A Funny Thing Happened After the Forum – Pt 2

This is from a 3-part mini-memoir about the Landmark Forum from my old blog in March 2009. It received thousands of views, and I still hear from people about it. You can read Part 1 here…

Welcome to Day 2, or “my story of what I learned” during the Landmark Forum…

I’m going to give a (not-so) brief summation of what was covered during my 3 days participating in the Landmark Forum seminar. It’s going to be missing some details since it’s been 15 years; however, I still recall most of the Forum’s main teachings to this day. I confirmed that with a Forum grad I spoke with recently, and we both found it to be remarkable how most of their terms and concepts stay with you years later.

On the first 5 minutes of the first day of the Landmark Forum, we meet our Forum Leader. You will see that he or she are a very energetic and effective communicator. He or she exudes confidence and a focused nature. In my case our Forum Leader was Jerry Baden, a fairly charismatic guy who clearly possessed these traits and who ultimately delivered the Forum sessions at breakneck-intensity.

Baden starts out reinforcing with the basic agreement, or rules, for participating in the seminar. If it can be avoided no bathroom breaks until an announced break period, no taking any over-the-counter medicines (prescriptions are OK), and note-taking is discouraged. What you will learn, Jerry said, moves at a discussion pace and is fast enough that your mind will remember it and really won’t need to write it down. I was dubious but I put the notepad I brought down, secretly intending to write it all down later. Of course I never did — Jerry was ultimately correct: most of the concepts and things discussed over the next 3 days just didn’t have to be written down. These ground rules that we agreed to were much nicer than the Forum’s earlier incarnation, est, where you couldn’t chew gum or wear watches among other things.

Some people have questions about the rules, some were logistical questions and others were skeptical questions. The Forum Leader handles the skeptics by explaining that honoring agreements is already something most people try to do, and doing so here will help us get the most out of our time. A matter of personal integrity to yourself, so to speak. After this brief Q&A period Jerry gives us one last friendly invitation to decide if the Forum is for us, or not, and stay or leave. I can’t remember, but I think of our large group maybe one person quietly and politely departed. Everyone else remained for the duration. This was the first of many exercises we’d later do involving making a distinction between Decisions and Personal Choice.

As the Forum Leader may say later on, if you stay, “I’ve got your money…it’s of no consequence to me if you stay, it’s entirely up to you.” a reminder of the Landmark’s strict “no refund” policy back then. You could get your money back in some instances, as I heard from someone who left, but it was a series of hoop jumps. The longer you stayed that first day, the less likely any kind of refund will happen, and the more likely you are to stay the entire forum. This logic, and the Forum leader’s invitation to leave if you want to, create a deeper implication that your natural instinct is to put aside doubt and try to GET SOMETHING from your investment. The Forum Leader counts on this instinct to keep you there the first day, which increases your chance of getting all of the information that first day. Someone told me years later that the people who complete the first day have 3 times the chance of completing the entire seminar.

Besides lack of time passing, there’s also lack of the outside world. Watches are fine in the modern Forum, but texting and cell phones are outright banned. Not a problem in ’94 when I went, but these days I wonder how they deal with smartphones. This zero-tolerance of outside contacts until the breaks was well enforced, but during the later breaks you were actually encouraged to call people if you want, especially by day two and three. The windows of the large meeting room are always closed, and you’re sitting for a long time between the breaks.

So began the first of several sessions that involve discussing many abstract, common-sense, and sometimes uncomfortable topics. The early discussions are intense and a lot of information is digested, and you feel like you’re drinking from a firehose. It feels a lot like a philosophy class this first day, like a kind of this ongoing Socratic Method discussing how we look at things in life. Peoples’ views definitely get challenged and the group becomes more comfortable with discussing topics the Forum Leader brings up. A little debate here, a few concepts and doses of common-sense there, all weaving this dialogue concerned with questions and ideas about what it means to be a human being.

