I heard about the Landmark Education thing from a friend, and after reading up on it it sounds like quakery bordering on culthood. More than anything, it sounds like Scientology at a more affordable price.
But the more I read about it, the more I don’t understand what actually happens during the seminars. What is said? What exercises are done? What happens that “changes people’s lives” so much?
You’re very astute to recognize it as Scientology like. Landmark grew out of est which was started by a former Scientology staffer. Scientology tries to get a lot of money out of a few people. Landmark tries to get a little bit of money out of a lot of people.
I know some Quakers who would take exception to that.
You sit, you listen, you share if you want to. ETA: oh, there’s also some writing exercises and phone calls that you’re suggested to make. I didn’t do most of those, honestly.
Nothing that’s said there is new or groundbreaking, it’s the force with which it’s said and the lack of bullshit they put up with from the participants that’s different from any other self-help kind of seminar thingy I’d ever done. It’s NOT okay to wail about how your man done you wrong or your daddy molested you or you were picked last for baseball in the third grade for hours on end. You’re allowed about 3 minutes to wail before the facilitator calls you on your bullshit.
Some things that are taught:
We are far more affected by our stories of what happened to us than the actual events.
We are all scared of everyone, and everyone is scared of us. Get over it.
We mostly act out of fear of looking stupid in front of other people or because we want other people to like us. Get over it.
We all run rackets - their term for persistent complaints and excuses for things that we never change.
There is no higher meaning in life. You’re born, you live, you die. Any meaning you give life is meaning you give it, therefore you can give it any meaning you want - why not make it something good?
If you want to change your life, live your life as if it’s already changed, and the change will happen. Waiting to live the change until it’s changed means it’s not going to change.
ETA: You can apologize without “losing”.
Like I said, nothing new. Nothing sinister, nothing evil, and nothing religious. Due to a combination of fatigue (VERY long hours) and repetition, the messages just got through like they never did before.
Changed my life? Yep.
By the way, this is how I got involved in Landmark Education.
Sounds like AA without the alcohol part.
A good friend of mine is an advanced instructor or some such in Landmark. He knows that I’m not interested and that I think that although it does help some people it’s largely a bunch of bullshit. He obviously disagrees but also concedes that I’m doing just fine without having to attend a class. Whatever. We respect each other and are still pals.
Whynot’s explanation is a good one. Strip away the jargon and, like most other self help programs, it’s very basic common sense. I figured out all of that shit when I was in my early/mid-20’s on my own. If it takes one of their classes to get it through to you, you’re going to be better for it. Like most other self help programs, most people walk out of it thinking about how profoundly their life has changed and the next day they are back to their same shit.
Here is the thing that bothers me about Landmark. For a significant number of their adherents, it does become cultish. They persistently try to get their friends to attend and cut off ties with those that aren’t interested. People have told me that they took a class or two, got some good use out of it, and then moved on. When they stopped going to classes, the supposed friends that they made their dumped them. A lot of people take it too far. A lot use it as a crutch.
I’m glad I did it. I’m equally glad I stopped.
A few ways in which it’s forceful/cultish/bad (This is about the basic course, the only one I did):
Once you’ve gotten this far, if you (try to) leave during the ‘lectures’, you are called out. The doors have been shut, and you very publicly must announce why you are leaving, why you made a deal and won’t stick by it, and isn’t that the exact kind of behavior you’re trying to change, etc.
They play a lot of games with language. They take the common word “integrity”, and redefine it to mean something different. They do it subtly, so you don’t notice it, and how it reinforces their way of thinking. They introduce more and more terminology that ads up to a completely different worldview. If you talk with people who have been through many of their courses, it’s striking how difficult it is to have a meaningful conversation where you use the same words. Since the only people who understand Landmarkese are the other Landmarkians, it all reinforces.
Long hours. Fairly short lunch breaks. Exercises to do at home. This adds up to short hours of rest and probably bad nutrition. I think we all know how this lowers defenses.
I have quite a few things to say on the positive side also, but WhyNot’s post said it so well, I hesitate to go there. I’ll simply say it can be very (in their words) “transforming”. You see a lot of people make enormous breaks with their past and begin to forge new identities, for better or worse. Mostly better I like to think.
I’ve never done AA, so I don’t know. What I’ve heard about it from the outside is that it’s giving yourself over to a higher power and admitting that you are powerless over alcohol. That’s almost exactly the opposite of Landmark. Landmark is all about taking personal responsibility for ACTIONS, not emotions, not intent - the Landmark perspective doesn’t care if you’re powerless or not, and they don’t care if there’s a higher power or god or not - if you want to not be an alcoholic, you have to ACT like you’re not an alcoholic, and that means not drinking. Inner motivations, higher powers or your drunk daddy are all irrelevant.
