Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Bryan Mineo . We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Bryan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Was there a defining moment in your professional career? A moment that changed the trajectory of your career?

At 18, living in small town Texas, my life completely changed. For better. For worse. It was hard to know how pivotal this experience would be. I grew up swimming on a local team from age 4 – on, and was naively confident that I had the ability to help a friend train for an open water swim without ever having been in an open body of water. The 30min drive to the lake was the first indicator that I was unprepared – nerves crept up and I had to turn the music off in my car to try to focus my brain on the overwhelming noise inside of it. Within the first minute of walking into the water I was panicking. My friend swam ahead and I was to follow, but I couldn’t. I was maybe 50yds off shore, upright, frantically treading water and trying to simply stay afloat between gulps of gnarly lake water. My friend looked back at me to see why I was so far back and I gave a pathetic thumbs up that likely was very telling. A minute later they swam back to me. At this point I had convinced myself that I KNEW I couldn’t do this. Looking into my friends eyes I read their lips – JUST. BREATHE. A novel idea I hadn’t even considered until that point. My brain and emotions were so flooded, and I told myself inhale as I began to slowly breathe in and then exhale as I began to breathe out. This miraculously got me back to shore and that was the moment. I had discovered my very first fear, experienced my first trauma and the humbling irony was that it was with something I identified most passionately with – being a swimmer.

This experience has given me the opportunity to have the patience and understanding to support and guide people in overcome their fear in the open water, as well as using the open water as the vehicle to work through trauma. To this day with clients I still use the device of saying to yourself – INHALE – EXHALE.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

The ocean is my life and I believe that it’s here for all of us. My aim is to create opportunities for people to connect with the ocean and with each other via the ocean.

I founded the non-profit, One With the Ocean, and our mission is to improve human’s relationship with the ocean. We do this through weekly beach cleanups, free ocean conservation and swim lessons for kids in underserved communities, coached group ocean swims and a lot of fun social events.

I also offer daily 1-1 lessons to facilitate confidence and skill in the ocean on a pretty broad spectrum – beginner to Olympian. As a Trauma-Informed Coach, I’m able to help people work through fear and trauma by utilizing the ocean to sync movement and breath in a therapeutic, highly-rewarding way. Beyond this, I enjoy offering swim technique and race-tactical lessons for triathletes and different-abilities swimmers.

Putting training and knowledge aside, what else do you think really matters in terms of succeeding in your field?

Consistency. As I was building One With the Ocean some 10 years ago, there were many points when it would’ve been much easier to throw in the towel when no one was showing up for the sessions I was holding. At this point these were free sessions, even! What worked best for me was the consistency of offering the same session every Saturday at 8am throughout the entire year, never missing a week. People came to know and expect that we’d be there for them on that morning and our group grew and grew and grew and allotted us the opportunity to expand to additional days and chapters across the US.

Have you ever had to pivot?

As many experiences, COVID shook things up for both One With the Ocean and my private coaching clients. OWO is an incredibly tight-knit community and largely and in-person one. When beaches closed, quarantine continued and we didn’t have the ability to be together, we quickly began offering opportunities to connect virtually. We created a pretty comprehensive calendar of events with things like movie night, digital happy hours, yoga classes, sports physical therapy classes, meditation classes, swim coaching classes, etc. Maybe not-so-ironically, this bonded the group further and forged some really strong relationships between us.

Contact Info:

• Website: OneWithTheOcean.org TheSwimMechanic.com
• Instagram: @one.with.the.ocean @theswimmechanic
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/onewiththeocean/?ref=share_group_link

Image Credits
@bluewesley (the two photos of me in brown Nike shirt and yellow Nike shorts running in water) @sexton_gallery (photo of me swimming with red swim cap)