Resilience under pressure: an evening with Chandler Comerford
St Catherine’s College welcomed former US Navy SEAL Chandler Comerford to its UWA campus in Perth for a Faculty and Industry Dinner exploring resilience and decision-making under pressure.
He opened with a riddle: what do the Prime Minister, Dr Fiona Wood and LeBron James have in common? They all put their pants on one leg at a time. The point was simple. People who achieve extraordinary things are still human.
Chandler had needed that reminder himself. His interest in the SEALs began at fifteen, when a bandmate showed him a dive knife and told him about the demands of training. Years later, at the US Naval Academy, he worried that he was neither a top-ranked student nor a strong swimmer. His father gave him much the same advice: the SEALs were not superhuman either. From there, Chandler returned throughout the evening to three ideas that had stayed with him through training and beyond: perspective, fellowship and commitment.
Perspective was about how you choose to see a difficult situation. During Hell Week, one of the most demanding stages of SEAL training, his crew once earned a brief rest and huddled together on the ground for warmth. After prolonged exhaustion, even that small reprieve felt significant.
Fellowship was about the people beside you. During a dive training exercise beneath a ship, Chandler became disoriented and afraid, with little to guide him except the dim light of his dive buddy’s compass board. Knowing someone else was facing the same conditions beside him helped him keep going.
That sense of connection carried greater weight when Chandler spoke about Erik Kristensen, his Naval Academy roommate and closest friend there, who was killed in Afghanistan in 2005. He remembered Erik not only as a SEAL, but as a poet, scholar and athlete.
Commitment, meanwhile, was less about guaranteeing an outcome than keeping a promise to yourself. Chandler recalled nearly failing a demanding pool training exercise and being warned that he could be dropped from the program.
But the conversation also made room for what happens when effort is not enough. When a UWA staff member asked what he would say to someone who had committed fully to a goal and still fallen short, Chandler’s answer was measured: once you have genuinely explored every option, it is fair to let yourself off the hook.
For residents, it was a useful counterpoint to the evening’s emphasis on resilience. Ambition matters, but so does knowing when you have done everything you reasonably can.
That balance between effort, preparation and perspective came through again in one of Chandler’s final stories. He described a parachute jump when his main chute failed to open. As he began the emergency procedure, it started to deploy, but he continued with the reserve because the procedure was already in motion.
The lesson was not about reacting heroically in the moment. It was about preparation. His training had taken over before he had time to think. It was a fitting way to close an evening centred on resilience: the habits we rely on under pressure are often built long before the moment when they matter.
St Catherine’s Faculty and Industry Dinners give residents the opportunity to hear directly from people whose experiences sit well beyond the classroom. Chandler’s story brought that purpose into sharp focus, opening up a conversation about pressure, setbacks, the people we rely on and what it means to keep going.
Explore Faculty & Industry Dinners
Discover how St Catherine’s College connects residents with industry, ideas and opportunities beyond their degree through our Faculty & Industry Dinners. Read The Future of Energy, which brought together leaders across engineering, energy, infrastructure and research, or explore The Attention Economy and College Life, with Resident Fellows Dr Valeria Bodishtianu and Dr Yanlin Lin.
About the Author
Farnam Namvar is a resident at St Catherine’s College and is studying a Master of Renewable and Future Energy at UWA. As part of the St Cat’s community, Farnam writes about the people, ideas and experiences that shape life at College.