When face to face with a young person despairing about What To Do With Their Life, who hasn’t told them to consider how lucky they are to be born at a time when they have so many choices? “The world is your oyster!” is the phrase de jour many of us were served during our adolescence and now dish out to the teens and 20somethings in our own lives.
But we should stop that right now if we want to improve youth mental health and build resilience, says a new book by a youngish New Zealander who, at 27, already knows a fair bit about strength and indomitable spirit. Not that cancer survivor turned resilience educator and author Jake Bailey would give parents advice. As he points out, he’s not a parent and the whole business of raising kids is, well, complicated.
“I’m abundantly unqualified to give parenting advice given I’m not a parent and I’m really not a child any more…”
He is, he says, at the “in between stage” in life, where childhood and adolescence is in the rear vision mirror but not entirely out of sight as you adjust to adulting.
So, he’s written his second book, The Comeback Code: The power of resilience when the going gets tough. It’s ostensibly aimed at teens – “Jake’s vision is to equip the next generation with the tools to meet life’s challenges” – but it’s full of sensible and straightforward advice and gentle prodding to rethink the way we might look at life. Who doesn’t need that from time to time? It also includes stories from other high-profile New Zealanders – Liam Malone, Will Jordan and Chloe Swarbrick among them – which back up Bailey’s own wise words.
My own copy has so many stickered pages and notes – with comments like “interesting point”, “well said/written”, “that makes sense”, why I haven’t I read this before?”, and “why didn’t they teach us this at school?”, that I can hardly close it. This is remarkable considering I’m more than a little sceptical about self-help books, which promise you can Be Better and Have The Life You Dream Off if you just follow the advice in a book – and then sign up to buy the accompanying online programme.
But Bailey doesn’t sound as if he’s trying to sell anything; it all seems like genuinely sincere and practical, tried-and-tested advice. I’ll also confess to having had therapy – so maybe I should have read more than a self-help book or two – and having never heard some of the things Bailey writes about. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder? Don’t forget to look for the Post Traumatic Growth.
He draws his advice together in something he calls the Four S Model of constructing resilience:
Slow Down: Don’t fall into the trap of facing adversity as one big challenge and becoming overwhelmed by it – instead, break the challenge into manageable chunks.
Salvage: Deliberately seek out the good within the bad – no matter how creative you have to be.
Streamline: Try to minimise and contain the everyday fears and anxieties that we all have.
Stand alongside: Maximise the impact of your community and support on your ability to outlast and survive adversity.
Bailey builds compelling arguments for why this Four S Model works, grounded in his own experiences plus offers a chapter - very much aimed at younger readers - on the need for the sorts of things we’re repeatedly told work for most physical and mental health problems: exercise, healthy food, getting enough sleep and trying to resist peer pressure to drink.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. You could well be wondering why the name Jake Bailey rings a bell. It’s because some 10 years ago, at the end of 2015, Bailey went viral – or at least a speech he gave did – when he was wheeled onto the stage at Christchurch Boys High to address graduating students.
He was head boy and until a few days before that night, he thought he’d be graduating with his Year 13 classmates, enjoying summer and then figuring out what to do with his life. Except life – or cancer, at least – had far more threatening plans. He gave the speech on November 4; on October 29, he’d been told he had Burkitt’s non-Hodgkins lymphoma, an aggressive form of blood cancer that would kill him in a fortnight without treatment. It followed months of niggly health issues which finally knocked him off his feet and demanded further testing.
Bailey was three days into a treatment regime that included chemotherapy and targeted drugs when he delivered his speech. He was yet to lose his hair or get so weak he couldn’t crawl off a bed and out of a pool of his own vomit, as he writes in the book. Asked why he was determined to speak that night, Bailey says he felt privileged to have been head boy and didn’t necessarily feel he deserved the job. Indeed, throughout The Comeback Code he’s self-deprecating about his academic abilities and says he wasn’t much better at sport, either.
“I had a sense of really wanting to strive to be head boy to the absolute best of my ability,” Bailey says from the Arrowtown home he shares with partner Jem and her parents. “I’d gone into the role, at the start of the year, with the sense that I really ought to do everything to the absolute maximum, the absolute best of my ability, given that I didn’t think I was probably the person who deserved the job.
“That carried through to how I felt about giving the speech that night. I felt I really owed it to those young guys who I’d had the privilege of leading over the course of the year. I’m not suggesting that it was sort of a conscious thing; I wasn’t lying in the hospital bed going, ‘well, you know, there probably was another student or two better suited to this role, so I better go and do this end-of-year speech now I’ve got cancer’.
His treatment lasted throughout the summer of 2015/16 and on January 29, he was told it had been successful and he was in remission. Until then, he says, he’s faced no more than the “usual” challenges many young people confront, like parents divorcing and a grandparent dying.
