The mandate of the Institute for Maritime Medicine (IMM) is to support and enhancethe operational performance of sailors of the South African Navy during maritimeoperations, while also ensuring positive long-term mental health outcomes of sailorswho serve their country at sea. To achieve this, the IMM proposes to re-orientate themobilisation and demobilisation programmes used for ship-based maritime operationstowards a predict-and-promote (P&P) approach, to enhance the psychological adaptationof sailors to the emotional demands of deployment as well as to support more adaptiveforms of mental health resilience, both before and after sea-going operations.First, this article aims to present the proposed P&P approach for enhancingpsychological adaptation during and after seaward deployments, with a specific focuson assessing personal emotional regulation (ER). For effective implementation, thisapproach is contingent on several clinical assumptions about ER in the operationalenvironment, namely: the absence of significant psychopathology; the stability ofthe ER measure; the role of dispositional factors in operational adaptation; and theavailability of population-specific normative data, which act as an interpretative guideof ER profiles for sailors. The second aim is to consider support for these assumptions,using previous experience during the mobilisation and/or demobilisation of shipsinvolved in maritime operations. Support was found for all four assumptions, indicatingthe clinical and operational utility of the P&P approach at the IMM broadly, and theassessment of ER for sailors in particular.