You’re out there, having a fun and great time, enjoying the warm feel of the sun on your slowly darkening cheeks, and relishing the cool splash of ocean water about your face. You smile knowingly, hearing your friends are nearby, hooting and hollering as wave after fun wave rolls in … truly a surfer’s dream come true on this Hawaiian summer’s day.

The dark shadow from a distance tells you ready yourself … the ocean water beneath you calling out like some kind of early warning system indicating your turn at the line-up. As you take off on what can be clearly described as the wave of the day, shoulders pumping like an elite locomotive chugging down the sure tracks of the rail, you are mindfully picturing the increbdibly cool and audience-inspiring bottom turn you are about to bust out.

The familiar feeling of the wave’s speed building up behind you as ocean meets surfboard, and as the board begins to churn forward without much assistance from your churning shoulders, you know that the adrenaline high from the drop is coming strong and fast.  Moving on it’s own now, your board begins to propel itself forward, using the smooth and flowing lines underneath to channel the water through, like hundreds of pistons moving an unstoppable machine down an immovable mountain.

You have done this hundred, if not thousands, of times before — the familiar feeling of your stomach rising to your chest as your body momentarily succumbs to the speed of the wave and seemingly floats, and is quickly reclaimed by earth’s gravity and hurled down the speeding path of the wave, turning and twisting into a beautiful ballet of ocean, body, and board.

But not this time.

This time, your legs were not paying attention. They were watching some sea turtles playing underneath the surface of the water, or they were lulled into sleep by the swaying of the ocean’s waters. Or something else, but they were not ‘in the moment’ at the time you needed them!

And that wonderfully majestic back side bottom turn you were picturing in your head turned out to be something that could only be described by on-lookers as ‘the agony of defeat‘. A tumbling and bumbling trip down the face of the wave with your arms and legs flailing helplessly as the ocean swallows you into the washing machine cycle of shame … your board acting like a beacon as it shoots from the waters surface straight up into the air, indicating to all where the inattentive surfer can be found in the creamy white froth mixing in the impact zone.

The ride in the froth ends quickly – although not quickly enough – and you surface from the ocean’s grasp. You, my dear friend and fellow surfer, have just been through a familiar feeling for most ocean goers … a wipe out. A common occurrence in the life of most surfers.

Now, what do you do?

As surfers, we understand that out in the line-up (and especially in the aftermath of wipe outs) focus is everything – focus, not necessarily  concentration! What you choose to focus in on now will pretty much determine where you go from there … do you laugh or cry, do you make note and move on or try to assess what went wrong over and over again? Do you focus on the embarrassment of who could have been watching, or the pure fact that falling is something we all do, and can learn from? In a split second, what your focus leads toward manifests the next few moments … and more than likely the rest of your session.

Although this concept of  ’getting what you concentrate on’ is hardly revolutionary, it has garnered quite a recent boost from the resulting aftermath of the economic crisis. It also seems that as of late, everything that has been manifesting itself on a daily basis, has something to do with the whole concept of focus. The old sage from the Karate Kid films could not have told his young student a better piece of advice when it comes to facing adversity – focus, and if you do it right, it is absolutely unbeatable as a tool or weapon!

The idea of focus derives itself somewhat from the ‘Law of Attraction‘ concept, which  implies that people’s thoughts (both conscious and unconscious) dictate the reality of their lives, whether or not they’re aware of it.  Essentially “if you really want something and truly believe it’s possible, you’ll get it”.  Conversely, putting a lot of attention and thought onto something you don’t want means you’ll probably get that too.

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