Life-shaping experience
Bailey has been cancer free ever since, but the experience has shaped his life. Rather than tread down a well-worn path to university and probably into a law or business career, Bailey wrote What Cancer Taught Me, studied positive psychology, spent time in Australia and took up ultramarathon running.
Since graduating from the Australian-based Langley Institute with a Diploma in Positive Psychology and Wellbeing, he’s built an international reputation as a resilience educator, travelling New Zealand and the world to talk to young people about overcoming adversity, how to develop the skills to do so and how to flourish rather than just battle through.
He has spoken to some 100,000 people around the world because while he might say he wasn’t – isn’t – academic or sporty, he’s an engaging speaker with a clear gift for stringing wise words together (he even won New Zealand’s annual Quote of the Year contest in 2015 with “Here’s the thing – none of us get out of life alive. So be gallant, be great, be gracious, and be grateful for the opportunities that you have”, part of his school speech).
But Bailey doesn’t see himself as unique or special. In fact, he describes his experience and story as “completely unremarkable” but thinks he’s fortunate to have been given the opportunity to share his story to help others: “I was one of the lucky ones who walked out of that place – and there were many who did not,” he writes of his time at Christchurch Hospital’s Bone Marrow Transplant Unit (BMTU).
He’s good-natured enough to take on the chin my questions about the cynicism some might have towards positive psychology and resilience: “I often do anonymous surveying of students after I’ve presented at schools, and I’ll tell you what, there’s no fear like giving an anonymous survey to a bunch of teenagers to ask what they think about you,” he says.
“Generally, it’s quite positive and that is very humbling, but I got a comment from a student which was very negative and said something along the lines of, ‘all this is is toxic positivity’, which was a term I was entirely unfamiliar with.”
So, Bailey looked into it and says the feedback told him that he’d done a poor job of communicating the information because what he advocates for isn’t irrepressible optimism and outright dismissal of life’s darker moments.
Embrace the tough stuff
Rather, he thinks it’s vital to embrace the tough stuff life throws at us from an early age – and he says reading a book on resilience won’t make anyone any more resilient.
“It’s something that is learned a very tactile way,” he says. “It’s learned by doing and experiencing. And so while I can, and hopefully do, I aim to provide information about the skills and the tools in a way that young people can understand and relate to then retain and go on to use.
“But there’s so much that goes into making and creating resilient people. From the research and my understanding of work and experience in this space, you can see how there are so many variables and factors that are not necessarily within anyone’s control, that can either go your way or not.”
Here’s where Bailey does have some sound advice for parents and caregivers.
“I hear a lot of stories first-hand of sports coaches, for instance, who are approached by parents who don’t like the team their child’s been put in or think they deserve a better outcome, so they got into bat for them and fight and advocate for them, but you can’t do that throughout your child’s life.
“If you deprive them of the opportunity to face regular, normal, everyday adversity like that at that stage of life, then you stump their ability to learn and develop these skills of resilience. It means that as they move out increasingly further into the world, they’re going to have to learn these things on the fly and then the stakes are much higher, the consequences are much greater and the outcomes are much more painful if you’re, for example, finally learning how to manage interpersonal conflict when you’re going through your first divorce rather than having a fallout in the school playground when you’re 10 years old.”
Make them feel safe
Then Bailey checks himself, adding, once again, that he’s not a parent and parenting must be hard, given we’re surrounded by “societal messaging” that suggests we’re bad parents if we have the capacity to intervene and shelter our young ones from adversity and negativity but don’t use it.
He suggests that parents and caregivers “stand alongside”.
“Give a young person a sense of safety, giving them a place where they know that someone’s got their back,” he says. “Often it’s kind of a solution in itself for parents to discuss the setbacks and adversity they faced and relate it back to their kids.
“So, talk about your own experiences of your first break-up, of being bullied at school, your own experiences of disappointment or failure or shortcoming, because it allows you to empathise and it allows young people to sort of see that we all get through these things.”
And when it comes to the whole “you’ve got endless possibilities ahead of you” stuff? He says rather than being reassuring, the idea of having so many opportunities, so many possibilities can be daunting and terrifying. Instead, he advises slowing down because taking entire problems or issues as one big significant thing is “a recipe for being entirely overwhelmed and crushed by the weight of it”. It’s stand alongside, slow down and streamlining in action.
How does he stay well?
“I love the mountains, so I love skiing and I love trail running and I love hiking and I love just being out in the back country. And for me, it’s incredibly important to go into places and environments that make you feel really small. I like to be in places where I feel awe…
“Being in nature, there’s the exercise component but there’s a lot of research and positive psychology about the impact of awe. Because at its core, I think it means that when you come back out into your own domain, you feel bigger or you feel more, I guess competent, going back into your own world.”