What the water asks of you

There is a particular kind of attention that comes over me underwater.

I felt it again recently while diving Protea Banks and Aliwal Shoal, surrounded by sharks.

Oceanic blacktips moving through the blue, ragged-tooth sharks hanging almost motionless in the water, and on our last dive, Zambezis (bull sharks) appearing beneath us.

They don't all move in the same way. They don't approach in the same way either. You start noticing distance, direction, body language, how an animal turns towards you or away from you. The current is moving you at the same time, the group is moving, visibility changes, and somewhere in all of that you are keeping track of your own breathing and what is happening inside your body.

For some people, being underwater with sharks is about as far outside their natural environment as they can imagine. For me, after years of diving, the water feels familiar. But familiar does not mean I get to stop paying attention.

The ocean doesn't adapt to me. I have to read it.

Where is the current taking us? What is the visibility doing? Where are the other divers? How are the sharks behaving? How am I breathing? Am I relaxed? Am I aware of what is behind me as well as what is in front of me?

Around sharks, your own behaviour matters too. You don't chase them for a photograph. You don't thrash around trying to get closer. You give them space, watch how they move and let them decide how close they want to come. There is a strange balance between being completely present and not needing to control what happens next.

I love that feeling.

And somewhere during those dives, I realised how different this can be from the way we move through the rest of our lives. We become very attached to our preferred ways of operating. We learn what has worked for us before and repeat it. We develop a way of communicating, making decisions, handling conflict, leading people. Eventually we call it our style, or perhaps simply our personality.

This is just how I am.

The ocean gives you very little room for that. You can have a plan for the dive, but if the current changes, the plan changes with it. You can want to go in one direction, but conditions may make another choice more sensible. You can be completely comfortable one moment and suddenly need to pay much closer attention the next.

None of this means surrendering yourself to whatever is happening around you. Quite the opposite. The more demanding the environment becomes, the more important it is to manage yourself within it.

If something unexpected happens underwater, panic rarely improves the situation. Your body may react before you have had time to think. Your breathing changes. Your heart rate rises. Your attention narrows. You may feel the urge to move quickly or get away.

You cannot always prevent that first response. What matters is what happens next.

Can I notice what is happening in my body without immediately obeying it? Can I slow my breathing enough to see the situation more clearly? Can I separate what is actually happening from what my nervous system is telling me might happen?

That small space between reaction and response matters underwater. And I think it matters almost everywhere else too.

A tense meeting is obviously not a shark dive. A difficult colleague is not a predator. Missing a deadline is not a threat to your physical safety. I don't want to force the metaphor further than it deserves. But we carry the same nervous system into all of them.

Someone challenges us in front of a room and we become defensive. A project starts going wrong and urgency spreads. Someone goes quiet and we fill the silence. A client is unhappy and suddenly everyone is moving faster. We feel uncertain and compensate by becoming more controlling.

Often, before we have decided how we want to respond, something in us has already started responding. Self-leadership, for me, increasingly lives in that moment. It is not in being calm all the time, not in suppressing emotion or somehow becoming unaffected by pressure. It is being able to notice what is happening inside me while remaining interested in what is happening around me.

Because the environment matters.

There are moments when good leadership is decisive. People need clarity, and hesitation from the person leading them only creates more uncertainty. There are other moments when decisiveness becomes dominance. Sometimes a team needs direction. Sometimes they need you to stop directing long enough for somebody else to think.

A new employee may need structure and reassurance. Give the same level of instruction to an experienced specialist and it can feel like you hired them for their expertise and then refused to trust it.

Even empathy changes with context. One person wants to talk. Another needs space. One difficult conversation needs softness. Another has been softened so many times that what it finally needs is honesty.

The behaviour itself is not automatically good leadership. Its usefulness depends partly on the conditions in which it is used. That makes me sceptical when leadership gets reduced to a collection of fixed traits.

Be confident. Be empathetic. Be decisive. Be vulnerable. Be calm.

Yes... Sometimes.

But maybe the deeper skill is range. Can you move towards someone without crowding them? Can you step back without withdrawing? Can you make a decision when a decision is needed and tolerate uncertainty when one isn't? Can you bring energy into a room without making everybody match yours? Can you recognise that the way you successfully led one team may be exactly the wrong way to lead the next?

Adaptability sometimes gets confused with inconsistency, as though changing our behaviour according to context makes us less authentic.

I see it differently. I am not less myself underwater because I move differently than I do on land. I have adapted to the environment while remaining completely myself. Maybe leadership asks something similar of us.

There is another part of diving that complicates the idea further, though. When I am watching the sharks, I am also being watched. I am not an objective observer floating outside the ecosystem. My presence changes it, even if only slightly. My movement matters. My position matters. How closely I approach an animal matters. I am reading the environment while simultaneously becoming part of the environment I am trying to read.

We do this in rooms full of people too.

We talk about a tense room as though the tension were weather that rolled in without us. We talk about an anxious team, a difficult culture, an unmotivated employee, a stressful workplace.

Sometimes those descriptions are entirely fair. But we are still in the water.

A leader's urgency can become everybody else's urgency. Their defensiveness can teach people which subjects are safer not to raise. Their need to have an answer can gradually stop other people from offering theirs.

The opposite travels too. Someone who can stay present when a conversation becomes uncomfortable makes honesty a little safer. Someone who can hear bad news without immediately looking for someone to blame makes it more likely that the next problem will be raised early. Someone who does not need to dominate every silence leaves room for another person to enter it.

We affect the conditions we are trying to manage.

That might be one of the more uncomfortable parts of leadership, because it is much easier to diagnose an environment than to ask how we participate in creating it.

What happens to the room when I enter it? What becomes easier to say? What becomes harder?

Do people become more thoughtful around me, or more careful? When I am under pressure, does everybody else feel that pressure too? What happens to my listening when I already believe I know the answer?

The ocean makes this kind of feedback immediate. Ignore the current and you drift. Fight it unnecessarily and you exhaust yourself. Approach an animal badly and it moves away. Human systems are less obliging.

People adapt around us. They become quieter. They stop bringing certain things up. They learn how to catch us at the right moment. They compensate for our blind spots and sometimes become so good at doing it that we never discover those blind spots exist.

The environment adjusts to us just enough that we can forget we are affecting it.

I think that is why I find being underwater so clarifying. There is very little interest down there in who I think I am. The ocean does not care about my job title, how experienced I believe myself to be or what kind of leader I would like to imagine I am. There are simply conditions, other living things, my own internal state and the choices I make in response to all three.

The better I read them, the less I need to force.

And I believe that is something worth bringing back to land. Leadership is not only about knowing where you want to go. Sometimes it is about noticing where you actually are. Reading the conditions before applying the response that worked last time. Knowing what is happening inside you without making everybody else responsible for it.

And remembering, when you walk into any room, that you are not only reading the environment.

You are part of what the environment is reading.

Let's build capacity that creates impact.

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