Find your voice and hone your individuality

The woman pointed out to my mom. As I opened Madeleine and read, my son and then my other son woke and came toward me. Here I was: the mother I wanted, so very much, to be. I promised myself I would never--absolutely never, no matter what--drink more than four glasses of wine in one night again. By February, I would make this promise a lie. Even as I type this, I want a glass of Chardonnay. I have never found my jade earrings. When I was fifteen, my father got sober. In the end, his struggle became the greatest gift he could ever give me: the understanding of how alcohol could wreck your heart, and the living example that you could burn your way to freedom. On my eldest son's fifteenth birthday, I had given up the search for the third door; I'd been sober for two years. The first revolves around an ability to understand, strategise for and solve complicated problems. The language that emerged around this cluster includes a capacity to solve problems with different modes of thinking: creativity, critical thinking, insight mapping, design, strategy and situational intelligence. The second cluster that emerged centres around people skills. This includes the ability to persuade, to move others to action and engage and galvanise support for one's ideas. Lastly, the third cluster centres on the idea of control. This includes controlling our own performance under duress, our own fear, the quality of our output, the environment (in its broadest definition) and others -- in terms of consensus building, social justice and crime prevention. All three of these clusters reveal themselves throughout our skills research, throughout the history of work and human endeavour, in our present workplaces and also in the predictions of futurists and economists about the near and distant future. Which makes them forever. So what are the three Forever Skills clusters?

The capacity to garner insights, invent, innovate, solve problems and be mentally agile. When you extend your exhale by one to two counts longer than your inhale and you practice this for a couple of minutes, your heart rate will slow down. This sends a feedback message to the brain saying that everything is more peaceful and calm than it was a few minutes ago. This lets the brain support this shift further by turning on the rest-and-digest mode of the nervous system, which goes back from the brain to the body. The amazing thing is that the lungs and heart can send feedback to the brain and essentially convince the brain that things are calm and peaceful, even when there are still stressful circumstances or anxiety-provoking thoughts circulating in the mind. This is especially important in modern life, when internal and external stressors are often constant even though we are in no physical danger. I often hear from clients that they are stressed about the never-ending stream of email in their in-boxes and the feeling of having to check their phones first thing in the morning. In some people, anxiety or stress can cause a freeze response, which is typically marked by a fast and short inhale that is held until the body has to release the carbon dioxide. After our first session, they often report holding their breath while glancing over email on their phones. This type of breath response can reinforce the physical feeling of stress. This is one example of how our systems are becoming increasingly taxed and overloaded in our modern world and how stress can perpetuate itself. They hunted and gathered but also raised crops. Some archaeologists believe that they were the ancestors of the wandering Shawnee. In the second half of the 1600s, Ohio was nearly depopulated until woodland dwellers--Shawnee, Delaware (Lenni-Lenape), and Huron--migrated into the state. They, too, used this trail, following the deer they hunted. After a long, steep ascent, the Zaleski trail passes through an area where the ghostly white bark of birch and beech testifies to the climax stage of a mature forest. Here the hiker finds painted trillium growing near rocks and in the spring sees the lacy white of dogwood mixed with the bright green of early-budding trees. Ubiquitous birdsong announces the mating season. The trail follows an old road that connected two frontier towns whose names recall the encounter of Europeans and Native Americans--Marietta in the east, christened for a French queen, and Chillicothe in the west, a Shawnee word for village. Settlers used the road until the last of the farms in the area was abandoned in the 1920s.

Another part of the trail follows the route of an old road where wagons hauled charcoal to the Hope furnace in the mid-nineteenth century. Ignoring the woman, Mom marched back to the car, head down, dodging manure land mines. You have to understand what you have here. Good walnuts are hard to come by, and every mother or wife is baking cookies, pies, brownies--all kinds of things--this summer. Eager, I opened the glove compartment, got some paper out, and found an old pen and started to add to Mom's list of all the things walnuts could be used for: banana bread, fudge, salads, ice cream, cereal, carrot cake. Then I made a list of everyone I knew who might want to buy walnuts from me. Living out of town on a farm with only a few neighbors was not going to slow me down. I began writing. Grandma cooked a lot, Grandma's friends cooked stuff with walnuts, all the ladies at church, a new neighbor with four kids had just moved in. You know, I could drop you off in different neighborhoods across town and you could go door-to-door. Okay, after I get everyone out here where there are no grocery stores, I said. After a celebratory family dinner, I settled into bed with a article. He wore shorts and a T-shirt. I'm going on a quick run. Want to come? I had once been the kind of mom who said, I'm already in my pajamas. But I closed my article, losing my place. I threw back the sheets. I said, Why not? The sun was low in the sky.

