When my colleague Lucy kept insisting I'd do the Landmark Forum, after a quick Google search and the word cult popping up on my screen I decided it would be a marvellous idea to check this out for myself.
Lucy kept telling me she was 'committed' I'd do it - which back then sounded like a strange turn of phrases. I told myself that I signed up for it more to get her off my case than anything else.
'It will be good' I said 'to take a couple of days off and reassess', whatever that meant. I was quite clear that my career needed reassessing, but I did not really know what that entailed.
I kept telling my dear ones that at work I felt like I was 'stuck on an escalator' - I was going up but I felt like I was not the one in control. I had this feeling that I was meant to do something else. I felt like something that was not doing what that something was meant to do.
'I will come out of this with a couple of good pointers' I thought. I was ready to go in, learn a couple of things and then use them in my life to do what I did, just better.
The Landmark Forum gave me something completely different. I did not 'learn' anything as such, but I saw things that until now had been outside my view. Once they came in view, they did not need to be learnt - they were just there. A bit like riding a bike - until you know how to do it you cannot even phantom how it all works, but once you learn, that's it - you can just do it always.
Things came into my view that made me realise that it is not just the things that are burdening us that limit us and our happiness. Even the things that we are amazing at have already defined what we will be for the rest of our life - like a golden cage that we are not aware to be trapped in. Here was my 'escalator'.
And not only did I see this, but I could also understand how I have ended up in that golden cage and why - just by trying to do more and better - really did not do anything in the way of freeing me.
All this came to view and suddenly I was not the guy in the cage. I was an observer of that guy. I was looking at him. And as an observer I could go to that cage and just open it. Unsurprisingly it was not locked - I had never realised the door was open either.
I am not going to try to summarise what and how this path works, because I could not do it justice. In practice it is an intense three days sitting in a room with people you have never met and with organisers that are ever so keen about punctuality and that seem to be very committed for you to 'get it'. You don't take notes, there is no mention of any religious or otherwise belief system, you do not learn anything (like you did at school), you don't have to say a word if you wish so. You just sit there and allow yourself to be led down a path.
What I will say is that it was through this path that I realised that the key to 'reinvent' ourselves is not trying to do more, less or different from what we have always done - to try to resolve all the things that make us upset. This is quite simply because that upset exists still now everytime we try to get rid of it through these 'better, less, more or different'. That upset is the comparison term that we keep bringing up over and over again.
And the way to reivent ourselves is not either allowing the strengths that we have got to predifine what we are and what we are going to be.
Reinvention comes from a place where all these things are just that- things. These things are there and we can look at them without having 'to be' them. And if we are not them then we can be something else - something different, something we could never have imagined we could be.
