When Your Best Friends Become Your Students: The Real Test of Teaching
Becoming an instructor
The experiences I lived with my first summer teaching students taught me even more about me than I ever imagined. I could see people coming with their own struggles, with their own anxieties and existential fears – they were coming to do a dive but didn’t imagine the things that would come up in the process. I realized that as much as scuba diving was bringing fascination in people, it was also bringing a lot of fears and insecurities. At the end of the day, you are going in an environment that your brain could easily mark as “danger”.
I had a couple of my best friends come over this summer to get certified.
One of them, Jenny, was super excited to try, and as soon as she got in and I asked her to put the regulator in her mouth and breathe on the surface, she just placed her face down without letting her ears touch the water. When I told her to get her face a bit further in, she just said “but water will come to my ears.” Her brain had started alerting her. By the time she realized she would need to get her entire body under the water, she started crying and feeling completely overwhelmed. It made my heart stop. The one thing I felt when scuba diving was peace, and now I was faced with the realization it was not the same for everyone. And the biggest block between peace and fear was the brain, the mind, the way it alerts us for danger when we start expanding our comfort zone and when we start feeling out of control.
Funnily enough, Jenny is a psychologist – and even knowing about how our mind plays tricks on us, she struggled to get in control. We spent a significant amount of time on the surface, did a bit of snorkeling with the scuba equipment, and in the end, Jenny did a little dive and really enjoyed it!
My other friend John came a couple of weeks after. He was my closest friend at the time, and the learning curve for both was enormous. John wanted to complete his Open Water course, and one of the requirements is to remove and replace the mask underwater. It is a requirement ensuring the diver will feel comfortable and safe, especially as this requires coordination between inhaling from the mouth and exhaling through the nose.
John struggled with this coordination – the mask became a physically and mentally challenging experience. We spent over 2 hours in the shallow water: breathing without a mask, clearing the mask without water, clearing the mask while pinching the nostrils, to finding ourselves negotiating that we cannot remove this skill from the requirements. We finished the day with a conversation which was eye-opening for both – I couldn’t do more than facilitate the ability and mindset, and John had to shift his mind from what was not working (breathing from the nose) to what was working (breathing from the mouth).
The next day we went in and decided to go for a dive before trying the mask again. John loved the feeling of diving, the freedom, the fish… and he realized he could only get to continue enjoying it by going through the “difficult thing.” We stopped at the end of the dive, and he himself told me he wanted to do the mask clearing. I could see the internal negotiation that was happening in his eyes. I could see part of his brain ask him “why are you doing this” and the other part responding “don’t be silly, you can absolutely do this.” I just showed him a sign that he was strong, he nodded, and filled up the mask. He stayed with the mask full and continued breathing, marking his own breathing from the regulator. I could see he was not comfortable, but he was determined. He stayed there for a while, opened his eyes, and realized he was still ok. And this was the moment – I saw him decidedly place his fingers on the top of the mask, exhale through the nose, and look up. Mask drill perfectly executed after a perfect mindset shift. He first smiled, and then we both started laughing – HE DID it!!! I couldn’t be more proud of him, and he was absolutely thrilled!
For him – he completed the skills needed to be certified as Open Water and absolutely rocked it as we were doing the last dives because he loved scuba diving. For me – I realized that teaching scuba diving is more than skills; it is personal transformation. It is the opportunity to empower someone to do “the hard thing” to achieve their dreams and to get to a better version of themselves.
This revelation would shape everything about how I approach diving instruction…
