Standing for Something Bigger

Twelve days ago, nine friends accepted an invitation and attended an introduction to Landmark, which I arranged at a venue in Kendal.  The space that has opened for me since then has been incredible.

Being in touch with the work that Landmark so powerfully bring to my life and to the world is an important ingredient of the transformative learning that they teach. 

Like going to the gym and taking on a healthy diet for three months and getting in the shape of your life, if you spend the next three months sat on the settee eating cake you will get flabby again.  You must first know to do the right things, then you must bring them into action, and be committed to doing them over and again.

When I played a lot of poker I had a poker strategy book on my desk at work and a customer told me that he had read over thirty poker books and had not improved as a player. Perhaps it was not the reading of the books that was required.  The professional players I know who work tirelessly at improving their strategic games have to put into practice many times over before they can adapt their style.  They have to understand the strategy, not just read the words on the page.  Jonny Wilkinson stood out in the training field clasping his hands, visualising, and then taking his run up to loft the ball over the goalposts.  David Beckham stayed behind after training to practice his free-kicks daily.  Even the master has to continually sharpen the saw.  They both repeated what they had learned during each match.  Nothing comes from knowing once, without further practice.

There is a phrase that I have seen being shared a lot recently.  It says 'surround yourself with people who are going to lift you higher'. 

I remain slightly uncomfortable with the aforementioned statement as it occurs to me that there is  a suggestion that we have to leave behind those that are not positive and that is a way of being that is not compassionate.  If it occurs for you in the same way, I do not subscribe to the ide of casting off people because of where they are in their journey.  I stand for inclusion of everyone; wherever they are right now, or wherever they have come from.  Have compassion for our humanity. 

I have benefitted from surrounding myself with some great people recently, none more so than by undertaking the work I have done with Landmark since last September.  The introduction leader who led our introduction in Kendal saw me for something more than I have been able to see myself for and her words and the stand she took for me allowed me to find power, empowerment, and to cast off the weight of the meaning I attach to everything that happens.  She reminded me of the experience I had in London and asked me if I wanted that for my friends.  When you find a space that good you don't just want it for your friends, you want if for the world!

The most important reminder that has contributed to the great space I find myself in has been that I now stand for something bigger than me and I am being bigger for the world than I ever thought I could be.  Greatness is within us all.  All you need to do is peel back the layers of the onion and reveal who you truly are.  You will not find cynicism, or inaction, you won't discover hate, or find exclusion.  We were all born into this world with the same possibilities ahead of us.  Then we layered on meaning, we shrunk from our greatness, and we made things wrong.

As humans, we are here for connection, for inclusion, for communication, for action, for possibilities.  Leave the meaning behind.  There is only what you did and what you didn't do.  Do more of the things that have a powerful impact on the world and create traction in your own life that propels you forward.

In the Landmark Forum they open up a space for you to see how things truly are for yourself,  In the Advanced Course they show you how you are the cause for everything, not just in your own life, but in the lives of those around you.  If you want your relationship to work, your family to heal, your business/employer's business to grow, your community to flourish, and for the world to be the place you want it to be, then it's up to you.  Stop looking at each other waiting for the other person to make the first move.  Be great.  Be courageous.  Be powerful.  Be authentic.  Enroll other people in what you are up to.  Be a stand.

Ask yourself what game you are playing.  Once you know what game you want to play it's time to get in action.  I am playing the game of everyone gets it.  My work has begun through this blog, through the introduction I arranged in Kendal, and through the enrolling conversations I undertake each day.  I will take to this blog again soon and share with you some more of what I am getting and what possibilities I am creating.

If this post has touched, moved, or inspired you in anyway please get in communication with me - either through this blog, or directly on social media.  Thanks always for your time and your interest.

On The Court

There is a much used phrase, one of many, within the Landmark training which is 'on the court', as opposed to 'in the stands'.  What is meant by this phrase is two-fold; firstly that people tend to go through their lives, or areas of it, sitting in the stands watching the action, whilst others get on the court and make the plays.  Secondly, that when people talk about things that are closest to themselves they either do so from the stands, talking in general terms and theorising, whilst others talk about their lives as they are actually happening, bringing their world to others and therefore sharing experiences, which often elicits a much more resonant response from the audience.

