Soon after, he took part in an exchange program to Mexico despite having a strong fear that his Spanish wasn’t good enough. Despite feeling awkward about his language skills, he dove into conversation there, and was soon translating conversations between his host family and another American teacher staying with them.

Soon he had taken up a leadership role in the exchange program and what they were up to and was meeting with local officials, such as the mayor of a town they visited.

Du Soleil indicated in the CBS story that while collecting bras might seem like an unusual cause, it’s a real need for women in tough circumstances that often doesn’t get filled. “When you’re from a low-income family and a decent bra starts at maybe $20, it is not a priority,” he says in the CBS story.

While the name of the group, Support 1000, was invented out of du Soleil’s intention to collect 1,000 bras, CBS indicates that he has in fact collected and distributed nearly 3,000 new and barely used bras so far. He has worked with a variety of organizations including local Chicago group Southwest Chicago PADS (Public Action to Deliver Shelter).

He indicates that there was a time when he was concerned that people might find the project odd, but he got over it – women’s dignity was more important.

The work of Support 1000 has previously been written about in a wide range of different media outlets, including a feature story in the Chicago Tribune.

1. I uncovered a childhood memory that crippled me in my relationships with women, starting with my mother, then teachers, aunts, friends, and ultimately the entire feminine half of humanity. Out of doing the Landmark Forum I achieved my first goal and was married within one year. I have an incredible relationship with my wife, and have extraordinary relationships with all of the women in my life.

2. I restored the integrity and harmony and wholeness to my relationships with my mother, my father, my sister, and brother, aunts, uncles, cousins, and close and distant friends. I discovered the key to having ALL of my relationships work.

3. I moved from being lost and uncertain about my future, and transformed my self from being a frustrated Artist, and uninspired biologist, to being an inspired and successful civil engineer working on the development and construction of hundreds of thousands of acres of residential, commercial, industrial, and recreational projects throughout the states of California and Nevada.

4. I discovered the truth about my family history with money and as a result tripled my income and removed the barriers I had with money such that I was able to create anything I wanted for my self and my life.

5. When everyone and everything seemed to be against it I created my own family with my wife, with a son and daughter, and now have a granddaughter and another grandchild on the way. My family is my source of my power and inspiration, and launches me out into life each day.

6. I became a leader in my family, a manager in my career, president of my Homeowner Association, vice-president of the local chapter of an international organization for world peace. Hundreds of people I have trained and managed have gone on to be highly successful and recognized in my industry, and in the world for their leadership and accomplishments.

7. I got beyond my fears of public speaking, and became a public speaker, educator, lecturer, seminar leader, and ran for City Council of my hometown. (I lost).

8. I created a purpose, and vision for my life, and through my full self-expression and leadership I inspired the expansion of Landmark Education into Asia, starting with Japan, moving on to Thailand, Singapore, Korea, Philippines, and China.

This is only the beginning of the difference Landmark Education has made in my life, and through me; the difference Landmark Education is making in the world.

But that is not the breakthrough I want to share here. Like many of the other participants in this extraordinary training program, I got remarkable shifts in completely unrelated areas of my life that I had not even been regarding as unsatisfactory. For one thing, I experienced greater empathy and more powerful communication with a number of the important people in my life – even with people whose relationship was already warm and in no way in need of “fixing”.

But the most surprising result was in the area of my sport – acrobatic highboard diving. At the age of 54, I had come to take it for granted that my time as an active competitor was drawing to a close. Indeed, many people would regard that conclusion as somewhat obvious and maybe even overdue! Although there are so-called “Masters” events staged for competitors of more advanced years, it had been about a decade since I had competed and I had been gradually coming to the conclusion that I should cancel my competitive membership of the club and move to the recreational category.

But two things happened to have me look at things in a different light. The first was that, in a training session shortly after I completed The Landmark Forum, my coach exclaimed “What’s happening Derek, I haven’t seen you diving like this in years!” On examining the situation I concluded that there had been a decisive shift in my mental experience while training. Whereas previously I had been substantially absorbed (without realising it) in an inner dialog with myself, I was now experiencing an inner stillness, a Zen-like state of focused non-judgemental concentration in the present moment. I realised that all the background mental chattering about declining strength and suppleness, about advancing years, about loss of courage, were all taking my attention away from focus on the experience of performing the dives and becoming so many self-fulfilling prophesies.

The second thing was that I saw this as an opportunity to try out one aspect of the “technology” we learn in Landmark Education programs – the ability to “create new possibilities”. What do I mean by this? Up until this point I had had no scope for determining how my future would unfold with my participation in this sport, because it had been already determined by my resignation and by my unspoken assumptions of how it would be. But now I had wiped that away and the future was a blank canvas. So I invented the possibility of “Being a Winner”. Of course that didn’t mean that I immediately started winning anything – what it meant was that I resolved to relate to myself as operating henceforth in a way consistent with the “Winner way of being”. That shifted my attitude to my training and conditioning. It involved enrolling my coach in my intentions and goals, and having her hold me to account for them. And most obviously it involved filling in the forms and sending them off to enter the events!

Six months later I dived in the British Masters Highboard Championships and came third in my age-group to win a bronze medal. The following year I won gold and silver medals for coming first on Highboard and second in the Springboard event.

I took the Landmark Forum that began on September 14, 2001 in Washington, DC. I signed up for the course in July with my husband, Brian, who was a lot more excited about going the course than I was.

