We were at eighteen metres.
Visibility was good. There was no current. Nothing was “wrong.” My student was diving beside me, well balanced, breathing steadily. Moments earlier, he had completed a shallow-water exercise exactly as it was meant to be done: remove the mask, put it back on, clear the water. He had performed that movement dozens of times in the pool.
And in that moment, I suspected nothing.
Then he turned and looked at me.
There was something in his eyes behind the mask — fleeting, perhaps a second, perhaps less. Not fear. Not panic. Something finer than that. A kind of uncertainty. Then, before I could ask, he gave me the sign for “I’m okay.”
Before I could ask.
On the way home that day, I could not let go of that moment. Something had not gone right — but I could not name what had gone wrong. My student had made no mistake. The skill had been flawless. There was nothing to report.
So why was an alarm sounding inside me?
The unseen problem
Years later, when I found the answer to that question, I realised how simple it was — and that it was precisely this simplicity that had kept the industry from speaking about it.
My student knew the skill. But in that moment, he was not aware of what was happening within himself.
For decades, dive education has repeated the same formula: demonstrate a movement, have the student repeat it, tick the box if it is done correctly, move on. The formula works — until the real world stops being as predictable as a pool. Until something enters the scene: a small fatigue, an unexpected current, a buddy whose condition is quietly deteriorating.
That is the point at which simply “knowing the skill” begins to fall short. Because the real question is no longer, “Can you perform this movement?” The real question is: “Right now, underwater, are you truly aware of what is happening in your body and around you?”
I call this situational awareness. And the day I understood that it could not be written onto a checklist and marked “complete,” the first seed of Rubelis was planted — years before I knew it.
When I began looking for evidence
For a long time, this remained only a personal observation. An intuition. A feeling distilled from time spent in the field.
Then I found a study, and everything changed.
A peer-reviewed study published in 2026 observed 732 divers during real dives. The result surprised even me: on average, divers make contact with coral once every four minutes. Four minutes. Over the course of a long dive, that means dozens of contacts.
But that was not even the most striking number.
Roughly eighty per cent of those contacts go entirely unnoticed by the divers themselves.
Read that sentence again. In eight out of ten contacts, the diver is not even aware of what they are doing.
And the same study goes one step further: when divers were asked to estimate their own number of contacts, they gave figures far below the real count. They are not merely failing to notice — their beliefs about their own behaviour are wrong as well.
These are not people acting in bad faith. Nor are they careless people, at least not in the way we usually mean it. They are people unable, in that moment, to observe the relationship their own bodies are forming with the environment.
Just like my student. He knew the skill. But he did not notice the moment.
The uncomfortable question an instructor asks himself
After finding that research, I began trying an interesting exercise with my own instructor candidates. I asked them directly: as a dive instructor, how would you assess your own awareness of risk?
Almost all of them rated themselves as good, even very good.
Then I tested them with real scenarios and real observation exercises. And the gap — between how they saw themselves and how they actually behaved — surprised me every time.
There is a name for this: a natural tendency of the human mind to overestimate its own competence in an area where it has less knowledge or experience. In the literature, it is called the Dunning–Kruger effect. It is not unique to diving — but underwater, its consequences are far more tangible.
Now consider this: if that tendency can be so strong even in experienced instructor candidates who have trained for years, how strong might it be in someone putting on a mask and entering the water for the first time — someone who has never dived before?
And the standard training system does not even ask the question.
The space between “nothing is wrong” and “everything is right”
I want to be very clear here, because I do not want this to be misunderstood: this is not an argument that dive education is bad. Technical skills are necessary. Being able to clear a mask, recover a regulator, maintain buoyancy — these are essential foundations, beyond dispute.
But there is a space between “nothing is wrong” and “everything is truly right.” And that space is exactly where awareness lives.
A diver can finish a dive without making a single mistake — and still remain unaware of much of what is happening in their body, their mind, and their surroundings throughout that dive. A certification card cannot see that. A checklist cannot see that. Because both ask, “What did you do?” not, “What did you notice?”
After that day in shallow water, I began asking this question as an instructor. And every time I asked it, I found the same thing: students knew what they were supposed to do. But very few truly noticed the moment — or themselves within it.
A philosophy takes shape
The idea of founding Rubelis did not arrive in a single day or through a single decision. It was the accumulation of small moments over years: that hesitation in shallow water, those instructor candidates misjudging themselves, the eighty-per-cent figure in that study.
But all of it led back to the same question: what makes a diver so much more than a certification card?
The answer was not a skill. The answer was the ability to observe oneself.
That is why, when I created Rubelis Beyond, I deliberately moved away from the traditional model of “demonstrate and repeat.” Our programmes do not simply tell a diver what to do. They teach them how to notice their own behaviour, recognise their own limits, and truly see change in the world around them.
In doing this, I have been careful about one thing: grounding the work not in intuition, but in real research. When a person’s safety underwater is at stake, “it seems that way to me” or “this is how it has always been done” is not enough. Rubelis’ methodology is informed by published, peer-reviewed research — and wherever the science has a limit, we say so plainly. We know that Rubelis’ own long-term impact has not yet been measured and proven; that is why we limit our claims to what the evidence we have actually says.
Not the easy path, but the right one
I need to say this: it is not an easy philosophy.
It is far simpler to complete a checklist. To say, “They performed all twelve skills; they have earned the certificate,” is a story that is easy to measure, easy to sell, easy to tell. Teaching a person to observe themselves is much harder to measure, much slower, and far less showy.
But I have never forgotten that brief hesitation in the eyes of my student in shallow water. It appeared on no checklist. It occupied no box on any certification form.
And I decided to devote the rest of my career to helping shape divers who can see precisely that hesitation — and, more importantly, can see it in themselves.
Now I ask you
On your next dive, try something.
Enter the water. Follow your familiar routine. But at one point, stop — for a second — and ask yourself: what am I truly feeling right now? How is my breathing? Are my shoulders tense? Has something changed around me, and did I notice it — or did I simply assume that “everything is normal”?
That simple question is what lies at the heart of Rubelis. Not skill. Awareness.
And I would wager that in your first few attempts, you too will find what I found in my student in shallow water: far more unnoticed moments than you imagined.
That is exactly why Rubelis exists. To make those moments visible. And to help make a diver not merely “certified,” but truly ready.