Learning important life skills through scuba diving

There are many different ways and places where we learn life skills. Maybe it’s through a parent, teacher, coach or friend. Maybe it’s through participating in a sport, doing your part at home or even through learning to play a new instrument. But did you know that you can learn some of the most valuable life skills through scuba diving? This is because scuba diving takes you out of your comfort zone, creating an accelerated learning experience and is a great way to challenge yourself.

"...scuba diving takes you out of your comfort zone, creating an accelerated learning experience..."

 

Communication

This might sound funny since you have to have a regulator (breathing apparatus) in your mouth the whole time. How are you supposed to communicate and actually improve this skill through scuba diving? Firstly, divers have their own type of “language” underwater. For the most part, they communicate through the means of hand gestures. This forces you to find creative ways to communicate with one another because believe me there’s certainly not a hand gesture for every type of situation. You are forced to focus a lot more on your dive buddy’s body language. In general, being buddy conscious is quite a big deal when you go scuba diving so you also become a lot more aware of other people’s needs and how they are communicated.

Stress-management

When you do your first diving course, namely your open water scuba course, you learn a lot of safety procedures and of course what to do in the case of an emergency. This is crucial when diving since it’s such a technical sport and something can easily go wrong through human error. Most of these crisis management situations will be practised and tested before you will be qualified to go diving. This forces you to learn how to keep your cool in stressful situations and how to handle them effectively or better yet, to avoid them altogether.

There are even further courses that you can do after your initial open water course that will help you even more in handling stressful situations, like the rescue diver course, which basically entails what the name says. You will do first aid in this course but also do more in-depth crises scenarios and learn how to handle each one of them. You learn to focus on the people around you, to spot stressed divers long before the dive has started to help them relax and sort out whatever is on their minds.

Self-awareness

Some of the main things running through your head when you start diving, are thoughts about yourself, how you are feeling, where you are in relation to your environment and where all your gear is located. You will constantly asses yourself. This is an important part of self-awareness since, in its essence, it’s all about the knowledge of your own character and feelings. The amazing thing about scuba diving is that you pick up this skill almost without realising it, you just automatically start doing it while diving since it’s essential for you to have enjoyable and safe diving experiences.

How to get started

If after reading this article you feel like you might benefit from taking up diving, click here to see what courses are available for you to get started. Maybe you’re already a qualified scuba diver but would like to enhance your skills by further education. The Advanced Open Water course or Rescue Diver course might be viable options for you. With every new course you do, you learn new skills to become a better scuba diver and a more well-rounded individual.

 Article by
Katia Theron