coComment at Landmark Forum with Jon Burke from Alarm Clock

It’s T Minus 48 hours and counting before I check into the Landmark Forum in San Francisco. I’d better start by explaining what is going on around here. If you are reading this blog you probably know what CoComment does. The company aggregates comments that you might have made across blogs and other social network sites. I contribute to a tech business site called alarm:clock. So to illustrate the point behind CoComment, they have commissioned me to blog about a subject in a blog galaxy far, far away. CoComment is dispatching me to a weekend seminar called Landmark Forum. I am not just a technofile, I read the newspaper and watch cable TV news but to be honest I had never heard of Landmark Forums. Now that I have boned up on it I can tell you that is seems to be big shakes for many people it is off-putting to someone like me who is not prone to much self reflection and gets the heebie-jeebies at corporate bonding outings.

I have heard of Landmark’s predecessor - Werner Erhard’s est Training. So my stereotype of Landmark is something like Tony Robins meets Scientology with a touch of AA. Going into this, I’m not thinking of Landmark as being a cult (although I have asked a buddy to stand buy should I hit the panic button) but rather more of a corporate mind-meld retreat replete with silly exercises and highly paid motivational goons. Like the corporate retreats, Landmark has an ear for painful jargon like Unmessable with - The quality of being able to stand in the face of any circumstance and not be thrown off course.’ And ‘Racket(s): Recurring complaints in tandem with a “way of being” that allow persons to justify themselves and their point of view but which can rob them of opportunities for satisfaction and joy; ways of being that allow people to justify themselves and their point of view; preconceived notions of why one is right and others are wrong.’

Making these statements might make me sound unappreciative. Thousands of people have to sacrifice to save up the $400 to get into The Landmark Forum and CoComment is paying my way. But we all understand that blogging is dull if you’re not honest and this is how it is. I’d much rather catch the UCLA game this weekend and then doze off in an blissful afternoon nap than to face down my ‘rackets.’

This is how I expect to feel at the Landmark Forum.

I am not the first blogger or journalist to infiltrate the Landmark Forum. It’s nice to see that these folks were not body-snatched: Huffington Post and GQ.