A rainstorm had just come through, and it was cool, the night smelling of asphalt and magnolia. The ability to engage, persuade and move others towards a shared goal. The mastery of power over self, our actions, the environment and social consensus. Within each of these three clusters sit four crucial skills. Now to explore these 12 skills that will be evergreen. Unfortunately, even though we've identified this as a critical cluster of Forever Skills, most people don't actually believe they are creative. It's likely you're one of them. Research done by Adobe in 2012 found that eight in ten people felt that unlocking creativity is critical to economic growth, and almost two thirds believed creativity is valuable to society. Yet, only a paltry one in four believed they are living up to their own creative potential. Adobe's research correlates with our own experience. We regularly ask conference attendees and boardrooms filled with people to raise their hands if they think of themselves as creative. Breathwork is an excellent practice to stop that cycle in its tracks. Anxiety and stress cannot live in the body if you consciously slow down your breathing, because they require a cycle of fast and shallow breathing. The majority of the breathing exercises in the Breathwork Practices section of this article are designed to strengthen your parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) to help you move easily into conscious healing as well as grounded and restful states. Over the years of working with clients and teaching groups, I've found that the majority of the people I work with don't need their sympathetic systems turned on any higher, so the focus is less on getting them super energized and more on how to ground and replenish their systems. For those of you who are looking for more energizing practices, I have included a couple of them for you as well. One of my main areas of focus with new clients is on the exhale. Since the vast majority of the people I work with have a tendency to either hold their breath, have very short exhales, or feel challenged by exhaling, I have found that is a good place to begin to explore the breath. I also hone in on this area because, as I mentioned before, the exhale correlates with the parasympathetic nervous system (our rest-and-digest mode), which is a system that usually needs support. One thing I've seen consistently over the years is that many of the people I work with are either entirely on or entirely off, with no balance in between (this can also be a marker of trauma, which I touch on a little later in this section).

They have no idea how to truly rest, and they don't have a practice of rest that is actually nourishing and restorative. Both roads had been deer trails used by people of the Fort Ancient and later woodland groups. The roads grew up in grass while the once-planted slopes reverted to woods and then forest. Now the roads are trails once again, traversed by hikers as well as deer. No greater emblem manifests the potential resurrection of the wild. Wildness is the process which restores and rejuvenates the land. In Wendell Berry's poem The Wild, the abandoned city lot, although not natural, is nevertheless wild, and the tanagers and warblers in the locust trees enable the land to remember what it is. Wilderness in Ohio was that canopy under which pioneers walked for days without seeing the sky. Wildness, on the other hand, is the big-tooth aspen taking root on a mined slope. Wilderness was the prairie grass reaching to the saddle horn. Wildness is the dew shimmering at sunrise on the orb weaver's polygonal web strung between stems of Queen Anne's lace, the snapping turtle wading in a drainage ditch, the ironwood tree growing from the cellar hole of a house long abandoned. Mom smiled. As soon as we got home, I tied a bag of walnuts to my bike's handlebars and on the back fender. I also picked up one in my arms and planned to ride one-handed, but decided against that after I crashed. Going to the only three neighbors in our area, I had a warm reception. After my carefully planned pitch about all the things they could use walnuts for, each woman smiled and laughed. In fact, they all wanted a bag. Then I upsold them (I didn't know what that was back then), making sure to let them know that I was the youngest and smallest kid in 4-H who had already sold the most walnuts, capping it off by saying, And I'm going to win first prize. That made the women buy another bag, and they didn't even care when I told them. I didn't even know what the first prize was.