They do encourage you to contact people you’ve wronged and apologize, though. That’s certainly a commonality. They even encourage you to contact people who you may not have wronged and apologize anyway!
And I agree with **hajario **that some people become cultish about it, and that the pushing people to sign up their friends and family gets old really fast. I’ve made, besides this thread, I think 3 mentions of it here in the last 3 years. That’s very, very little, considering how much I post about my life and how profoundly it affected me. Why? Because they drive me fucking nuts with the hard sell. I get why they do it - they don’t advertise, so their entire financial structure is based on word of mouth PLUS, if you had experienced something life-changing that finally made you “get it” and be happy with life, wouldn’t you want to share it? Well, yes. Am I still operating under that fear that my friends and you all won’t like me if I try and sell you something? Yes, absolutely. I’m still growing, and I have to decide which battles to fight.
What I don’t agree with, hajario, is that most people go back to their same old shit the next day. They actually do follow up surveys that reveal most people are still changed at a year, unlike other programs. That’s what, to me, makes this different somehow. I watched my self-help junkie of a stepmother for 3 years after her Landmark experience, and astonishingly enough, it stuck! That made me more interested, as NOTHING ever stuck for the woman before. I’m coming up on 2 years now, and while I’m not perfect, it’s stuck for me, as well. So there is something different, at least for some people.
Like muttrox, said, I’m glad I did it. I haven’t done the Advanced or Communications or the dozens of other classes they’ve offered. I’ve assisted at a few, and I enjoy it a lot. But I’m glad I haven’t let it take over my life. They started calling too much for too much assisting time and I just laid down a boundary and they respected it and wait for me to call them now. How many cults would do that? Plenty of people left in the middle of ours, and in subsequent ones, and no one called them out. My mother, in fact (not step-mother, the other one) found that she couldn’t make it back on Saturday, and they called her to see if she was okay and refunded her money - well after the “no-refunds” deal you speak of. Your points 2 & 3 I agree on. It might have been better to call (Landmark) integrity “Glunderwhop” or some other made up word and stop confusing people who try to have discussions with Landmark graduates.
I’m absolutely ready to believe that SOME people are crazy. No shock there. But I’m confident that the system itself is sound.
About six years ago, most of one of my groups of friends (I’d say 90%) started doing Landmark. Not all at the same time–one person did it, and then a few others, and so on. It was a bit surprising to see it spread through the group this way.
I was invited to attend a graduation, and I went. They do some exercises at the graduation, give a sales pitch, and have people give some personal testimony about how Landmark changed their life. It wasn’t my type of thing, but it seemed harmless enough.
I ended up deciding not to do Landmark for several reasons which I won’t get into here. But one thing I did notice is that when I decided not to go, these friends all stopped talking to me. Nobody said to me “if you don’t do Landmark, we’re not going to talk to you.” It’s just that phone calls never got returned, emails went unanswered, and I stopped being invited to their parties. A couple of them who I was doing business with pulled their business from me as well.
I don’t know specifically what the reasons for all this behavior is, since I didn’t do the Landmark Forum and can’t speak to what their philosophy is. It was just weird, though, and turned me off the thing completely.
YMMV, of course.
C’mon. Their own surveys show that most people are helped. I call bullshit. A lot of people get something positive out of it. There is no doubt about it. Also, a lot of people will answer a survey positively when it didn’t really help them (this is very common in psychological studies and researchers have to be very careful to keep this bias out of their results). In addition, someone who had a good experience will be much more likely to even respond to the follow-up in the first place.
Well sure, but you have that problem with any “self-help” educational program and yet they still get better feedback than others have been able to show me. Even with the flaws inherent in the feedback system, they have better results, and I wouldn’t be at all happy if they gave out my name and phone number to an independent surveyor, so what are you going to do? You (meaning I) go with what I observe and the best information possible in a flawed universe.
Cmon yourself. You can call bullshit, but WhyNott presented some evidence, and you’ve presented none. You seem to agree that some people are helped, but simultaneously think it’s bullshit that some people are helped.
