Forget the Summer Sprint. Go to the Beach Instead

It’s almost officially summer, and my inbox and feeds have been flooded with calls to join “summer sprints” focused on keeping us in motion when we’d all rather be at the beach.

I absolutely see value in putting in some focused effort in the summertime. For me, I’ve got longer days, good vibes, and plenty of pool time, so I can balance it with some focused activity.

Whether you’re hearing summer sprint or summer marathon language, the message is: push through, stay consistent, and keep the pace.

The underlying sentiment is the same: achieving your goals is an athletic event, and you’d better lace up.

But just walking outside on this 92º hot and humid Florida summer day, the last thing I want to do is run anything. The thought of it genuinely exhausts me.

What I would do, however, is go to the beach.

And it turns out, going to the beach is actually a better framework for manifesting your goals. What you’re responsible for, what you’re not, and exactly how those two things work together.

Most frameworks give you pieces. Mindset over here. Action plan over there. What’s rarely handed to you is the complete process, the full 360º of how this actually works.

So I decided to lay out the steps of manifesting in a way that finally makes the whole picture make sense to me (and hopefully you).

So I want you to picture this for a moment.

You’re at the beach, standing on the shoreline with the waves gently touching your toes. Stand there for just a moment. Don’t move.

As the waves go in and out, can you feel the sand shifting under your feet?

You didn’t do anything to cause the grains of sand to shift, and yet they do.

The ocean is doing something you cannot control and would never think to try. Understanding this concept of the inevitability of the sand moving, is key to manifesting. So let’s get started.

Step 1: Prepare For Your Beach Walk

Before you hit the sand, you need your sunscreen.

Sunscreen is your mindset. It’s the protection you put on before you ever touch the water.

And just like the real thing, nobody else’s sunscreen does you any good. Your friend can be fully covered and completely protected, and you will still burn. This one is yours to apply.

There are two things that go into this particular bottle of SPF.

The first is keeping your eyes on your own paper. This is your beach walk. Your goals, your timeline, your actions.

But here’s the thing.

Eyes on your own paper goes deeper than just not comparing yourself to other people.

It’s about where your energy is going, full stop. Energy flows where attention goes. What you focus on grows.

Here’s the image I want you to sit with for a second. Think about two different people arriving at the beach for a walk on the same day.

The first person has a wagon. And in that wagon is a pop-up tent, two folding chairs, a beach blanket, a cooler of drinks and snacks, three books (because they couldn’t decide), and approximately seventeen other things they thought they might need.

Dragging that wagon through the sand is exhausting. Setting it all up takes another twenty minutes. By the time they’re actually at the beach and set up for their day, they’re already tired.

The second person has a great insulated water bottle, a sun hat, their sunglasses, and their beach bag. They are ready to walk. They’ve got full energy.

That second person is who we’re trying to be.

This is your invitation to look honestly at everything in your wagon (business). The activities that haven’t been working. The platforms that drain you. The strategies you’ve been hauling around out of obligation or guilt or because someone told you that you couldn’t afford not to.

You don’t have to throw any of it away. It still exists. You’re just not bringing it to the beach.

If you are spending your energy on the algorithm not showing your posts to enough people, on what everyone else in your industry is doing, on the flood of marketing telling you that you need to be doing something more, different, or less, then you are focusing on things you cannot control.

That’s like trying to control the waves at the beach. The waves are completely oblivious to your attempts. You are spending real energy on something that is simply not possible to control.

So let this be an invitation for you to “unsubscribe.” From the newsletters, the accounts, the voices that are consistently pulling your attention away from your own shoreline.

Maybe not forever. Just for now.

Guard your attention like it’s more valuable than gold. Because it has the power to create everything you want in your life.

Gratitude Is Your SPF 50

The second thing that makes your sunscreen effective is gratitude.

Not a list you write one day and then forgo the practice. Active, daily gratitude.

It’s impossible to hold gratitude and anxiety simultaneously. And it’s actually extreme gratitude that has changed my life.

So I’ve begun to practice gratitude for everything.

When things go right, I’m grateful.

