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Interview with Dr. John Hanley - Page 2 INT: What was the main thing that you wanted to add that was missing from the Mind Dynamics approach? JH: We felt that it was a little bit too conceptual and we wanted to make the training experiential. We'd done some research and saw that the new, emerging notion that if people really got something in a way that they could hold it, it would be much more valuable than getting it...like out of a book, for instance. So, we put down the first training with the idea of having people incorporate the emotional, the physical, the mental, the spiritual--all sides of a human being in the five day course, and to give people an opportunity to immerse themselves in all those domains. The idea being that, when they finished the training, they had a set of tools to go out and have their life turn out the way they were committed to having it be; to go beyond wishing and hoping but actually be an action in an effective and powerful way. This contrasted to Mind Dynamics which was more of achieving a…what they call an alpha state, which was a state of relaxation. That was kind of their primary objective, if you will, which we all know is good and valuable, too, but it ran a little counter to the way we felt we wanted to participate in the seminar business. We were more action oriented, more goal-oriented, and wanted to reach out to a wider band of people who were dealing with the rigours of raising families, starting businesses, working inside organisations, to be able to provide them with an aid which, up until then, simply wasn't available. Now, the whole idea of what we now call Large Group Awareness Trainings simply didn't exist before Lifespring and EST started. EST started a little bit before us--about a year--and then we started after that. EST's focus was not so much on the experiential side, although it was, I think, important. I'm not an EST graduate so I really cannot comment first-hand, but we do know that this whole experiential learning concept, as it turns out, seemed to catch on. In fact, no one is more surprised that it caught on the way that it did than I am. |
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