How to Keep Going When Life Falls Apart | Jake Bailey

Jake Bailey offers a refreshingly clear definition of resilience: one's ability to recover from adverse events. While often framed around major life challenges, Jake emphasises the value of resilience in everyday situations - from arguments to losing car keys - having learned through his teenage cancer experience that resilience skills improve daily life.

He describes resilience as a capacity that can be trained like a muscle through intentionally facing challenges. This development happens through self-efficacy - backing yourself to overcome difficulties by having successfully done so before. Jake finds this empowering because while adversity itself is often outside our control, our ability to develop resilience remains within our control.

Jake's relationship with his cancer experience is nuanced. Personally, he feels grateful for how it shaped him, while acknowledging others cannot feel similarly. He struggles more with external definition - being known primarily as "teen cancer survivor" despite being 27 and having built expertise in resilience psychology.

Looking forward, Jake sees his recently published book as marking "the start of the end" of this chapter, having reached what he describes as a summit in his current work. He's ready for new challenges, though uncertain what form they'll take.

Jake's perspective on resilience is reinforced by experiences like ultramarathon running and visiting Antarctica to study pioneering explorers. These pursuits taught him that humans can endure far more than they believe possible, with mental approach being the key to unlocking this capacity.