Seven key lessons on how to live your best life from Dame Deborah James’ new book

The inspirational podcast host, cancer campaigner, blogger and author Dame Deborah James posthumously releases her second book How To Live When You Could be Dead today.

Known as Bowel Babe on social media, the former deputy school teacher was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2016 aged 34. Despite being told she only had two years to live, the extraordinary woman campaigned tirelessly to raise awareness and money for six solid years. During that time, she raised more than £7 million and encouraged a record number of people to check for bowel cancer, as well becoming a co-host of BBC Radio 5 Live’s award-winning, lively podcast about living with cancer, You, Me and the Big C.

Her mother Heather James told BBC Breakfast that although Dame Deborah had lived a full life “with no regrets”, she did “say ‘I don’t want to die’. And that’s the hardest, saddest part.” As her new book explores how she cultivated her famous rebellious hope in the face of such adversity, we reveal her seven key life lessons.

1. Hope is one of the most powerful human emotions we have

“When we hear tales of people who have survived being lost in the jungle after a plane crash or adrift in a boat in the middle of the ocean, the survivors often say they never gave up hope - in such extreme situations, it can literally be the difference between living and dying. But it applies to all aspects of life.

“Hope isn’t something that just happens to you - it’s something you have to actively reach for, to cultivate and to doggedly hang on to when you find even the smallest handhold, even in the darkest of times. I absolutely believe that hope brings strength, the more you have hope, the more likely you are to keep getting back up again when the wind is knocked out of your sails.

2. Value today because tomorrow might not come

“We think that we can put things off to another day or that we can buy more time. But sometimes there is no tomorrow. Each of us has 86,400 seconds every day, and we assume they will keep on coming day after day, for many, many years - and for millions of people they do. But for me and others like me they will run out so much sooner than we ever thought they would.

“Some of those 86,400 seconds you get every day need to be spent on moving closer to what you want from life, because once they’re gone, they won’t come back. You can’t “bank” the time you’re given in a day and carry it over to the next one, so you might as well start using your days better. I really believe that you must remind yourself to look to the future with hope and optimism, but that it is equally important to value the here and now.

3. The path to success is paved with small wins

“People often say to me, ‘How do you get through a day?’ But sometimes you don’t have to get through the day. You just have to get through the next hour, the next minute, the next few seconds. I get that this prescriptive approach doesn’t work for everybody, but it really works for me and is a strategy that allows me to carry on scheduling my time gives me a sense of achievement in two ways: first, I am more organised, use my days effectively and don’t forget things because my goals and commitments are written down.”

4. Failure adds fuel to the fire

“Fear of failure is something that holds us back and stops us from learning. But if we acknowledge that failure is an integral part of how we learn and grow, then it follows that it isn’t something to shy away from or be ashamed of. So how do we best extract the lessons from failure? It’s no good just saying that failure is OK because it is part of life and that we learn from our mistakes if we are not engaged in working out what those lessons are

“If you make excuses for what has gone wrong, you won’t address it and you’ll struggle to use it as a driver, but if you see your failure or the difficulties you are facing as  reason to try harder, you’ll find the tools and the inspiration to keep going,”

5. You need to have grit

“Grit to me, means the outright refusal to yield, to keep picking yourself up again, to always find a way to preserve and keep going, and it is vital to living like there’s no tomorrow. In her book, Angela Ducksworth describes the formula that she has come up with to describe this kind of grit:

TALENT x EFFORT = SKILL

SKILL x EFFORT = ACHIEVEMENT

‘Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort,’ Ducksworth explains. ‘Achievement is what happens when you take your acquired skills and use them.’ In other words, without effort, your talent is just what you could have been capable of if you’d tried; skill can only get you where you want it to if you put in the effort.”

6. How laughter can heal

“I really believe that it’s OK to laugh, even in moments of darkness or sorrow. Some of my funniest memories are from the saddest moments of my life. Like when I got absolutely bollocked by my parents for being late to my grandmother’s funeral. I’d gone out the night before and drunk too much, and I ended up following the casket down the aisle of the church because I was so late and really hungover. But that’s now all I really remember about that funeral, which I think is a positive thing. And it definitely lightened the mood in the moment. Some people might shy away from humour in a setting like that, but laughter is such a big part of life and needs to be celebrated.”

7. There’s always something to be grateful for 

“Gratitude is one of the things that helps get you through. It is a gift that you cling to when so much is being taken away. Before cancer, I never truly appreciated how lucky I am to have my parents and my husband and my kids in my life. I loved them, of course, but I didn’t realize just how important they were until I understood my time with them would be cut short.

“It’s difficult when things are going to well to take that step back, but if you can, make yourself pause every now and again and think about what it would be like if the people you loved most in the world were taken away from you. I have no doubts that you, too, would have those feelings of gratitude that I have experienced.”

Ebury, a division of Penguin Random House, will pay £3 from the sale of ‘How To Live When You Could Be Dead’ by Deborah James in the UK to Bowelbabe Fund for Cancer Research UK. Cancer Research UK is a charity registered in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247).