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Founding Your Way
Hosted by Maggie Ward and Lucy Luneva, co-founders of Pearl + Light, Founding Your Way is a podcast exploring the human side of building something meaningful.
Pearl + Light is a small business and nonprofit consulting agency inspired by good people doing good things. They partner with organizations rooted in service, creativity, and community, and are passionate about helping spread awareness of the people and projects uplifting local communities.
This podcast is an extension of that mission.
Through honest conversations with founders, creatives, nonprofit leaders, and community builders, Founding Your Way shares the stories behind the work — what inspired people to begin, what challenges them, what keeps them going, and what it really looks like to build something of your own.
Rooted in Boston and shaped by the people creating impact within it, the podcast highlights the ideas, relationships, and communities that make meaningful work possible.
Founding Your Way
Living Adventurously, Safely: David Trant on Building Trant Training
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
David Trant didn't set out to build a training organization.
What began as a way to keep his lifeguards certified gradually evolved into Trant Training, a growing New England-based collective offering lifeguard, CPR, first aid, wilderness safety, and instructor certifications.
In this episode of Founding Your Way, Maggie sits down with David to explore confidence, preparedness, and the unexpected journey from public school teacher to founder. Together, they discuss why we respond the way we practice, the art of staying calm under pressure, and how learning safety skills can help us live more fully and adventurously.
Learn more about Trant Training:
Connect with the hosts, Maggie & Lucy
You can't make life totally safe, but m life without those moments, sunrise coming up, the moon setting. Without those moments, I'm not me and I'm not happy. So that's really the essence of training. Be prepared so you can live adventurously. And if something goes wrong, you have the ability to think your way out of it.
SPEAKER_00Hi, welcome to Finding Your Way. I'm Maggie and I'm Lucy. We're the co-founders of Pearl and Light. This podcast explores the human side of building something meaningful. We talk with founders, creatives, nonprofit leaders, and community builders about what inspired them to start, what keeps them going, and what they're learning along the way. Thanks for being here.
SPEAKER_01Hello, folks, and welcome to Finding Your Way. Today on the show, I chat with David Trant of Trant Training. Trant Training is a growing New England-based training organization offering certifications in aquatics, CPR and First Aid, and Wilderness Training. For those of you who may be unfamiliar, aquatics meaning lifeguard certification, water safety instructor, which is swim instructor certification, and a few other courses, which you can find on his website, TrantTraining.com. Lifeguarding in particular is about 26 hours over one weekend, so they're pretty intensive. And David has been doing this alongside teaching full time as a public school teacher. David shares how this started as a bit of a side hustle and unexpectedly evolved into a full training collective. We chat about confidence, preparedness, the psychology of emergencies, and why learning safety skills can help folks to live a more full and adventurous life. So please enjoy David Trant. David, welcome to the podcast. I'm excited to have you.
SPEAKER_02Thank you very much. I'm excited to be here.
SPEAKER_01So Trant training. Be ready and live adventurously, safely. Love it. I'll tell the story how we met. We met because I was re-certifying for lifeguarding just a couple of weeks ago, which is kind of crazy because I feel like I've now seen you a lot.
SPEAKER_04You have seen us a lot.
SPEAKER_01Um I haven't lifeguarded in 20 years. And so I kind of knew going into it that it was gonna be me and a bunch of teens. And I was like, oh great, um, I'm doing it for my summer job. But uh then I met you and a totally new unexpected path opened. And I also loved what you were doing and immediately was like, oh, as soon as I met you, I was like, oh, this guy's great. And the training was awesome. And then we I had a couple other trainings to do with you, but um tell us how it started and tell us a little bit about Trant training.
