BBC Best Bits | Ep 5 | Bounce

The word resilience is thrown around a lot at work these days, but it's more than just a buzzword. In this episode of BBC Best Bits, taken from episodes 39 and 84, we'll hear an incredible story of resilience from Ryan Campbell and insights on the psychology that explains it from psychologist Niamh Fitzpatrick.

Absolutely. I'd love to. I have lived, I think, in its simplest form, a life of adventure and adversity, a life that had some unbelievable highs, but also some unbelievable lows. When I was a young kid, I decided I wanted to be a pilot. I found my passion, and that was all things aviation. When I was 14 years old, I found out that you could fly an airplane on your own for the very first time on your 15th birthday, something that Common sense just—it just didn't line up. That was just madness. It was honestly just out of this world. So I decided at 14 that I wanted to learn to fly an aeroplane. I set my first big goal, which was to fly solo on my 15th birthday, and I went and found two after-school jobs to pay for it. I would fly a flying lesson once every two weeks, and thankfully, on the day that I turned 15, the skies were blue, the winds were calm. I climbed into an airplane, took off, and flew around and landed completely on my own for the very first time. That was a moment that everyone loved except my mum. She was absolutely beside herself. What that did for me was start this crazy kind of obsession with doing everything I could at the youngest possible age. Now, we had modified the airplane. So that it had 160 gallons of fuel in the cockpit with me, as well as what was in the wings. That allowed that airplane to fly about 16.5, 17 hours nonstop. And that's what I needed to cross the oceans. So at 19 years old, I climbed into that airplane. I took off from the Sydney area in Australia, and I started northeast over the Pacific Ocean. What followed was 24,000 nautical miles 35 stops, 15 countries, a wild journey. The shortest legs were 20 minutes. The longest leg was Hawaii to California, 15 hours nonstop. On the 28th of December, 2015, I was 21 years old, just about to turn 22. It was about a little over 2 years since the end of the round-the-world flight. I climbed into that airplane and I took off. For what was a normal day at work, a normal flight, no oceans to cross, no records to break. We departed the grass airstrip. It was very short. As I had the runway disappear beneath the nose, the engine failed at an unbelievably low level. And as a pilot, I pushed the nose down. I went through the, I suppose, the process that we're trained. To do. And despite what I could do, despite my best efforts, within seconds it was all over. We were over the top of trees in terrible terrain. What resulted was a horrific plane crash. And not only a horrific plane crash, but one where I was cut out of the wreckage and flown to hospital as the only survivor. I had 5 breaks in my back. I had Shattered facial bones, a shattered right ankle, and I had cuts from head to toe. And when they operated on me that night, they placed titanium in me from head to toe, and I woke up in a recovery ward. When I woke up, I had no movement or feeling below my waist. I had suffered a spinal cord injury at L1, and I was a complete paraplegic. So in a split-second moment, I had gone from this unbelievable life of highs, the very thing that gave me my identity, to halfway through this rollover, I was up on my side and the pain through 5 breaks in my back was just too much. I just stopped and in the hope that my pain would kind of calm down for that moment and it did. So I just laid there on my side. My right arm was all twisted up and I ended up looking through a small hole made by my elbow and I looked into the eyes of a guy who would change my life, change my way of thinking forever. His name was Ben. He was a quadriplegic who had slipped over mopping his girlfriend's floor in his early 30s, hit his head, broken his neck. He was a quadriplegic from no movement or feeling from his chest down, very little movement in his arms or his hands. I looked at Ben and Ben was looking straight at me. And here I was feeling sorry for myself, sad about, you know, what had happened, the accident, sad about the fact I couldn't fly, let alone walk, let alone go to the bathroom like a normal person. But when I looked at Ben, I realized what he'd give for just one chance at rolling over, just one. And I felt like the worst human on the face of the planet. And I finished my session. They put me in the wheelchair, took me back to bed, and my mind was just racing a million miles an hour. What came from that moment was not only realizing a whole bunch of lessons, taking a whole bunch of lessons from that moment with Ben, but realizing I needed to remember it. I needed some form of systematic approach that I could apply every time I came up against a challenge or a bad day. And I knew there were plenty of bad days on the horizon. What Ben had taught me in that moment was gratitude. He'd shown me that I needed to focus on what I had, not what I'd lost in the form of physical function. He showed me that every challenge was an opportunity to quit, but every challenge was also an opportunity to adapt. He had most importantly shown me that I was lucky. To be a paraplegic, lucky to be a paraplegic, and never in my life would I ever have thought that those words would have come out of my mouth. But that's what he showed me overall. Ben showed me gratitude. When we fly an airplane and a red light comes on or a warning buzzer sounds, the pilot uses a checklist, and that checklist is a systematic, tried and tested, proven approach to overcoming all sorts of predetermined scenarios. So they've looked ahead when all this stuff could go wrong. Let's write a checklist. All right. That's how you're going to find a solution. So we work through that list. We hope by the time we get to the end of it, we don't skip any steps. We do it in order. We get to the end of it. Hopefully, we've found a solution for the problem. How could I create a checklist that I could use every time I had a bad day? That's the 3-step checklist for navigating change. So the first step is simply gratitude, that lesson from Ben. Every time we come up against a challenge, every time we have a bad day, every time we have to navigate some form of crisis, I want you to find gratitude in the problem at hand before you even start to navigate it. Just stop, step back, look at the big picture, find something to be thankful for. If I could find gratitude in being a paraplegic plane crash survivor, there are a lot of things to be thankful for. You might not think it at surface level, but start to dig deep. You will always find something to be thankful for.

