15/06/2026
FAILED! What now?
In this month's reflective blog, Rachael considers the challenge of responding constructively to failure...
CHANGE OF ROLE
June kicked off with me laying aside my non-diving role as Chief Medical Officer of Integritas Healthcare & Integridad: Heart for Detainees, based near Subic Bay (home of some of the world's most incredible and accessible wreck diving) on the Philippine Island of Luzon. Instead, I flew to another island - Panglao, neighbour of Bohol - and (except for the odd emergency requiring my attention) switched my mindset from medicine to diving.
BACK TO CLASS
For the first week, I instructed OWC (first level), Reactivate (refreshing out-of-practice divers) and AOW (next level) students of recreational ('rec') diving, meaning diving that is 40m deep (at the most), uses only air or slightly more oxygen-rich versions of it, and doesn't require you to come up in stages in order to avoid the bends (decompression sickness).
After saying tatty bye to my students who went off to dive with sharks (not as scary as it sounds), I rifled through my enormous kit bag, donned my old dive student rash guard, and wore it until it once more stank to High Heaven of stale sea water!
Yes, finally I had made time in my diary to start learning sidemount diving (done with a cylinder under each arm rather than one or two on your back) and technical 'tec' diving (>40m deep, using more complex gases, and/or staying under the water so long that you have to come up in stages to avoid the bends). It's been way over 18 months since I bought the first tec e-learning but, hey, life is busy!
SURPRISES
A couple of things were surprisingly easy-ish. For example, going into the sidemount course I was so sure that I'd mess up by breathing too much from one side and so end up lopsided, but funnily enough this did not happen once. So often in life, we fear something that just doesn't ever materialise!
STRUGGLES
Very many things though have been downright hard, bordering on fiendish. And whether it is lack of knowledge or practical struggles, it is often useful to analyse problems in terms of the unsurprising and the surprising...
UNSURPRISING STRUGGLES
Some struggles I expected.
- For example, I vacillated between having my gloves on (knew it would make it harder to feel the bolt snaps) or off (got hydroid burns and shredded fingertips - not good for my other career as a surgery-performing doctor). Eventually I cut off the gloves' thumbs and index fingers.
- As expected, several times I trapped a finger between two clanging cylinders - ouchy ouchy!
- I knew that my back kick was terrible and tended to take me up or down in the water column.
- And I had already predicted that it would be difficult to go straight from learning the fundamentals of sidemount to using it as the basis for learning tec.
SURPRISING STRUGGLES
Other struggles though were real surprises.
- Outside of the classroom, I found some of the signalling difficult to read and keep up with.
- I had totally forgotten that the reason I almost always hover in the buddha position is that my large-ish chest makes it really hard for me to hover on my front without moving my feet frequently. And the Buddha just does not sidemount dive!
- Because I usually cope absolutely fine with task loading (multiple things happening at once) in rec diving, I simply assumed that I'd be fine with tec multitasking. Hah! I struggled to do even two tec tasks at once - for example, ascending at a precise rate to whilst deploying my DSMB (underwater-to-surface rope + balloon contraption for signalling/straight up/down lines).
- And a personal upset plus a (as it turns out, not so trivial) back injury also rose up to bite me on the proverbial bottom!
I could go on as there were many more unwelcome surprises, but you get the general idea.
ENCOURAGERS
When something is proving really tough, it's good to remind yourself why you're trying to do it...
The major reason I decided to start trying to sidemount and tec dive is because I'm keen to extend the limits of my passion for diving with a purpose / trash diving / diving against debris (DaD) or whatever else you want to call it. (Also, sidemount is great for many divers with disabilities, and I'm an adaptive diving instructor. And yes, I admit it - there's a third, more selfish reason: I would just love to be able to explore the tiniest nooks and crannies of gloomy wrecks! At the moment I'm limited to 40m-back-to-the-surface. I so, so love small, dark underwater spaces!) Our beautiful, life-giving ocean is being choked by trash - plastic & bottles, lines, ropes & nets. Discarded fishing gear often lurks in the sub-40m range and/or takes so long to retrieve as to require decompression procedures. Hence my desire to deco dive.
