By Wyatt Emmerich,
Publisher

The Landmark Forum is coming to Jackson, which is quite an honor.

This fall Jackson will join 50 other cities in the world where the Forum offers its intensive three-day, 45-hour seminars.

Jackson is by far the smallest city ever to get the Forum. The next smallest is Greensboro, North Carolina, which really serves a greater metropolitan area several times greater than Jackson.

More typical of the cities that have the Forum are places like Los Angeles, Paris, Zurich, Munich, Montreal, London, Melbourne, New York, and many other cosmopolitan cities in 15 different nations.

To me, Jackson is becoming a New South city so confident in its traditions and past that it can embrace new ideas and thoughts.

Jacksonians are remarkably open, honest and willing to embrace change. Perhaps the tremendous change and progress in civil rights has given us a sense of what's possible.

I first heard about the Forum in February from my friends Wilson Carroll and Liz Blankenship.

I ran into Liz earlier in the afternoon and she asked me to dinner along with Buddy and Sally Faulkner. They had all just returned from a Forum in New Orleans and were bubbling over with enthusiasm.

It all sounded kind of weird to me.

By coincidence, the next week I was driving back from a tennis tournament on the coast with Henry and Pat Larose.

They had also been at the Forum that month and told me how great it was.

Yeah, yeah, I told them, playing the cynic.

Pat, who runs Jackson's Easter Seals office, later that week called me up and invited me over to her house for a Forum introductory meeting.

The introductory session was led by Liz Jones, a Jackson Episcopal priest, who along with her husband David have been instrumental in bringing the Forum to Jackson.

I had already made plans later that night, so staying for Pat's three-hour introductory session was out. Instead, I bargained my way out by signing up for the Forum which was three months away.

On the way out, I grabbed a promotional brochure.

At some point, I actually read the brochure out of curiosity.

What struck me was the plain, common-sense language of the brochure and the modest, yet important, goals of the Forum.

In the Landmark Forum you get at the heart of who you are - examining the basis of your identity, your personality, your formulas for living, relating and achieving success.

The Landmark Forum is an invitation to move beyond the limits you have set for yourself, the constraints you have imposed on your own life, breaking through to new levels of performance and ability.

The Landmark Forum is not designed to give people easy answers, tips, or rules. It offers no new beliefs or prescriptions. Rather, it offers insights that make a difference: a new method of engaging in age-old questions that brings a new dimension and casts a new light on the situations and events that make up our lives.

That language intrigued me. Not didactic. Not heavy-handed. No great promises. Just some insights that might really make a difference.

The brochure contained some pretty impressive statistics compiled by a reputable polling company.

More than 95 percent of the thousands of Forum participants rated the Forum "good" or "excellent" on the statement: "The Forum has specific, practical value for many aspects of my life."

Other statements got similar ratings of "Good" or "Excellent": "Likely to have enduring value for me," 94 percent; "Well worth my time and effort," 93 percent; "A better understanding of relationships, how they work, and the part I play in them," 91 percent. And so on.

One bit of data really jumped out at me. More than 7 out of 10 Forum participants agreed that "The Forum was one of the most valued experiences of my life."

Daniel Yankelovich, chairman of one of the largest polling companies in the country, concluded: More than seven out of 10 participants found The Landmark Forum to be one of their life's most rewarding experiences. To me, this suggests that it addresses many of people's most profound concerns-how to improve their personal relationships, how to be a more effective person, how to think productively about their lives and goals. I can understand why people recommend The Forum to their associates, friends and relatives.

I considered the possibility of going.

After all, these life issues are some of our most fundamental, yet outside of traditional religion, we rarely address them or work on them.

Traditional religion is wonderful. I'm a church-goer.

The world has changed a lot. Life is a lot more complex. Our society has room for some new techniques, some new technologies, to help us live better lives.

So I went. It was great. I recommend it to everyone. It's not dogmatic. It's not religious. It's not anti-religious. It's not intellectual. It's not weird. It's human.

Basically, you cram 70 people in a room from 9 a.m. till midnight and get them to talk about life: what it's about, what problems they face, who they are, why they are.

Our Forum leader was a Swiss-German grandmother of five who lives on a bee farm in Switzerland and jets around the world leading Forums.

She is an extraordinarily kind and compassionate person who truly loves her work.

She's also sharp as a tack. She knew exactly how to handle the group. A real pro.

The key to The Forum is that it's a group experience. The lessons you learn are plain common sense, kind of like that old cliché, "Today is the first day of the rest of your life."

But through the 25-year-old, well-honed Forum methodology-and by sharing life experiences with others-these simple, straight-forward ideas somehow pierce the outer layers.

Some people come to The Forum to help resolve a particular problem: a relationship with a parent or child, interpersonal problems at work, an inability to commit to a relationship and many other specific problems.

Many others just come because they have a nagging feeling that they can do better.

For me, I came looking for an answer to my failed marriage.

I still do not have all the answers, but The Forum gave me more of them than I could have possibly achieved on my own.

I'm not sure exactly why The Forum technique is so successful but I think it has something to do with the 70 other people you go through it with.

At this New Orleans Forum, 25 of the 70 people were from Jackson.

At one point, I was standing - voluntarily and terrified - arguing with the Forum leader about who I was and why. I was sure I was right and the leader was wrong.

So the Forum leader turned to the 70 others and said, "Wyatt doesn't understand this about himself. Anyone in the room who sees themselves in Wyatt and sees that Wyatt has blinders on about himself raise their hand."

Every hand in the room went up.

Only at that point was I finally willing to acknowledge that somehow, some way there might be something about me that I didn't understand.

It just took the unanimous opinion of 70 objective people to get me to that point.

Everybody goes through it in The Forum. You learn from the others and they learn from you. It's an amazing experience.

At the end of my Forum, I listened to a 73-year-old man who attended my Forum with his wife of 53 years.

He said all his life he closed people off and avoided people. But now he believed he could reach out and listen to people and not be afraid to get to know people.

Many, many others had stories of similar personal breakthroughs.

Whatever your personal problems are in life, The Forum is likely to make a difference.

When it comes to Jackson this fall, do it.

Excerpted from the Northside Sun,
May 26, 1994, Jackson, Mississippi.