And they could be the tiniest things in the world, I guess, the tiniest things.

100%. And those tiny things allow us to take a really big mountain that we have to climb and shrink it, to look forward at the problem at hand and have a different perspective on it. It makes it easy before we even begin. The second step is confidence. You have to have confidence. You can have all the thankfulness in the world. Now you've shrunk that mountain. You have to have confidence in your own personal ability to get through the challenge ahead of you, right? No one else can do it for you. Having confidence comes from locking in the next step. Not by knowing the entire way that this whole process is going to play out. Like, from the position we're all in right now to the end of coronavirus or whatever the resolution, solution, or end goal of the challenge you are facing, you have to understand that we will never know the entire process. We're just not. It's unknown. We don't know when it'll end. We don't know how it's all going to play out. We can lock in the next step. So by locking in the next step, it removes excuses and it gets us to work. It puts us to work. So locking the— find confidence by locking in the next step. That was a lesson learned during the round-the-world days that, as you could probably guess, became unbelievably useful when learning to walk again. Learning to walk was literally one step at a time. So we've found gratitude. We have found confidence. We know what the next step is. We've now started to work. The third step is resilience. Resilience, at the end of the day, it's probably the most phenomenal tool, the most powerful asset we have to overcome rough times in our life. You have to be tough. It's time to come out from under the covers and realize that life is tough sometimes. That's just part of it. It's a byproduct of being human.

And what types of things, just chatting about leaders and chatting about people presenting with With particular, I don't even know if symptoms is the right word, you can correct me on that, when they come into work and they're maybe not in a great place, what are the types of things that perhaps leaders should be looking out for to be able to say? And I think it's even harder now. Only this morning I was having a conversation with a leader in a big organization. He said, it's just so much harder now on Zoom to work out if people are okay or not because we're still seeing their faces, but we're not seeing their whole selves. How do leaders spot if there's an issue? What are they looking out for?

Well, if you're a leader and you're listening to this, the first thing you do, again, we're going to put the context on this. If you're able to do it, as in if your workload allows you to do it, this is the ideal, what I would be suggesting you do, is you tune into the people you're working with and you get to know their baseline. So I have clients now, I have a few little physical health issues myself, so I've not gone back to in-person work yet. So all my work is on Zoom. So I have a raft of clients who I've never met. We have never sat in the same room. But what has happened is I've had to learn to just dial up those skills that I would have always had in person and apply them in this environment. And you can do that. Even though it's difficult, it is entirely possible. And what I mean by that is get to know your people. Get to know the people that are in your team that you're working with who report into you. So when you're—

Very early on, in the pandemic on this podcast, actually, when I said I'd gone through a bit of, well, okay, well, we're stuck 2K from our house, but I've got a nice house with a nice garden in a nice area with a nice cabin at the back of the garden where I can work. And I really don't have the right to moan about anything or be upset about anything or have depression or anxiety or anything, because look at all the things that I've got compared to what other people might have. And it's easy to do that today by maybe going, well, Geez, you know, I'm not in Ukraine right now, so, you know, I'm doing okay. What do I have to complain about? It's not fair to hold yourself to somebody else's account. It doesn't matter how much better or worse it is, it's not fair. Hold yourself to your own account. That's, that's, that's where I suppose where I got to on my journey.

That makes so much sense, and that's a great place to have gotten to because what you've done there is you've allowed for your feelings. You know, if you think of a few years ago in Thailand, there was The football team got trapped in a cave system when the rains came down.

Hmm.

And at one stage in the early days, there was talk of, you know, would they leave them down there and send supplies down? But eventually the rescuers decided they were going to sedate the team, the young boys, and they strapped them to divers and took them out through the underwater tunnels. There was only one way out for that team, as it turned out. There is only one way out for your feelings. You've got to allow and accept and validate them and understand them. It takes us time sometimes to get there, but we do need to get to a space where we can say, I can understand how I can feel this way, and to not judge it or diminish it.

What's your one piece of advice to listeners? Just one thing that they could perhaps do to protect and strengthen their own mental health.

An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior. So whatever it is that's going on in your life that has you feeling anxious or depressed or down or burnt out or anything like that, most times it tends to be there's something that's gone on in your life and your emotional response is actually a normal response because whatever you're dealing with is, is not normal for you or is not okay for you or is not aligned with your life for you. Allow yourself that. An abnormal reaction— this is from Viktor Frankl— an abnormal reaction Any reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior. Allow yourself those feelings because then it allows us to get to a place of, all right then, what am I going to do about it? What changes might I need to make in my life internally or externally? But allow those feelings first. That's the biggest thing you can do for yourself.

Brilliant. Thanks for listening. If you want to hear these interviews in full, you'll find links to each one in the show notes. And for more on Inspiring Change and the work we do, just pop along to inspiringchange.ie.