For young adults with cancer · Ages 18-39
Cancer hands you a pile of problems at once. Bright IDEAS teaches you how to take them apart, one at a time.
6 one-on-one sessions of about 60 minutes each, by video, with an interventionist who works with you on the challenges you actually have — work, school, money, family, the future — using a five-step method studied in oncology for more than twenty years. You choose every session time yourself.
The five steps
With optimism at the center — not hoping for the best, but treating a difficulty as something you can manage.
Identify the challenge or goal
- · Get the facts
- · Keep it simple
Define your options
- · Brainstorm
- · Strategize
Evaluate your options and choose the best
- · Balance costs and benefits
- · Pick the best
Act out your choice
- · Make a plan
- · Give it a try
See if it worked
- · Did it work?
- · Revise and redo
What the six sessions cover
Learning Bright IDEAS: The Five Steps
Your first session is the teaching session. You and your interventionist get to know each other and talk through why a step-by-step approach to problem solving helps — pausing before you act, making thoughtful decisions, and lowering stress — and what you can expect from the six sessions. Then you walk through all five steps together: Identify the challenge, Define your options, Evaluate them and choose, Act on your choice, and See if it worked, with optimism at the center. You finish by listing the challenges and goals on your mind right now and circling the one to work on first.
Practice: Your First Challenge
From here on, the sessions are about doing rather than learning. You start by reviewing the homework from last time, then take the challenge you circled on Worksheet 1 and work it through the steps with your interventionist — Identify the facts, Define and Evaluate your options, make a plan and Act, then See if it worked. Use whichever worksheets fit where you are in the problem. Before you finish, you agree what to try between now and the next session.
Practice: Keeping the Cycle Going
Review how the plan from last session went — what you tried, what happened, and whether it worked. If it did, recognize the effort and pick the next challenge from your list. If it did not, that is information, not failure: go back a step and try a different option. Either way you work a problem through the steps again, using the worksheets, and set homework for the week.
Practice: Thoughts, Feelings and the Next Challenge
Same rhythm: review homework, work a challenge, set homework. By now you will have noticed that how you read a situation shapes how it feels. This is a good session to bring in Worksheet 5 alongside the others — catch the automatic thought behind a strong feeling, test whether it is completely true, and write a more balanced thought in its place — while you keep working your current challenge through the five steps.
Practice: Running It Yourself
Your last practice session. Review the homework, then work a challenge through the steps with your interventionist taking more of a back seat, so that you are running the method rather than being walked through it. The Quick Check is there for the moments between sessions when you feel stuck. Set one more piece of homework to carry into the wrap-up.
Wrap-Up: Keeping Bright IDEAS
The last session looks back and looks ahead. You and your interventionist review and reinforce the parts of Bright IDEAS-YA that worked for you, and you tell us what the experience was like. Then relapse prevention: the setbacks you expect, how you will notice yourself slipping into old ways of handling problems, and how you will keep using the steps instead. Your final questionnaires are open this session. Thank you for taking part.
How it works
Check you're eligible
A short screener: your age, your diagnosis, where you get your care, and whether you can join a video visit. A few minutes.
Pick your six times
Choose your interventionist, then a day and time for each of the six sessions — all at once, before you start, so the whole program is in your calendar.
Learn it once, then practice
Session 1 teaches the five steps. Sessions 2 to 5 are practice: each time you work a real challenge of your own through the steps with your interventionist. Session 6 wraps up, so you leave running the method yourself.
Find out if Bright IDEAS-YA is a fit
The screener takes a few minutes and tells you straight away. If it isn't the right fit, we'll point you somewhere that is.
Check eligibility