Why surfing should be taught to sales and business people?

A few years ago, after I decided with my wife to move to western France and leave Paris, I landed a job in the nearby of Biarritz, the French Mecca of surf then moved to South Brittany where incidentally I found out there was a surf spot 15 minutes driving distance far from my home.

Then I decided at the of 49 to learn surf. Wasn’t it too late? Well, having practiced free ride snowboarding for more than a decade, I thought it was going to be really easy.

Big mistake: you need to forget all your references (or nearly) and start from scratch. 

No matter, first lesson, I immediately loved it and start the whole process.

Then I found out there were quite a lot of similarities with sales and business in general. So I thought it could be of interest at that point to share my experience.

Probably, all learnings can apply to many sports (except maybe curling).

• Listen and adapt

In surfing, you are always analysing the environment : how the wave will unfold, its energy, what the geology of a beach, what the wind directions are, how your board will suit the conditions ... A complete set of parameters which sometimes conflict or are interdependent to each other. That is really active observation when you are constantly gathering piece of information and processing them on the fly. Then, only then you will pick up the right one.

Like in the business, you need to understand product, market, competition sometimes regulation, company organization or even social relations between individuals to make your own way. … And in sales, everything is computed during a call or a meeting.

• Be sure of nothing

A wave is a moving water volume. Surfing is all about perceiving and reacting to a moving variable surface[1]. The thing is, no one can predict how a wave will behave exactly. It changes as it moves with the wind, beach, tide. So you will need to correct realtime your position and /or movement accordingly.

Once standing up on the board (means you are either lucky or experienced), you will also observe and react in milliseconds. 

The tough crisis we have and are still living through have shown nothing can be taken as granted. And in business, until dully signed, a prospect is not a live customer generating revenue. And to get it across the line, you need to navigate through all kinds of process, circumstances logic and irrational behaviors from buyers (that is all about human). And of course, some of unexpected and none was forecasted in your CRM. Mastering uncertainty has emerged as a top skill.

• Follow a path

Surfing is all about following a  predefined sequence of gestures, from popping up to riding and turning. In a surfing session, you will stand on the board at a maximum of 5 % of the time, even for the best ones : 3 minutes maximum for a 1 hour session.

Means the time being left, you will be either paddling (it seems easy, believe me it is just f… exhaustive) or waiting (waiting being just not passive as you actively observe what is going on).

So there is very limited room to properly learn and train. You can only learn by repeating a sequence of movements that are perfectly ingrained in your mind.

And learning is ok when you are not thinking anymore of the process you repeat but doing it unconsciously whilst constantly learning from your environment and adapting real-time to it.

A surfer has a window of 1-2 seconds to take off. Once correctly executed, the ride starts, you literally fly over the ocean …for a for few seconds only!

Before you probably paddled minutes or even sometimes hours to get to the peak (the location where you will start the ride). Means a lot of activities or exercise, leading sometimes to no result or a fail which can be very frustrating.

Similarly in the business, the decision taken by a customer can be made up in 2 seconds. But it comes after he or she has made some research, met several possible suppliers, had several internal meetings …

On your side you had prepped the meeting by studying the organization, your customers profile on LinkedIn , rehearsed your playbook, crafted your questions to unveil the pain points and turning them into matters that must be solved as quick as possible. And more often than you expect, you fail.

 Which leads to another obvious point

• Stay humble and resilient

The ocean is always stronger than you. Sounds a little naive but I nearly drowned once. Just because I skipped warm-up and ignore conditions (wanted to rush during Covid).

When you watch the ocean from the beach, you do not feel the power and energy of the waves. Once into the water, when a wave hits you, it feels like a slap in your face. Thing is you will receive approximately 1 slap every 10 seconds, so 6 in a minute, means in a hour session, you will receive 30-40 slaps. Sometimes without having a chance to move to the peak and take a ride. 

Now, look, how many times have you failed for cold calls? How many times were you turned down by prospects? 

Here, trial and error is the path cause otherwise you end up stuck where you are. The only way to learn is to accept stepping out your comfort zone and start to fail. Again and again. Day in day out. Until… yeah at a moment you start standing on your board …during 1 quarter of a second. But you do not care, that is a victory after so many frustrating efforts. 

It sometimes takes weeks or months before a prospect just accepts to start a conversation with you. I remember I have pitched a large e-retailer during… 8 years before getting to the contract signature. 8 years during I was first turned down, then became someone good enough to have contact with, became a possible solution, then an interesting solution, then a very possible solution till …my contact person changes company and another comes in.

Getting back on track can be about questioning your self but also ignoring failures, and restart over and over.

• Work your physics

If you think of surfing as a cool, relax activity, having in mind a Beach Boys song, with lazy people suntanning at all times, you have presumably watched too many Bay Watch episodes. 

While surfing is probably one of the most technical sports (unlike curling), you need to have the perfect condition. Not need for a triathlon physics, but of course how to swim and also to breathe (especially when you are under the water, in a washing machine of several waves above you)

In the business, if you are not healthy, had a good sleep, you can not be focused on hearing properly your contact persons, detecting their body languages, asking the right sequences of questions at the pointing times.

• Accept to be lean

Unless you are enrolled within a surf club, most of the time you will go by yourself. No poolhouse, no shower. You end up on a parking taking your clothes off and putting up your wetsuit. Sometimes under the rain and wind. Sometimes by 12 C.

Forget comfort at all.

But fun is all there.

Think in business it is the same. You do not have the multimillion dollars ad campaigns nor a complete staff to support you, you rely on your very own resources to make it happen.

I hope you enjoy the reading and now think of make a try on surfing. As we are now close to the season break, it is now time to say Aloha !

Thumbs up for our 🏄 athletes at 🌊Teahupoo : Johanne Defay, Vahine Fierro, Joan Duru and Kauli Vaast 🚀

NB1: of course, if you are a tech guy, highly likely surfing will also be benefiting to you

NB2: nothing against curling 😉

Credits :

My dear fellow instructor victor Le Goff ;)

Pictures : AFP Fédération Française de Surf Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia

[1] Chris Mill, How To Read Waves | Surf Strength Coach