Summary: When I was in high school and college, my brothers and I worked part-time diving for mussel shells in the Kentucky Lake area.<br><br> <br><br> We would sell them by the pound at local markets, and those shells would in turn be sold to Japanese markets. Apparently, the pearly-white cuts from those shells are unique implants for growing cultured pearls in oysters. <br> One day I was climbing across the bottom of an area that was ten to twelve feet deep. The only sounds I could hear were the hissing breaths from my regulator. As I found shells, I placed them in a net-bag I had clipped to one side of my weight belt. <br> Because of low visibility, we didn’t swim with tanks on our backs. Instead my compressor, tank, and filtered line all connected to my boat. I was connected to a 50-foot air hose taped together with a 50-foot line of rope, and my regulator line was connected by a clip-on-hook to my weight belt at one end and attached to the boat and compressor at the other end. As I worked along an even stretch of clay and mud, I swept the surface with my hands while pulling the boat along with me.<br> Suddenly, I came up to a trotline. This was a problem. Above me somewhere, long fishing cords were stretched, weighted, and floating horizontally while in front of my face were the vertical lines interspersed with hanging hooks and bait. I didn’t like cutting these, so I tried maneuvering around this one instead.<br> But a few minutes later, I felt a pressure pulling on my line. I tried to turn around to pull back at my hose in case it was caught on a root or stump, but I couldn’t move it any further than a few inches. As I strained at the line, I finally saw where a few hooks from the trotline had snagged it. For some reason I decided it would better to unhook my regulator so I could hold the line in front of me and take out the hooks by hand. This seemed like a reasonable option, so I reached for the clip and flicked it open. Wrong decision.<br> In a flash, my regulator line jerked forward, and I was left biting my regulator’s rubber mouth piece as hard as I could while the line shook with amazing force. At the same moment, I also realized I couldn’t move forward toward my line because something was tethered to my back. Somehow I had been hooked in the back and my regulator was pulled away from me at the same time.<br> If this is hard to imagine, picture standing in a room with two doors. You are standing with your back stapled to one door while your only source of oxygen is a mouthpiece connected to a hose and tank on the other side of the room by the second door. Someone opens that door, picks up your oxygen tank and is walking away. Only your teeth in that regulator mouthpiece will keep you breathing.<br> Twelve feet under water, in a cloud of mud and clay, I was being pulled from two directions at the same time. With my free hand, I reached for my knife I kept sheathed around my leg and began cutting at any of the tangled trotline I could find. Soon I was free again. I reattached my line to my belt, breathed deeply again and followed the air-hose line back to my boat.<br> 3 Lessons From A Close Call<br> Just in case you’re wondering, I didn’t make lake diving my life-time career. I still made dives for year afterwards, but I realize now how lucky I am to be telling that story. My point is this: If I had not been prepared ahead of time for what do when under pressure, I could have easily never made it to the surface alive.<br> How does this apply to your own school leadership? You may not face life-and-death situations on a daily basis, but you face amazing pressures all the time. Whether that involves managing student safety, resolving conflicts, directing personnel policies, or prioritizing budgets — you lead under pressure (sometimes handling many scenarios at the same time).<br> I remember one day visiting with an elected official in my office.