When we got there, everyone seemed friendly, which was strange to me given that we had just suffered through the terrorist attack on the Pentagon four days prior, and it had left me closed off and afraid of people. The course started promptly at 9 a.m., and the leader acknowledged right off the bat the elephant in the room, the terrorist attacks that had just occurred on Tuesday and had affected the nation deeply. She prodded us to share whatever we needed to say to get that complete, and several people had a lot to say about the attacks. Looking back, I don’t remember the specifics of what was said, but what I do remember is that walking in that morning; I was very frustrated, upset, and afraid to be with people after what had happened in my adopted city that week, and walking out during the first break, I had a sense of being related to and connected with people again; I was again empowered to stand for what I believed in…the good in humankind and the greatness of our nation and our society.

The course began in earnest for me on Saturday, when the leader challenged me to call my parents and get complete with them. It was not difficult to do with my dad, because he and I were always very close. I called him on the first break, thanked him for the great job he did raising me, and told him how much I loved him. I wimped out on calling my mom on that first break, and I couldn’t quite put a finger on why. During the second part of Saturday (there are roughly four parts per day), we had the opportunity to look at where we were “inauthentic,” meaning that we say one thing when we’re feeling another. I saw that what was keeping me from calling my mom is that I didn’t want to admit how “inauthentic” I was with her.

Through the exercises of day two of the Landmark Forum, I saw that as an adolescent, I created the pattern of laying the blame of everything that was wrong in my life on my mom. It was her fault that I struggled with weight issues, it was her fault that my parents got divorced, and it was her fault that my little sister and brother drove me nuts growing up. I also saw that this pattern of blame had never ended, and at 28 years old, married and living 3,000 miles from home, I was still blaming my mother for things in my life that she now had nothing to do with and no influence on! When I saw that, I saw the whole insanity of it, that I would keep blaming my mom for things she had nothing to do with, that in blaming her, I was not taking responsibility for my life, that it is so automatic as a human being to point the finger elsewhere, and that I could, in an instant, point the finger inward and take responsibility for my life and have a real say in how my life goes.

Once I saw this, I called my mom on the next break and apologized for what a jerk I’d been. She was amazing, took it all in stride and told me how she loved me and how she’d always been so proud of me when I was growing up. I’m sure she’d said that to me before, but I could never hear it until that day. That was the beginning of a brand new relationship between me and my mom that’s been amazing.

I rarely think about events in my childhood anymore in terms of how they’re impacting me today, when I used to do that ALL THE TIME.

Once those childhood stories were out of my way, I all of a sudden had the freedom to create my adult life. Once I’d given up those stories about my “difficult childhood”, I saw that I actually had a fun time as a kid, and it opened me up to the possibility of having children. Not much more than a year after the Landmark Forum, my husband and I welcomed my first daughter into our family! Now we’ve got three daughters, and my mom lives 15 minutes away and visits at least a couple times a week.

I got all of that out of the Landmark Forum, but most importantly I got that I am the creator of how I experience life, and my experience of all of it, the kids, mom close by, etc., is great!

I highly recommend this course for anyone who is up for unforseen breakthroughs, freedom to be, and personal growth in their life!

He also talks about how he saw that to be successful in life, he needed to pay the price – pay the price in terms of hard work, even when he didn’t feel like it, going the uncomfortable feeling of failing at times, asking a lot of questions and really figuring out what would work in his business. More from Devon Brown can be found at http://www.renegadesuccess.com/

‘Whatever I ask, she’s always right’

Jenny Wilson, 30, secondary school teacher, and Samuel Cole, 29, primary school teacher, will marry today Every Saturday, Jenny and Sam volunteer to work with street kids in Nairobi slums. Sam plays games with them and Jenny teaches to read and write.

They have lived together since January when Jenny arrived in Kenya. In October she gave up her job at a London primary school. She and Sam had dated since the previous May. “It has been a whirlwind romance,” Jenny says.

It began with a six-hour phone call. Jenny and Sam met through the Landmark Forum, a three-day course with follow-up sessions that encourages participants to take life-changing decisions.

“It makes you see that you always have a choice,” says Jenny. “Landmark education actively encourages you to take chances on people and to go with your gut feeling,” explains Sam.

“Jenny’s very intelligent. I was looking for someone who was able to listen to my ideas. She lets me be who I am. I tried really hard to meet somebody, through dating websites but I couldn’t find anyone interested in development work or in going overseas.” Jenny, he adds, is “always right. Whatever I ask her she always know the answers.”

Within two hours of Jenny’s arrival in Nairobi Sam had driven her to a rubbish dump. “It really was like a warzone. There was smoke coming off the rubbish and we saw children eating food off the dump,” says Jenny.

The next day, Sam proposed. They went to the top of the Kenyatta conference tower and then to a restaurant where the staff brought out a pink cake, with ice swirls that spelt in Swahili the words “I love you very much.”

They marry at All Saints’ Dogsmerfield, Hampshire, with the reception in Casa dei Cesari, an Italian restaurant whose owner lived in Nairobi.

In the interview, Tahir relates that he was inspired to start planting trees when he returned to Ethiopia after a long time away and discovered that the dense forests near his home town had been almost completely destroyed, along with the wildlife that lived there. He also witnessed many young people on the streets without jobs or hope.

Tahir wanted to both begin a reforestation project and help the youth of his area at the same time. In addition to its environmental benefits, the organization has provided jobs for almost 500 people, training unskilled workers, and brought Christians and Muslims together.

He relates that the hardest challenge involved in reforestation was getting permission to plant on the land from the community and local government. By starting with a couple of acres and producing results, he gained trust and approval to plant on more land.

Tahir sees the work of the Greenland Development Foundation spreading throughout Africa, through cooperation with governments and the emergence of new leaders to take it to new places (which the GDF is training).

See stories on Landmark Education News for more details about Gahir and the work of the GDF.