Category: Landmark Education

This category covers things that relate the personal development company Landmark Education. I attended their primary course, the Landmark Forum, in late March 2012 and found it to be a very helpful and transformative experience. It is a group therapy type format that presents psychological information in a unique and interesting way over the course of three consecutive days – Friday to Sunday. Many of the lessons remain with me and, if nothing else, it provides an framework for unpacking and understanding your life. I make no claim about its scientific validity, I just found it helpful and significant enough to write about.

LandMark Forum Letter To Who I’ve Been Inauthentic With

Having made amends to everyone I crossed during my chaotic journey the only person remaining to ask for forgiveness was myself. Part of the homework was to write a letter to this person. The goal was to complete the past and let them know about the possibility I have created for myself and my life in a way that leaves them touched, moved or inspired for having gotten that possibility. This letter was written on Friday evening and reviewed on Saturday morning.

I didn’t say it out loud in front of the group; it would have been unfair given that most of the people there hadn’t attempted to complete their past and needed the coaching a lot more than I did. Des, Adam, Leigh, Kinga, Kate, my dad, Sean, Jeff, Lisa, Christine, Brett, Chris, Heather, Rachel, Mau, my mom, Tony, Deb, Glenn, Kim, Leta, Steve, Ryan, Sarah, Sara, Mirella, Mandy, Sharyl, Andrea, Ben, Kristian, Jeff, Elaine, Rebecca, Rosa, Lauren, Gary, Dr. Gilbert, Jackie, Melissa, Brenda, Dr. S, Dr. H, and many that I’m forgetting, didn’t get their names or didn’t realize helped me while it was happening have been beside me to remind me that in my living of life is the being great, inspiring and unstoppable.

Hi Pat,

As you know I am attending the LMF this weekend with the intention of reconciling the difference between how others see you and how you see your self.

The truth is that these things haven’t been that far apart. They view you as great, awesome, capable, smart and loveable. The key issues is that you haven’t been authentic in accepting that you are these things and your desire to be right about how wrong they may be.

It is meaningless when all is said and done, but you’ve been laying meaning onto in order to maintain anxiety and remain small so you can complain and not risk.

Your romantic relations have been to serve this need so you seek out girls to fix without realizing that they are not the broken ones and that you are in no position to judge them anyway.

You’ve delayed the start of your second act of your live and found yourself staying away from people who treat you well. This has hurt you as it is inauthentic, you suffer when you are lie. It has caused you to engage in a lot of compulsive escapist behaviors and seek out distraction.

The possibility I have invented for myself and my life is the possibility of being naked, bold and fearlessly authentic in my quest to help create order in living and non living things. To this end, I am starting with you and your potential and am committed to give you the time, energy and focus needed to move your towards being Patrick William McKinney in all that you are, all that you do and in what others see you as being.

With love and adoration, be well,

Patrick

My LandMark Forum Part 3 – Day One, Part Two

As the session begins, we’re asked to consider what we are thinking about, how we feel and what our impressions are of the first few hours. I’m feeling very impressed with the day so far. I’m well fed, have drank a few coffees and I’m feeling good about the exchange at lunch. People give different answers, most are what you would expect – running from satisfaction to confusion. The member of the walking dead in front of me raises his hand and when call upon says that he’s “not getting it.” “That doesn’t surprise me” is my thought and the leaders comment is “good, keep trying it on.”

It doesn’t surprise me because the walking dead doesn’t look like anyone I’ve ever seen before other than one of those fellows from the Thriller video. His frustrated response is silent body language that screams WTF?!?!?!?

The next session covers something called Rackets which are persistent complaints or fixed ways of being, the notion of “already always listening” (AAL) which is the internal self talk that seems to narrate everything and the notion that human beings existence is in language. These are lumped together because they are the foundation for reflective human experience.

I consider the scripts that we run to be the same sort of thing as AAL in that we enter into every interaction with a lot of knowledge about the world and a strong desire to predict / win every interaction. Given that we have notions in our heads already, we perceive everything from the stand point of what we know. When all you have is a hammer, everything you see is a nail covers this. The rackets are related in that they are the outcome of the AAL. For example, every relationship I have had ends and it is usually the girl who ends them so my AAL would tend to direct me to perceive anything that isn’t positive about an interaction with a GF to mean it is about to fall apart. The racket is that I’m unlovable, not worthy of the love of a female, etc…. It’s some BS I’ve made-up based on my small sample size of maybe 15-25 relationships.

