Everyone at some point has experienced an impasse in communication; those frustrating occasions when it all breaks down and people want to get up and walk out. Just look at a sample of recent headlines: “Peace Talks Breakdown” or “Labor Negotiations at a Stalemate” or “Negotiations Fail to Result in an Accord”. When the stakes are high and people are afraid they have something to loose communication becomes strained and people stop listening to one another. Usually this is while claiming that the people on the other side of the table are actually the ones who are not doing the listening. We get so concerned and fearful about getting other people to hear what we have to say, we become unwilling to hear what they have to say.
Indeed, listening seems sometimes as if it is a rare happening among human beings. We can’t really listen to another person speaking if we’re preoccupied, or if we’re trying to decide what we’re going to say when the other stops talking, or if we’re debating about whether what is being spoken is true or relevant or agreeable. Listening, in other words, is being accessible and open to what is being said.
At Landmark Education we contend that listening has an amazing power. It gives life to what is being spoken. You might even say it is with the listener that both the speaker and what is spoken exist and come alive. Think of how inspired and enlivened the elderly can become when you sit down and have an extended conversation with them. Think about what happens when someone is really listening to you. Ever notice that you become funnier and more playful when someone laughs at your jokes? What about when a child recognizes that adults are actually listening to them? Their whole demeanor shifts. In the programs of Landmark Education, you find yourself with a new ability to listen to others. You find yourself inspired by the people you have in your life. When you truly listen to people you discover the best of what they have to offer.
Speaking, meanwhile, can be something more than talking, more than the exchange of symbols or information, more than saying what you really think. In speaking we can share ourselves; we can evoke experience in others. Speaking is where our ideas become clear and possible. It is where others are expanded by our time spent with them. It allows for the futures we create. Speaking lives in poetry, in the appreciation of another, in idle conversations that pass the time, in great theories and books that give rise to wonder and thought.
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Speaking allows for “who” and “how” we “are” in the world. It is what gives voice to all that is possible in being human. In our ability to speak and share we have the ability to shape the world we live in.
In the courses of Landmark Education you find that true communication is creation. It has the power to shape, determine, and alter the course and quality of our lives. It moves people. It generates experience in others. It not only delivers information to others, it actually transforms their ability to hear. True communication transforms both the speaker and listener.
The Landmark Forum suggests that what it is to be human has its own domain and that domain is one of language—of communication, of conversation. Through communication —the realm of language, of conversation—each of us has complete access to ourselves, to others, to the very essence and possibility of what it means to be human.
This is the essence of what Landmark Education is about and what The Landmark Forum provides.
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