Sharing Resources to Help You Grow Personally, Professionally & Financially

Sometimes it helps to get a little dose of encouragement—along with a good cup of coffee!—to start the day. Today we discuss tension.

Hopefully the message below will help you get off to a good start for the week.  Please feel free to forward the newsletter on to others that you think would benefit from the content.

Tension

Mr. Webster offers the following definitions of tension:

• Inner striving, unrest, or imbalance often with physiological indication of emotion
• A state of latent hostility or opposition between individuals or groups
• A balance maintained in artistic work between opposing forces or elements

The third of these definitions is where I would like to focus in today’s MMM. In particular, I would like to build on this definition in light of Steven Pressfield’s “The War of Art”—one of my all-time favorite books.

Pressfield points out that we all struggle with the challenge of starting and staying with tasks. Pressfield first digs in to why this is the case and what we can do to overcome what he calls “the resistance.” Finally, he frames the struggle to stick with those things important to us in the context of our relationship to a higher power in life.

Pressfield has essentially written an entire book about the tension we face in life as we pursue our chosen profession. We are called to do something uniquely our own, and yet we struggle to do this thing that is uniquely our own. AND, we need to recognize that this tension is related to our connection to something bigger than ourselves. If you want to dig deeper into how Pressfield views the topic, you can read a full summary of his book (or download a PDF copy of the summary to print and read offline).

What’s super interesting about tension is that, while the connotations are often negative, there is rarely—if ever—anything fruitful in life where tension is not present. The good things in life are NOT easy, and you must strive to work through the tension to get to a better end state. Embracing versus fighting tension is the key. That’s easy to say, but hard to do.

That brings us to this week’s question:

• Are you embracing tension in your life?

Thanks for sharing a bit of your time with me this Monday morning.  

Have a great week!

Blog post from this past week:

Monday Morning Motivation - Rhythm