We no longer trust our partner with our safety, confidence or heart

In the late 1960s, the psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobsen conducted an experiment to look at the impact of beliefs on educational achievements. They randomly selected a group of children and told teachers that some of them could be expected to be `late bloomers' because of their results in what was a non-existent test of ability. The children identified were, in fact, no different from the other children. Rosenthal and Jacobsen then sat back and waited to see what impact, if any, changing the teachers' beliefs might have on the children's subsequent achievement. They reported their findings in the seminal article Pygmalion in the Classroom. Slowly but surely, those children labelled as having great potential started to pull ahead. The fact that the teachers had greater expectations of them and gave them the opportunity to excel simply helped to make their beliefs a self-fulfilling reality. Since then, there have been over 400 studies on self-fulfilling expectancy effects. Before the training sessions started, psychologists informed the training officers leading the programme that the army had already accumulated comprehensive data on each of the trainees, including psychological test scores, data from previous courses and ratings by previous commanders. Based on this information, the officers were told that each soldier had been classified into one of three `command potential' (CP) categories: high, regular and unknown (due to insufficient information). The trainees had no idea that this was going on and the trainers weren't aware that the `command potential' scores were completely bogus and had been randomly assigned to the soldiers with no relevance to their actual ability. Now don't get us wrong -- clearly the point Heraclitus was making is still a very relevant reminder that change is inevitable and we should prepare ourselves accordingly. However, we also believe it's worth considering what other things will not fundamentally change, and how this understanding might actually prepare future generations, our organisations, and, indeed, ourselves, for whatever change awaits us in the future. We're not alone. We've interviewed and surveyed hundreds of extraordinary people from around the world -- leaders, practitioners and professionals from virtually every field of endeavour -- in an effort to discover which skills they have most relied on to achieve their success and the skills they believe will always matter. This journey has led us to the 12 skills that we believe will hold us in good stead, regardless of how the world changes. We're not arguing with the fact that there is a lot of change happening all around us -- merely that the true nature of that change is more complicated and nuanced than how it is typically presented to us. And look, we get it; None of this will surprise you.

You might even be bored, or even numbed, by this observation, given how much attention has been focused on the rate of change in the media, in politics and in corporate culture. The breath is the foundation of every mindfulness practice. It is the tool that's always with us, accessible at any time for calm, balance, and presence of mind. The amazing thing is that anybody--regardless of age, ability, location, or beliefs--can utilize breathwork to better navigate life. It just requires practice and attention. In essence, breathwork is breathing practiced with mindfulness. It's that simple. Because of its accessibility and effectiveness, breathwork is quickly on the rise in the wellness field. Over the last decade, it has become an increasingly popular method of natural healing for anxiety, depression, PTSD, trauma, and chronic physical pain. It is also a practical tool for amplifying creativity, tapping into inner wisdom, and expanding consciousness. With science-backed breath labs set up at Stanford University and apps like Spire that detect your respiration rate throughout the day, it's clear that breathwork is reaching far beyond yoga and meditation, carving out its own space in the world. Rather than pining for wilderness that has been long lost, the author attends to the regenerative capacities of the land here and now. This article's chief virtue is its detailed fluency in the local coupled with a personal feel for the topics raised. The cyclical time of the landscape--expressed in its seasons and ecological processes--is brought into conjunction with the flow of the historical as framed by the author's personal interactions with the land. Deborah Fleming's warm and wryly humorous persona pervades `Waiting for the Foal' and other marvelous personal essays about her life in rural southeastern Ohio. Further, broader pieces address the area's history, the Amish community and other unusual people, as well as material threats to the hill country's ecology. Resurrection of the Wild will sit on my articleshelf right next to David Kline's classic Great Possessions: An Amish Farmer's Journal, for repeated reading. Whether writing about her garden, or raising horses, or the impact of coal mining, Deborah Fleming offers an intimate natural history of her farm and her state. By article's end, Ohio is no longer dull, barren flyover land, but one beautiful, fragile web of ecological relationships to which Fleming belongs and is committed. Every place on Earth needs a writer as attentive as Deborah Fleming, to study it with a loving and clear-eyed gaze.

