The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - How U.S. Navy Dive School Drownpoofing Taught Me to Better Deal with Adversity | PPP #55

Episode Date: October 20, 2020

Sharing an analogy from completing the "drown proofing" portion at U.S. Navy Dive School to facing challenges in 2020 and an update on my October Sober journey.

In 1997, I was in Panama City, Florida as part of the dive medical technician course for the United States Navy as a hospital corpsman. Part of that course involved what's called drown proofing. And that's where you will get in the water with your hands and feet tied. You'll bob up and down. You will swim like that. You'll swim with just a snorkel, no mask. You'll get splashed. You'll have to flip around.

You'll swim just a snorkel, no mask. You'll get splashed. You'll have to flip around. You'll swim around the pool. You will ditch and don or drop all your stuff in the deep end, go down and get it, come back up with it on. And it's a heck of a test. It's a good metaphor for life now where there's chaos, there's challenge. But if we take a breath and we focus, we can get through it. And that's what we're going to focus on a little bit today on the People Process Progress Podcast. Everybody, welcome to episode 55, Drown Proof Yourself for Adversity. This is just a short one, a recap, like I've done recently of articles I

wrote on LinkedIn in the past. This one was from March of this year. And it speaks to me as a teenager, probably like a lot of other folks. I watched the movie Navy Seals, read books, cool VHSs. Yes, I'm 46 years old. Movies about the SEALs, the men with green faces was all in. I was like, yeah, I'm going to do it. Did some prep, took some swimming courses at the YMCA, did join the Navy, got a contract to be a hospital corpsman. I was a hospital corpsman. I never made it to the basic underwater demolition school though, that basic SEAL training because of one pull-up or it seems so because I didn't qualify on the test, but it's more than one pull-up and

we'll get to that. What I did do was make it to the Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center in the dive medical technician course. So my goal, my dream, or so I told myself, was I want to be a SEAL during the screening test which is 500 yard swim, bit of a rest, push-ups, rest, sit-ups,, rest, pull ups, rest, and then a mile and a half run. There are standards. I met the standard to be a dive medical technician, at least the basic, right? There's a baseline, but I didn't for seals. And I said, well, I'll do that anyway. So one right there, I knew I settled for something that I didn't really want to do. Not that I didn't want to do it, but it wasn't your dream, right?

It wasn't the thing that was burning in your gut, or at least I told myself that was burning in my gut. So I did make it. It's a pretty elite school. A small percentage of people made it just to the school, but I didn't make it through the school. I didn't focus enough on academics. I was good to go with the physical training. You know, the runs, the eight count bodybuilders in a drainage ditch because somebody was late for class that had a few inches of water, you know, that kind of stuff. What I wasn't good at was base

swims with fins. But what I really wasn't good at when I didn't realize that till later was I accepted something that I didn't 100% have my heart into. So I didn't 100% put my mind and body into it, right? What I did pass in there, even though I didn't pass my last open water base swim, was drown proofing. So if you've seen movies about seals, whether it's a documentary or the baiting parts of like Lone Survivor, other things, you see these folks in these short brown shorts, they're called UDT shorts or underwater demolition team shorts and there's a thing called drown proofing so you bob up and down in 12 feet of water your hands and feet are tied um you go up to the top get a breath blow your air out kind of chill out float down to the bottom push yourself back up and it's it's an

exercise in one obviously if you're going to be a diver, you have to be comfortable in the water with or without a scuba tank, right? Or whatever apparatus you're going to have. But it's really a mental exercise. The physical piece of it, you're in good shape. You have plenty of lung capacity. But when you are in 12 feet of water and your hands and feet are tight, you can get out of it if you really need to. And there's instructors there for safety. But, you know, when you're slowly blowing the air out, you descend to the bottom.

Then you push yourself back up. You get that breath. You go back down. You kind of get in a rhythm and it actually becomes pretty comforting. You're just kind of chilling out. But it also freaks a lot of people out and a lot of people are lost in that competency and that water and that drown proofing piece. For me, I did OK with that. Where I had a challenge at first was the other evolution is you have to drop your snorkel mask and fins in 12 feet.

You have to from the surface, get a breath, go down, put everything back on, clear your mask. And you do that by pushing on the top of your mask a little bit and then blow out your nose. So you're consuming oxygen. You've consumed oxygen. Rather, you're blowing some of that out. It displaces the water in your mask. You can see you go up. You have to keep your face in the water. I freaked out. Didn't get a good breath. Didn't calm myself down the first time. Slowed down. Said, okay, you know, let's do this ditch and don again. Dove right back down after, you know, some do this ditch and don again dove right back down after you know some encouragement from the instructor hey you can do this it's right there look right down

and then did it and so so what about this short thing about a piece of my life uh one it is don't settle i would say for if you qualify for something your heart and soul is not really into and it's a super challenge like seal training or dive training, which is also challenging, maybe consider going, you know what, I'm going to work harder and get to where I want to be instead of settling for what I qualify for now. Now in October 2020, that's tough for folks that need to find jobs or have opportunities with education. But really, when you're pursuing your dream and something that's a real mental and physical challenge, it pays to put the work in and prepare like you should. And there are folks that don't do any research.

