Social Media, Mental Health & Essential Skills for a Digital Culture with Bailey Parnell

How can we use social media in a way that will leave us feeling well before, during and after without deleting our accounts? What skills and mindset do we need to thrive in the age of digital?

Bailey Parnell is the Founder & CEO of SkillsCamp, a soft skills training company, and was named one of Canada's Top 100 Most Powerful Women. Bailey is a 2x TED speaker with over 4 million views, an award-winning and internationally-recognized entrepreneur, an active humanitarian, and one with a talent for helping people develop the skills they need for success. Her work and expertise have been featured in Forbes, Good Morning America, Fox, and more. Bailey is currently working on her EdD in Learning and Organizational Change at Baylor University. Previously, she completed her Masters in Communications and Culture at Toronto Metropolitan University with research looking into social media's impact on mental health, the results of which she's presented in multiple global forums and turned into her signature 5 Steps Towards #SafeSocial and a connected non-profit of the same name.

In this episode, we answer questions like:
- Why you don't need to delete your TikTok or Instagram account to thrive in the digital age
-  How social media use changes for different generations
-  Why are soft skills so important and which skills do we need to thrive in the digital age?
-  What do you need to focus on in your "offline life" to feel well online?

Follow Bailey's work and become an ambassador:
https://safesocialmedia.co/
https://www.skillscamp.co/about/#soft-skills

Transcript

Iliana

Hello and welcome to The Quiet Living Room, a podcast by Quiet Social Club, where we discuss and explore ideas on how to live and work well in a digital world. Every two weeks, we invite industry experts, entrepreneurs, scientists, and inspiring voices to share their stories, knowledge, and wisdom. My name is Ileana and I will be your host in today's episode. My guest today is Bailey Panel. She is the founder of Safe Social, a nonprofit dedicated to investigating and developing solutions for responsible social media use with a mission to help people be mentally well before, during, and after social media use. Bailey's also the founder of Skills Camp, a soft skills training company that works with businesses and educational institutions to build soft skills in their staff and students. Her Ted Talk is Social Media Hurting and Mental Health received over 4 million views, and I'm honored to have her with me today to speak about well being, human connection, and the soft skills of the future in the age of tech and social media. Bailey, thanks so much for being here today.

Bailey

Happy to be here.

Iliana

Bailey, you started raising awareness to the importance of finding a healthy relationship with social media long before this even became a topic in the media. How did you get started and how has this journey been for you?

Bailey

Well, it's funny now because when you're doing it at the time, it just seems so natural to you, and you're like, why isn't everyone else talking about this? But then just to, I guess age and time goes on and you realize, hey, you might have actually influenced other people joining this field, which is kind of neat. I started looking into this stuff, though, only really around 2011 2012 era, and it was because I worked in a higher ed institution, a university in Toronto at the time, and part of my role was responsible for social and digital marketing, or what we called it. There was more digital student engagement. So really creating some early models for, hey, marketing has figured this out, but how do we use these same tools to build community with our students or to engage students in their education, most especially when they're not on campus? Because at that time, that school was like 96% commuter school. It's kind of like a city school, like an NYU of Canada. So then the other half of my role was in student affairs, which was kind of everything outside the classroom that supports student success, including health and wellness departments, mental health initiatives, and we were the ones to kind of combine it all together.

Iliana

And so really, by about 2012 to 2014, we were saying, hey, well, if we're going to be asking young people to be on social media with us, it felt like a moral obligation to make sure that they could also do this safely. Because we were starting to see the beginning of research saying, hey, there might be a connection between spending time on Facebook and maybe a decline in mental health or teens on Facebook. That was what we were studying at the time. There might be something worthy of concern here. So then I started looking into our own student body. What do you like most and least on each platform? How do you feel as a result of using? And then this really just snowballed over the years. I did my master's in this work, the Ted Talk actually came out in 2017, which was even before I was technically done my Master's. And it was based a lot on the professional work that we had done even before I went and decided to get a degree for it, basically. And that snowballed, of course, to getting some notice and doing some talks around the world, really about this. And I always felt when I was doing those talks, you should be able to get this knowledge without me in front of you. Like, you shouldn't need me flying across the world to learn how social media might affect you, the risks of using. So I always wanted there to be a nonprofit extension of this. And then really what I needed was the pandemic. When the pandemic hit, I got kind of three to four months of uninterrupted work in my room to just build the nonprofit, honestly. And that's when I put together the more formal portion of it, brought on the volunteers and whatnot. And then actually, it's funny we're talking now because it was only just a couple of weeks ago that we were formally approved as a charity in Canada, which can take like one to three years.