Before the end of the first day the Forum establishes key distinctions that may be possible, based on certain agreed concepts. Jerry acknowledged that making these distinctions and getting any kind of insight from them, or “getting it” as the Forum calls it, takes time. The learning was a process for each attendee does on their own, not a process that is done to them. You hear the “popcorn analogy” a few times: each individual will “pop”, or get it, in their own time. This reassurance was useful to a lot of the older people in our group, who had a more established mindset and took awhile to get comfortable trying on some of the ideas Jerry discussed. Some people in our group were downright giddy and amused when they started to understand the whole of the conversation, or “pop”, by day 3. By the second day, though, more practical information starts coming to light, but not before the early discussion groundwork taking place on the first day.

At first you may think your seminar purchase gave you little more than a long Oprah or Dr Phil show. Right around this time, when Day 2 starts, the Forum takes a turn and hits you right in the chest with some interesting facts. You learn a lot about how people hold onto persistent complaints, how there is a payoff to these complaints and views we choose to hold. We learn how our own “story” or meaning we attach to situations can be self-serving, yet cost us a lot. Useful things, but taken within the context of the Forum’s ongoing discussion, you start to get a common-sense view of how people often won’t take responsibility for some things in life. The most responsible people you can imagine (we had a cop, a couple lawyers, even an elected person in our group) seemed to find this concept foreign at first.

Among the huge volume of information and insights covered in the Forum’s 3 days, I’m only going to talk about 3 of the major concepts the Forum covers. Two reasons: these are the 3 concepts I use the most to this day, and there’s not much benefit for me going over what I remember verbatim anyway. Most of the concepts and distinctions the Forum teaches are best experienced in the context of a verbal discussion in order to make sense.
The 3 insights that I am going to talk about are: -1. Blind Spots -2. Life is Meaningless (and we are “meaning-making machines”) -3. Rackets

First, the concept of “Blind Spots” is simply a term for a concept that Socrates and Plato put to humanity eons ago: “there are things that I know…things that I do not know…and a whole domain of things that I do not know, that I do not know”.

Yes the whole idea reads like a run-on sentence, but it’s a fascinating concept visualized through the Johari Window I mentioned in the last post, and best illustrated in this pie chart.

The above piece of Greek Philosophy was amusingly used, clumsily, by former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in his famous “Unknown Unknowns” statement in a press conference. Hearing Rumsfeld made me wonder if he was an est graduate when he used the Johari Window to explain unseen issues in prosecuting war. Of course the press and American society was having none of it and called BS. To this day “Unknown Unknowns” defines Rumsfeld and his poorly-planned administration of the early phase of the second Iraq War.

So the Forum talks about “Unknown Unknowns” and “Blind Spots”. Once people start to get comfortable understanding there s a whole domain of things we cannot even be aware of not knowing, the concept of the “Blind Spot” starts to finally make sense. This idea helps prepare Forum attendees acknowledge that they do not know everything there is to know, and truly knowing this allows you to be open to considering new information and new ways of thinking you may not have considered. This paves the way for other big distinctions the Forum will next ask you to make over the next 8 hours.

Once such distinction and concept the Forum teaches is the Racket.

In Forum language, a “Racket” is a persistent complaint about something, or someone, which leads you into a habit of feeling, acting, or thinking a certain way. For many people this can be a bad or non-productive behavior that you may not like, but on the other hand somehow works for you. The Forum tells us that there is a payoff, and cost, for every Racket we have.

Think about what Racketeers do: they establish a legal-appearing entity or business and then, behind the scenes, partake in illegal activities with money going under the table to keep everyone happy, and to keep the Racket going. In the front of the business, you have the nice smiling person putting their best foot forward…and in the back room you have these bad illegal activities taking place.

