This year, I wanted to do my end-of-year reflection a little differently.
Rather than sitting down to write a traditional review, I asked an AI platform to act as an interviewer and talk me through the year. I answered the questions out loud, and then used the same tool to help shape the conversation into something readable. It felt like a slightly playful experiment, and also a surprisingly good fit for how I think and work.
What follows is an edited version of that interview. It is a reflection on what didn’t work, what surprised me, and how some ideas that initially felt like failures ended up pointing me in a more useful direction.
Interviewer: When you look back over the last year of work with Fit to Dive, what feels most significant to you about how the year unfolded?
Laura: If I’m honest, the most significant thing for me last year is how much of it didn’t work.
I had a couple of aims around building group formats, as a way of delivering some of the things I do in one-to-one work to a wider audience and making them more accessible. I was particularly interested in working with common diver issues, things like mask skills or deploying an SMB, where I know these approaches can be helpful, and where not everyone can access individual support.
In the previous year and earlier this year, I did a lot of additional training around group-based ways of working and specific, well-evidenced protocols for working with fears, blocks, and barriers, including in diving contexts. Despite that, I haven’t managed to get those groups up and running.
The issue hasn’t been the delivery. It’s the organisation. Getting enough people to attend at the same time has been the sticking point. I tried different formats, and they didn’t quite work either. Ultimately, I wasn’t able to make that happen.
Interviewer: How did you make sense of that professionally and personally?
Laura: One of the concepts I’ve been very interested in this year is productive failure. I see it a lot in teaching diving. People are often most open to learning something new immediately after something hasn’t worked.
If a student comes to the surface finning hard, struggling to stay up, out of breath and working too hard, that’s the moment they’re receptive to learning a method for getting positively buoyant (inflate BCD). The experience creates the need for the information. If you give the same instruction beforehand, it often doesn’t land.
That idea translates well to this year. I’m trying to view these difficulties as productive failure. One thing that became clear is that my attention was split. While I was trying to build the groups, I had other ideas pulling at me, and I found it very hard to focus on one thing.
At the same time, another route to widening access to my work started to feel more compelling. I also had to be honest about how I work best. I find it much more straightforward to work deeply with individuals, and I work well through writing. Group formats bring up more resistance for me, and that’s something I may need to explore further. For now, an alternative approach makes more sense and opens things up more widely: creation of recorded audio practices that scuba divers can access. I make these at a time that works for me, and divers use them whenever they want!
Interviewer: How did your one-to-one work with divers sit alongside all of this?
Laura: In many ways, that work is the most established part of what I do. I’ve been working as a clinical psychologist for over 15 years, and that experience carries across. At the same time, there’s very little written about how to work with scuba divers specifically. There’s no handbook for the kinds of issues divers bring.
Because of that, every person I work with teaches me something new. I’m constantly linking their experiences with existing theory, and noticing where the gaps are.
I use established approaches, particularly Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR), which apply very well to divers who’ve experienced distressing or traumatic events. I also work with people fairly soon after incidents, where there are ways of reducing longer-term impact. That’s work I find particularly valuable, helping in preventing PTSD and other problems that can emerge after a distressing dive.
Alongside that, working with individual divers continually reminds me of the consequences when things go wrong. It reinforces how helpful it can be to support things that might seem small, like becoming more comfortable with a flooded mask, speaking up when something doesn’t feel right, or building confidence with a skill.
I also end up learning a lot about the medical side of diving incidents. Having studied diving medicine at an appropriate level for a lay person, as a non-medic, has helped enormously. It means I have a working understanding of the kinds of medical experiences divers describe, and when appropriate, I can encourage people to go back to their diving doctor or specialist for further assessment.
This year I spent time learning more about things like laryngospasm, patent foramen ovale (PFO), and immersion pulmonary oedema or immersion pulmonary edema (IPE). These are experiences that can be frightening for divers and are often poorly understood. That kind of learning happens naturally through the work.
Interviewer: You are now developing a library of guided audio practices for divers, brought together under the idea of The Invisible Toolbox. How do you see these practices working?
Laura: I like thinking about these practices as a container for helping people metabolise experience.
In diving, we talk a lot about experience making you a better diver. If you’re a scuba diver reading this, you’ve probably had the experience of struggling on a dive or on a course, and being told by an instructor or guide, “That’s OK, you just need more experience.” That’s partly true, and it’s not the whole story.
To actually learn from experience, we need more than the experience itself. We need ways to slow down, reflect, absorb what happened, notice gaps, let go of any distress, and then decide what to do next. That next step might be seeking more information, changing a habit, adjusting a process, or adding something new to how we dive.
That’s a cycle, and we don’t always complete it.
These practices create a space to slow that cycle down. Some will work like guided log booking, helping divers look at more uncomfortable aspects of a dive in a safe and supported way. We naturally avoid discomfort, so having a container that allows us to sit with it matters.
Another example is fear. If something has gone wrong underwater, the appropriate thing at the time is often not to feel the fear, but to act. The fear then gets shelved. If we don’t come back to it later, it can linger. Slowing down afterwards to acknowledge it, learn from it, and let it go can be an important part of learning. The guided practices are designed to support that.
Interviewer: As you close this reflection, is there anything else about how you are working now that feels important to name?
Laura: Artificial intelligence has changed how many of us work, particularly those of us who write. I’ve had to think carefully about how I relate to that.
Writing has always been effortful for me. I have a lot of ideas, and sitting down to write them is hard. I also find verbal communication difficult. Dictation never worked for me, particularly when another person was listening and transcribing. Knowing someone else was there made it much harder to speak freely.
What I’ve found with AI is something different. I can speak in a way that’s much closer to my inner monologue, have it recorded, and then lightly tidied. That silence I normally need to write in, I can access it while speaking.
This has completely changed how I write, particularly for the audio practices. I’ll often go for a walk, along the beach or near water, and let a practice form. I then speak it out loud, have it shaped into a script, and later record it. The words are mine, and the process flows much more naturally.
It has a better energy, and I think that carries through to the listener as well. Creating the practices in motion, in the environment, rather than at a desk, feels more alive and more connected to the way the practices are meant to be used.
Closing
Looking back, this year hasn’t been about getting everything right. It’s been about noticing what didn’t work, staying curious about why, and letting that information shape what comes next.
Some ideas stalled. Some plans quietly fell apart. Others turned out to be far more interesting and useful than I initially realised. In hindsight, many of the things that felt like failures were simply pointing me away from approaches that didn’t fit, and towards ways of working that feel more sustainable, more accessible, and more honest.
If there’s a theme running through this year, it’s that mistakes can be informative, failure can be productive, and learning often happens after things don’t go to plan.
Fit To Dive 