Iliana

It's a big process that is a very big milestone. Congratulations. So for someone who has not engaged with Safesocial before, could you explain a little bit more about what the work of Safe Social involves? What information does it provide for its users and how does it do that?

Bailey

Yeah, so the main three pillars of Safe Social are research, education, and empowerment. I find in general, actually, this whole field is still very much in an awareness phase of this work. If you're thinking about any risky behavior, you want to go from know better, to do better, to teach others to do better type of deal. But I actually still find I'm very much having the conversation with a lot of people of just, hey, do you even know what's happening here? So we actually spend a lot of time on the education piece, whether it's even on our social media, what we're teaching about, or going into classrooms mostly around North America. But I get the pleasure of going all over the world to do this and teaching about the risks of using social. But actually more, I'd say what's most important to note today is that there is good sides of social media, too. And all of our work is a harm reduction approach to essentially mitigate those risks and get more of the good sides of social media. So this really resonates even more so now than when I started this work with young people because they'll come up to me and say like, oh, my parents and teachers are always just like, get off social media.And they go blah, blah, blah, we're not getting off. And I'm like, I know that's why it would be a waste of my time to say get off of it. It's less of a waste to say take breaks and look out for this stuff and do this stuff offline so that you can reap those rewards.

Iliana

Are you finding that there's something that people are particularly surprised about when they interact with the content from Safe Social?

Bailey

What are most people most surprised about? It changes. Well, I think it changes per age. So when we do older folks or parents, they can be surprised by just how much this is used and how important a piece of young people's life this is. Recent research would actually suggest that young people confirmed by my own on the ground work, they don't really see it like my online life and my offline life. They just see it as just life. Like they've literally never known life without it. If we're talking to a gen Z, certainly with their parents having it and all those sorts of things. So I think that this is good because at the same time the research is showing that they see it as neutral in their lives. I think it's about 59% or 52% or something like this. Certainly the majority of young people today are registering social media as neutral. They say like, oh, sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, it just is. So they're kind of seeing it like maybe how we might view it, the TV, we'll say like, well, it can be good, can be bad. Sometimes I have a good day, then those have a bad day. This I find promising because in my work it's a lot easier to go from a neutral sentiment to a positive sentiment than it is to go from full on negative to full on positive. And if you ask older folks, do you think social media has made the world a better or worse place? They most often say a worse place, but young people can't compare. So for them it's just neutral.

Iliana

I think it's super interesting you mentioned this because previously the differentiation between offline and online was more clear. Right. And a lot of concern from the older generation would be that today it's not the same quality of relationships when you're online. It's not the same way of living. And you might be missing out on developing some skills for your real parentheses life when you are doing everything online. What are your thoughts on that?

Bailey

Yeah, I would say one of the things that I do certainly say to all young people, really all generations actually is. Well, you know what? You just entered in the most important part of my research. I think the most important contribution out of that was that I was investigating what made someone feel good or what made someone feel bad, because really that was of more interest to me. There was actually this whole group of people that wasn't being covered as much, I thought, which were where social media was having a positive impact on them. And the most important indicator in my research of whether or not someone would have a good time or bad time and moderator so how good or how bad was how they felt about themselves offline at time of use, otherwise known as offline affect. So this is incredibly important, because if you're actually trying to create a long term strategy for yourself, to actually have a life where you don't hate social media, it might seem counterintuitive at first, but the number one suggestion I would give you is build an offline life that you are happy with, and I promise you it will translate online.

And so, yeah, 100%, I would tell kids too, make sure that you're not forgetting about this offline life. I guess maybe we could make a clearer distinction when I say that the students see it as neutral these days, they're able to distinguish how I present myself online and who I am offline, but they just don't see it as like they just see it as all one life. Like, this affects one, this affects the other, which is interesting. They see it as like a neutral thing in life that can go good or bad.

Iliana

What are some of the first foundational things you emphasize when you bring up the topic of safe social?

Bailey

Well, first, I've been using this format for a while, which seems to go well. Well, you also have to know that context matters. So a lot of the time I'm only really getting an hour, maybe 90 minutes with these students, sometimes even 30 minutes. But if you give me five minutes, I will take it. And I'll do my best to dispense the most amount of knowledge I can and have the most amount retained in that time. So with understanding that context, sometimes I'll do like the three six five or the four six five of social media. And we'll start with the landscape. So we'll cover things like sometimes I call them stressors, sometimes I call them understanding the environment you're playing in type of deal. And we'll cover concepts like what is a highlight reel? What is social currency? What are online predators? What is online harassment? And this is to kind of understand the space I'm playing in. This creates the risks and the good and the bad. So it's kind of like if we think about another risky behavior, like driving, for example, a risky behavior is simply something in psychology where when you participate, you expose yourself to potential harm.

