This is from a 3-part mini-memoir about the Landmark Forum from my old blog in March 2009. It received tens of thousands of views and I still hear from people about it…
In 1994 I became one of millions who graduated the Landmark Forum …
It’s not anything to crow about, and the organization is downright controversial in some circles and in the media. Landmark is is not anything I have ever spoken with anyone about, until now on this blog. You do speak about “The Forum”, and some people might look at you as if you lost your mind. Who knows, for some that might be the case? To most people, personal-growth seminars like the Landmark Forum are those cheesy self-help things we laugh at. Yet somehow through chance, I ended up attending “The Forum” due to a pushy company I worked for. And from this distance (a decade and a half now), I wanted to share my experience from my journal right here on my blog.
I am still familiar with their various terms and concepts, and if you Google Landmark Forum and Landmark Education you will find it likened to a cult by some. Others cite the Forum as a positive experience with powerful insights. I fall somewhere in the middle: I’m no apologist for Landmark and I can offer several criticisms; however, I also do not believe Landmark is exactly a cult or religious group. A Multi-Level Marketing group? Sure. Yet I personally don’t believe it fits the trappings or definition of a cult. Your mileage may vary if you have experienced Landmark Education, but in any event the Landmark Forum is definitely NOT for everyone. In fact, I would say the Forum is only beneficial for specific types, or styles, of personalities. They even say this, during the opening day. More on that later, as I progress us through some specifics of the 3-day Forum seminar.
I’ve had years to reflect and educate myself on the original Eastern/Western philosophies that inform the Forum, and I decided to write about my own Landmark Forum experience from a distance. From this perspective, I can detail how I experienced this Human Potential Movement seminar, and convey a basic understanding of what exactly the Forum is about.
If you are not familiar with Large Group-Awareness Training methods (or LGATs, if you like your cognitive behavioral therapy in shorthand), they are essentially mass-marathon training sessions that usually employ either some kind of specific knowledge or reasoning. You may see similarities between the Forum and Dr Phil or Tony Robbins (Dr Phil actually went through early Forum training). For my experience, the Forum is probably the least-discussed of all of the awareness training systems out there, yet it’s a huge organization. Unlike Lifespring or other new-age style LGATs, Landmark doesn’t have a charismatic leader (at least not anymore, read on for more on that), it gets no publicity through traditional methods or marketing. The Landmark Forum is advertised almost entirely by word-of-mouth.
In covering the Landmark Forum in 3 parts over the next two days, I want to discuss some of the specific Forum tenets that I actually use in my professional career, and the aspects I wholly reject. I hope to give an even-handed review, though my aim is not to satisfy Forum critics or Forum evangelists. That is a good thing. If nothing else, if you are considering the Forum perhaps these articles can help you in your own research.
My “story”
Over 15 years ago the owner of the company I worked for asked employees to attend the Forum tuition-free, on his dime. My Forum experience started like most, at one of those infamous “Tuesday night ceremonies”. There I found myself and several co-workers enduring the “hard sell” sign-up pitches, and testimonies of enthusiastic recent Forum grads. To this day, my biggest criticism of the Landmark Forum are those “Tuesday Night” sessions. I will discuss a bit more on those later on.
Our Tuesday night Intro Session was full of lively and excited people, all discussing their breakthroughs gained after their recent Forum sessions. Some of the benefits were detailed to us should we decide to sign-up. We were to sign-up of our own volition, of course, not because of our generous CEO’s offer to pay or because of the euphoric Forum grads, either. No, signing up for the Forum was, as they say, a “commitment to ourselves” to obtain new insights on being an effective person, and nothing more. Sounded weird and self-helpy, sure, but this was the first of several exercises the Forum undertakes if you sign-up.
History of the Landmark Forum
Like anything new involving a group, I followed my own individualistic skepticism gave a firm “no” to signing on to attend or participate. Over the next few days that became a qualified “no”…which in the end became a tentative “yes” after prodding from my boss and CEO. Such was the convincing nature of our CEO Jerry Federico. Jerry could sell ice to Eskimos, and he made a powerful case for the Landmark Forum. I told him he would get my answer after I had time to hit the public library and read up on them. Yes this was 1994 and there was no real public Internet or Wikipedia: you had Microfiche and magazine archive CDs with “search engines” at the library back in the day. Good times. I miss them, actually.
In researching the Forum I found that Landmark Education is the culmination of former participants and employees of Werner Erhard’s “Forum”, a program which he originally created in the 1970s under the name “est”. I had heard of est before, and Erhard (originally John Paul Rosenberg) was a controversial figure who administered est with a zeal and harshness that is mostly absent from the modern Forum. Erhard created a huge self-help meme that stands to this day: if you have ever see the 1977 movie “Semi-Tough”, Bert Convy’s caricature of est and Werner Erhard are a mirror of how America views self-help movements in general, and Erhard in particular. 2008’s “Yes Man” has Terrence Stamp’s “Yes” guru evoking Erhard. And you can see some of Erhard’s directness in the live dialogs of other LGAT rockstars like Tony Robbins.
