The Recreational SCUBA Diving Learning Zone Model

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

This is undoubtedly an inspiring maxim, yet it’s a statement we would never want to hear from our instructors, buddies, or even the captain of the boat. And definitely not from the chef aboard.

But this maxim appears to be the unconscious default solution for many divers tackling one of the most critical issues in SCUBA diving: sustained personal skill development, whether this development means overcoming a problem, or achieving personal excellence.

By frequently diving beyond the limits of their certification, sometimes facing objectively more demanding conditions, and surviving these challenges, divers often confuse “experience” with “mastery”. This leads to an unjustified sense of overconfidence, even when not a single fundamental skill has likely been explicitly performed or reviewed. 

Many divers end up relying on a level of competence that is merely perceived and not real, diving as if driving on ice: unable to truly control events, but only accepting them and unconsciously hoping those events never show up.

In this document, we aim to lay the groundwork to bring clarity to this issue by providing a map from where we currently are to where we should strive to go, and how we can get there, while avoiding the costly pitfalls along the way.

Thank you for reading!

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