Conference Day Two

Day two of my three-day “better yourself” conference in the books.

I will be processing some of the concepts we’ve learned the past couple of days for a while. Some will probably remain lifelong tools I’ll reach for.

Going into this conference, I asked a handful of people to specifically pray that whatever is true will penetrate, whatever isn’t will fall away, and that God would use this time at the LandMark Forum to grow me. It is an intense experience based on becoming authentic about where you’re being inauthentic. But we’ve also talked about the ways our stories about others shapes our behavior within those stories, often causing us to become people we don’t really like or want to be. In all of it, I know God is with me, leading me into truth about myself.

One of the big takeaways for me today came at the end of an exercise meant to help us recognize our power. Oddly, the exercise began by sitting with our fears. I won’t fill in the details in case you do the LandMark Forum, but at the end we came to the realization that essentially everyone is running around trying to look good for one another, or to avoid looking bad for fear of being judged. (There’s more to it than that, but I won’t unpack it here.) I have enough power that someone is trying to look good or avoid looking bad to me so that I won’t judge them. You have that same power. Now, I’m sure each person had a different takeaway from this exercise. Here’s mine. Why would I give away my power to other people by making decisions, big or small, based on whether I will look good or avoid looking bad to them???

Now off to do my homework to be turned in at 9 am tomorrow….day three.