In my last post about expectations I don't think that on re-reading I was on the court enough.  There are reasons that people do not get on the court when addressing their lives; mainly perceived as either to protect themselves, or sometimes also to protect others.  I don't think at this time it is fair to write so publicly, under my own name, and sharing through my own social media accounts, about all of the affairs of my life and relationships, the interactions with my family and friends, and my most personal past.  There are some things at this stage that I do not feel will benefit me or those around me by sharing.  I am not ashamed of anything that has happened in my life and privately in conversation there is little or nothing I wouldn't be happy discussing. However, I do want to get as much on the court as I can without breaching this thought.

To return then to what I am getting from completing the work I have done so far with Landmark and now that I am coming to some bigger realisations with the benefit of more time and clarity I want to talk more about how life is transforming for me.  When I say transforming, I really mean that too as I am finding that life is turning up for me in a way that I'm not sure I would have believed if you had sold it to me this way only a few months ago.  That being because when habits have been formed over such a long period and when feelings are so ingrained that you do take a comfort from them no matter how unwanted it can take something to really see that life doesn't have to continue to be the same way that it has always been.

I asked my sister-in-law's partner - who together both kindly funded the expense of the Landmark Forum for me - what he had gotten out of the experience and his answer was that he just takes an extra second or two before responding. It didn't sound like much to me, but I had an inkling that there was more to that than at first sounded.  Now I get a sense of that myself with the small differences in my way of being that are contributing to the transformation I am experiencing.

The most noticeable difference for me is, I am less angry.  This is huge for me.  I was very angry at lots of things, lots of people, for lots of reasons.  Some of those reasons were good reasons.  I mean very good, very well-thought out reasons, that others were enrolled in agreeing with me on.  I am sure I could enrol many of you to agree with me in the same way.  Couldn't we all do the same with our constant complaints?  I have been perpetuating some of that anger for a long time, probably since my teens and right throughout my adult life.  Being angry about those things and with those people has kept me right about the reasons and kept them wrong.  That being so, it has done nothing for me positively that I can quantify and yet still, I hung on to them, going down the same corridor expecting the cheese to be there when it was moved years ago.  Even rats don't make that mistake more than a handful of times.

Being angry is a terrible emotion.  It has a distinctive feeling that goes with it that is not enjoyable at all.  It manifests itself physically - I suffer from pan-ulcerative colitis, but have most certainly aggravated my condition, or had related irritable bowel symptoms caused by my anger.  I have suffered back pains too.  Above all, anger is completely disempowering and tethers us to the person or situation we are angry about, denying us our freedom. It also prevents us from being truly present.

Part of being able to let go of anger comes from learning about forgiveness.  I have come to forgive myself and others, which has meant I can create a future free from those tethers to the past.

Forgiveness can often seem like a weakness.  We are so concerned with protecting ourselves that we actually cause further damage by holding on to anger, by continuing to make people wrong, by detaching from the moment and living in the past, or by putting our past into our future by failing to forgive and failing to let go.  Forgiving is for our own benefit and not to condone another.  If you are hanging on to your past consider what that is doing for you.  How has it helped you get on with your life?

In India, monkeys are trapped by placing a banana inside the neck of a bottle, anchored to the ground, just wide enough to slip their hands in but not wide enough to pull the banana back out through.  If the monkeys let go of the banana they would be free, but as the banana has value for the monkeys they do not and the trapper easily places a bag over the monkey to capture it.  If you haven't done yet, let go of the banana.

With being less angry through forgiveness there has come a contentment.  Not only was I angry with other people, but I was angry about the situations I found myself in.  When someone says that their kids are diffciult or annoying, that there life is boring or frustrating, that their partner is uncooperative or uncaring, that their boss is dominating, or any of the other numerous complaints we have in life then they are really saying much more about themselves, their opinions being a reflection of themselves, than they are about the people or situations they have complaints about.  I found irritation in the most minor of things and now those things are just things that need doing so I do them, or that don't need doing so I don't worry about them.

With contentment comes an ability to live in the moment.  Rather than spending time worrying about or hanging on to the past, or being troubled about what may or may not happen tomorrow, and also being able to really move to a point where I am leading my life the way I want to rather than for the response of others, I am able to just be in the moment. That means being present, taking each moment for what it is, a massive sense of contentment and an appreciation for what is happening, rather than living in the concerns of my mind.  I have enjoyed moments that previously would have left me feeling either angry, or irritated, depressed, or frustrated.