After the hardest training day last Friday, I honestly was ready to throw in the towel. Thankfully my instructor suggested a two-day course break over the weekend so that I could practise my sidemounting on fun dives. That helped. But still, on Monday morning I jumped into the water seriously wondering why I was doing this to myself. And I guess God knew that I needed a bit of a motivational reminder: right there on an otherwise pristine piece of sea bed, as soon as my NDL hit zero at 45m, I drifted over my first bit of easy-pick deco debris. A single-portion sachet of chocolate paste (see photograph). I picked it up, tucked it into my glove, and smiled. And you know what? The rest of that dive went far more smoothly than on Friday.
SUCCESS FACTORIES
Encouragement is great, but it doesn't make up for skill. You can be as enthusiastic and determined as anything. But if you don't make the grade, then you shouldn't pass.
And isn't this the problem with a lot of rec diving courses these days? I've seen so many 'qualified' SCUBA divers who just cannot dive for toffee. They have no sense of the importance of buoyancy, and a few can't even swim! How can this happen when a swim test is an OWC performance requirement?! Many dive shops seem to have morphed into so-called 'success factories'. A few grades up, I've dived alongside a dive master who couldn't float without a buoyancy aid, which again just shouldn't be possible as performance requirements are specific on this skill. And very occasionally I see qualified tec divers diving in a way that is obviously incorrect even to my un-tec-trained eye.
Why is this happening in such a safety-critical sport?! Safety standards should always come above everything - including personal ambitions and plans.
PROPER CRITIQUING
So for my own sidemount and tec training, I was careful to select a high standards tec-specific training agency, a very high quality dive shop, and a really skilled instructor who calls a spade a spade and is the absolute opposite of a bare-pass box ticker. And indeed, he came through for me - passing me on sidemount and stronger enriched air skills, but failing me on deco skills at this time. To be honest, I was expecting this outcome, although I really did continue trying right up until the course ended yesterday.
HONESTY v EGO
Last week I blogged about the need for more women in positions of influence within the diving world. I will go to my grave maintaining that women are less individually proud and all about the ego than men. In life in general. And specific to this blog, in diving. So many men I've taught or guided on dives try to hide their 'mistakes' - not watching their NDL and then not telling you that they've accidentally gone into deco, telling you that they have more air than they do (why?!) whilst breathing so hard that they end up dipping into their reserve gas, straying from their buddy, and getting panicky etc. Women are far more likely to admit their struggles - up to and including admitting that they failed this course or that exam. Failure is not a blue word. So yes, 'I failed my tec diving course'. It's sad but it was the right decision and it's not shameful.
RE-EVALUATION
One of the big problems in our post-modern world is that people often tell themselves and their friends, 'You can do ANYTHING if you put your mind to it'. But that is patently untrue!
Most athletes cannot train up to become Olympic marathon runners. Your average high school kid has not got the combination of intelligence, opportunity and dexterity to become a brain surgeon. A morbidly obese lady can't transform into Miss Universe within a month. And an average rec diving instructor like me doesn't necessarily have the makings of a good-ish tec diver.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with re-evaluating oneself after a failure. In fact, to me it seems totally bonkers to do anything else! Maybe it's the doctor in me: a good medic continually re-evaluates everything.
Despite being attributed to him, Winston Churchill probably did not utter these words, 'Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts'. However, there are pearls of truth within this pseudo quote:-
No one-off course pass is a guarantee of enduring skill and safety.
Conversely, no one-off course failure is a guarantee of repeated failure.
Agreed.
And yes, there can be courage in continuing - practising over and over, hitting the books/e-learning once again, and then returning to repeat a course - but ONLY when it is appropriate. The big question is, 'IS it appropriate to try continuing to go in a particular direction?'
I'm going to have a mental rest and physical recover before I ask and answer that question for myself. I'll take some third party advice too. Yes, most likely I will end up throwing myself back into it - I'm highly competitive with myself! But still, it should be an active decision not a passive drift.
Regardless of what happens to me, happy, safe diving to everyone! And if you want an excellent Philippine dive shop - for rec courses, tec courses, or plain old fun diving - you couldn't do better than Blue Revival Diving College.
(This blog was written on Monday 15th June about chocolate flavoured ocean debris encouragement, and edited on Wednesday 17th into a reflection on a constructive response to failure.)