That's it. We know for sure now that you participate. When you're on social media, you expose yourself to potential harm, and the same is true like when you're driving. So when you're driving, we've done all of these things to help keep us safe and keep others safe on the road, right? So we can mitigate the risk and get the benefits of it. Understanding the environment is basically teaching them what the road looks like. It's like, here's where you're going to be driving. Like, here's what to expect there. And then we go through, in the three, six five, we go to sometimes like six. We'll go through maybe six risks of using here. A risk is that you could become depressed, anxious. You could experience FOMO, which correlates with another risk addiction. You could become lonely, surprisingly. You could become frustrated. You could experience PTSD, because you never know what you're going to see in a feed, and it might just be your trigger that day and all these things. So then I really hit home the point for them. This is a risky behavior that really resonates with actually everyone. I think that resonates with everyone. I say whether to parents and I just said it, to grade four in the same day a couple of weeks ago. It would be more useful for you to think about this like alcohol or like cannabis than it would be to think about it just like the TV or radio or another communications platform in your life. And then, of course, we spend the whole good portion of it on my five steps towards safe social. Like, what can you actually do about this? Beginning with building awareness and understanding, which they're doing right there.

Iliana

Are there any experiences or stories you want to share with us today that have kind of shown you yes, this is exactly why I'm doing this. Your Ted Talk, for example, received over 4 million views, and this is obviously a very clear sign that a lot of people have questions about this topic.

Bailey

Yeah, you just don't know where things are going to always go. I had vision for I still have vision about what the world could be like. And I have a lot of hope in this world, like in this world of digital well being. It's been interesting to see it become a field. Like, in the last ten years, our field was collected for the first time, I think, ever, just last year. So you hope that it will have the intended effect. I've seen some positive movements in younger generations, and this isn't just me. There's people like me all over the world, much like yourself. So I guess the things that make me think like, okay, this is working. We have an ambassador program, and the ambassadors come from all over, and they will say things. They'll say things like, I had this conversation with a parent today, and I told them about what we're doing. And I taught them about what social currency is because I taught them about how to have a conversation with their kids because we also have a parents page and educators page. I actually find that a little bit cooler in my life than just getting feedback.For me, I'm very fortunate. I get to experience some direct feedback almost immediately after giving a talk. But when I hear that an ambassador has taken the ideas and has taught others who are now understanding how they can teach others, that to me is like, okay, yeah, that's the point. It's like, you do this work and you understand this knowledge, but ultimately I believe that education is a moral altruistic act. So it's like, just give it away.

Iliana

This actually ties in beautifully with a bit more of an exploratory question that I had for you. If you could design any social media app and this could be aligned with the Safe social philosophy, how would this app look?

Bailey

You know what? I do. That's a great thought experiment. We could probably riff on that for a long time. The first thing that pops into my head is that it would be tied to your identity. Like, if we really want a great social, like a public sphere that exists on online and the same benefits that we got from the offline public sphere in terms of, well, everything, then it should be tied to your identity. Like formalized, in a formal way. That way. We would probably eliminate a lot of risks that way, or just at least mitigate some of them. Like, for example, you probably would see less harassment and bullying. You probably would see less grooming like predators because it would be tied to who they actually are. And I'm sure there's going to be ways to get around it, but for the majority, you'd be fine. Whereas not right now, you've got little Ricky in Iowa hiding behind a screen and an egg, radicalizing himself because there's no accountability and no parents teaching and none of the other systemic structures. I wouldn't even create the platform in the first place until companies and governments and parents knew what we're talking about here.

So that's another one. I would make it so that like driving, there is some kind of competency fitness understanding test that you have to do before joining. And maybe along the way, maybe there's a reminder every so often, like, we have road signs that it's like, hey, you're going too fast. Maybe there's a reminder that these words you're using are typically offensive. Just letting you know. And you've been here 5 hours today. You might enjoy a walk outside. I don't know, something like this, right? And again, yeah, I know I could ignore it if I want to. I could find the answers to the initial test if I wanted to. You could do that for driving too, if you really wanted to. But I think it would help a lot of people. And even if you're forced to answer the question and you don't care about it, it's kind of one of those things that sits with you later. So these are just kind of the first things that are coming to my mind because I'm thinking about it like another risky behavior. I also think of everything through an equity lens. So you have to think, what are the benefits that brought traditionally oppressed people? They gained benefits online that didn't exist offline. So we would want to maintain that in some way. Like, I would still want private spaces online even if your identity is tied to it. I would still want people to be able to speak freely and openly. But obviously people need to understand that freedom of speech never came with freedom of no consequence.

