Landmark Forum Results Blog

I did the Landmark Forum in 2009 and have been participating in many other programs of Landmark Education. I produced dramatic results in many critical areas of my life.

i) I had huge anger within me and in my relationships- especially with my mother and my wife. I either used to take it out on them or on myself. I am now able to dismantle my anger without suppressing it and have created the possibility of great harmony, peace and love.

ii) I had very low self-esteem and lacked assertiveness. I used to be self-blaming and self-punishing. After the Forum, I have created great self confidence and peace of mind for myself.

iii) I am a university teacher, and thanks to the Landmark Education, I am far more effective in communication, planning and dealing with work stress. I even relate to students and my work in a far more positive way than before.

iv) I have asthma from past twenty five years , and I was suffering from depression from past few years too. My physical as well as mental health was deteriorating fast. Thanks to Landmark Education, there is great improvement in my health, fitness and overall well-being. My medication for asthma as well as mental health came down by almost sixty percent. The Landmark Education, however, is not psychotherapy or a substitute for it.

v) I used to relate to myself as ‘team player’ rather than as the leader. Now I relate to myself as a leader and have taken up new projects for the teaching community.

vi) My communication is more effective. I am a better listener and can be present to the person and communication fully. I also do not ‘react’ to something automatically in a negative way. This has caused positive shift in all areas of my life.

I acknowledge the Landmark Education and my coaches who enabled and empowered me to deal with life in a powerful and effective way.

—Sachin Ketkar

My name is William Brandon Shanley. I’ve taken the Forum and many other Landmark programs.

In 1993, my Self Expression and Leadership project was a book about the new worldview based on leading discoveries of science that became, Lewis Carroll’s Lost Quantum Diaries. I received a $50,000 advance and the science novel was published in Germany in 1999 under the title Alice Zwischen den Welten. The book was then sold licensed in paperback for another $15,000. Amazon.de called it, “…the best and most complete work of the modern scientific conception of the world of quantum physics.” Next, the book was licensed to the Japanese for $14,000 and published there in 2002. Just last month, Alice finally came home to America, and I’m happy to say our new anthology of selected chapters from the original work has been released under the title, Alice and the Quantum Cat. And guess what? Now we’re working on a movie script!

My quantum journey would very likely never have taken place had it not been for Landmark Education.

My deep appreciation and gratitude to all those who coached me, and thanks also from our many readers who love the continuing adventures of Alice in in the Quantum Universe.

I am very much committed to the work of Landmark Education and would like to inspire others to experience its inspiring and life-altering programs.

Light falls in love to create life! Keep going….

—William Shanley

I completed the Landmark Forum in April of 2009 in Columbus, OH. I was introduced by one of my close friends whose life I had seen alter around him and I was interested in having those same kind of results, although I was a bit skeptical. However, I was a waiter at a national restaurant chain and other than plenty of online gaming time, I didn’t have much going on in my life. So I trusted my friend and went through with it, and my view of life altered such that I could suddenly bring forth any result that I could envision.

As my relationship with my family improved dramatically, I began to think of my 3 half brothers that I had been separated from as a result of my father’s addiction and my own apathy about the importance of family. I began to see that I was resisting contacting them because, to me, I was a loser that abandons his family. It wasn’t until December of 2010 that I really distinguished how much of my life was given by this story and I began to accept and get over it enough that I made promises to find them. Well, after many breakdowns and breakthroughs, I’ve found them!!

After 12-14 or so years, I’ve found my 3 brothers, my step-mother, 2 aunts, 3 cousins and an uncle! This event has completely altered my life! I am more profoundly connected to the world around me and the shift is so subtle and smooth and JOYFUL.

Now there is just the question of what is next??

The answer: Finding an investor who will put a combined $20,000 into my two businesses!

Thank you for your listening and I look forward to hearing many many of your breakthroughs!

—Chris Honeycutt

After my father’s death in ’98, my family comprised mother, sister and me. My mother went through tough times building a home; becoming self-sufficient and providing my sister and I with all the comforts and luxuries that one may find oneself fortunate to enjoy.

After I was introduced to the distinction of responsibility as a possibility – being a cause in the matter – I realized that the responsibility that I had assumed as I grew up to observe my mother’s hardships wasn’t authentic. At copious instances, I had handed over my power to situations and circumstances.

Now, I’m the cause in the matter in my family. There is an undying possibility of responsibility that repeatedly calls me into action.

Earlier, I was resigned in the face of an argument with my mother. Not any more. I drop my resignation with her and see how the situation occurs to her so that we can address it and give her peace and joy.

I also took on being the cause in the matter in my sister’s education.

My family is now living in harmony.

—Karan Kamble

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.

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.