Diving, Leadership, and the Importance of Self-Awareness
Learning your limits before the current does
Cold water does not care how clever you are.
You step off a boat into dark north Atlantic or Pacific west coast water and the rules simplify very fast: breathe, see, stay with your buddy, know your limits, manage the unexpected. You can bring degrees, designations, an impressive biography. Underwater you are just a body in a hostile environment with a tank that will run out.
That is why diving is such a useful mirror for leadership and careers. Everything you normally hide behind falls away. Self-awareness stops being a “nice to have” and becomes the difference between a clean ascent and two people in trouble.
Self-awareness when the environment does not care
Many professionals can remember one instructor who set the standard for how teaching ought to feel. In diving, that may be someone fresh out of the navy who has poured most of his savings into a modest boat with a hopeful name and spends weekends taking small groups into a cold bay.
He is not auditioning as a guru. He wants you to understand the sea, your equipment, and yourself. He watches the anxious student who fails the theory test or panics in shallow water and responds with extra time, calm explanations, and another chance rather than humiliation. Fear becomes information, not a defect.
You remember that kind of instructor because you felt guided and respected. You were not a throughput unit. You were a person learning how to operate in a hazardous environment.
That is what good leadership feels like, and what many highly educated professionals almost never experience around their own careers. You are taught to accumulate technical mastery. Very few people ask whether your temperament and limits are being honoured or quietly ignored.
Later, if you take a rescue diver course, the tone hardens. Training stops being about your badges and starts being about responsibility. The core message is simple and brutal: one victim cannot become two — or even more.
If someone is in trouble, you assess, plan, and act if you can do so safely. If you cannot, you do not sacrifice yourself to the situation, in theory. The sea will happily claim a second person who overestimates their strength or underestimates the current.
That line lands harder than any mnemonic. You see how often, on land, you have tried to “save” a team, a boss, a project or a relationship by throwing more of yourself into something that was already fundamentally unsafe or unsuitable. Stepping back begins to look less like cowardice and more like wisdom.
In leadership and careers, rescue mindset turns into uncomfortable questions:
Where are you allowing yourself to become the second victim in a system that has already shown you its limits?
Where are you clinging to a role, a firm, or a relationship that is dragging you under simply because you cannot bear the story of leaving?
Self-awareness here is not naval-gazing. It is survival.
Systems, sunk costs, and the stories that trap you
Warm, clear water feels friendly, which is exactly why it can be dangerous.
On expensive tropical trips, the pressures change shape. You have spent serious money and precious holiday time. The sun is shining, the water looks benign, the operator wants full boats, and there is often a bar waiting afterwards. Saying no to a deep or complex dive feels almost impossible. You hear the voice: you came all this way, everyone else is going, you will be fine.
You see the consequences in small ways: divers doing advanced dives with barely adequate skills; people shortcutting safety stops because the boat is rolling; someone taking hot showers and hard drinks after deep dives and later wondering if the strange afternoon symptoms are “just tiredness” or the edges of decompression sickness.
The career parallel is obvious. You accept a role that does not fit because the title flatters you or the firm is prestigious. You stay in a narrow lane for a decade because the pay is good, even though the work is slowly hollowing you out. You agree to one more year in a city that never felt like home because relocating would be expensive and embarrassing.
In both settings, sunk cost becomes a trap. The fear of “wasting” what you have already invested blinds you to the larger risk of compounding a bad position. You are less afraid of danger than of admitting a story has run its course.
Technical fields also love acronyms and mnemonics. Diving agencies use them. Professional bodies use them. They make exams passable and marketing tidy. You memorize a list, tick the right boxes, and collect another card or set of letters.
The gap appears when the environment stops cooperating. Acronyms do very little when an unexpected current hits, visibility drops, a buddy bolts for the surface, or a regulator fails. In that moment you fall back on something deeper than rote learning: practiced judgment and honest appraisal of your own capacity.
Careers fail in the same place. Plenty of people can recite risk frameworks, leadership models, or code-of-ethics language. Fewer can sit in front of a genuinely ambiguous situation and say, with calm clarity: this is beyond my limit; this is safe enough if we change these conditions; or this looks attractive but the structure is wrong and the incentives are misaligned.
If you have spent your working life inside systems that reward performance and polish over reflection, you will not find that ease by accident. You have been trained to look confident, not to tell the truth about what you can actually carry.
Buddies, teams and the question of suitability
In diving, your life is tied to your buddy. If your buddy lacks self-awareness, pushes beyond their skill, or disappears chasing a turtle or a photograph, you inherit their risk. The wrong buddy turns a simple dive into a near-miss.
Careers work the same way. The wrong manager, founder, board, or peer group can drag you into ethical grey zones, chronic overwork, or reputational danger long before you realize what is happening. You discover too late that your “buddy” does not respect limits, does not tell the truth when visibility drops, and does not share your sense of what counts as safe.
Suitability, in that sense, is not about whether you are tough enough. It is about fit. Does this team treat risk honestly or cosmetically? Does this leader respect human limits, or glorify burnout and bravado? Are you allowed to speak up when the metaphorical visibility goes to zero, or are you expected to smile and press on?
Choosing a diving buddy, an operator, or a boat is practice for choosing colleagues, firms, and boards. You look for people who respect the environment, prepare properly, and know when to call a dive. That is not squeamishness. That is stewardship.
A leader who understands suitability does not wait for the crisis to reveal character. They notice how people behave during boring checks and early warnings. They take seriously the quiet signals that say “this partnership will drag us under” and change course before the story becomes dramatic enough to impress outsiders.
What this means for your leadership
Leadership in finance and other high-stakes professions often happens under metaphorical water: limited visibility, real pressure, and consequences that stretch far beyond your own CV. You carry responsibilities to clients, colleagues, stakeholders, your family, and your future self.
From that perspective, diving offers a unapologetically blunt set of questions worth asking more than once:
Where are you playing the hero when you are already at your limit, silently turning yourself into the second victim?
Where are sunk costs and pride keeping you in a role, firm, or pattern that your wiser self knows is no longer safe or suitable?
Where has group culture – in firms, professional bodies, or training – taught you to perform competence instead of owning your real capacity?
Where are you trusting the wrong buddies because changing teams or leaders would be awkward?
Self-awareness in these questions is not a wellness add-on. It is the foundation for any leadership that hopes to endure. Technical mastery and credentials matter. Without honest awareness of your limits, your environments, and your companions, those same strengths can carry you into deeper, colder, and perhaps inescapable water than you ever intended.
You have one life, one body, one mind. You are not expendable, even if parts of your industry quietly behave as though you are. The work now is not to collect more acronyms or to pretend you never feel the current. The work is to learn, with increasing clarity, where you can safely go, who you can safely go with, and when you need to turn for shore while you still have air in the tank.