Turning Pro with Mental Illness | What Steven Pressfield Leaves Out
Have you read Steven Pressfield's best-selling book "Turning Pro" and loved it, but haven't actually been able to turn pro yourself? By the end of this video you'll know why that is, and hopefully feel a hell of a lot better about yourself, and feel empowered to turn pro in a way that works for you!
Watch the video below or read on for the transcript.
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I read "Turning Pro" about eight years ago and I absolutely loved it. It felt like a giant guiding light in the sky, ready to swoop down and carry me forward into my best life. But did that happen? No. I honestly don't feel like I turned a pro until the last couple of years, and I had to learn a lot of things about the nuances of "Turning Pro" that I feel like Steven Pressfield doesn't touch on in his book, and is information that I feel like gets left out of the conversation a lot. Which is why I want to talk to you about this topic today.
First I want to do a really quick summary of the book. In "Turning Pro" Steven Pressfield talks about what he calls shadow callings and addiction, aka the stuff that is absorbing your time as an amateur that is preventing you from "Turning Pro". He also talks about what "Turning Pro" actually means, and we're going to get into that a lot in the rest of this video. At the end of the day Steven really focuses on how your daily habits are either those of a professional or those of an amateur, and "Turning Pro" is about adopting the habits of a professional.
I'm going to mention quotes from the book and talk about what I feel like he leaves out a lot, and I'm not saying that the book is bad. It's not. I just want to talk about what gets left out, and the nuances that need to be discussed in order to have a holistic understanding of this concept of turning pro. So let's go ahead and get started.
The first quote reads, "The addict seeks to escape the pain of being human in one of two ways--by transcending it or by anesthetizing it. Born aloft by powerful enough chemicals, we can almost, if we're lucky, glimpse the face of the infinite. If that doesn't work, we can always pass out. Both ways work. The pain goes away. The artist takes a different tack. She tries to reach the upper realm not by chemicals but by labor and love."
So there's a lot going on in this quote, and one of the things that bothers me about it is Pressfield creates kind of like a black and white distinction--that you are either addicted to a shadow calling or you're doing your true calling. Using the word addiction as liberally as he does, I... I feel doesn't do that word justice, because people who are dealing with true genuine addictions like... That's no joke.
And I'm not a licensed therapist, so I don't necessarily feel comfortable talking about that in particular, but what I can say is that this quote to me feels like an example of toxic positivity. It implies that all you need to do is make the choice to act differently in order to act differently. And especially for those with mental illness or chronic illness, that is simply not the case.
Let's move on to the next quote. "Addictions are not 'bad.' They are simply the shadow forms of a more noble and exalted calling. Our addictions are our callings themselves, only encrypted and incognito."
Pressfield talks a lot about how what creatives are addicted to in life is a shadow version of what their true calling is, and they only need to shine a light on it in order to understand what they quote "should" be doing with their life.
He also says, "Addiction becomes a surrogate for our calling. We enact the addiction instead of embracing the calling. Why? because to follow a calling requires work. It's hard. It hurts. It demands entering the pain-zone of effort, risk, and exposure."
So with this quote, I do agree with the idea that part of what creates resistance to following what Pressfield calls our true calling is simply that it's work. Yes, doing what we want to do involves work, and it can be hard work, but the good news is you can do hard things.
I feel Pressfield almost goes out of his way to not acknowledge the elephant in the room, and that is mental illness and even chronic illness. Like I mentioned in my video last week, when you have a mental illness you are not a hundred percent in control of your behavior. Your mental illness is creating behaviors on its own. And to suggest that you have 100% cognitive control over your behavior when you are suffering from a mental illness is damaging.
Which brings me to the next quote that I want to address. In this one Steven writes, "The payoff of living in the past or the future is you never have to do your work in the present."
Oof. There is a lot to unpack here. First of all I want to say in general I agree with him. There is a payoff when your head and your thoughts are stuck in any time but now. One of the benefits of that is you don't have to live in the now, which would involve doing your work--the work that you want to do, the work that is your calling.
However... And I speak to this from direct experience because I not only have a history of chronic trauma from childhood abuse, but I also have an unfortunately extensive history of very traumatic one-off medical events that each one in and of itself would give me the diagnosis of PTSD. (My therapist diagnosed me so quickly with PTSD I almost got whiplash from it. That's a different story.)
