Focus has been a quiet mantra for me, and like a good workout plan for your muscles, gets stronger and stronger. The more complex our lives get, the more FOCUS becomes our compass and gives us the ability to clear our psychological and spiritual decks.

We are living in the era of multi-tasking. We talk on our cell phones while driving our cars, while tuning the radio, while drinking our Starbucks, while talking to our kids who are listening to their iPods’, while texting their friends, while painting their nails black.

We are living in the age of distraction. While working on a project, we check our e-mail, while linking out to the web, while listening to talk radio, while waving as colleagues walk past our desk, while answering the phone.

We are living lives of multiple priorities. We coach our kids with more complex school demands, while helping our parents navigate the challenges of aging, while supporting our friends who wrestle with divorce, lost jobs or issues of illness.

We are living in a world of constant information. We listen compassionately to media reporting tragedies on every continent and across town while Wall Street crashes, while our government collapses, while our retirement funds disappear while our credit tightens up, while our businesses hang in the balance.

Under these circumstances, we would all be forgiven if we couldn’t even spell FOCUS, let alone find it in our live. But, we find it with clarity and a quiet intensity.

I am a single mom to a teenager, a daughter to two parents in their 80’s, an owner of a business with 30 employees, a manager of a commercial building. I have a 100-year-old carriage house, a nephew, sisters and friends whose lives I am involved in. The beauty of this lifestyle of overload and mayhem is that the less important must be let go. The path to a sane life requires FOCUS – directed by what’s most important and what to let go of.
We cannot do it all, or even process it all.

I loved Ellen DeGenere’s character in Finding Nemo and her lovable, distractibility with anything that came along – the “shiny object.” Every menopausal woman I know related to her, so much so that “shiny object” became almost universal code for “what was I saying? What were we talking about?”

But FOCUS is the road map back. It can be the super highway built by those things that are most dear. FOCUS is what helps us stay fit and healthy. No matter what, we will stay on target to our goals, get those workouts in each week, stay on the plan to eat healthfully. FOCUS is the filter all the noise of distractions goes through, distilling it back down to what is really important.

This past year provided two seemingly impossible business challenges: I needed to severe a bad business relationship and get a commercial mortgage in the worst banking climate this country has seen since the Great Depression. The roadblocks that came up in both these situations made both goals feel more than impossible. My determination drove me with a clear FOCUS that no matter what came up, I would pushed on through to the finish line. I found every bit of inner strength, and my ability to persist to get through and succeed in both scenarios.

FOCUS is the car that drives our values and goals. Focus is like riding double on a fast horse. Focus is the strong silent coach on the sideline of your game believing in your goal. Find it and your hair will fly in the wind, with sunshine on your face as collect your gold medals in life.

Gayle Winegar is a fitness revolutionary. She is founder and president of the SweatShop Health Club in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Winegar’s mission is to change people’s lives for the better through a unique approach to physical, mental, spiritual, and social health. Her vision is rooted in her empathy with her clients’ struggles to “find time for exercise.” Since 1982, she’s applied her “humor, endless energy and creativity” to helping women and men discover the joy of fitness, overcome insecurities about their appearance, and create a new way of living that means more fun and less stress.