Large Group Awareness Training (LGAT) is one of the most interesting forms of personal development programs that began appearing with the rise of the human potential movement, especially in the 1970s through the 1980s.

LGAT programs provide personal development training for groups of over two hundred people at a time, and share some of the characteristics of both spiritual revivals and encounter groups training. However, it would be fairest in some ways to say that these programs draw as much from the tenets of humanistic psychology as from anywhere else.

One well known LGAT program was developed by Werner Erhardt who founded EST training (Erhardt Seminar Training, also Latin for “to be"). After modifying the EST program format some Erhardt changed the name of the program to The Forum. Ownership of the program was later changed to the Landmark Education group and it is still presented by them on a worldwide basis.

Another well know trainer using some of the practices associated with LGAT is Anthony Tony Robbins, who became famous leading firewalks. He integrated the basic technology of NLP with highly charged motivational platform skills in a LGAT format sometimes running programs with thousands of participants.

It is also possible to use some of the techniques of LGAT in professional development applications as well. For example some professional motivation speakers and specialists use the large group format when presenting programs for entire organizations or when presenting programs to associations with large numbers of members, such as when they are kicking off a major new product or project deployment.