SPEAKER_02So I am a public school teacher and we had two children, and my wife has a research social worker, so she was working from home, and we had to figure something out because two kids in daycare, we were gonna run around frantic, and we made the decision one of us would stay home. And I think that's what she had always wanted. So she stayed home, we sold a car, I became a full-time bike commuter, and I worked right through the year. She worked through the summer, and then she stopped working on September 1st. I went to school, and our budget was a little short. So I knew I had to get a job in the summer, and we figured it would all work itself out. We'd figure it out. About October, an organization called Bally Pond called and asked if I'd be interested in being their waterfront director. Had never been a lifeguard, but been a long distance triathlete, spent a ton of time in a kayak, loved the water, feel really comfortable in and on the water, and it felt like a really good job. Hang out, manage a pond, have my kids come to work with me, spend the summer in an office like this.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Um, it worked out really, really well. So I became a lifeguard at that point in February, opened the pond in May, learned a lot, and then a few years into it, I decided I'd become an instructor so that I could keep my staff recertified. Made my my goal was to make my summer life a little bit easier by making sure that my staff are always certified. And so I became an instructor, went through the process, struggled with it a little bit because the Red Cross course is designed to take aquatics people and make them teachers. Whereas I came from a teaching background looking to learn how to do the aquatics piece. So I wasn't, it wasn't a totally smooth transition. And I was unsure if I'd do a lot of it. But I found that working running classes for my staff really allowed me to develop the good skills because I knew that they were competent. So I wasn't worried about not training safe people. I knew they were already safe. And then from there, I felt like my skills would get rusty. So I would be very focused on aquatics all summer. And then September would come, I'd go back to school, and the skills would get rusty. So I decided to gamble and put $1,000 in a checking account, opened up a DBA in 2017, and started running classes in 2017. And the goal was if I didn't spend all the money and run out of money and I made a little bit, then I it would be a success if we could go down the Cape for an extra week as a family vacation.
SPEAKER_01So it's so initially you were training your lifeguards for how about how many years were you just training in Valley Pond?
SPEAKER_02About two. Um, and just didn't feel like I was staying current. I just I would learn a lot while running classes and then not touch it for nine months and then come back and forget a lot of the lessons I learned until I was in it again. And I just didn't feel like I was getting better. Um and so that was really what inspired me to start running classes all the time year round. And I did some bridging, so I was running CPR classes and wilderness remote first aid classes just to kind of stay in the practice of the skills and teaching.
SPEAKER_01So you've expanded a lot since then. Since you're doing a lot. So how did it go from being, I just want, you know, an extra week on the Cape to now running, I mean, it's a full full-time, in from my perspective, a pretty full-time thing that's going on. A lot of training.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. Um, we we've grown a lot. So I think the first piece was COVID happened, and I assumed that I would never make it through COVID. I kind of felt like that was the end. And then somehow I made it through that. And I started to offer more and more classes, and every year the number of classes I offered went up, the number of people I trained went up, and the the this different classes I was teaching increased. And then I made the decision to go and become an instructor trainer, which means you have to attend an academy at the Red Cross, so you can run lifeguarding classes, and then you can run classes to teach people how to run lifeguarding classes. Right. And I had a challenging experience there as well. I had anticipated that I would be going with tw a bunch of 28-year-old aquatics professionals who did this 24 at seven. Um so my staff during the buildup to it, because the class was in July, every every weekend I was in the water with my staff going over my skills, and they were kind of like, David, what's going on? Like we we're always in the water. Uh, and I was just really trying to make sure I was prepared. Went into the academy and um it was really overwhelming. It was three days, 10 plus hours a day. And it was hard to absorb all of the content. And what I really struggled with was the amount of code shifting. So sometimes we were participants in a class, sometimes we're instructors in a class, and then sometimes we were the instructor trainer evaluating the instructor. I was getting confused about what role I was in constantly. Um and I left it and decided that I was gonna shut down my training business. That there was just so much there's just so much to it, and in aquatics right now, and instructors were having their v certifications nullified, and there was just a lot of pressure, and it just didn't feel like something I really wanted to deal with. And a friend of mine needed help with a instructor research course, so I went and taught it, and it didn't go well, and then I got frustrated with myself because I don't like to do things and not have them go well. So I wound up teaching a number of recertification courses and came to the conclusion that I'd been doing this work in isolation for too long. And to do this work really well, you need collaborations. And so that was really when training began to shift in my mind away from just a tiny little side hustle that I would do all on my own. And if I could get it to the point where when I was ready to retire from teaching, I could just do this and run my own schedule to really looking to build and training cooperative where we have multiple instructors, and our model is that we like to go into one facility and run multiple classes at once. So I might be there running instructor course, and Jen might be there running a lifeguard research, and Brent might be there running a WSI. We bring in our own lifeguards, we bring in our own equipment. The benefit for a facility is they get all of their staffing needs retrained or trained in a weekend. And the benefit for us is we have a number of instructors available. We bring in our own lifeguards, our own equipment. And so there's this huge camaraderie and collaboration that occurs. And what I'm finding is the quality of our classes have gone way up because we're supporting each other better.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Collaboration is key.