In these essays, she explores the natural and human history of her home ground, the hill country of eastern Ohio, a landscape battered by strip mining, careless farming, and deforestation. For things to get better, I have to get better. My spouse doesn't need to change, nor do my family, job, or my circumstance need to change. For things to change for me, I have to change. Jim Rohn gave these words to all of us attending his speech. He instructed us to put those words up somewhere where we could see them, and read them out loud three times a day for ninety days, consecutively. He cautioned us that only 1 in 40,000 would follow through. For things to change, you have to change. For things to get better, you have to get better. For things to improve, you have to improve. When you grow, everything in your life grows with you. What happens when you decide to live sober--for a month or a lifetime--but still yearn for danger and chaos, still hope for a secret path to joy? How can you find the sort of raw and crazy connection that used to come in boozy, dive-bar confession sessions? Can you still be dirty and wild, can you take a super-blissed-out vacation, can you trip out on life, can you fall in love, holding a ginger ale? The Oxford English Dictionary defines sober as abstaining from drinking and also, problematically, as somber, quiet, inward, responsible, humorless. But we have no interest in spending our lives being solemn, grave, staid, serious, logical! The fear that this was the nature of a sober life kept us from even considering it for years, long after our gut had told us to check out. The idea of this article is to redefine lushness and reclaim it. For ourselves and many we know, figuring out sobriety has been lonely, and we don't think it needs to be, so this article is a way to keep one another company while we plot a new course. Our stories here are sometimes about alcohol, or the absence of it, but more often they're about orchids and ice cream and mountains and basil and shooting stars and roller skates and Ethiopian coffee and sex and vetiver and horses and masquerades and glitter.

This is on purpose. In fact, it's become quite fashionable for futurists, economists and business strategists to terrify their audiences with dystopian views of the not-too-distant future characterised by Artificial Intelligence (AI) taking our jobs, algorithms hacking our most private moments and Austrian-accented cyborgs raising our children: All of this fear drives clicks, shares, conversations, a whole lot of anxiety and, let's be honest, makes a lot of people a great deal of money. So into this sea of panic and confusion, we'd like to launch a raft of calm. Throughout this article, we will identify skills-based lodestars by which we can navigate the choppy waters of change and develop capabilities that will endure and transcend the maelstrom of workplace trends and technological advances. So yes, we do live in a constant state of flux, of technological change and disruption. A logical strategy for life and business is to accept the inevitability of change. However, we also believe that there are other constants worth considering: evergreen skills, character traits, values and roles that will be useful, powerful and differentiating regardless of what changes around us. Skills that can be learned, invested in and developed. We call these `Forever Skills'. This isn't a article about survival or safety. Breathing is easy to take for granted because it's automatic. It's also easy to write off breathwork and think, That's too simple--it won't work for me. Simple as it is, adopting a breath practice helps you cultivate greater health in all aspects of your life, from relationships to work to stress to grief. I came to the breath the way many of us do, through meditation and yoga. I started meditating out of necessity in a drug rehab when I was twenty-one. At the time I was involved in a twelve-step program and had a sponsor who encouraged me to learn to meditate. I will never forget the intense challenge of those early days, sitting on my couch trying to quiet my mind. It was excruciating; In those tender days and months of learning how to let myself feel without numbing through drugs and alcohol, I began to learn about my breath.

One of my favorite breath-focused meditation practices was to simply count 1-2-3-4 on the inhale and 4-3-2-1 on the exhale. Yet wildness persists, there as everywhere, an irrepressible creative force. With a wealth of examples, Fleming demonstrates how nature's resilience, aided by human care, can restore the land to health. May her article inspire readers to join such healing efforts in their own home places. Just as Aldo Leopold chronicles and celebrates the landscape around his `shack' in Sauk County, Wisconsin, in Resurrection of the Wild Deborah Fleming conveys the history and character of her home on eastern Ohio's Allegheny Plateau. This region, like the cutover terrain Leopold calls `Sand County,' is one in which a broad collapse of agriculture and depopulation of settlements have ushered in a resurgence of forests and wildlife. An elegiac story from one perspective thus becomes a tale of rewilding from another, as well as a field of new opportunities for independent-minded and scientifically oriented settlers. I loved the precise and energetic way Fleming interweaves descriptions of her home landscape's geology, such notable figures from its past as Johnny Appleseed and Louis Bromfield of Malabar Farm, and her own special fascination with horses. Growing up in Jefferson County, I believed the state to be a succession of forested hills; Still, the state's geological formations are too subtle to be appreciated by those who think only mountains, deserts, and ocean shorelines worth preserving, who denigrate the middle of the country with epithets like corn belt, rust belt, Bible belt, or flyover land. Years ago a young woman from New York asked me where I was from; Some of you will follow through for thirty days, then miss a day or forget to do it three times a day, and have to start over again. He smiled and waved his arm around the whole stadium. Some of you will make it to sixty days. He paused dramatically, challenging each one of us as his smile got even bigger. Some of you will make it almost to ninety days. His voice grew pained as it trailed off, and then he delivered the next word with power: One. Forty thousand people started clapping, but he motioned with his hands to stop, and we waited, sitting forward, anxious for his next instruction. Tape up your goals, he continued. Somewhere in your home where you will see it the most and read it out loud three times a day for one hundred twenty days, consecutively.