UTD Essentials - What an experience

Just thought I would share some of my key experiences after completing Essentials I have only been diving for about 10 months and decided to take UTD Essentials after doing a lot of research and wanting some exposure to the DIR methodology. Overall, I feel pretty good in the water, I know that I am far from perfect, but when I compare myself to other divers that I dive with, I feel like I am a step ahead of a lot of them...So why not take the next step and see what all the commotion is all about? It can't be too hard....

The first thing you notice as you go into this is you are being provided blocks that continually build on each other, so nothing you learn gets wasted...No more going through the motions. As you hit the water, the first thing they tell you is "no more kneeling on the bottom. You are a new kind of diver and the expectation is for you to do tasks while maintaining buoyancy and trim." Also, as we go through our skills we are going to tape you so you can see exactly what you are doing. As someone else mentioned, this is one of the key differentiators. What I quickly found out is what you feel like you are doing and what you are actually doing usually aren't always the same.

During my class, skills that I felt like I was doing well back on my original dive, I was now struggling to do. Talk about frustration..... As we continued, my frustration just continued to compound. At times times, I would pull it all together and do a skill and feel really good about it....then as I started feeling good again, it would all fall apart. Ultimately the truth came out as we watched the videos.

As we watched the videos on the way home from Avalon, some key things became very obvious. The comfort I thought I had in the water was a figment of my imagination. First, one of the things that made things such a challenge was that we were rushing though everything. As we did a skill, we were in such a hurry to get through the task that we would let the task overwhelm us and let everything else (trim, buoyancy, awareness, etc) go to heck...Never had to worry about that before when I was kneeling on the bottom. Awareness of time is important. If you have the time, take the time. What's the rush? I did have those moments where I was solid, but at those times, my only focus was a single task such as trim and buoyancy during an ascent/descent. As soon as I added a task such as shooting a bag, or sharing air....Uh oh!!!! This is where the difference comes into play. Teaching a diver how to task load is the key to it all. Being able to control your focus on a given task (i.e. air share) without losing focus of the other tasks (i.e buoyancy and trim) is THE critical skill. Teaching a diver to do a skill while kneeling on the bottom is not teaching them...it is just going through the motions. No longer are you just going through the motions to appease an instructor. Practice is critical because a skill you learn today is a requirement for tomorrow. No more getting certified and abandoning the class/skills....Those days are over!

Ultimately, I would like to thank Jeff and the UTD crew for helping me work to achieve the next level. I know I am far from there, but I have been armed with the path forward, tools, and the support needed to help me achieve it. It was definitely a positively humbling experience, but for all the right reason. A good dose of reality as to how good of a diver you really are (or aren't) is not a bad thing. Especially now that you ARE a team and someone else is relying on your livelihood.