SPEAKER_02It really is.
SPEAKER_01I have my own journey with that from being, I was uh attempting to be a life coach for a period of time, and I was really like banging my head against the wall unsuccessfully. And I think a huge part of it was the fact that I was doing it alone. And one of the things I loved so much about the first training I had with you was that I could see in you really wanting to inspire confidence in young people. And I think lifeguarding is an amazing way to do that. So for me, I kind of lit up because I was like, oh, this is like a really practical way to apply all of the tools and skills that I'm passionate about, like in a real world scenario. So I was like, it's taking things I'm passionate about, but making it practical. And I loved that. Um could you speak a little bit about that? Like what you sort of like coming back to training lifeguards, because it is predominantly a younger group. It is mostly like teenagers working at their local facilities and some of the trends that you may see. I just think it's interesting. Um, and then I want to get back to like where you're headed, but just with the skills of lifeguarding, because I think it's a huge part of your business from reading your website of just wanting to instill values or at least do your best to teach values and inspire confidence. I and you correct me if I'm wrong, but it feels like a part of your your sort of life philosophy, your business philosophy um and how you approach the trainings.
SPEAKER_02I it is. We are it's interesting because I would say the largest population that we train are young people. The second largest population we train are retirees. Right. There's not a lot of people in the middle, right? But a ton of people who have retired and decided they're gonna go lifeguard at their local facility a shift or two a week. Um, and they always come in with a tremendous amount of trepidation of I'm gonna be in the pool with a bunch of 18-year-olds and what's that gonna be like. And for me, that's some of the more enjoyable classes because you have a grandparent and and grandkids all interacting on the pool deck and they learn how to work with each other, deal with each other's strengths and weaknesses. That's the fun part. Um my educational background is I actually have a master's in counseling. And for me, this work that we do is incredibly important. And in order for us to perform well, we have to have a high degree of authentic competence. And that's that competence where you know what you can do really well.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And you know the areas you need to get better.
SPEAKER_04Right.
SPEAKER_02And so in any kind of an emergency, I really want people to believe in their training and have confidence in their training and their experience and their skills so that they can provide the best care possible.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_02So the only question and I I will ask a lifeguard in an interview that I really care about is if I'm in the middle of my pond and I was drowning, could you save me? Because I want to know how they're gonna answer it.
SPEAKER_04Right.
SPEAKER_02Because if they answer with the bravado, oh yeah, of course, hell yeah, then they're gonna have a really hard time saving me that first time.
SPEAKER_04Right.
SPEAKER_02And if they ask answer the question with a lot of trepidation, how many other staff are there? Do we have an EAP? Is there backboard, other rescue tubes? Then you know they need a little bit more confidence because you have to believe you can do it before you can actually do it.
SPEAKER_01How have you gotten people there? Because I feel like do you the experience is the teacher? Like that's something we say in yoga, like the experience is the teacher. So even practicing saves is you see that slowly build confidence of like they're a little nervous to do a save and then they do it. Do you see confidence rise in class?
