The Landmark Forum

In the month of July this year, I attended the Landmark Forum. The promise of Landmark Education is “Living life powerfully and living a life you love” and I got to tell you; they deliver on that.

The venue was Sathya Sai Sadan, right next to Fourum Mall Koramanagala. A total of 330 people were present for the program. Among the crowd were students, software engineers, project managers, doctors, vice presidents of various companies, lawyers, accountants, housewives, and even celebrities (well one celebrity actually: Rahul Dravid).

The Landmark Forum was led by Mahesh Nambiar, a Forum leader who has been with Landmark Education and conducting such programs for the past 15 years.

I was introduced to the Landmark Forum by Mr. Taranath of G. T. Enterprices who is my ex-boss’s friend. But even before that Prof. Lingaraju, who was my Computer Graphics teacher at JNNCE, was persuading me to join the Landmark Forum. He had completed the “Cirriculum for Living” (which is basically Landmark Forum, The Advanced Course and SELP) a couple of years back. Ever since then he was persuading me to do the course. I was, however, not very keen on taking up the course, for whatever reason.

Anyways, I finally decided to take the course in July. I got to say the Forum itself, though good, was not extraordinary. Many people that attended the program along with me went on and on and on about how wonderful and spectacular the experience was and how they created extraordinary results for themselves. Their feedback was so superlative; that I began to wonder if they were faking their experiences and results.

About a month or so after that, my wife attended the Landmark Forum. She felt just the same: the seminar is good but no extraordinary results.

As a part of the Landmark Forum program, participants can choose to attend the “Landmark Forum in Action Seminar” series, which is basically 10 evening sessions. Every Monday evening between 7 and 10, we have one session. These sessions are being led by Venkat, who is a Seminar Series leader. In each session Venkat revisits one distinction from the Landmark Forum and helps us put them into action. The first and second session were just ok, but from the third session onwards I have been noticing extraordinary results myself.

Two distinctions taught in the landmark forum have impacted me a lot
1. The Distinction Racket
2. The Distinction Identity

Racket, they distinguish, is a fixed way of being and a persistent complaint. It is a front-end behavior (the persistent complaint) to cover up a inner flaw. All rackets have a common structure. By running rackets we get some payoffs at the cost of love, affinity, well being, freedom and self-expression.

In the seminar series they deepen this distinction and help us identify our own rackets. I have always had complaints about “how I cant delegate effectively”, “how I cant find the right people for my team” and so on. On the face of it, these complaints really dont have much to do with me, or so I thought. Venkat encouraged us to consider that these complaints are Rackets. Upon taking on that consideration and understanding the structure of my rackets I realized that I was indeed running a racket. At some point in my life something happened and from then on I made decision that I will for ever be one-up with my peers. Over time I had forgotten about the incident and also forgot that I made the “being one-up decision”; but the behavior and attitude remained. I had to ensure that I delegate tasks in a way that made it difficult (if not impossible) for people to deliver good results. That way I could continue to be “one-up”. The Landmark Forum helped me identify this inner flaw and move beyond it, by declaring a new possibility of being without the “delegation racket”.

Identity, they distinguish, is a set of three strong suits. A strong suit is something we use repeatedly to deliver results and become/be successful. While strong suits are wonderful tools to deliver results, it is also highly limiting. For example my strong suit is “being self-sufficient”. While that strong suit helps me in being independent and proactive, it doesnt really help me when I have to depend on others for creating results. That explains more of my delegation racket. The Identity conversation helped me get why I am the way I am, and why I am not the way I am not. After the session on Identity, I declared new possibilities of being not my strong suits or rackets.

The Landmark Forum in Action (LFIA) Seminar series is still going on. I am thoroughly enjoying the journey of inner discovery that the LFIA is causing. In the coming few blogs I am going share the results that I have been generating and the new insights gotten out of my participation in LFIA.