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Interview with Dr. John Hanley - Page 6 INT: And what does that mean, specifically? For example, what constitutes that some learning formats fall into that category? JH: Well, I think that awareness trainings at the time were, for the most part, taking place with humanistic psychologists on more of a one-on-one or a small group basis--you know five, ten people. We were the ones to sort of break through that and say, "Well, you know what? We are not therapists so we are not fixing people per se. What we're doing is helping good people get better, or people who aren't dysfunctional in the first place. People who are functional but wanted to get up on top of the Maslowvian pyramid, if you will, the domain of self-actualisation." And we felt like "Well, we think it is doable to move it from five or ten people to 100, 200, or 300 people at one time" and produce maybe even a better result than the humanistic psychologist or the persons who were doing small groups were able to do at the time. Thus we hired Lieberman and Yalom from Stanford to begin a series of studies. Lee Ross, another professor at Stanford, we hired to determine whether in fact we were making a difference or not making a difference. And, as it turned out--I think all the way up until the '90s now ('94-'95 is the last study that they did)--it seems the case that Large Group Awareness Training did in fact exceed even our expectations of its ability to help people produce the kind of results that they were looking for in their lives. I don't know in precise terms which groups they compared it to, but they had a database made up of several hundred other training organizations, you know, from the small group therapist to the adult education college course in the evening, etcetera, and they washed all those against a Lifespring Basic and Advanced and Leadership program. Fortunately, they found that the kind of benefit people were getting was significant, over and above what had, up until then, been something other than Large Group Awareness Training. |
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