SPEAKER_02When the classes go really, really well, Friday night, there's a lot of nervous laughter, there's a lot of giggles, there's a lot of anxiety. Saturday they come in, it's a long day, a lot of time in the pool, they work really hard and they get tired. And then Sunday they come in, and by Sunday, I'm now just starting to treat them like lifeguards. They know what they're supposed to do, they know what the equipment is, they know how to store the equipment, where to place it. And so on Sunday, on a class that's gone really, really well, they're walking around on the pool deck like they own the place, like I belong here, like this is my space.
SPEAKER_04Right.
SPEAKER_02And that's that's when you know it clicked, the whole process, the slow building of the skills, the practice of scenarios, putting it all together, you know it's clicking at that point and they're really ready to go on and do the work.
SPEAKER_01Right. I think part of what um this podcast was founded on is local people, you know, good people doing good work and local community. And it's a huge part of why we did this was wanting to sort of amplify the local community aspect of people who have an idea and then act on the idea. And it's a different sort of story for everyone, but I think a lot of founders feel similar to you, where it was like I didn't really necessarily set out to have it become what it's become, which I think is more of life guiding you rather than you guiding life, which is a different way than we've been sort of taught to achieve things in life. Yeah. Um and so where you're at with Trant Training Now, and it's I know from speaking off the podcast that you're taking a leave of absence from school next year. I mean, haven't spoken too much about does your school know that? Did I just blow up your spot?
SPEAKER_02No, you didn't blow up my spot. Um, my school knows it. Not all of my friends know it yet. So hey, there'll be some people discovering things from this.
SPEAKER_01And is the goal to then do trant training full-time or see what you could do with it with more time? What led to the decision to take a leave of absence?
SPEAKER_02I feel like education has become a service industry and not an educational foundation. That's a pretty bold statement of doesn't it?
SPEAKER_01It's a whole other podcast.
SPEAKER_02It is a whole other podcast, maybe. Um, but for me, I just needed a break. I needed a change. I'm working a lot. I and trining has really um has really expanded and exploded a little bit. And I've worked at my school for 22 years. It was it's the one thing I can let go of for a year to create some space, to create some bandwidth, and and figure out what I really want to do. Tra training has always been my side hustle and I love it and I'm passionate about it and I am floored at our success. But the thought of doing it as my full-time employment, being responsible for everything, I don't know how that's gonna feel. And I might get six months into this and be like, you know what? Yeah, being out here all on my own, it's a little more scary than I'd like to be. Um, or I might find that it's time for a change in my life. But with education, there is one amazing benefit, which is you can take a one-year leave of absence and return to your school for with no challenges.
SPEAKER_01So really like an exploratory year of just seeing how it goes.
SPEAKER_02Total exploratory year, seeing how it goes.
SPEAKER_01Like seeing how it feels to step in to it.
SPEAKER_02Yes, to lean into it all the way.
SPEAKER_01Do you run trainings? So when I mention about lifeguard training, a lot of people assume it's seasonal, but do you run trainings year-round? Or is there opportunity to?
SPEAKER_02There are opportunities too. Um the the flow of the industry at this point is you get pretty slow November, December, especially with the holidays and travel and family obligations. But January Christmas break on school vacation week or winter recess, a lot of people want classes. And then we start running a lot of water safety instructor courses to teach people how to teach swim lessons and a lot of instructor courses because it's a great time for people coming into aquatics that need to become instructors. It's a great window of time where aquatics tends to be a little bit slower. And so we'll do in some instructor courses through February vacation. In February vacation, we'll start adding lifeguarding. We run lifeguard instructor and lifeguarding and swim instructor classes through April vacation. And then starting April vacation through right now, we're going well into July for lifeguarding. Um, for lifeguarding.
SPEAKER_01Into July.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Classes are are filling up constantly right now.
SPEAKER_01And why do you think there's so much demand?