They make it through SEAL training. No problem. I wasn't one of those people. I went on. I had a great career or great time in service, almost six years as a corpsman. So I don't regret any of that. And for me, it was lessons learned. I pushed myself and got through things I never thought I could.

And I also realized some of the lessons that I just mentioned. So what does that have to do with folks that are never going to be in the Navy, that are never going to be in a pool in 12 feet of water with dive instructors yelling at you? To me, the lesson of being in the middle of adversity is easier to handle when we're faced with challenges we're practiced for, like the incident command system, or much harder when we're faced with tasks we've never performed,

like dealing with crisis standards of care in a pandemic. So if we've practiced those, if we realize, hey, let's take a breath, let's focus on these, let's get used to them, it doesn't mean that we can't do it, even though it's hard and we realize, hey, let's take a breath, let's focus on these, let's get used to them, it doesn't mean that we can't do it, even though it's hard and we practice. It just means we need to slow down, think through the challenges we face, regroup our thoughts and teams, and get after it. And we're well into this pandemic.

We're well into this state of America kind of recalibrating itself on race and gender and all these different areas in this crazy political climate. So here's kind of three things and a few more comments that I think are helpful is to one, get after it by focusing more resources on expedited but well-planned processes, right? So to me, that equates to perfect is the enemy of good. So if you have to accomplish a drive-through testing center, if you're planning for a protest or civil unrest, if you're still doing the day-to-day business of migrating servers from one to the other, have a really good plan, get your really good team together and go forward, and don't get in that paralysis by analysis. Another thing is get after it by implementing out-of-the-box ideas like creating provider-to-patient family.

I've talked about this before. Telemedicine has gone leaps and bounds just in eight months, whereas it's been around for years because of necessity. Families can see their loved ones in the hospital via FaceTime or Zoom or other stuff. Families can be there for end of life, which is unfortunate, but it's good that they can be there virtually. And that's a huge thing. So think of other solutions to how you can monitor crowds without putting your people in the crowd and exposing them. Drones, cameras around your town. People may not like surveillance, but you know what? That's a public health measure from a public safety standpoint. If you're on a project, how are you monitoring your team's tempo through their work queues

and things like that? And then things get after it by continuing to coordinate with partners that you need and don't let egos or organizational silos get in the way, right? So we're all stressed out vendors and clients and nonprofits and government entities. And there's a mix of everybody working together. And at the end of the day, we should all have one banner we're under, and that's our team, not my team from this company and your team from that company and your team from this organization. There's enough split in our country in America and from across businesses that, you know, there's folks that are going to different doctors and they don't have shared records

together. And there's folks that are, gosh, one example was Lowe's where the back of the store could access my dad's account information and the front couldn't. That's just crazy, right? Organizations can do technologically almost anything. We can share almost any amount of data across logos, but those logos, whether it's themselves internally not planning well or logos across each other, choose not to do it. So let's, you know, as we're hopefully going to come together more as a country in America in 2020, you know, later this year, also as organizations think about what's the greater good, not for the greater profit. You know, to me, the pandemics produced numerous

areas for improvements. We face new challenges like I did at the bottom of the 12-foot pool. But this time, I think there's an opportunity for us to put into action the things we have practiced and learned from previous exercises, right? Planning meetings, there's after action reports, you know, and the key to that bobbing in the 12 foot of water on short breaths under the eyes of some of the Navy's most intimidating folks, I'll tell you, is to relax, take breaths, trust in yourself. It's the same as we all push to provide for our residents, colleagues, patients, family, and friends in day-to-day life, right? Let's all mentally drown-proof ourselves by accepting that we can't control everything. But let's take comfort in the thought that we do know what we're doing. We're just doing

it under a bit more pressure. Right? So give ourselves a break, but also realize, you know, we can do this. We have the skills. You know, if you want more resources, more templates, more information, more episodes, people process progress.com. And then if you go to that.com, and then forward slash templates, there's some planning tools there, both for project managers and incident managers. I hope you all are taking measures to drown proof yourselves for adversity through getting enough sleep, exercising. I am on sober October day 20 as of what is today, October 20th. So I have taken this time in one of the most challenging times where it's easy to, you know, kick back each night and have a beverage to take a break. It's been good. There's

some clarity. There's certainly some feelings in the past few days of wanting after a long hike, a nice cold beer with my burger. But that's part of the challenge, right? Is challenge yourself when it's hard, because when it's not hard, life's going to be so much easier, whether it's through the exercise, through it's taking a break from drinking or smoking or whatever vice you have, or just going for a walk or reading a book or disconnecting from the news or the internet. I like to be informed and look at entertaining videos and this and that too, but it's good to take a break. It's been very helpful both mentally and physically. So I wish you the best. I thank you

all so much again for listening to this podcast. Please reach out to me, peopleprocessprogress.com. My contact info is there, PPP underscore POD on Instagram, peopleprocessprogress at gmail.com. Thank you so much. Stay safe out there. Wash those hands and Godspeed.