So what do you do when you find out that 12 young boys and their football coach are stuck nearly two kilometres in a complex cave system in Thailand and the monsoon rains have just begun?

You call John Volanthan.

I remember watching this rescue unfold on the news back in 2018, and like many others I had basically already assumed them all to have died. It sounded like something out of a Mission Impossible film. There was, sadly, one death and that was a Thai Navy SEAL who got trapped inside on the of the chambers and ran out of oxygen. The boys and their football coach all survived. What can we learn from this event?

This particular book is a combination of two different things. The first is a detailed recollection of the entire rescue process from the person who helped put it together, and the second is a series of reflections on life lessons which you can put into daily practice to help you in whatever task you have set yourself.

This combination makes for a page-turning read, and stands out as one of the very few self-help books that is written by someone who has proactively put their advice directly into practice. There are hundreds of texts written by psychologists and high profile business experts on personal development, but the ones for me that really stand out are those written by people who have applied their lessons in practice, often in extreme circumstances.

I was curious to try one of them out this last week as I have been reading the book. Basically, divers do this thing called ‘decompression’ when they come up for air from a deep dive. They have to do this in stages, which means hanging about at higher and higher points towards the surface so their bodies can adjust properly. If they mess this up, they can get something called ‘the bends’, which is a form of decompression sickness.

The work equivalent, if you’ve had a very tough week which I just have, is to take regular naps. Time out. 30 minutes is enough to recharge a little bit, so I experimented with doing one task, then resting 30 mins. Doing another, then resting again. Slowly, I cut the nap times back to 25 mins, then 20 etc, until I was no longer napping. This has made a really big difference to my energy levels and how I feel. Well worth giving a go!

I don’t think we realise, if we’re working towards a goal, just how difficult it is to manage fatigue. This is partly because fatigue is a compound of many low level stressors, so we tend to keep going until suddenly we feel exhausted. A key indicator of this is waking up after a very long nights’ sleep and still feeling tired. When this happens, it’s time to decompress and take things really easy. This happened to me a few days ago so I’ve been taking lots of regular naps and feel a lot better for it. I have the cool visual in my mind of a scuba diver gradually surfacing, resting, then focusing once again on another goal. This is a big part of general wellbeing. John Volanthen has a lot to say about managing tiredness and it is interesting how he identifies his own limits by looking out for small but potentially deadly warning signs from his thoughts and actions. Well worth a read.

Lastly, I’ve noticed that although I was planning on writing an A-Z theme of personal development, and had even put aside a word for this blog (the word ‘belief’), I feel like it would be too much like shoehorning a concept into a post where it does not really need to be. The idea of decompression both resonated and worked for me so well that this is the more important message in my opinion! Strange how writing works sometimes.

Up next – ‘The Diary of an Apprentice Astronaut’ by Samantha Cristoforetti.

Until next time…