When I attended The Landmark Forum in 2002, the main issue I wanted to examine was the struggle I had been experiencing in running my business. To cut a long story short, I had been finding it increasingly difficult to be competitive in the field of software development, which had previously been very productive for me. Through insights I got in the Forum I gained clarity about a whole different direction I could take the business in.
But that is not the breakthrough I want to share here. Like many of the other participants in this extraordinary training program, I got remarkable shifts in completely unrelated areas of my life that I had not even been regarding as unsatisfactory. For one thing, I experienced greater empathy and more powerful communication with a number of the important people in my life – even with people whose relationship was already warm and in no way in need of “fixing”.
But the most surprising result was in the area of my sport – acrobatic highboard diving. At the age of 54, I had come to take it for granted that my time as an active competitor was drawing to a close. Indeed, many people would regard that conclusion as somewhat obvious and maybe even overdue! Although there are so-called “Masters” events staged for competitors of more advanced years, it had been about a decade since I had competed and I had been gradually coming to the conclusion that I should cancel my competitive membership of the club and move to the recreational category. 
But two things happened to have me look at things in a different light. The first was that, in a training session shortly after I completed The Landmark Forum, my coach exclaimed “What’s happening Derek, I haven’t seen you diving like this in years!” On examining the situation I concluded that there had been a decisive shift in my mental experience while training. Whereas previously I had been substantially absorbed (without realising it) in an inner dialog with myself, I was now experiencing an inner stillness, a Zen-like state of focused non-judgemental concentration in the present moment. I realised that all the background mental chattering about declining strength and suppleness, about advancing years, about loss of courage, were all taking my attention away from focus on the experience of performing the dives and becoming so many self-fulfilling prophesies.
The second thing was that I saw this as an opportunity to try out one aspect of the “technology” we learn in Landmark Education programs – the ability to “create new possibilities”. What do I mean by this? Up until this point I had had no scope for determining how my future would unfold with my participation in this sport, because it had been already determined by my resignation and by my unspoken assumptions of how it would be. But now I had wiped that away and the future was a blank canvas. So I invented the possibility of “Being a Winner”. Of course that didn’t mean that I immediately started winning anything – what it meant was that I resolved to relate to myself as operating henceforth in a way consistent with the “Winner way of being”. That shifted my attitude to my training and conditioning. It involved enrolling my coach in my intentions and goals, and having her hold me to account for them. And most obviously it involved filling in the forms and sending them off to enter the events!
Six months later I dived in the British Masters Highboard Championships and came third in my age-group to win a bronze medal. The following year I won gold and silver medals for coming first on Highboard and second in the Springboard event.