When you have a history of trauma, it can be dangerous to be present in the present moment. It can be safer to dissociate and to be somewhere else: either in a fantasy world in your mind, or thinking about the future, even worrying and stressing out about the past can feel safer than being in the present moment. Because at least the past is a known entity. You know what happened. You know what came of it. It's something you can process and control, whereas the present moment has a whole slew of opportunities for new things to come your way. And if you have a history of trauma you probably anticipate more trauma in the present if you find yourself constantly somewhere else with your mind.
With your thoughts anywhere and anytime other than here right now, that's an indication that you might be struggling from a mental illness. In which case you deserve to get some help and support for that.
So this brings me to my next and perhaps most important distinction of this whole video, so I really want you to listen to me when I say this. If you identify as someone who has an addiction as Steven Pressfield describes it, and/or you find your mind is always anywhere but here like I just described, you are doing those behaviors likely as a coping strategy. Those behaviors of yours (even though you may not like them), they are a coping strategy. You are using them subconsciously to help yourself feel better and to stay safe. These strategies are protecting you. Just because you don't like them and you would prefer to be behaving differently, doesn't mean they're not helping and protecting you.
We develop our coping mechanisms when we're younger, when we're children, and those are the only ways that we found to gain enough control to protect ourselves. And so now when you're older... (You may may or may not identify as an adult. I'm technically old enough to qualify as an adult, but I still put a question mark after the word "adult" a lot of the time because, like... Ugh. What is adulting but anyways?)
It's really important when you're thinking about true change and behavior modification, to move forward in your life, you need to take into account what those coping mechanisms are doing for you and understanding why they're there in the first place. Because if you just simply try to get rid of them, and replace them with different behaviors that likely won't provide the same coping benefit, you're going to suddenly be someone who is like in the ocean in a life vest, and then somebody took away your life vest. You're going to have a much harder time staying afloat. So it's really important to get the help and support you need to make change safely and to heal as you do it, instead of just trying to cold turkey change your behavior and then probably have a huge backlash from it, and actually regress into your coping mechanisms more than you were using them before.
So comment below and let me know if you now realize what you may or may not have been calling an addiction in your life is actually a coping strategy. If so, write "coping" in the comments.
Okay. We've talked about Steven Pressfield's concept of addiction, and things that I think are left out of that conversation in the book. Now we're going to move on to the main topic of his book, which is "Turning Pro" itself: going from being an amateur to "Turning Pro."
Now the first thing I want to talk about (and this isn't necessarily something that is in Pressfield's book itself, this is more of a cultural expectation that I know I was brought up on here in the United States, and you watching this might really relate to this), and it's the idea that culturally, if you're not productive you don't have value. And there is this huge cultural expectation to be perfectly productive, and to be more productive over time, and to just churn out stuff more and more. It's like there's no time for rest. There isn't a celebration of rest. It's not built into our culture. We have to like fight tooth and nail for it (not just rest but also play).
And so as I was reading "Turning Pro" as someone who has chronic illnesses and mental illness and a history of trauma, I was reading this book with a lens that I was given by my culture: that a good person, a person who has value is perfectly productive. And so I would look at the words "turn pro" and think that means working my butt off all the time. And so again this isn't something he necessarily speaks to in the book. He's not saying "Turning Pro" means working yourself to the bone. He does say that "Turning Pro" involves a lot of hard work, but he's not suggesting to work a hundred hour week. He's not. He's suggesting to be professional.
However, reading "Turning Pro" in the context of being a United States citizen meant hundred hour weeks. And as someone who maybe has four to six usable hours a day on a good day with all the stuff I've got going on? That's never happening.
So "Turning Pro" to me felt like this impossible thing that I had no hope of reaching, and it was really defeating and I felt hopeless. And so while the book was really informative and inspiring, and had the potential to inspire hope, it felt like a dream for everybody else but me. Because I do not have the capabilities a healthy person and a neurotypical person has, let alone those things put together.
So this brings me to the next quote and it reads, "The difference between an amateur and a professional is in their habits. An amateur has amateur habits. A professional has professional habits."
On its own this is a really benign sentence that makes a lot of sense, right? However, if you place it into the context I was just talking about as someone culturally socialized to believe that being professional is overworking, I read "professional habits" as overworking. And that is simply not true.
So after the whole idea that "addiction" is usually just like a coping mechanism, this is the biggest thing I want you to take away from this video. I want you to understand that, regardless of your circumstances, there is a VERSION of professional that works for you.
So this is I think the thing that took me the longest to come to terms with. I have the ability to be professional within my physical, mental, and emotional limits. Just because I have maybe four to six usable hours a day (which is significantly less than a healthy or neurotypical person), doesn't mean I can't be professional.