In a personal context, the Forum says people naturally develop their own Rackets — where are smiling on the outside, while having a righteous complaint or issue about something or someone going on in the background. We are subconsciously seeking only to validate ourselves in the process. The Forum says we as human beings often seek to Justify our views, even at the cost of invalidating others. We hold rackets about “being right” (“payoff”) while making others wrong or harming relationships (“cost”). We also hold Rackets to Dominate a situation, or avoid Domination in a kind of weird circular dance that most humans do. You often can see Rackets come alive in workplace settings, but they also happen in interpersonal relationships.

So a Racket is essentially an unconscious benefits/payoff system (like giving up responsibility for a situation) that often has a hidden cost (hurting other people/hurting relationships) and is basically a disservice to yourself in the long-run. Feeding our Rackets makes us dishonest communicators, keeps us from being authentic, and keeps us from hearing the truth.

By learning to realize when we are holding a Racket about something or somebody, and recognize what it’s getting us and costing us, we can give up complaints about things we don’t control. The Forum essentially states the people cannot be happy, or find peace, if they are not willing to give up their Rackets, give up the need to be right and for others to be wrong.

At some point someone asks the Forum Leader what everyone else is thinking about Rackets: “what if someone is running a Racket against me? What do I do? What if I KNOW they think X, or have Y opinion, about me unfairly?” Our particular Forum Leader Jerry Baden was really good about answering it. He reminded people that: if you still agree with the “blind spot” notion, that there is a domain of things that we don’t know…that we don’t even know that we don’t know (the “unknown unknowns”), then we must admit that we do not know everything there is to know. So if we don’t know everything there is to know, how can we be so presumptuous as to think we know exactly what someone else is thinking about us? And why do we care?

That exercise, admitting we have blind spots, admitting we are not omnipotent when it comes to other people and what they may be thinking, gives us permission to give up being right. He explained that, it’s fine if you suspect that someone is running their own Racket on you, but only if the goal is to confront it and create an opportunity for understanding with that person; however, it’s another thing entirely to sit and think we know what someone else is thinking about us, and not confront it: you’re putting the responsibility for your issue or complaint on the other person, and conveniently leaving yourself off the hook for your part in the misunderstanding or problem. Only when people realize we are not are truly, honestly, omniscient of what other people think…can you give up caring about “other people’s Rackets” and you take responsibility for your own Rackets in the process.

The next big concept in the Forum directly relates to Rackets, but is in and of itself a powerful concept. There are “two domains” that occur in our minds when we deal with any past and present situation: “what happened” versus “my story of what happened”. The domain of “What Happened” can simply be words someone said (soundwaves passing through the air into your eardrums), the facts — while “the story” is the meaning you took from those words (taking the raw data, or soundwaves, and attaching meaning to them).

The Forum asks you to consider that human beings are “meaning-making machines” and, because of our unique human trait of language, we are always constantly looking to attach meaning (or reasons, or fallacies ) to what people say or do. This meaning-making ability goes back to our caveman survival days. While a healthy paranoia might have kept the Geico caveman alive and safe from saber-tooth tigers, this natural meaning-making ability often causes big misunderstandings and other problems for modern people.

If you have ever read some Heidegger, this concept gets meshed out thoroughly. For the purpose of the Landmark Forum, it’s only important to understand we are “meaning-making machines” and we can learn to recognize when we are attaching a meaning to something that is separate from WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED. Learning to see what happened as passing individual moments, regardless of context or what we decide happened, allows us to see what meaning we are attaching to something.

Here is a classic example: someone at work says to me “have you lost weight?” with an inflection in their voice I am not familiar with. Perhaps when the person asked their question, they looked at me a certain way I learned in the past was judgmental or mean. Perhaps I recently decided I needed to lose weight, and I thus I take their question and mannerisms to mean they are really saying I’m a fat ass that needs to lose some weight!! Well…right there I have determined what “I think they meant” by interpreting their question “have you lost weight?" as something more. Boy was he a jerk! In fact, that person is an a**hole!! I will never work a project with him!! Suddenly this person is my worst enemy at work, because I attached a negative meaning to what they said. They are now limited in who they can be…when ALL THAT HAPPENED is they asked a simple question. ALL THAT REALLY HAPPENED is sound waves traveled through the air and reacted on my eardrums. The rest is up to me. Forgetting how someone speaks to you, or how they looked when they spoke, acted,or anything else…is key. If I break it down to their words only, if I’m no longer attaching meaning, there’s an opportunity to avoid misunderstanding.

