Background

Lifespring's courses are designed for adults who are committed to maximizing their effectiveness, improving the quality of their lives and the lives of the people they interact with, and contributing to the world.

All of Lifespring's courses are based on an experiential, or participatory, learning model. The roots of the experiential learning model date back to 1947 and the National Training Laboratories in Bethesda, Maryland. There, researchers developed what they called the "process learning model" which implemented exercises (processes) enabling participants to learn from the whole of their experience rather than intellectual input alone. NTL provided programs for government, business, industry, and the public throughout the 1950's and 1960's. During the late 1960s and 70s, a rapid synthesis of education, technology, ethics, philosophy, and psychology took place and, by the early 1970s, commercial training or seminar companies such as Lifespring started to flourish.

Lifespring operates from the position that the issues that are the greatest sources of satisfaction and accomplishment in adult life--for example, love, relationships, fitness, giving and receiving feedback, making and keeping commitments, and communication--are not fully accessible intellectually; they also need to be experienced. Lifespring, therefore, has developed a curriculum based on experiential education.

In Lifespring courses, people participate in a structured series of exercises, conversations, and games that are metaphors for life. They come face-to-face with many of their unexamined practices and assumptions about life that invisibly shape their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.

The Lifespring courses are also founded on the philosophical thinking of modern Western philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Soren Kierkegaard, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The premise of Lifespring courses is the idea that human beings are not static entities with fixed characteristics, but rather that, to a great extent, we have the capacity to design ourselves, our behavior, and our lives within certain limitations of history and physical circumstance. The objective of Lifespring courses is to give people a new sense of freedom about themselves and their lives such that they accomplish extraordinary results, achieve deeper personal satisfaction, and take responsibility for the difference they make in the world.

Lifespring was created in 1974 by John P. Hanley and four other co-founders with extensive educational and business backgrounds.