No. I think that it’s bullshit that most people are helped. Whynot hasn’t presented any credible evidence at all that most people are helped. She said that she has been helped and I fully believe that. I might be able to accept that the success rate of Landmark is somewhat better than other programs but I doubt that it’s significantly better than other alternatives. Even if that’s true, there are downsides that Whynot has already conceded that might not make that extra success rate “worth it.” In any event, the burden of proof isn’t on me to prove a negative. Clearly, as Whynot said, a true, independent survey would be extremely difficult to do.
:smack: And here I go not responding to you as well!
Sorry. Ahem. No, what they did is not at all suggested or condoned by Landmark. Having said that, I can tell you that my own experience is that once you and several friends have been through it, you start to communicate differently, and that makes the non-Landmarkians feel awkward. You begin to use the terminology as shorthand and call each other on your bullshit because you know how to do it without hurting anyone. If a friend who’s been through Landmark starts going in about her abusive Daddy, I can smile and say, “So, how’s that story working for you?” or “Are you done with that racket yet?” and she knows exactly what I mean and what she’s doing and she knows I’m not being an asshole. If you haven’t been through it, I sound like an asshole.
So it can become hard to hang out with folks who haven’t been through it, just because your whole style of communication changes. I found it hardest, of course, in the first few weeks after. Like any new convert, you want to change the freakin’ world. You just KNOW that if Jack took the Landmark Forum he’d stop doing that THING that’s so annoying and sabotaging his happiness! The fact that he won’t is very frustrating at first, and continuing to hang out with him watching him do that THING over and over gets painful. Most of us settle down and stop sounding so judgey after a bit. I’m sorry your friends didn’t work it out.
Thanks for the responses. It sounds, like most self-help things, to be a combination of simple NLP and re-wording basic common sense so that it seems profound to weak-willed and simple-minded people. No offense to anyone who’s been helped by it, YMMV, and all of that.
Hajario, you claimed most people are not helped. You presented **zero ** evidence. WhyNott presented **some ** evidence that this isn’t true. We all agree that the Landmark survey has obvious biases, but it is still better evidence than simply asserting it ain’t so. You’re free to believe what you want, but not to assert it with no basis whatsoever.
And now, I’ll stop harping on this. Feel free to get the last word in. 
No, I get the last word. 'Cause I did find the independent research page. 
Linky.
The Yankelovich (DYG, Inc.) Study: Analysis of The Landmark Forum and Its Benefits
“More than seven out of 10 people found The Landmark Forum to be one of their lives’ most rewarding experiences…” Nationally recognized social scientist and public opinion analyst Dan Yankelovich, DYG Inc.'s chairman, conducted this study. The study addresses profiles of participants in The Landmark Forum, their satisfaction levels, and the value they reported.
The Talent Foundation Study: A Shortcut to Motivated and Adaptive Workforces
“Individuals surveyed showed significantly higher levels of motivation, self-esteem, and confidence…” The Talent Foundation, a global organization that provides innovative methods for the development of talent in the workplace, published a study on The Landmark Forum. This study, conducted within accepted scientific guidelines, validates the results that the Landmark technology produces.
The IMC, Inc. Report: Evaluations of Landmark Education’s Programs
“Participants gave The Landmark Forum extremely high ratings in important categories. Nine out of 10 participants expressed strong satisfaction with the value they received from The Landmark Forum.”
The Harris Survey: Money: The Impact of Landmark’s Programs on Participants’ Income Levels
Participants reported that Landmark’s programs had a positive impact on their relationship with money in key areas such as significant increased income, less anxiety about money, and greater effectiveness in managing their finances.
Robert Marzano Study: A New Paradigm for Educational Change
“The ultimate proof of the effectiveness of the seminar is the extent to which participants consider new, more effective paradigms…” Robert Marzano, a Deputy Director with the Educational Laboratory is widely recognized as an expert in critical thinking and curriculum design. This study explores the nature of the change process and the impact of change in business and education.
A University of Southern California Case Study: Transforming the Network of Conversations in BHP New Zealand Steel
“Leaders in BHP New Zealand Steel assert that LEBD’s [Landmark’s] engagement… galvanized the workforce…” The University of Southern California Marshall Business School published a case study that focuses on the impact of Landmark Education Business Development’s work at BHP New Zealand Steel.
A Harvard Business School Case Study: Landmark Education Corporation: Selling a Paradigm Shift
“LEC’s technology… is intended to provide individuals and organizations with an insight into how to become more effective…” Harvard Business School published a case study that focuses on the history, curriculum, and results of Landmark Education’s programs.
We work with some of those research groups, not too shabby. Better than I expected to be honest. I’d love to see if those numbers were compared to other programs.