Erhard Seminars Training
| Privately held company Corporation (defunct) | |
| Founded | October 1971 |
| Defunct | 1984 (dissolution) |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, USA |
|
Key people
|
Werner Erhard, founder |
Erhard Seminars Training (marketed as est, though often encountered as EST or Est), an organization founded by Werner Erhard, offered a two-weekend (60-hour) course known officially as "The est Standard Training". The purpose of the seminar was "to transform one's ability to experience living so that the situations one had been trying to change or had been putting up with, clear up just in the process of life itself." It "brought to the forefront the ideas of transformation, personal responsibility, accountability, and possibility." Live est seminars were offered from late 1971 to late 1984, and spawned a number of books from 1976 to 2011. Est has been featured in a number of movies and television shows, most recently depicted in the critically acclaimed spy series The Americans. Est is an outgrowth of the Human Potential Movement of the 1960s through to the 1970s.
The est Standard Training program consisted of two weekend-long workshops with evening sessions on the intervening weekdays. Workshops generally involved about two hundred participants and were initially led by Erhard and were later led by people trained by him. Ronald Heifetz, Founder of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard, called est "an important experience in which two hundred people go through a powerful curriculum over two weekends and have a learning experience that seemed to change many of their lives." Trainers confronted participants one-on-one and challenged them to be themselves rather than to play a role that had been imposed on them by the past.Jonathan D. Moreno observed that "participants might have been surprised how both physically and emotionally challenging and how philosophical the training was." He writes that the critical part of the training was freeing oneself from the past, which was accomplished by "experiencing" one's recurrent patterns and problems rather than repeating them. The word experience was used to mean a process of fully experiencing the pointless repetition of old, burdensome behaviors so as to not be run by them. The seminar aimed to enable participants to shift their contextual state of mind around which their life was organized from the attempt to get satisfaction or to survive, to an experience of actually being satisfied and experiencing oneself as whole and complete in the present moment. The est training offered people the opportunity to free themselves from the past, rather than living a life enmeshed by their past.
Participants agreed to follow the ground rules which included not wearing watches, not talking until called upon, no talking to your neighbors, not eating at or leaving their seats to go to the bathroom except during breaks separated by many hours. Participants who were on medication were exempt from these rules, and had to sit in the back row, so that they would not interfere with the other participants These classroom agreements provided a rigorous setting whereby people's ordinary ways to escape confronting their experience of themselves were eliminated. Moreno describes the est training as a form of "Socratic interrogation...relying on the power of the shared cathartic experience that Aristotle observed." Erhard challenged participants to be themselves instead of playing a role that had been imposed on them and aimed to press people beyond their point of view, into a perspective from which they could observe their own positionality. As Robert Kiyosaki writes, "During the training, it became glaringly clear that most of our personal problems begin with our not keeping our agreements, not being true to our words, saying one thing and doing another. That first full day on the simple class agreements was painfully enlightening. It became obvious that much of human misery is a function of broken agreements – not keeping your word, or someone else not keeping theirs."
...
Wikipedia