Transformation … My Education Begins

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Colette dumped me.  I was heartbroken and this heartbreak even more intensified my questions about life.  Sometime during 1994, a friend of mine, Mark Meritt, recommended that I take something called The Landmark Forum.  The Forum is a weekend course put on by Landmark Education.  It’s designed to impact the quality of life.  Mark thought it might offer me some insight into what I was dealing with in my life, so at the beginning of my last year of law school, on Mark’s advice, I took the Forum and my education finally began.  To be honest, I wasn’t instantly taken with the Forum.  In fact, I didn’t get much out of that first weekend course.  It was in other course – the Advanced Course – that I really began to see the possibility of transformation.

Here’s the thing about Landmark (LEC), if you search the Internet, you’ll find a lot of information on LEC – both good and bad.  In my experience, it didn’t answer all my questions and at times, I found participating with LEC to be extremely frustrating, but the education itself is extraordinary.  I loved that it focused on real life and how to live.  The “distinctions” of the Forum were designed to give you access to living, not understanding how to live.  It wasn’t just the content, but it was the way in which it was delivered that captured me.  It connected theory to real life in a way that no other education had ever done for me.  In fact, the measure of the work was not how well it made you understand, but how well it had you living your life.  It also got people talking about the real stuff of life authentically without a need for experts or textbooks.  You could put your life at stake in a course and have it be transformed.  

So here was my predicament: four years of college at Cornell, one year to go of law school and there it was in front of me – what I wanted to do with my life (if you listen really closely you can still hear my father, “What? Are you kidding me?  This would have been useful information about … say … SEVEN YEARS AGO”).  I had certainly been exposed to self-help, but nothing ever like this, delivered in this way, with this impact.  It had me firing on all cylinders.  It focused on the questions I was most interested in, and it was all about making a difference in the quality of life.  I’m not suggesting that other fields of study like psychology don’t have that same end in mind.  Of course they do, but the field of transformation, in my experience, makes a difference like no other.

And so I studied with LEC for about five years.  In 1999, I became clear that it was time for me to move on.  I had learned a lot, but I was experiencing this tug of war in my participation at LEC.  I loved it, but also felt like I was being held back in some way.  In leaving, I left behind a community of supportive people.  I don’t mean that they abandoned me or I never saw them again, but you know when you participate in a certain group for a certain purpose, it’s just not the same when you leave.  No different than graduating college.  You still love and honor your college friends, but you’re not in “it” together anymore.  Plus there was one that stuck with me … my wife Lisa.

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