The business lesson I learned while completely out of my depth

Two years ago, I nearly quit my open water lifeguard qualification because I decided I didn’t belong there.

This week, I had to go back and do it all over again, and it was fascinating how quickly all those old feelings came flooding back.

Let me take you back to August 2024, when I set off to Lake Windermere to do my open water lifeguarding certification with the RLSS.

If you’ve been in my world for any amount of time, you’ll know how passionate I am about cold water and wild swimming and adventure, and bringing that spirit and feeling of invincibility into the entrepreneurial journey. I also know there are people out there doing this stuff without the proper qualifications, so it was really important to me that if I was going to incorporate this into my work, I did it properly.

It was a full-week intensive course with a lovely, lovely group, and the first couple of days had gone really, really well because it was all classroom stuff. It was academic stuff, it was very intense and it was all things I didn’t really know because I don’t come from that world, but I am the archetypal Good Girl. I am very, very good at academic stuff, and I felt like I was nailing this thing.

And then it was time to get into the lake.

Now, it’s really important to understand that my type of wild swimming is lady breaststroke. I like floating about in waterfalls and lakes and I’m a perfectly competent swimmer, but I am absolutely not competitive. Everybody else on the course seemed to be a triathlete or an open water coach or a ‘proper’ swimmer.

We went to get our wetsuits on and I pulled out my crappy one from Go Outdoors that I use when I go bodyboarding with the kids in Cornwall. They all came out in competition-grade wetsuits.

I looked around and thought, hang on, we might be in trouble here.

Our first task was to get into the water and swim to a buoy that seemed to be pretty much on the other side of the lake. It might have been August, but if you’ve ever swum in the Lakes, you’ll know that water doesn’t exactly warm up, certainly once you get away from the shore. It was blowing a hoolie that day as well, so the water was really choppy.

Everybody else set off with their competitive front crawl, while I set off doing my lady breaststroke. I’m pretty fast at breaststroke, but it’s not slick regardless, and because they set off so proficiently I was absolutely left in their wake.

I couldn’t get my breath. I was getting hit in the face by the ripples and splashes they’d left behind, the waves were smacking me in the face, I was swallowing water and I couldn’t get my rhythm going.

And I ended up having a panic attack.

If you’ve ever had that feeling of being out of your depth in water when you don’t feel safe, it is absolutely terrifying. It’s this primal fear where you genuinely feel like you might die.

Thank god, I managed to get myself back to shore, and I had to go to the instructor and say, “I can’t do this.”

For somebody who has absolutely smashed pretty much every academic test she’s ever taken, admitting that I couldn’t do something was effing horrible. I was devastated.

And then the instructor looked at me and said, “Are you sure you want to carry on with this?”

Well. You can imagine where my mind went.

I’ve screwed my business. I’m not going to be able to run the retreats the way I want to. I’m a failure. I don’t belong in this world.

What’s interesting is that a couple of months earlier I’d published my book, Why Impostor Syndrome is Killing Your Business, and there I was going through the full rainbow of symptoms myself.

I don’t belong in this world. I’m a failure. I’m not enough. I’m not worthy. Who the hell am I to try and get qualified in this space?

It was horrible.

I spent the whole afternoon spiralling and somehow got through the rest of the session, then sat in my camper van that evening and rang Ant. I poured my troubles out to him, crying and saying I didn’t want to be there anymore. I wanted to come home. That there was no point wasting the next few days trying to do this when I couldn’t even do the basic swim requirement.

He was, of course, really sympathetic and said, “Look, you can come home if you want. Of course you can. But what advice would you give the kids?”

And I was like, well, sod you.

Obviously I had to stay and figure out how to do this thing.

And then I got hit by a little bit of divine inspiration, which was to put a post on LinkedIn and ask for help.

Not in one of those crying-CEO, fake-emotion, humble-brag ways of asking for help, but a genuine: I am really struggling here. I don’t know what I’m doing. Can anybody help me?

I sat in that van eating something sad for my tea and was absolutely overwhelmed by the outpouring of support I received.

I tried to find the post recently to see how many impressions and likes and comments it got and I couldn’t find it, but it was thousands and thousands. I think it might still be the most popular post I’ve ever done.

The support ranged from “Claire, you can do it” right through to people saying, “Look, this is how you swim in this situation.”

I am so grateful for the support I received that night because it made me feel like I wasn’t alone, but it also gave me the courage to go and try again.

So the next morning, before anybody else got there, I arrived at the lake and got into the water on my own. I taught myself how to swim front crawl and I did the swim I’d failed to do the day before, on my own, because I needed to prove to myself that I could do it.

Every stroke I took, I had all the advice I’d been given ringing in my mind. It was like this little crowd of cheerleaders sitting on my shoulder, spurring me on and letting me know I could do it.

Long story short, I smashed it.

I did the rest of the training and completed a pretty intense assessment, including a live timed rescue from the water. I qualified, and I was really, really bloody proud of myself.

I hadn’t really thought about that experience for a while until this week, because two years later - it was time to do my renewal.

And what has fascinated me is how much going through that situation again brought all the old stuff back up.

Even though I had the muscle memory and two years of evidence that I could do it, I could feel all those discombobulated feelings coming back. Not being good enough. Being in some way lacking. Not really belonging in that world.

Which, when you think about it, is ridiculous.

Since qualifying as an open water lifeguard, I’ve gone on to do several other qualifications in the wild swimming and open water community. I’ve used these skills in my work. I’ve got two years of evidence that I know what I’m doing.

And yet there it was again.

That same old feeling.

The difference this time was that I had the evidence to recognise it for what it was.

I sat my renewal assessment this week and I absolutely smashed it.

And actually, going through all of this again has reminded me that the original experience gave me two of the most humbling but golden business lessons I’ve ever received.

• The first is about asking for support.

So often as business owners, founders and entrepreneurs, we feel like we’ve got something to prove by being the strongest, by demonstrating how much we can carry on our shoulders, by white-knuckling our way through doing the thing.

Actually, asking for help could be the very thing that transports you to your next level.

I’ve recently had that lesson again in business. There’s that saying that if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together, and I think there is so much truth in that.

• The second lesson is that you get to decide where you belong.

Since qualifying as an open water lifeguard, I’ve encountered quite a lot of snobbery about my particular brand of wild swimming.

There are people who don’t seem to get that because I’m not using these skills and qualifications competitively or for sport, and because I choose to use them as part of the WildEdge method and as experiential coaching to help the clients we work with, that doesn’t make what I do somehow lesser.

I think that’s bullshit.

There are going to be some rooms as a business owner that you walk into and immediately feel like you’ve got no business being in. Sometimes you can feel like you need to prove that you belong, and sometimes that’s helpful. Sometimes you do need to do what you need to do to make sure your voice is heard.

But sometimes you need to build your own rooms.

Sometimes you need to intentionally decide where you belong and exercise some discernment about which fights are worth fighting to pull up a chair at somebody else’s table, and when you need to build your own table and invite your own people to it.

Two years ago, I stood on the shore of Lake Windermere absolutely devastated because I thought I didn’t belong in that world.

This week, I went back and felt some of those same feelings all over again.

And then I absolutely smashed the assessment.

Maybe that’s the real lesson in all of this.

Feeling like you don’t belong doesn’t mean you don’t belong.

You get to decide that for yourself.