SPEAKER_02There's been a reduction in instructors. COVID, there was a period where people weren't getting recertified, so a lot of instructors let their lap their certifications lapse. The standards and obligations are changing. The number of lifeguards a lot of facilities feel like they need are changing because of the legal nature of the industry. And so fewer trainers, the amount of time it takes to train, how busy our young people are with internships and volunteering and applying for schools and playing sports. It's hard to find times where people can take classes. And so I think there are a lot of contributing factors that have contributed to the shortage of lifeguards. But facilities are calling. I get a call at least one call a week from a facility saying we really need some training.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And I've been talking about it because it's kind of a niche thing. It's a unique thing that you're doing. And a lot of my friends, almost all my friends, were lifeguards at one point or another. And now the thing is like, oh, well, AI is not going to take that job. So good. Good. And there's also that where, yeah, no, you're not going to have a robot lifeguard anytime soon anyway. So there's the practical element of it. And I think practical is the word that comes to me often, just feeling as though it's just more of a personal thing, trying to I like it, I like things to make sense. There's a simple structure to it in a way. But I also there's a lot of, I don't want to say red tape, but rules and regulations that come with such a job that is so heavily safety involved. Yep. Is that the most stressful part of it? Or what do you find to be the most stressful part of it?
SPEAKER_02I think more, to be honest, it's more the business side of things that I find more stressful. Um probably not the right answer, but the honest answer. The people who are drawn to these courses are the people that care about each other. There are occasionally participants who are doing it to look at a college application, but for the most part, it's people who really want to be engaged in an environment. They want to be for us, we're pretty seasonal in New England. They want to be outside a lot of the time. It's a phenomenal summer job. And I believe the the journey through a class teaches you that you're gonna use these skills for the rest of your life. They're really life skills. It's a it's a way of thinking about safety through life. And I do believe very, very strongly in being well prepared so that you can embrace the full adventure. Because life isn't safe if you're living if you're living well. It's not completely safe. There should be moments in your life where you're a little scared, like right now, when you walk away from a career and you're going out on your own at 56. Like you don't usually do that. But there is times in life where you have to make scary decisions. Having quality safety skills, having quality first aid skills gives you the confidence to take risks and evaluate risk and live more fully, live more adventurously.
SPEAKER_01I love that live adventurously line you have because safely.
SPEAKER_02Right? Like, isn't that the balance, right? It's it but it's tr for me, it's so true. It's never I don't ever feel like it's my first bad decision that gets me into trouble. It's when you've made three or four bad decisions in a row because you start to panic and you start to put more pressure on yourself. Having the the wherewithal, the the courage to pause for a moment and evaluate. Please stop making bad decisions. That's the very first step in living safely, right? Like getting out of your bad situation. I made one bad decision. Let's stop here. But how often does one bad decision lead to another bad decision lead to another bad decision lead to frantic decision making? That's and that's to me the the enjoyable part of this work is the lifelong skills you build.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the art of the pause. It's like a meditation to me. And so and I think part of what you're describing is self-awareness, which self-awareness. You have to know you're doing you've made a bad decision to recorrect the bad decision. Uh, and sometimes that just takes time and age. But in an instant, which is an emergency, what you're dealing with is training people how to respond. In an emergency, it's a really unique scenario because when that happens, no one really knows how they're gonna react. And we spoke about this a little bit in class the other day, but even just imagining yourself reacting a certain way, even being presented with a scenario and going through how you would respond helps the brain sort of acclimate to that. And I think just practice so that it becomes almost second nature. And I think that hopefully, you know, once you only have so much amount of time with these lifeguards, like you would hope the facilities are doing the in-services and just keep practicing the saves and so that it's just becomes second nature to be able to react, you know.
SPEAKER_02And what's really enjoyable is a number of people that come back time after time after time.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I've been training some people for six, seven years now, and they keep coming back. And each time you can see they're they're better, they're stronger, um, and they're more aware aware. They need to get better, which which is really enjoyable. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01It sounds like a value. Um, you h you know, self-improvement seems like a pretty big value, even by the fact that you would kept this going for self-improvement, like I want to get better. Yeah. Um have you always been that way?
SPEAKER_02Um maybe to a fault sometimes. Yeah. I I do I do try to get better with each iteration, each season, each year. And sometimes that can get frustrating for other people in my life.
