Well? Will you take responsibility and admit it? 
ho ho. raises hand.
It’s far from the only embarrassing thing I did back then.
I was born in '81, so I’m curious what this was.
I was born in '84, but google says this: Erhard Seminars Training - Wikipedia
I didn’t, but a good friend did, and he was so transformed by the thing that he begged me to take it. He was willing to pay for it, in fact, if I took it and said it wasn’t the most amazing thing ever.
I haven’t thought about it in a long time, but I happened to be driving by the hotel where is was hosted all those years ago and was reminded of the descriptions he gave.
Was EST the one where they didn’t let you go to the bathroom?
Speaking of EST reminds me of another incident back in the day. Some fellow students lived together in a rented house. One of the guys was friendly, but easily taken advantage of. There were not enough bedrooms so he ended up sleeping in the garage. He got quietly angry and decided to transform his life by taking an assertiveness training seminar (not EST). He came back a complete asshole, so his house mates kicked him out of the house.
I usually post from my phone using Tapatalk - I can’t always just Google something quickly. Plus, seeing that article, I don’t get why going to one would be seen as something someone would hide.
Nope but i did what seems to be similar course in the '80s in Australia called Alpha Dynamics.
At the time i found it helpful but now I see the founder says he is the soul of Jesus.
est is one of those embarrassing relics from the 70s that some people don’t want to talk about. It’s kinda like an old cocaine habit. It was something you did because other people were doing it, too, and if you convinced yourself that you got something out of it, other people did it because you did it.
It morphed into something called the Forum in the 1980s. I went to one of their introductory seminars. It was interesting, but not interesting enough to drop the $500 for the next seminar.
OMG. WHo was that guy? Werner Eckhardt or something? I knew two people who thought the found The Way. One dragged me to a big Manhattan venue to listen to him. So I was listening and hearing that he wasn’t saying a damn thing! Wonder if there is anything one youtube. And everybody was like applauding and going Yes! Yes! And the man wasn’t saying anything except words.
Nice job if you can get it.
Shaking my head…
fyi, probably more than you want to know:
http://www.angelfire.com/ut/7777777/Est01.htm
No, but for a short time I worked in a restaurant next to a place the seminars were held. They’d come in after the seminars, disrupt the restaurant staff and customers, agressively demand things on the menu, wander from table to table, stand over other patrons talking loudly and generally be dicks.
We referred to them as Est-holes and they were a primary reason nobody worked long at that restaurant.
Never heard of it. Sounds a lot like Anthony Robbins and the like.
There’s pretty much a direct lineage from Eckhardt to Robbins.
This is related to the Landmark Forum stuff, right? I had a friend who did that and said it changed his life.
To the rest of us looking in, it seemed to change his life for the worse. All of us got alienated by the “new,” more aggressive, more pushy him (although he got more LF friends, so I suppose that came out even overall). He got dissatisfied with his job and decided he wanted to do more upper-level management, which he wasn’t really suited for. When this was pointed out, he quit and went into another field of work, where I think he’s doing more management-ish things, but I think he found he wasn’t really into it, and I do know he’s making less money and is working with a less interesting group of people doing less interesting things than in his previous job. Maybe he’d say he’s happier, though? Dunno because I haven’t heard from him in some time.
I got pushed by him to go to one of the LF meetings, where they instructed everyone to think of a problem in our lives we wanted to work on. I have trouble with exercising, so that was my problem. “Envision how you’ll feel once you’ve obtained your goal!” they said. “I’ll feel much the same as I do now, except more tired,” I said. They didn’t like that answer…
Yeah, but Burt Reynolds had a solution for that. It’s called a busman’s friend.
And if est wasn’t hip and cool enough, you could always sign up for the Primal Scream Therapy- another so-called life changing process that cost a bundle back in the day.
I actually knew a woman in Berlin who saved up money and flew to California to have all of her problems solved by that Primal Scream…and after she left Berlin, a mutual aquantence said, “When she realizes what a rip off scam it is, she will really be doing a primal scream.”
Ah, the great con/cults of yore.
$600 in 1978?
NO WAY NO HOW!!
Yeah, but he didn’t get it.
We had something that was “EST-light” or maybe “EST- like”. A waste of time.
My fun thing was getting up and going to the bathroom, and the dude running it told me I couldn’t, and I said "How are you going to stop me?"
After that, about half the class made a break for it.