Landmark Forum Results Blog

Before I did the Forum I often wondered if I was doing the right thing, and worried that I was not. What a relief to learn in the Forum that , though I might have made different decisions, EVERYTHING WAS AS IT SHOULD BE: PERFECT! Things are perfect the way they are, at every moment. What a relief it was to have a great weight lifted from my shoulders. I still remember driving home feeling much, much lighter. My job now is to keep remembering this!

My dad was a lieutenant in the Navy in the early 1960’s and was not exactly an emotive guy. He was affectionate and a great dad, but while I was growing up I could probably count on one hand the number of times we said, “I love you,” to each other. Even though I’ve always loved him, and I know he loves me, we’d still only say it to each other at maybe a funeral or a graduation.

Then I do the Landmark Forum when I’m 26. So after the course I realize that it’s actually a problem for me that I don’t tell my dad (out loud) that I love him. We talk on the phone all the time, and so I’m driving in my car and am talking on the phone with him and it’s getting to the point where I can tell the conversation is wrapping up, and so a little voice in my head is saying to me, “A.J., you’ve got to say ‘I love you’!” but I’m also really nervous.

So he says, “Okay A.J., I’ll talk to you later,” and then I say, “Alright dad, I’ll talk to you soon. I love you,” and he says, after a little pause, “I love you too, son.” It feels very…new, but I have a big smile on my face. And so every time after that, it got easier and easier to say. Now we say “I love you” to each other every time we talk on the phone. It also spread from him doing it with me to now when my dad talks to my brother and sister, they say, “I love you,” to each other on the phone every time too.

The most useful concept I learned in the forum is the distinction ‘story’.
My husband Steve , who is the king of men and an amazing, brilliant and generous human being, has, in a very deep place inside, a story called ‘I’m a victim’. We laugh about it, because he realizes it is an automatic narrative which pops up from time to time. In the midst of being a very responsible person, I’ll suddenly hear him saying someone ‘did’ something to him that isn’t ‘fair’; he’ll be all upset . However, as soon as I say,’Oh, there is the victim!’ he’ll laugh, be able to distinguish his conversation as a story, and be able to totally give it up.

At the time I took the Landmark Forum I was a sophomore at Yale University. The reason I got into Yale was the same reason that I had success in other areas of my life: I was good at being different. I had created a resume built on the principle of standing out from the crowd, either by performing at a higher level than average or by doing things that my peers didn’t. For instance, only a handful of people from my hometown in Oregon went to college out of state; so I applied almost exclusively to out-of-state colleges. And when I wrote my application, at every possible moment I highlighted the unusual things about my background: whitewater rafting since a young age, living in foreign countries, starting a jazz combo, and so on. During my freshman year I had the odd experience of talking to someone who was at the table when they were deciding whether to admit me, and learned that what tipped the scales was just that – I came across as unusual. Different. 

What I didn’t get is that being different is not a silver bullet. Eventually I ran into situations where being different didn’t work. I began to distance myself from many of my peers, and did not participate fully in my classes. To do so would have made me “one of the crowd” – which would have meant giving up that very thing that had gotten me where I was. If I weren’t different, who could I possibly be? Because I didn’t participate in my communities, I began to lose power in my life; I discovered that almost anything you want to do in the world requires you to rely on other people, and since I was alienating myself from everyone around me, my ability to get anything done in the world was continually shrinking.

If you had asked me why I was frustrated with my life at the time, I could not have told you. I had no idea it was because I was attached to being different; it was a blind spot, something I couldn’t see because it was so much a part of who I was. But I got it when I took the Forum. It was suddenly absurdly obvious why I was getting stopped in life, why my life was frustrating. And once you know something, you can act on it. I started to treat my community as something I was a part of, and began to participate fully with my peers and in my classes. And almost immediately results started to come back. At the time I was working on getting a group of students to travel to a post-conflict zone near Russia, and the project was about to collapse from lack of funding. Soon after the Forum an individual in my community stepped forward and offered a means to funding. I began to engage with my professors, who mentored me and provided advice and wisdom that revolutionized my academic career. In short, my life took a dramatic leap forward after the Forum. And it was all from learning how to engage with my community; with engagement came the power to create the life I wanted to live.