Throughout the 1970s and 80s people flocked to Werner Erhard’s est training. Yoko Ono, John Denver, and yes even Dr. Phil McGraw attended est seminars. To this day est and Forum grads recognize McGraw’s use of more polite est/Forum techniques on TV. For better or worse, Dr. Phil and other self-help personalities owe much of their success to Erhard and est.
Plagued with controversies and tax issues into the late 80s, Erhard/Rosenberg retired from public life and sold the Forum to his employees and est graduates who were led by his brother Harry Rosenberg. From that purchase they established Landmark Education Corporation and the original “Forum/est” publicly faded away. The Forum remains probably the largest and most successful personal-growth workshop to come from the Human Potential Movements of the 70s.
Deciding to go…
The more I learned about Erhard and est and the media coverage, the less interested I was in doing the Forum. On the surface it reminded me of Scientology; however, I later learned Scientology is actually a big enemy of Erhard and Landmark Education, with L. Ron Hubbard claiming that Erhard simply stole his concepts and ideas and re-branded them. When you make an enemy of an entity like Scientology, maybe you are doing something right or, worse, you’re doing something wrong.
I decided I would decline our CEO’s offer for the all-expenses-paid journey. Of course Jerry’s ice-Eskimo sales capabilities were in full play, and he urged me to consider going at least the first day. He told me the Forum was not like est or Scientology and, if after going one day I still I didn’t like it, I could walk away. So he was willing to front the $500 admission price and essentially toss some vacation days at me for giving up a Friday. Though I was still dubious, in my 20s I was not about to pass on future days off for going to some dog & pony show that I could quit. So I gave him a half-day commitment, pretty much deciding I would see some cult or other weird happenings…and just leave after a couple hours.
I ended up staying the entire 3 days.
That first day I arrived at the convention facilities of a nondescript hotel in a Houston suburb the following Friday with several co-workers. I didn’t see any robes, symbols, or magical trickery or things like Scientology “e-meters”. From briefly talking our group felt fairly assured that, if the Forum was a cult, it certainly didn’t have the trappings of one. We would find, later at the end, the “marketing” of the Forum is what really gives it that cult-taste.
Within about 30 minutes a relaxed individual came forward and introduced himself to us. This person was going to be our “Forum Leader” during of the seminar, and he began explaining the ground rules and what we would get out of the next 3 days.
Nuts & Bolts: How the Forum Works
The Landmark Forum is, simply put, an ongoing 3-day rigorous conversation. It is facillitated with a 75–250 person group, and is then followed by a final Tuesday weeknight graduation session. It gets intensely philosophical, dialogic, and incurs a deep inquiry of questions that have been of interest to human beings for eons. The Forum usually takes place in or near a hotel meeting facility because of the long hours, which are usually 9AM until about 11PM at night. Even with breaks about every 2 or 3 hours (no bathroom breaks, either — just the afternoon/early evening meal break) the pace is constant and you will lose all track of time. You basically go from what was a 9–11 hour grind right to your hotel room, usually physically and mentally-spent. Then you start right up the next day because the rhythm they set is intense and focused for each day.
The Forum basically espouses a “Technology”, or knowledge, that can be applied to daily living. This “technology” pulls together practical concepts offered by various philosophers like Socrates, Sartre, and Heidegger (there’s a metric ton of Heidegger in the Forum). There is nothing mechanical about the Forum’s “technology”, their technological angle is the “application of a specific knowledge”.
The Forum applies systems of thought to conversations in the form of exercises, and involves cognitive psychological concepts like the Johari Window’s “Blind Spot”. Essentially a good amount of what might feel like neuro-linguistic programming, but I would disagree. Lingual conditioning, maybe, but I never felt like I was being “programmed” or hypnotized. Quite the opposite in most instances. While there is an existential angle people attach to it, the Forum makes it fairly clear the first day that they are not out to explain the meaning of life or give out some “ultimate truth”. That’s on you to figure out. Instead, the Forum concepts are basically just practical common-sense ideas delivered with a shocking intensity.
The Forum claims to be concerned with helping already-effective, usually successful, people make specific distinctions about goals and happiness. One distinction is: seeking happiness in the future after meeting a goal creates a cycle where, after the goalposts get moved, “happiness” gets put off or “re-defined”. The Forum believes that this constant struggle to be happier stops us from being happy and at peace right now in the present. It’s such a reasonable and basic idea, that the concept of learning to live in the moment seems too-obvious to be something that can be taught. But as anyone who has read Eckhart Tolle will tell you, the present moment is one of the chief concerns of self-help systems like the Forum.
So the Forum claims to use a specific set of knowledge, or “technology” as they call it, culled from various sources to compile a possible way of “being”. This way of being can stop the above cycle and help people live in the moment. And living in the present, according to the Forum (and Buddha and so many others), allows you to be happier and successful. Who can argue with that? Still, this aim usually incurs harsh judgment from most independent-minded people as well as critics of LGATs and Human Potential seminars: they’re selling how to live in the moment! Not being a self-help expert, I can’t tell you if the Forum is good at teaching this; however, I can tell you that the concepts the Forum discusses are almost universal and of interest to most any human being. What the Forum tries to accomplish is connecting people with the present in a very visceral way. More on just how the Forum labors to achieve this result tomorrow, in Part 2.
Originally published at mydigitalpathos.com in 2009, and re-published at julianwest.me on September 14, 2012.