Middle Way Management
Practice

Creative tension

The stress is the distance between where you are and where you want to be.

A way of working with the stress that comes from the gap between your current position and the place you want to reach: you picture the gap as a stretched rubber band and reduce the tension in creative ways instead of trying to eradicate the stress. Reach for it when you feel the telltale signs of stress and would otherwise be pulled into a problem space.

How it goes

  1. Visualise a rubber band looped over the backs of both hands, and pull your hands apart.
  2. Take one hand — say the left — as your current position, and the right as the place you want to eventually reach. The tension between the two is the domain of stress.
  3. Work to decrease the amount of tension between the two in creative ways, so that you reach your goal over time with less stress.
  4. Categorise your potential stressors.
  5. Concentrate upon a single category until you have mastered it. His example: if you manage a large group of people, take “people issues” as your category of focus for a week.
  6. Through that week, every time someone brings you something that requires your attention, raise your awareness to recognise the stressor inherent in it and why you feel the way you do. Remember that stress is created by good scenarios as well as bad ones.
  7. Once you recognise it, turn the stress into creative, goal-directed tension.

A caution

The rubber band is not his own image. He takes it from Senge’s The Fifth Discipline (2006) and, like Senge, treats the tension between current place and goal position as the domain of stress. The aim is not to get rid of stress: psychologists tell us not all stress is bad, he says, and terms like “stress management” have created a buzz that tells us it is something to be eradicated for the good of all — which he questions. He is candid about the limit, too. Asked whether this will instantly solve any problems you must address, he answers probably not always; what it does is expand your perspective into a solution space rather than a problem space.

One way to do this is to categorize your potential stressors and concentrate upon a single category until you've mastered it.

— Middle Way Management, Stress, and Creative Tension