And when things don’t go my way, hallelujah anyway. (Justin Bieber has a song called Everything Hallelujah, and I absolutely made it the soundtrack to my practice.)

There will be cloudy days at the beach. It might even rain. But I acknowledge the challenges, feel my feels, and stay grateful.

That is my practice. And it’s what keeps me in the kind of awareness that this whole framework depends on.

I invite you to give it a try.

So now we have our SPF. We’ve got our attention and our gratitude aligned. Next, we need to talk about your beach bag.

Step 2: Grab Your Beach Bag

Your beach bag is your container. It’s the structure that holds everything you’re bringing to the beach with you.

Your beach bag is your goal. The overarching intention. The timeframe you’re working within.

Maybe that’s a quarter. Maybe it’s the last stretch of the year. Maybe it’s a specific date that matters: a program launch, a revenue target, a decision you need to make by a certain point.

Whatever it is, you need a container for it. A beginning and an end. Not because everything will necessarily happen within that window, but because you need a point on the horizon to walk toward.

My partner Al learned this the hard way. He was walking the shoreline in Hawaii, from Waikiki Beach toward Diamond Head. It didn’t look that far. It didn’t feel that hot. So he just kept walking. And kept walking. And never stopped to reapply his SPF.

He came back absolutely horrifically sunburned.

The point on the horizon gave him something to walk toward. What it also gave him – and what he missed – was a built-in reason to stop, check in, and reapply.

That’s what your timeframe does. It’s not a deadline in the punishing sense. It’s a checkpoint. A moment to assess what’s working, what needs adjusting, and yes, a reminder to put on more sunscreen.

Pick your point on the horizon. Name your goal. Set your timeframe. Write it down. That is your beach bag. Now let’s talk about what’s going in it.

Step 3: Action Bottles & Ocean Bottles

Bottles are what fill your beach bag. And they represent that actions you’ll take and the things you’re going to ask for as you take your beach walk.

Now remember, this is a metaphor. You’re not actually going to pollute the ocean.

But we need a visual that connects you to what you’re actually doing in order to manifest your goal.

Think of them exactly like a message in a bottle. You write what you need or want, you pop a cork in it, and you throw it out into the waves.

The ocean receives it. And the ocean gets to work.

But here’s what makes this framework different from anything you’ve visualized with before. There are two completely different kinds of bottles, and they require two completely different relationships from you.

The first kind are your action bottles.

These are the things within your control. The actions you are willing to take to reach your goal. The work that is yours to do.

You write the message, you seal the bottle, and you throw it out. That’s the concept of “doing the thing.”

You make the call. Send the email. Show up. These bottles are within your ability to act upon.

Ideally, the actions you’re willing to do are aligned with how you are actually wired to take action. Not the actions that look right on paper or the ones that work for someone else.

The ones that work for you, given how you’re built, how you think, and how you move through the world. If you’re not sure how to determine if something is aligned, that’s how I can help you.

The second kind are your ocean bottles.

These are the asks. The things that would be absolutely extraordinary if they happened, and that you could not make happen on your own no matter how hard you tried.

Timely referrals.

The right person crossing your path at exactly the right moment.

A conversation that opens a door you didn’t even know existed. Synchronicity, Serendipity, and Magic.

The kind of thing that makes you stop and go, “How did that even happen?”

You write those message and seal those bottles. Those messages will be the ocean’s job to act on.

Step 4: It’s time for our Beach Walk

This is where everything comes together. You’ve got your sunscreen on. You’ve packed your beach bag. Your bottles are ready. Now you have to actually go to the beach and walk the shoreline.

Walking the shoreline is being in motion. Not frantic motion. Not exhausting, hauling-everything-you-own-across-hot-sand motion. Just walking. Present, intentional, moving forward.

Your job on this beach walk is to walk the shoreline and throw your bottles into the ocean. In other words, TAKE ACTION. On every single one of your bottles. That’s your only job.

If you said you’d post on LinkedIn three times a week, post.

If you said you’d send 3 emails per week to prospects, send them.

No matter what activities or actions you determined you were willing to do, get into motion.