Iliana

And do you see any progress from existing tech companies in this direction?

Bailey

Well, this is going to be an interesting conversation because I would say the only progress I've seen has been progress that does not impact the bottom line. So it'll be like, oh, we're adding an instagram well being page to the back end. I don't know anyone who's actually read that full page unless they were people like me. And there's like, oh, you can't get on. The only progress I've seen is probably TikTok. And here's an interesting one and very interesting this week that we're talking giving that the US is considering banning it for other reasons and other risks, which you can talk about. But from the mental health side of things, TikTok is actually showing the best results for mental health of youth, as in sometimes, like way more positive than any of the others. And I can say this from a practical standpoint. TikTok to me is hilarious. Like, I have a very entertaining time on TikTok. I always laugh, I learn things, and to me, entertainment joy that would be a positive outcome of using social media and 30 minutes experiencing entertainment if you actually are, would not be inherently worse than 30 minutes of reality television or something like that.

Iliana

I don't know if you've experienced this, but I've had this conversation on numerous occasions. Now, whether it is with the younger generation, with millennials or older generations, when we have a moment to fill today, whether it is the lunch break or an afternoon at home that we would have previously had to fill with something else, like an afternoon activity or going up to a stranger or even just sitting and doing nothing. We now just use and turn to our devices. And this doesn't just add up into real chunks of time, but it also prevents us from having these moments or these conversations with strangers that we would have had otherwise.

Bailey

Yeah, for sure. I have both sentiments towards that because you just brought me back in your story to a distinct memory in high school. Because on one side I would say yeah, I would say to parents as much as you can, whatever privilege you're afforded, help your teenager find an offline outlet. Like whatever it is, even if it's hanging with their friends and they're going to a sleepover, like, I don't know, you don't want to drive them there. It'll probably be for the better in the long term. But one place I see where this could provide a social savior is the classic lunchroom. I remember there was a couple, I went to a very large high school and I was pretty good. I had a lot of friends, so I was good in that way and whatnot. But I do remember just like a couple of lunches that clearly stuck out in my memory to even remember them at all, where I couldn't find any of my friends or they had gone home for lunch or they had a spare or something. And I felt so attacked, right? I'm like, what do I even do with my life? And thank goodness there was a space which was our music room. Students would often hang in there at lunch and they would just like riff. It was always such a safe space and I'm so grateful for that. But in the times where it wasn't there, I could see easily how a kid would be like, oh my gosh, I just need to make it look like I'm doing something. And maybe social media is kind of becoming that thing. So I'll give that grace for sure. But I would still say do your best to find some offline outlets.

Iliana

Do you think that safe, social and your observations of what is happening in the world, did that impact the founding of Skills Camp?

Bailey

Actually, no. So skills camp came first. It's kind of a funny story because I mentioned that role where I had at that university, where my role was very much half like half of my role was social marketing. Everything we talked about building digital community. But the other half of my role within student affairs, which is like I mentioned everything outside the classroom that supports student success. So things like Health and wellness, career centers, student events, experiences, housing, all those things, we kind of partnered with those departments to help them kind of update, innovate, co create their new programming. So it was very clear to me that the students who were using those services like Health and Wellness and going to resilience programming or career centers and understanding networking and personal branding and going to student events and engagement and all these things, the students who are using those services were more successful. But the reality was most didn't. And at the time there was work coming out from our government in Canada, which was reflected in the States as well, about a skills gap and a potential reason for it being a lack of essential skills in people in general. Those essential skills being things like resilience literacy, problem solving, a lot of soft skills. So it was clear to me also that those students become employees without the same requisite skills to succeed personally and professionally. And there's a bit of a blame game in the industry about who's responsible for educating people on these skills. Is it families, is it schools, is it higher ed, is it the workplace themselves, is it governments? And that blame game I think is in part of the reason why there's a gap in the first place. So skills, I just really thought I was the perfect person to solve the problem because I started my career in film and television and marketing. So I understood that part of business. I was literally working on these kinds of skills within the university and I just kind of put it all together and started delivering that. And I have to say at one point I felt like I was like, oh my gosh, I'm going to have this internal crisis at some point where I'm going to need to choose between safe social and skills camp. And I couldn't have been more wrong because it was a poetic thing of life. What a beautiful thing that when I did the honest research where I wasn't intending to come out of it with anything, I was even exploring time on social media, if that was even a good enough variable to indicate experience on social media. But like I told you, what came out of it was the most important thing was your offline self. And I was like, wow, I'm already building the solution of Skills Camp, which I'm still getting shivers today because it's like if you are more resilient, period, it will translate online, you are going to be more likely to handle whatever you see on that given day. Time management, self awareness, self confidence, all of these things translate to the online world. And actually I can now say affirmatively are the most important things. So then fast forward to today and the connection between the two institutions is stronger than it's ever been. Because as we were talking about just earlier, workplaces these days, especially in North America and post Pandemic are now going in the direction of hybrid for good. Some have gone full remote, but that means that we spend a lot of our time, especially knowledge work in digital cultures, workplace digital cultures, which means then that workplace culture is digital culture. So now suddenly my safe social world and my digital well being world is in my skills camp world, saying, like, hey, well, if you want to kind of take your workplace culture online or if you want to talk inclusion or tech life balance or all of these things, now I'm just pulling from both worlds all the time.

