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In late 1990, I was extremely unhappy with my life. My job was a disappointment, I was losing interest in my marriage, my music career was going nowhere and, in short, not much of anything seemed to matter anymore. Over the course of a few weeks, I began having conversations with the woman who ran the catering company which serviced the office building where I worked (I always seemed to be in the lobby when she arrived to open up each morning). We became friendly and soon we were talking about personal issues. She told me about an organization called Landmark Education with which she did a great deal of volunteer work. She also told me about a program they offered called The Forum which started to sound very much like something I could use. After a great deal of prevarication on my part, I put myself in this three-day workshop and found my life turned around to a degree I never could have imagined. I wasn't quite sure what exactly I had participated in but I was clear that I now had access to a level of integrity and honesty and to a willingness to take responsibility for the state of my life that allowed me, in a very brief time, to shift situations which had been shackling me for years. I stopped hating my boss, I fell in love with my wife, I began getting performances of my music again and, in general, I started caring about people and things, maybe for the first time in my life. Knowing that many parts of the organization were run by volunteers (Landmark calls them assistants), I wanted to be part of this. From that point up until the present , I have pretty consistently spent a couple of nights each week (on average) assisting in the ongoing work of The Forum and its various follow-up programs. Most of the time, I act as a personal coach to people who, in the context of one of the programs, have taken on some kind of project to make a positive difference in their family, at their job or in their community. How did I go from being someone who saw people as obstacles on my way through a life over which I had little control to giving up several hours every week to make sure people I never met have access to a life they love? Most fundamentally, I started to notice that making a difference for others made a big difference for me. In my assisting at Landmark, I'm often called upon to take on tasks which I don't think I can handle. Not that I think that I lack the knowledge to do them but that I fear that I lack the mindset or even the confidence to produce a certain kind of result. Every time I break through one of these limiting preconceptions about myself, it's like an explosion of energy and joy in my life. My confidence expands, my vitality expands and my very notion of what's possible expands. There's also a sense of being part of a larger purpose. The Landmark Education charter has the following statement in it: "We say that making a difference honors the integrity of the human spirit and fulfills on the possibility of being alive." I honestly feel that every time I provide something for someone who is trying to overcome the circumstances of his or her life, someone who is striving to live powerfully, I leave my mark on the world, in however small a way (one of my favorite quotes speaks quite eloquently to this). There is real joy in this; knowing that someone is more in love with their life as a result of their interaction with me. I guess that, ultimately, all acts are selfish insofar as we presumably continue to do something only as long as we feel we are getting some benefit out of it. In that sense, I'm very selfish about assisting at Landmark Education. For every bit of effort I expend in this endeavor, the benefits come back to me ten-fold.
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