These rackets are noisy in our heads and they taint the perception of anything we believe is related to what what we’re presently experiencing. The language component is critical because without language we don’t really have a way to keep things going – experiences become memories which we can recall but tend to engage linguistically to created useful / accessible lessons.

It was pretty heavy, but my psychology degree, conversations with Des, experience with therapists / life coaches and independent learning had created most of the understanding I needed to accept the lessons quickly.

There was some sharing with the people beside us, I asked a bunch of questions to my partner and kept them talking because it was both interesting and what I like doing. It was fun to push the rackets back onto my partner as my observation of what they had told me. Their awareness of themselves was improved and it was good practice for the performance coaching I planned on doing.

My mind got completely blown again about 45 minutes before dinner when we covered actual impact of and cause of rackets; the stories we tell ourselves about what happened. For a while I had been holding considerable anger towards one of my best friends for something that she did. What happened was she made the decision to spend more time with her children and less time with me. The meaning I applied to it was that she had abandoned me. It’s silly to look at now because I really respect her decision to focus on her children but since our experiences linger on in language (the stories we tell) I had scripted a meaning that was great at maintaining the racket.

It was at this point that a lot of my past just disappeared. First off, I stopped feeling really crappy about my dad dying. My dad got cancer, he died, I was sad and grieved. That is what happened. The story I was telling myself that I had lost the 33% of my support structure, my primary male roll model etc… just ended. It’s fine to be sad, but he was content with his life and our family had lived our hearts out for the time between his diagnosis and death. It was actually the best 6 weeks of my life to date; or at least 6 of the best weeks spent living. The same applied to my friend. I loved her, she couldn’t continue the intensity of our connection, I was sad. I still love her, I always will, not because of anything to do with her, but because of how I feel. It’s fine and actually only appropriate for my love to be unconditional.

Dinner break.

The final thing we covered was context, and it seemed to be the icing on the cake made of icing about language. Change the context, change the meaning. This went hand in hand with the Cognitive behavioral therapy that I have been doing – change the thought, change the feeling, change the action. My friend is building adults with her children, not taking time away from me. My father returned to the earth, the very earth he had been eating for his entire life. The same earth we are all a part of, have all been eating and will all eventually return to. I was floating in a strange sense of contentment. No, I was drowning in the bliss of freedom.

The leader gave us our homework and sent us on our way. As I flowed down the stairs, across the road to my car something the leader said before dinner was thumping almost orgasmically in my awareness in a way that committed me to the possibility of a new purpose in my life – “I don’t want to make you feel better, I want to set you free.”

NOTE – what is covered in these blogs is based on my experience and is available on the Wikipedia Landmark Eduction page or available publicly with a Google search.

Stuff I Can Do With My Future

Texting Tony a few weeks ago about my life now that I’ve given-up my compulsive behaviors and he asked what I was going to do with my future now that it is no longer my past.

I passionately replied with:

Whatever I want! Write a few books, learn a bunch of stuff, eat well, date, marry a partner, buy a house, travel, start a charity, volunteer, become a public figure, coach people through life changes, ride my bike up bike mountains, get my teeth fixed, hang with friends, be inspiring, get therapy, get my body functioning, laugh, smile, shamelessly dance, go to weddings of friends, see my old girlfriend start families, be grateful for having lived, loved and still love so many beautiful people,….

Then I went to the Landmark Forum (LMF) and realized that I had already started it a few weeks ago after I got off the phone with Sean, Jeff, Heather and Kate having cleared-up my concerns about attending. Something funny happens when you commit to a different future, some doors close while others open.

On March 21st, a few days before I went to the LMF, I had an amazing conversation with one of my bosses about my intentions and she gave me a very clear indication of the vision that is to become a future. My intentions are not a big part of that, so I let her know how grateful I was for her honesty because it set me free. Gone was my created possibility and almost immediately I found that new possibilities were already opening in front of me.

It’s funny how acting boldly, decisively and authentically by announcing your intentions can actually slam shut doors that were holding you back for doing something new and creating the possibly of a more meaningful life.

My LandMark Forum Part 3 – Day One, Part One

There were a few really big moments during the weekend that rocked me hard. A lot of them were unconscious at the time, but revealed a lot of information that I was not able to flush out in the moment.

