A new course

…I can’t communicate completely the elegance of this April Fools prank, because some of it is simply inside humor that would only be funny to the people who deliver training for Landmark Education. But I can say some things about it that reflect the fun that the morning brought.

Tell us about that course, Vincent…

Well it went like this. I was coaching the communication course this week, a course for which Jessica was the primary person accountable on our team for the success of the course.

On Sunday morning, the course leader shared with us that he’d be pulling the participants collective leg with some of the material he would be delivering. In particular, he invented a gibberish exercise that would have them babble at one another.

To set it up, he asked Jessica and me to model the exercise on the stage. The instruction was that partner A (that was me) would speak in gibberish (actual English words, but none used in its intended fashion) and have the other person “get the love.”

It was fun and Jessica says that she’ll never forget “green tapioca” ever again in her life. For Jessica now, that’s how I say ‘I love you.”

We took the exercise another round, and this time simply used animal sounds to deliver the communication. That was even more fun for us, and funnier as we tried to keep a straight face for the benefit of the participants who were not yet in on the joke.

When they did the exercise for themselves, a funny thing emerged. Even though it was a totally bogus exercise made up as a practical joke, these people (in the context of the course) found something valuable from doing it. They discovered that the words are indeed a very tiny part of the business of communication. Some of them also discovered a new freedom as they could use the words however they chose to get their message across.

So the joke in a way was on the course leader as they took his “Communication: Relationship And Power [CRAP] exercise” and made something valuable out of it. This is what our courses create.

And for me, the joy was in the bond that Jessica and I created as partners in something grand. We left that morning, that exercise, and that course forever tied as two adventurers bound for the same hilltop.

Will we ever reach the hilltop, or will we arrive together? No one knows and it doesn’t matter. That we share a path as partners is sufficiently delightful for me to be an end in itself.

—v