Learning Swimming Skills and Techniques Won’t Make You Feel Safe in Water

Most swimming and training classes (even beginners’ classes) do not teach the foundations. First things first! You need to overcome your fear of water before you learn swimming skills and techniques.

Our brains know whether we are or are not comfortable around deep water, so spending time in water practicing skills and techniques won’t make fear go away. The danger of not addressing fear before learning skills and techniques is that if the brain triggers a fear response while you are in water and you panic, you increase your chances of drowning—the third leading cause of unintentional injury death worldwide.¹ It’s only after overcoming your fear that everything else falls in place. Skills and techniques are easier to imbibe when you’re not afraid of drifting off into the deep end.

In an online video about my 2016 near-drowning incident while playing in a pool, I discussed how I had taken and passed multiple safety courses for my offshore job, including learning to ditch a burning platform into the sea, how to rescue myself from a helicopter that had crashed and overturned in the sea, how to swim to a life raft, and how to survive and call for help if on a lifeboat at sea. I explained that some of the classes were in deep pools and some were in the ocean, but the near-drowning experience revealed to me that I did not have the foundations. All the skills and techniques I learned in all of the classes I had taken did not eliminate my fear of deep water. This realization led me on a pursuit to address my unease around deep water and gave birth to my Five Firm Foundations for Freedom From Fear course, which guides participants on a step-by-step journey to overcoming their fear or discomfort around deep water. The course can be found here.

References
_{^{1. https://www.cdc.gov/drowning/global/index.html}}