Now the ocean is going to get to work on your asks, too. The ocean bottles are beyond your control, but you can trust that they are in motion for you.

But here’s the magical part. Your actions are not just yours. They are ocean-assisted. Every single one of them.

Because what I need you to understand: the ocean doesn’t know which kind of bottle you threw in. It receives your action bottles the same way it receives ocean bottles. and it goes to work on them too.

Your ocean bottles aren’t separate from your action bottles. They’re being amplified. Every bottle you throw into the ocean is getting unseen assistance even though you didn’t ask for it.

The two types of bottles work together.

Go back to that visual of you standing on the shoreline. The waves go in and out. You can’t control them, but you can trust that it will happen. Now picture your bottles in the ocean. They WILL come back to you. It’s inevitable.

The incredibly refreshing things about this metaphor is that it shows you that your entire life is ocean-assisted. You can trust that the tide will come back in.

Step 5: Stay Aware as You Walk

This is where most people stop paying attention. Don’t.

Walking the shoreline and throwing out your bottles is only half of this. The other half is noticing when they come back.

The ocean returns things. It always does. But if you’re not in a state of awareness, you will walk right past the very thing you asked for and never recognize it as an answer.

This is why the gratitude practice from your sunscreen isn’t just a mindset exercise. It’s training your eye. Every day you practice noticing what’s working, what’s arriving, what’s shifting, you get better at recognizing a returning bottle when it shows up. The email that comes out of nowhere. The conversation that opens a door. The referral that arrives on a random Tuesday. There it is. That’s your bottle.

Now, I can already hear some of you. “But Eryn, I’ve heard stories about messages in bottles washing up on beaches in completely different countries. What if my bottle ends up in Australia?”

I get it, but for the purposes of this framework, we are assuming your bottles are coming back to you.

And here’s the thing: those stories of bottles crossing oceans? They actually prove the point. Those bottles didn’t disappear. They were still out there, moving, making their way to the shore. It just took longer than expected.

If your bottle hasn’t returned yet, it doesn’t mean it’s gone. It means it’s still in the ocean. Keep walking your shoreline.

When a bottle does return, you acknowledge it. You track it. You say, out loud or on paper, “That came back to me.”

Even on the days when what came back wasn’t quite what you expected, or when the sky is cloudy and nothing seems to be moving. Keep walking and throwing out bottles (taking action). The ocean is still working.

Here’s something else worth saying directly: you don’t have to walk this beach alone. A solitary walk is completely valid. But if you can find a coach, a mentor, or a community of people who are also throwing bottles and tracking returns, the harder actions become easier.

The uncomfortable bottles are less scary to throw when someone is walking next to you. If you’re inside a container or a community where this kind of work is happening together, use it. And if you’re not, consider finding one. You were not meant to do all of this by yourself.

Now, about adjusting. This is where I want you to pay close attention, because this is the place where most people go wrong.

You are going to develop such a heightened state of awareness from this practice that you will start to read the weather before the storm arrives. You’ll feel the shift in the air. You’ll notice the signals that something isn’t quite landing the way you hoped. That’s not failure. That’s information.

But – and this is important – one cloudy day is not a weather pattern. One week of a strategy not working is not a signal to throw the whole thing out and start over.

But that’s what we do. And it is the reason so many of us never get to see what’s actually possible.

If you’ve been sending LinkedIn connection requests with a written message and the acceptance rate feels low, you don’t abandon the strategy. You tweak the approach.

Maybe this week you try sending the request without a message at all. Same action, small adjustment, different experiment. You keep walking the shoreline and you stay curious as you throw out your bottles.

Read the weather. Make smart tweaks. But keep walking.

You already know how to do this.

You have been to the beach before. You know what it feels like to walk a shoreline. You know the way the sand shifts under your feet without you doing anything to cause it. You know the way the ocean moves completely independently of whatever is happening in your life, your business, or your head.

You have always known, on some level, that there is something out there bigger than what you can control. You just didn’t have a framework for working with it.

So here’s my question for you: does this metaphor land for you? I’d love to hear how you’re thinking about your own beach walk. Drop it in the comments.