuccessful in those areas, saying that as human beings we sometimes grasp onto being justified or right about a situation, and making others wrong, and become more interested in the validity of our opinion than making a situation work effectively. When one is assigning blame and making things wrong, happiness and true satisfaction are impossible – they literally can’t co-exist simultaneously with the experience of blaming others. The Landmark Forum cultivates the true opportunity of choice in these situations – one can choose to be right, justified and to blame others for a situation, or we can choose the possibility of true satisfaction and effectiveness – we can’t have both.
Another place where The Landmark Forum cultivates awareness is by distinguishing the difference between what’s actually happening in life, the facts, from our story or interpretation about those facts. Very often we confuse the facts with our own version of what we think is happening, and it makes us less effective, since we aren’t dealing with the true reality of the situation.
For instance, your boss might tell you that it’s very important that he talks to you at the end of the day for a few minutes. Those are the facts – that’s what has happened. But your interpretation might be that you are in trouble or that you might be fired. You then might spend the rest of the day worrying about what’s going to happen with your boss, thinking of things that you might have done wrong, or thinking about ways to defend yourself about possible criticism that your boss might have for you. All of your actions are correlated to your interpretation – in this case, that you are in trouble, rather than the facts. If one was dealing with the facts, one might say ‘I have no idea why my boss wants to talk to me, so it’s not worth spending time worrying’. The Landmark Forum cultivates an awareness of one’s own interpretations and stories about the facts of what is happening, so that one’s actions are more powerful.
This relates to a larger notion that while events, actions and facts happen in the real world, the meaning or interpretation about the world is invented by us, in language. When we see that we can create meaning in language, it gives us a powerful access to being more effective, since we can invent interpretations and meanings that empower us. The Landmark Forum cultivates the ability to use language in this powerful way – see more on this below.
A deep and profound respect for people of all cultures and walks of life is another of the things that The Landmark Forum cultivates. Because the course draws attention to things that people have in common across cultures – our goals, our aspirations, our concerns, the things that stop us from achieving what we want – people see themselves in other people in a way which naturally increases their respect for others who may have previously seemed different. In fact one of the ways The Landmark Forum operates is for people to be able to see their own ‘blind spots’ by seeing themselves in other people.
The desire to contribute to and make a difference with our fellow human beings is one of the many things we hold in common as people. The Landmark Forum cultivates both the desire and the ability to contribute to others. One way this desire is cultivated is by people resolving their own personal concerns so that they are free to address the world at large, and by having people realize that they don’t have to wait until they have resolved everything in their own life to begin making a difference.
The Landmark Forum cultivates using language creatively to invent and realize new futures that weren’t going to happen anyway in ordinary course of life. Everyone uses language, but mostly we use it representationally – we use it to describe the physical world. Using language creatively allows new ideas to be brought into being through declarations, commitments or promises which aren’t necessarily in line with past events.
The importance of language is highlighted by recent research, which has shown that language not only shapes our interpretations of the world, but even the way we physically perceive it. People with different language skills actually experience different sensory input. A deep appreciation of language and its power to shape the way the world occurs to is something that The Landmark Forum strongly cultivates.
During the last 20 years, The Landmark Forum has evolved and changed based on feedback from participants, and based on the findings of new research. It exists to empower and enable people ongoingly in what really matters to them.
landmark forum culture