The first was immediately upon getting off the elevator. I was there to learn and the staff was there to guide me. My cheque cleared so the roles were very clear to me. I was an authentic student with an open mind and gave into the notion that they were authentic coaches / teachers / guides. Most of them were distant, guarded and lacked something that those who suggested I would gain from attending possess in abundance – authentic fearlessness. Frankly, I got the sense that most of the staff was scared crapless of me and I couldn’t push away the feeling that I was actually there for them.

In the waiting room I chatted with some people and asked them what they were hoping to get out of being there. The participants were nice, some were complete phoneys that made my skin crawl, some seemed to be missing a critical piece of the puzzle and it was evident that many were guarded. I did what I do which is effectively be different from everyone else. I turned and opened up and started mining people for their stories.

We all went into the large room and I took my seat in the front row and engaged the two people who were on either side of me. It is impossible to include everyone when you are in a line so I sat on the stage to form a triangle (a circle that just happens to have 3 straight lines forced into it). The group therapy had begun. It’s easy to notice that no other line of people was doing this. The three of us were special. The leader walks in and the session begins.

After some introduction stuff, the leader asks “when someone gives advice to a group, who do you think they are giving to?” There were three answers, silence, “other people” and mine “me.”

Hmmmm….. if I hadn’t yelled “me” I wouldn’t have thought much about it, but there I was, a student who was there to milk the hell out of whatever anyone was going to say or offer. Alone, fearless and authentic. I started to levitate and a lot of what the weekend was about transformed in that instant (not accurate, but for all practical purposes how it was).

People asked some question and when the leader was asked about himself and I got up and left. At the moment I thought it was because I had to go to the bathroom and possibly eat something, but as I walked out of the room I realized it was because I didn’t really care to listen to his answers. It really didn’t matter to me. While some may consider that rude, knowing too much about a possible flash bulb mentor can weaken their position. He had effectively told us that his entire presence was contrived so what’s the point in listening to someone continue to manufacture context?

So, the first thing I realized that I wasn’t being the same as most of the other people there. I was being me, manipulative, controlling, and authentically consuming whatever anyone was willing to give me.

First break and I head across the street to get my lunch out of my car and find somewhere to eat it. There’s a grocery store with some chairs in it and I see a bunch of my fellow participants. All of the tables are being used so I sit on my cooler and begin to use a free chair as my table. A guy says “hey, you want to sit here” pointing to the empty spot at his table. I do. We start the small talk and it turns out he’s one of us, both in terms of a participant and outlier. He leaves and after a few minutes I notice that his jacket is still on the chair. After I finish my lunch I bring the jacket up to the room and go outside to put away my lunch. I see him and say “hey, did you leave your jacket?” and he says kind of avoidantly, “yeah, it’s upstairs.” And I say “it is now, you left it at lunch. It’s under the table where we leave our drinks.” He doesn’t believe me but says “thanks” to a lair who is trying to get credit for doing something they didn’t do. I smile and float away having read his mind.

I get a decaf coffee and head back. As soon as I get into the room, he walks up and I point to under the table where his jacket is, he’s just come from his chair where his jacket isn’t. There’s a look in his eyes that wasn’t there before, the guard is down and he is not afraid of me anymore. He says thank you and sort of outlines the consequences of what would have happened if it was lost because he didn’t remember wearing it when he left for lunch. I say “no, thank you for leaving it. Normally I would have just left it there for the person to come back for. You have given me a gift by providing me the possibility for a different future and then for me to make that different future.” I hug him and he hugs back – two strangers, men in their almost 40’s hugging because of a shared sense of gratitude seeing the gift the other has given to them.

I found my seat for the next session and sat behind one of the greatest people I have ever know. A member of the unawakened walking dead. That’s when things really began to get interesting….

NOTE – any one I mention in these series of blogs has given me permission to talk about our experiences.

Negative Love Syndrome – Revisited

A few weeks ago I blogged Negative Love Syndrome – It Can Stop Here. If you didn’t read it give it a read now, and the Hoffman .pdf. I’ll wait for you to do that before I continue.

Great, now we’re on the same page.

Okay, I don’t disagree with the article or the concept of Negative Love Syndrome (NLS) but if you’re reading a self-improvement / self-awareness blog it’s pretty clear that the concept isn’t flushed out. I had a feeling there was an emptiness to it when I read it the first batch of times but didn’t figure it out until this weekend while I was at the Landmark Forum.