Iliana

I can imagine this must have been a beautiful moment where things just come together and make sense. You mentioned screen time and that if a person is more resilient in real life. This would also help them navigate their time online better. Does the actual amount of time people spend online affect the way they feel about themselves in their offline life? Is there a correlation?

Bailey

Screen time is an interesting thing. Parents always want to ask about screen time. The time you spend in any world, in any realm is going to affect you in other realms. We don't just stop being a person when we're learning online versus the offline world. So yeah, you spend time there, what you consume is of greater importance. However, recent research would say that the time is more inconsequential than the quality of the time. And when you say that, that sounds obvious. But people still ask me about screen time all the time and I would say you're on a road trip and your kid is watching YouTube for 10 hours. That might not be worse than if they even have 30 minutes where they've been triggered, harassed, they were left out of a group. The 30 minutes can do absolutely more damage than the 10 hours if the quality of the time is not good. Right? So it's about when we talk about something like resilience or the offline skills that's almost the proactive upstream work. Like, let's make sure that this isn't even a problem in the first place because you already have a good sense of self confidence. You've already done some of this learning. You understand that this is not a reflection of reality. Like to augment a photo makes it quite literally unreal. So even just having this language makes people better able to navigate the situation in the first place.

Iliana

Do you think that this new hybrid way of living actually requires new soft skills then? And has your engagement with Safe Social impacted the soft skills that you look at with Skills Camp?

Bailey

Like I said, Skills Camp is separate, largely operates separately. And actually, since that's my for profit business, part of our corporate social justice is funding the charity in this space, but other things too. So separately I've seen different trends through the soft skills development world. When I first started, I launched Skills Camp at the beginning of 2016, whereas Safe Social as an organization wasn't launched until 2020. So Skills Camp, when I first started, there was a lot of emphasis on job, like obtaining job skills, like networking. Personal branding was a huge one at the beginning, interviewing, communications. Then there was a stark transition over to well being. Like there was a big, pretty big change in the pandemic by far, by factor of over three. Our biggest seller is anything to do with stress management and resilience. And Burnout started to see the introduction of more emotional intelligence. Now I'm starting to see, oh, and then there was the wave of anything to do with diversity, inclusion, equity work. Yeah, right now I'm getting into a little bit more psychological safety and I think right. Now, what's really big is change, friendliness and adaptability.

Iliana

Well, you actually almost answer my final question about the future of soft skills, but I will ask it anyway. What skills do you think will become increasingly relevant as we move more and more online? With the dawn of AI, AR and VR?

Bailey

Resilience is a big one. Change, friendliness and adaptability. Cross cultural communication is going to be a big one as well. The trends that we're moving in are going to be increasingly online, increasingly global, so you got to react to that in your skills. The only things that don't change, though, are the soft skills. So it's worth investing in.

Iliana

Thank you so much, Bailey, for your time and all your valuable advice. Do you have any parting words that you want to leave with our listeners today?

Bailey

Well, I would say practice safe, social, do the things that you need to do to get the benefits of this while mitigating the risks and then teach others about it.

Iliana

I couldn't have said it any better. And we'll be sure to link everything we talked about in the show notes of this episode, links to your website of skills, camp and safesocial. Thank you so much for being here today, Bailey. It was an absolute pleasure to have you.

Bailey

Thank you very much.

Iliana

Thank you also to you, our listeners, for being here. We'll be back in two weeks weeks with more conversations on living and working well in a digital world. So if you enjoyed the conversation and the insights from today, make sure to subscribe to this podcast and I look forward to seeing you again next time.