I read a book the other day called Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life’s Work by Steven Pressfield. In it, Pressfield writes about getting serious about our calling – what we feel we’re meant to do in this world – and treating it like a profession. He asks those of us who have been dabbling with our calling to make the choice to fully commit to it, to step out of our comfort zone once and for all and go from an amateur to a pro.

We frequently recommend books about creativity and writing to participants in our Your Soulful Book writing program (spoiler alert for those of you who are in it or who plan to join us next year!), and Dan and I both really enjoyed this – not only for our participants but also for ourselves. But maybe not in the way that I would have thought.

In it, Pressfield recounts a dream that singer/songwriter Rosanne Cash shared about meeting a man named Art at a party who turned his back to her after saying that he didn’t respect dilettantes. This fictionalized moment both crushed her and changed her life forever. It motivated her to “go pro” with her music – to take classes and voice lessons and take it more seriously than ever before.

As someone who also wants to give my own “art” – my writing – more airtime, I assumed that reading this book would inspire me to make more time to write (which is what it did for Dan, and I’m so happy about that and can’t wait to read what he creates). But that’s not what happened for me. After taking time to get clear about what I needed most, what my soul had long been asking me to do, what messages my heart woke me up with in the middle of the night, what scared me and excited me at the same time, what I would be sad about if at the end of my life I looked back and realized that I had never done this particular thing…I found that it wasn’t writing at all. While I am a writer and love to express myself in this way, there was another area in my life that I had been dabbling in for years – where I had been a dilettante: self-care.

Ugh. I couldn’t believe that I was back here again in this broken record that played the same thing over and over and over again year after year. Self-care. Self-care. Self-care. I was honestly so tired of this word and so desensitized to it after hearing it so much and writing about it so much that I was frankly disappointed that this is what my epiphany was coming back to…again. It seemed so whatever to me, so common and not at all exciting. And yet here it was. And for some reason, maybe because Dan was also going pro in his own way and I was his accountability partner in making sure he wrote during his scheduled times or maybe because I was worn down just enough to not be able to put up much of a fight against it or maybe it was because I was so tired of telling this same story over and over again about how I was exhausted and overworked and never had enough downtime or maybe it was just because I was finally ready…whatever the reason, I declared to myself and also to Dan that I was going to go pro with my own self-care. And I meant it.

Pressfield says that we never forget the moment when we decide to go pro. We’ll remember the second that shift occurred in our brain and we realized that we could never again live the way we had been living, when we realized that we could never go back. It’s that moment when we see the world differently – when we see that the dabbling with our calling becomes harder than giving it our all. It’s that moment when we realize that we must change, that we have already changed, and that our lives will no longer be the same.

That’s what I experienced. And now it was up to me to figure out what exactly this meant and how it would look in my everyday life. It was up to me to ground it somehow and bring it from a great idea to an actual change. And I instantly knew exactly where to begin this new life of becoming a self-care pro: the beach. My safe haven. My recharger. My vibration lifter. My home.

We moved to the beach two years ago because my soul asked me to. It said that this is what would allow my body to heal – it said that this is where I would find balance. For the first year, I spent more days at the beach than not. And I felt better than I had in years. My health was returning, my vitality was returning, I was returning. And then, sneaky old habits of overworking kicked in and took over, and before I realized it, I was caught up again in my old life of pushing and pushing and forgetting to rest and forgetting to slow down and forgetting to remember that I mattered, too.

As the months passed by, I found myself more often than not too busy to travel the three minutes that it takes to go to the beach. I had allowed myself to believe – to really believe – that I didn’t have time for it, that I couldn’t make time for it, and that I wasn’t worthy of time for it.

After reading Pressfield’s book and making the decision to go pro with my own self-care, I felt more determined than ever to create a schedule that included plenty of beach time. I am my own boss, and I am the only one standing in the way of my own well-being. And I was ready – finally ready – to make this change once and for all. So I asked Dan to be my accountability partner and make sure I got to the beach most days each week – even for an hour at a time. Thankfully, he loves the ocean as much as I do and was thrilled to help!

And off to the beach we went! Not just once. And not just twice. But several times in one week. And each time, I felt a little piece of me awaken. Oh yes, I remembered, this is why I moved here. This is what matters. And this is what will help me heal and create a life that’s filled with balance where I’m no longer depleted but am filled with energy. Yes. This.

While it’s only been a few days since going pro, I can already see huge changes – both internally and externally. And I’m fully committed to continuing this self-care journey and seeing where it leads. I have a feeling it’s going to be somewhere amazing.

We all have an inner calling. And so many of us are keeping that calling at arm’s length for all sorts of reasons: fear of change or failure or even success, not feeling worthy enough, not wanting to rock the boat, laziness, and the list goes on and on. But I’m here to tell you that deciding to go pro and take our calling to the next level brings us closer to our essence, to why we’re here. And when we’re brave enough to move toward that, things just sort of fall into place. That’s what I’m finding. And I have a feeling that you’ll find that, too.

I hope you’ll decide to go pro in whatever way feels best for you.

Hugs,