Having piece of mind breeds confidence.  I believe in myself, I believe I have value, I can see my experiences for what they have taught me and know I don't need to keep on repeating my mistakes.

This last two weeks over Christmas have been wonderful, even in the mundane.  Being be able to say that, to move past the normality of life feels incredibly empowering.  Now I am enjoying all my life is.  My relationship with my two boys is in a very good place and I am treasuring being their father.  Other relationships, at home and at work, are blossoming and flourishing as I know myself better and take full responsibility for my responses, actions, and feelings.

I wish you all a great 2016 and look forward to sharing with you again throughout the year. I will write about what I am focused on getting for myself and my family in a post next month and will keep my word to talk about the Excellence Seminars I attended.  Please do leave comments or reply to me on Twitter or Facebook as it is in the conversations with others that I have had the most pleasure and made real-life connections with my readers.

Expectation

Expectation. It's a word I used in the opening paragraph of my opening post to this blog. People expect all the time. Our expectations are in other people or in ourselves and the experiences that we are having. When those expectations fail to be delivered we tend to look for someone or something to blame. How often do we explore the expectation itself and whether the creation of that expectation is responsible for the perceived failure? We think people, things and experiences are supposed to be, yet they are what they are.

When I applied for the Landmark Forum I was asked to fill out an online form detailing my expectations of the experience that lay ahead for me that weekend. I don't have a copy of what I wrote, but I do recall that i filled my maximum word count. I wanted my life to change. I wanted to see improvement and development related mainly to personal growth. I wanted to be more. I wanted to get past procrastination, beyond knowing that I have the capability, realise the changes and make them lasting.

As I refered to last time, I have read and digested enough previously to be a theorist in the realm of personal development. I have not only read books and articles over the years, but I have also taken a workbook-like approach to breaking down the messages and applying them to my life. What has often stopped me from effecting lasting change is a lack of resilience. Being resilient requires self-belief, a bravery to continue in the face of criticism and scepticism, and a level of unreasonableness.

What I am learning now is just how important those concepts and distinctions are to understand and enforce within myself. I am growing in my ability to focus on the inside first and then work towards the outer. In other words, to examine my internal dialogue and how that effects my life, before going on to work on the how of accomplishment.

There is endless amounts of information on websites, in books and in videos, regarding motivation, focus, belief, and growth and there are techniques and methods to help you plan, organise, and structure your life in way that will make you more productive, more proactive, focused on the end result, and to help you to put the necessary steps in the right order.

Only since I have learned about letting go, detaching meaning, about the space I create for others to respond, and about being totally responsible, have I really been able to start creating a clearing for my life that anything is possible and I am the creator.  It is also important to have sympathy for the ruiner and understand that the machine of being a human never goes away, we just hope to become quicker and quicker at catching ourselves, acknowledging our inner-arsehole, and making a different choice. I do not want to be the victim of my reactions, to surrender to my machinery.

What I am getting from my experience with Landmark is that making people wrong, making myself wrong, and making situations wrong just doesn't work for me. It doesn't present me with possibility. I can be whoever and whatever I want to be. I know that taking a stand for myself and for others makes many people uncomfortable. We often take comfort in keeping ourselves small.

I am taking a stand right here and right now for myself and for you. Be everything you ever wanted to be. To get love, give it. To empower others, be empowering. To have it all, be it all.

I will write again soon about the Excellence Seminars that I completed on Thursday, so if you like what I have written please come back next time.

Graduation

In September of this year, I am proud to say that, I graduated from the Landmark Forum.  What does that mean?

I took a train to London for an extended five day weekend.  I arrived on the morning of the first day of the Forum and went straight to Landmark Worldwide's offices.  I had a little expectation, mainly from the short videos I had watched introducing some of the sessions and concepts that were to take place over the first three days.  I have been interested in personal development for over ten years, but more focused over the last five years.

What is personal development and why would I be interested in it?  For me, through my initial reading of some of Anthony Robbins' work and the now late Dr. Stephen Covey - whose book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People was my first introduction to this type of learning - it is about wanting something more from your life and of yourself.  Does that mean that my life isn't enough?

I have a family with my partner and two children, I have relationships with my family in the UK, and a more distant one with my family overseas.  I have friends.  I have a secure job with prospects that provides financially.  I have somewhere to live.  I can meet all my basic needs in life and I can enjoy much more than that.  I have reasonably good health, less good fitness, and I have mental health that has fluctuated over the last ten years, probably longer. Does this sound familiar?