SPEAKER_01Perfectionist way or just growth mindset? What do you think?
SPEAKER_02I should probably ask other people to answer that one. Um I don't think I'm a perfectionist, but I do think I have very high standards for myself. And I don't like it when I fall short of my standards. So I'm not sure if it's perfectionism. Um, but I certainly expect that I am still getting better.
SPEAKER_01Do you think you can teach that to people that kind of mentality?
SPEAKER_02I'm still working on teaching myself that kind of mentality. Um I do see some of that mentality in the facilities that I do a lot of work with. You see that notion for me bringing it back to safety. Any any um any moment, any crisis, any emergency, any facility that deals with coping with emergencies you need to get better from practice. And the notion that we can never make water totally safe. Humans have been drawn to water as soon as we we started to walk on two feet. Humans have been drowning ever since then. We're just innately drawn to the water. You could see that in COVID because during COVID, routing rates across the country skyrocketed. And we still haven't fallen to pre-COVID levels yet. We're just drawn to the water. I part of it is to be humble enough to know you can never make it completely safe.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's nature, man.
SPEAKER_02It's nature.
SPEAKER_01Fire's never gonna be totally safe, you know.
SPEAKER_02And people, people make bad decisions, and you can't we can't keep people safe from their own bad decisions. All we can do is be prepared to the best of our ability. And like you said, you never know how you're gonna respond.
SPEAKER_04Right.
SPEAKER_02What research shows is we respond the way we practice. Yeah, we stop thinking and we just start reacting, which is part of that whole art of the pause, right? Yeah. Get out of the reaction and take a moment to really evaluate. Having that that ability to pause in a chaotic moment is an art.
SPEAKER_01So do you meditate?
SPEAKER_02Not well.
SPEAKER_01No. Yeah. Um they say you can teach that with meditation.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Getting my mind to stop. Same.
SPEAKER_01Maybe it's the Aquarius brains that we share.
SPEAKER_02Exactly.
SPEAKER_01The thing about water, um, it's also so incredibly healing for so many different reasons as well. Water has always been my happiest place to be. Um, so I love and appreciate making as you know, as safe as you can, right? What else can you do besides that? And that we're gonna be completely safe. And I appreciate that you say that because it's true. But we can be um better, you know, we could be better, we could pay attention and make better choices and at least have some structure to it to make it as safe as can be.
SPEAKER_02Water's my happy spot.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Whether I'm in it, on it, kayaking, swimming, I just like being near the water. And to do those things, you have to have a skill set that allows you to cope with what can come up. I will often go kayaking before school, all the way up until when the rivers freeze, and generally as soon as the river thaw. So I'll be putting in at 5:30 in the morning in pretty much complete darkness. It's a section of the river I know. I've been on in my equipment for a long time. I'm really, really comfortable, but I have a dry bag with me full of clothes that I can really put on, and I'm not in the middle of nowhere. I'm in a pretty urban spot. So paddling on the Concord River or the Assabat River, I'm always close to a home. You can't make life totally safe, but m life without those moments, sunrise coming up, the moon setting.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Without those moments, I'm not me and I'm not happy. So that's really the essence of Trant training, right? Be prepared so you can live adventurously. And hopefully, if something goes wrong, you have the ability to think your way out of it.
SPEAKER_01Where can people learn more about you?
SPEAKER_02Social media, because I'm getting some coaching. Because still I'm I'm getting better. Uh we do we have a website, Trent Training. Um, we have a Facebook page and we are starting to get a little more active on Instagram.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_02And so we're working on that.
SPEAKER_01That I'm gonna help you start a newsletter.
SPEAKER_02And a newsletter. A newsletter is coming, folks. A newsletter is coming.
SPEAKER_01Thank you, David.
SPEAKER_02Thank you.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for listening to Founding Your Way. If today's conversation resonated, share it with your friend who's building something meaningful. And if you're a founder or community builder with a story to tell, we'd love to hear from you. Until next time.