Professional is not a function of time. How productive I am does not indicate my value. I have value whether I'm productive or not, and the same goes for you.
But what I needed to understand was that I could find a way of being professional, of turning pro, within the very real limits of my existence in this imperfect body. And this brings me to the next quote from the book. "Resistance hates two qualities above all others: concentration and depth. Why? Because when we work with focus and we work deep, we succeed."
Here we have what on the surface is a perfectly reasonable and benign statement, but again, in the context of the overworking overproductive American culture from which I was brought up in, implies that "Turning Pro," being productive, is about overworking. It's all about how much can I produce and how quickly can I do it so I can be of value to everyone around me? It's an awful pressure and expectation to put on yourself.
Now here's a really interesting quote that actually speaks a little bit to what I’ve been talking about in this section, and that we are socialized to expect certain things of ourselves, and that in itself is limiting. And the quote reads, "The amateur allows his worth and identity to be defined by others. The amateur craves third-party validation. The amateur is tyrannized by his imagined conception of what is expected of him. He is imprisoned by what he believes he ought to think, how he ought to look, what he ought to do, and who he ought to be."
And right there I feel like is the filter that we need to be reading "Turning Pro" with.
And it's the idea that simply by being human, Steven Pressfield himself is a biased person. It is impossible to speak without also speaking to your biases without thinking about it. We all have them. And we need to be able to think critically about what it is we are trying to learn, and what we're reading, in order to actually apply it to ourselves in a way that works for us. And that is really what I'm trying to do here with this video. I am trying to point out to you some of the blind spots in what Steven Pressfield is talking about that may apply to you.
You may be like I was years ago, dreaming of "Turning Pro" and thinking that looked like something in particular. But because of the realities of your life, and the body and mind you live in, they might not be possible for you. But that doesn't mean that "Turning Pro" isn't possible for you, it just means that that version of "Turning Pro" is impossible for you. So we need to take a critical lens at what "Turning Pro" truly means and apply that to our own life in a way that genuinely works for us, and is also safe for us to do.
So I want to summarize what I've been talking about really quickly. There are two things when it comes to Steven Pressfield's "Turning Pro" that I think are really important to understand. If you struggle with chronic illness or mental illness, or have a history of trauma in any way shape or form, that Steven Pressfield's idea of what an addiction is can be a really unhelpful way to look at your own behaviors. Yes, what he speaks about can be true. There is some truth to it. But it's not the whole truth. And so if you find yourself constantly not present because your mind is elsewhere, or if you find yourself consistently doing behaviors that no matter what you do you can't seem to change them, it's likely that they're actually a coping strategy. And to really look at them that way, instead of simply an unhealthy addiction, can be much more helpful and allow you to actually seek the healing that could help you move forward. Instead of just punishing yourself and cold turkey trying to change your behavior, which like I said earlier, if your behaviors are genuinely coping mechanisms, if you try to just get rid of them and replace them with what you perceive as healthy behaviors, eventually you're going to pull the rubber band so taut that it breaks. And you're gonna rebound back to your coping behaviors and use them even more than you did before, and it's probably not what you want to be doing. So understanding that your behavior is likely a coping strategy instead of an addiction is a really important mindset shift.
And then the other thing is that what "Turning Pro" actually means is just as simple as Steven put it. It's the difference between having professional behaviors and habits, versus having amateur behaviors and habits. And depending on your life, the reality of your circumstances, and the reality of what you are capable of because of either chronic illness, chronic pain, mental illness, history of trauma, if you're neuroatypical... "Turning Pro" for you is going to look different than it does for someone who is healthy and neurotypical, and understanding that is the key to moving forward and turning pro in a way that works for you, and works with the reality of your life and actually becomes a healthy way to move forward and change. Instead of one that is based in shame, in external expectations, self-punishment, and even self-sabotage.
So there you have it. The missing links in what it means to really turn pro. I hope this video has helped you at least feel better about yourself, because these are the things I wish someone had told me eight years ago when I picked up the book.
If what you struggle with in particular is just starting something that you want to do, I highly recommend checking out my Masterclass on what I call Butt In Chair Time. I consider this the single best tool for conquering resistance, and if you've read "Turning Pro" you know resistance is a huge thing that Steven Pressfield talks about a lot in his work. You can get a copy of my Masterclass for free by signing up here.
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I'll be back next week with another video. Talk to you then. Bye.
Check out these videos next to learn more about procrastination and motivation in the context of chronic illness and mental illness.
[OUTTAKES: blelelelelelel. WORDS. press feld *throat noise* Are they gone yet?]