If I never read a personal development book or attended the Landmark forum, my life most certainly would go on.  If I never learn to speak Spanish so when I next visit my family there and communicate with them in their own language, my life will go on.  If I never train my body so I can enjoy a better level of fitness and ensure that I can be active with my children as they grow up and enjoy the experience of a life of vitality, my life will go on.  If I never get round to writing any comedy and applying for the gong show at The Comedy Store to build on the experience I had when I performed in Kendal last year, having something creative and using my comedy to deliver a message as well as entertain, my life will go on.

I accept that things are OK and I also recognise that there are a lot of things that I am not OK with.

The way I have summarised, to those I have shared my experience of the Forum with and on the conversations had over the weekend with them is that the biggest irony for me was that they didn't really share anything I didn't already know.  There may have been some conversations framed in a certain way that I hadn't considered, but the message was not something alien to me.

We talked about meaning, our relationship with ourselves and others, the fixed ways of being we have around our constant complaints. We discussed sharing, creating possibilities, and ways of being.  We talked about creating in language, integrity and being your word.

People who volunteered to take the microphone and share openly with the entire group were addressed directly, as adults, and asked to confront themselves and their constructs of their ways of thinking and being.  They were pushed to 'get on the court' and bring to the group the detail of the share and make it real.    They were asked to be responsible for themselves and their lives.  It wasn't always comfortable, but mostly it was enlightening. 

The three days were thirteen hours in length.  To use a cliché, it was a rollercoaster of emotions.  We listened and we participated.  We shared with the person seated next to us and some shared publicly with the room  - numbering around one hundred and eighty people, if I recall correctly.

Landmark describe the Forum as transformative learning, ontological in nature,  informed in part by neuro-scientific research.  Landmark do not lay claim to have a magic wand for you and your life.  They do not even claim to have invented the conversations and concepts they share in the Forum.  They are very honest about their ambitions as an organisation, that their ability is in packaging information in a powerful way, and they are demanding in asking you to be coachable, to put in the work and continue to do so beyond the Forum - bringing it outside of their offices and into your life and to share with the people you have relationships with.

If you are constructing in your mind what I have written this far means, what it means about me or what it means about you, or what it means about what I did, or the people who do it, then the only thing I can be pretty sure of is that if I asked for ten readers to give me those meanings they would all differ.  There may be some similar themes - scepticism, intrigue, scorn, enrolment, confusion, but there would be nuances that set each opinion aside on its own.

What does that in itself tells us about meaning?  That there is none.  There is no meaning as the only meaning that there is, is the meaning you and I attach to anything and everything and everyone.  If we create our own meaning, which we base on our paradigms, experiences, and influences then we are actually truly free to create whatever meaning we want for ourselves.  If that is the case then do we want to create meaning that is empowering and freeing or meaning that disempowers us and is restraining?  We always have a choice.  It may not feel like we do, but feelings are not to be trusted.  We always have a choice, whether we make it consciously or not.

Returning to my opening sentence.  Most of us are our own worst critics and we often find it difficult to give ourselves praise or recognise our own achievements. I haven't always felt a sense of pride in having graduated. I have felt frustrated and disappointed. I have felt a sense of elation and of being powerful. I have felt like it was the best decision of my life and a waste of money. 

Now I am coming to the end of a ten session seminar where we have been discussing what excellence is as a possibility as opposed to as a concept.  In the same way that we create meaning in our lives, we also create what excellence is and we spend much of our lives striving to achieve it.  What if our concept of what excellence is has no basis in truth? What if the only truth in it is that we created the concept in the same way that we create meaning? What does that leave us with?

I am graduating from the program on the 17th December in London.  I invite you, if you want to come and find out first-hand what Landmark are about, to see for yourself and join me.  I can bring as many guests as I want and am excited to have any of you come along.  Please go get in touch even If you just want to talk more about what I have written here.  I am happy to pick up the phone, send a text, or whatever works for you.

Sharing this blog post with you and extending this invite makes me vulnerable to your opinion. Whatever you have made this mean, I ask you to consider that it doesn't mean that at all.  I hope I have shared with you in a way that inspires you to get in touch to discuss this more, or to come and join me.  If it doesn't, I hope it has at least posed you a question.

I will blog again shortly to tell you more of what I hoped to get out of the Forum before I went and what I am getting out of it now.