How to Use This Document
This is not a manual to be read once and shelved. It is the working reference for how FlowState Divers operates - and it is written for three different readers, each of whom will use it differently.
If you are a practicing Mentor or Mentor candidate, this document is your baseline. It defines the philosophy behind our training, the general standards that govern every training regardless of curriculum, and the conduct expected of anyone teaching under the FlowState Divers name. It does not replace the training-specific standards for the class in front of you - those live in separate, dedicated documents - but every one of those documents inherits its logic from what's written here. When a training standard is silent on something, this is where you look.
If you are a diver or candidate, this document tells you what to expect from us and what we expect from you: how trainings are structured, how performance is actually assessed, and why the process may move slower than what you've encountered elsewhere. It is deliberately not a marketing brochure. If a page reads as demanding, that's because it is meant to.
If you are evaluating FlowState Divers - as a partner, a prospective mentor, or simply someone comparing us to the rest of the industry - this document is the clearest statement of what makes us different. Start with the opening chapter on who we are and our guiding principles, and the chapter on our approach to training. Everything after is implementation detail.
A few practical notes on structure:
- The chapters covering general diving parameters, equipment philosophy, and quality assurance apply across every training we run, independent of level or curriculum.
- The chapter on the dive professional pathway covers the general framework only; curriculum-specific prerequisites and progressions are detailed separately.
- Where this document references a completion record, understand it in the spirit of our opening chapter on who we are: a documented outcome of the work, never the objective of it. We use the industry's common language because interoperability requires it, not because we measure our success by it.
- This document is reviewed and amended under the governance described in the closing chapter. Version history is maintained there - always confirm you are working from the current release before citing it in a candidate dispute, complaint, or evaluation.
- Who may enter training at all - and why we train only already-certified divers - is set out in Who We Train, in the chapter on our approach to training.
When in doubt, the guiding principles laid out early in this document outrank any specific clause that follows. If a standard and a principle ever seem to conflict, the principle is telling you the standard needs to be revisited - not that the principle bends.