Landmark in the News

Change We Can (Almost) Believe In

TIME Magazine, in the March 7, 2011, issue, includes a feature article in which Landmark and The Landmark Forum are described as “the natural first stop in any transformation tour,” and Landmark Forum leader Roger Smith as “remarkably insightful."

The story profiles the advantages of personal development, focusing on Landmark as a mainstream, positive example of a leading edge company in the personal development field.

Nathan Thornburgh, contributor to TIME, participated in The Landmark Forum and wrote about his experience. Acknowledging the major ground he personally took as a result of his participation, Thornburgh writes: “I benefitted tremendously from the uncomfortable mirror that the course had put in front of me. With [Landmark Forum leader] Smith’s mantra of personal responsibility playing on a loop in my mind, I started to take stock of the quality, not just the quantity, of the time I spent with my family.”

Here are a few excerpts from the article:

“The American obsession with transformation isn’t new. It’s about as old as the nation. In the 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson preached about tapping into the ‘infinitude of man.’ . . . Norman Vincent Peale was an early best-selling self-help author with The Power of Positive Thinking in 1952. But it was Werner Erhard, a lean, wolfish former salesman, who created the first modern transformation empire when he founded EST seminars in 1971. His courses were legendarily uncomfortable.”

“But it’s a tribute to the power of [Erhard’s] central concept—you have imprisoned yourself, and a few days of endurance ontology can set you free—that more than 20 years after he sold his ideas to a group of employees who went on to create Landmark Education, Landmark is still the natural first stop in any transformation tour.”

“At its heart, the course was a withering series of scripted reality cheques meant to show us how we have created nearly everything we see as a problem.”

“Like the Zen master who strikes his students while they try to serve him tea, Smith was unsparing. Each time someone looked to blame others or the world at large for his or her problems, he hammered back. His tone was compassionate, but the message was steely. ‘Who was there every time you got fired?’ he demanded of the group. ‘It’s not the economy, the climate, world conditions, your mother, your father. The right person to make a difference in your life is sitting in your chair.’”

“When I stepped to the mike at Landmark, I thought I could start by offering a mild testimonial. Something true but not as intimate or confusing as confessing to losing my temper with a doe-eyed 2-year-old. So I said, blandly, that even as a freelancer, I still felt unable to make enough time for my kids. Smith immediately gutted even that disclosure. There’s no such thing as being torn between work and family, he said. Either someone is with one’s family or not. All I was really doing was using the pretext of immovable scheduling conflicts to gloss over the fact that I, of my free will, was not keeping promises I had made to my children.”

“I found him to be remarkably insightful. He saw through my timid testimony and got right to a truth: if I can’t handle being a full-time parent, it’s probably because I don’t want to. I couldn’t argue with him, not because he had a clever script but because he was right.”

“I benefited tremendously from the uncomfortable mirror the course had put in front of me. With Smith’s mantras of personal responsibility playing on a loop in my mind, I started to take stock of the quality, not just the quantity, of the time I spent with my family. And I saw something in myself that plagued a lot of the other new fathers I'd met from around the country through my blog: we are powerfully distracted. We may change more diapers and pack more lunches than our fathers did, but our minds are more absent than ever.”

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