The Forum says: if I remove the meaning REGARDLESS of my interpretation’s accuracy (it’s not about “my story” or being “correct”), then only FACTS remain and I can abandon the negative or unproductive meaning I attached. If I don’t abandon the negative meaning, then I likely will create a “Racket” (or complaint) against that person. I get the payoff of being “right” and the “better person” when, in reality, I just misinterpreted him.

People rarely realize the benefit they can gain from suspending meaning, and just observe “what is actually happening” without care about what someone else is thinking, or what they meant. When you look at just WHAT IS: time passing in a stream of new moments, each moment complete in and of itself, then meaning takes a backseat or gets put in proper perspective. When humans do this they start to exist in the present moment and they stop “creating the story” (attaching meaning) about things other people say and do. The benefit: people do not obsess over another person’s motivation, expectation, and attitude. Instead, we are not encumbered with operating from a defensive place and we simply take “what happened”, make it meaningless, and devoid of any negative meaning we create.

The Forum says that making something meaningless helps you communicate (before the story is written, before YOU attach the meaning) with people in your life. This frees you up to openly seek clarification and, if needed, confront misunderstandings before it’s a train wreck (“Hey Bob, I may be wrong here…but it occurs to me that when you said X…”). Viewing something as meaningless, dropping your Rackets, means you take responsibility for how you view something. What’s left is the possibility to have a better outcome in any situation and having better relationships with people. Much of this sounds like dimestore existentialism, I’ll admit. The above advice probably exists in a ton of self-help books; yet I found the above concepts had common-sense origins and were very useful for me in my IT career. Other Landmark Forum grads reading this post probably understand the above concepts because they were exposed to the same lingual-training. For them, this is a mini-review of the Forum. For outsiders, on the other hand, the above is likely a confusing read. These concepts, the Forum states, are better understood if they are experienced in the context of the rigorous discussions of the Forum’s sessions (see what they did there? you gotta buy it to “get it” — and in this case it is probably true).

Others may call the above Forum concepts and linguistic terms as brainwashing. Many LGATs have terminologies and concepts employing a technique called Neuro Linguistic Programming (“NLP”) and it’s part and parcel to many Human Potential Movement seminars; however, I did not find their concepts akin to brainwashing, or hypnosis: I felt like I was able to toss and forget various things the Forum taught at any time. I even felt free to challenge the Forum Leader at every point in the course. Still, I do see how people can come to the view that Landmark Education’s marketing methods are a form of brainwashing. I’m no expert, but I think of it this way: I still remember almost EVERYTHING discussed for those 3 days in 1994. While I don’t necessarily believe I was brainwashed, I will say the format and and techniques the Forum uses…locks-in this blend of Eastern/Western philosophies in such a way that you will really remember, for years to come.

Even with the brainwashing concern, I have found that the above-mentioned concepts (when taught successfully by other groups, methods, or by the Forum itself) can make people more peaceful and successful. Whenever you make a new distinction in life, or you gain a new insight, you usually improve your daily life regardless of the imperfect human source the knowledge comes from. So I cherry-picked the above 3 items, and I have used them to great effectiveness in my career. Useful concepts always come with the usual human baggage and controversy. No system of teaching is ever perfect, and boy is the Landmark Forum far from perfect.

This leads us me to my third and final post on the Forum, including my own problems I have with the Forum. Tune-in for that post tomorrow.

Originally published at mydigitalpathos.com in 2009, and re-published at julianwest.me on September 15, 2012.