Here’s the deal with it:

Your parents create you and those who surround you are the ones who teach you most of what it is to be alive – survival skills, the skills of intimacy, and how to engage others. Good, bad, whatever. For example, if a mother used alcohol to cope with missing her family overseas, the child may learn to avoid getting close to other people to prevent what they judge to be a wrong type of behavior. If a father yelled because he never learned how to express his emotions his children may learn to avoid saying no or try and avoid disappointing people by never expressing their organic feelings. This makes sense. While not the same thing, both are a manifestation of a lack of authenticity which is the origin of negative love.

The concept is complete only when the individual identifies and addressed their responsibility in the existence of their NLS. Believing that your parents or caregivers did something wrong is a compelling slap to their face. Occasionally someone will do a horrible thing, but in many of the cases the parents were just people doing the best job they could, the only way they knew how. It’s nice to blame them for not doing what you believe would have been a better job, but chances are that they were younger than you are now when they did the things that shaped your NLS. If you are an adult and still blame your parents you are still a child. If you are a parent and still blame your parents you are lowering the potential for unlimited success and joy in the life of your children because you are a child raising children.

A parents role it to keep you alive until you are able to be independent. That’s it. Take responsibility for your place in life, your decision to transfer blame for your life onto them and others and get out of the past. Thank your parents for a job well done and ask your parents for forgiveness for being judgmental for their actions. If you don’t you are going to remain exactly the same as them.

Make no mistake about it, they feel it and believe that they have failed as a parent. Man-up, and let them know just how successful they were because you are alive. Let yourself be beautiful, vibrant and joyful. You don’t just owe them that, you owe them EVERYTHING.

My LandMark Forum Part 2

I’m an analytical manipulator with an empathetic kind heart. It’s good to know this because my jobs all make sense now. Goodness, my entire life makes sense from the seemingly random series of relationships to the self loathing and escapist behavior. When someone tries to sell me something or tries to manipulated me, I feel it in my stomach. I finally realized this fact this weekend. I’ve been hating myself because I am the very thing I hate. Except for one critical thing, I’m now incapable of lying to serve my own selfish ends so now that I see that I can make people think and feel things, I don’t make myself sick anymore.

The sharing session were me turning to my partner and saying “tell me about you” and when the leader said switch I’d say “no, we’ve got great flow here, we need to keep going, it feels like you are onto something”. A few of the people I talked to had never had anyone tell them the actual truth before in a way that made them see it, realize that they had created it and that there was a very simple course of action to a better life.

Over the last few weeks I’ve come to realize that am the architect and engineer of everything in my own life so nothing is in it or out of it by chance. You can imagine the sense liberation and power this information has made me feel – accepting that when I am just being, my manipulation is going to be honest and empathetic. I don’t feel any shame for this anymore, and it’s part of why I haven’t ever really felt like most other people. I’m not like most people. I’m out for humanity not for myself. I can’t lie to people. And I can get them to think and feel things.

The biggest impact on my life has been that I DESPISE manipulative people, so I’ve spend a lot of time hating myself. It’s silly really because I’m not the type person who takes from others. I see or hear someone say they want something and I set out fixing it. The only people it ends up hurting are the ones who were lying about what they want and they hurt because they feel I’ve run a game on them. And they should hurt because they haven’t been feeling bad about running the game on other people. They’re not necessarily assholes, they’re just may not be self-aware enough to realize they want to bitch and I can’t help but try and fix them. That isn’t evil, it’s actually kind of nothing.

My LandMark Forum

My Landmark Forum has begun. I left the graduation because it wasn’t mine. I am one of the few people on the planet who will never graduate from it because I was never there. My cheque cleared so I was allowed to participate but if / when you experience me being, it will quickly become evident that I am not only good or great, but I am the only. I work miracles and will aggressively work them on you.

I have a very strong ability to manipulate and control the way people feel. I can read peoples minds and I can get them to do the things I want.

I don’t use this gift to take peoples money or anything from them.

I use my gift to help them get what they say they want and to set them free.

Here is the thing, I will shameless run the game on anyone who tells me that there is something missing in their life.

But be clear, if you are simply complaining and looking for someone to agree with your complaint, you are going to feel absolutely horrible and exposed.

My compassion will have me understand how you are feeling and still expect your best from you.

I will recommend the Landmark Forum to anyone who is looking to understand how their brain and body actually work. I would recommend it to parents for their children because it is easier to make a possibility a reality when you are being with finely tuned machinery.