We are such comfort seeking creatures! Always seeking to feel comfortable.
Turn on the A/C. Adjust the volume on the music. Raid the frig. Avoid that person. Default to a comfort food. Reach for the TV remote. Ignore that negative thought. Sip that wine.
Thousands of years ago, on the savannahs of Africa, where the lions roamed – it was smart to seek comfort … it was smart to stay alive.
Comfort seeking is not so smart if …
you want to get your sacred work out to its rightful audience.
To get your work out to its rightful audience successfully, you have to be able to live with the tension of “what if nobody likes (buys) it?”
In the last post (which you can read directly below this post), we explored how such a tension is a reality … not a fear to be dispelled.
Even our inner drive to label this tension as a fear that needs to be dispelled IS seeking comfort. Nobody wants to live with tension, right? We default to “let’s get rid of this tension.”
Yet this tension may be just the thing. Let’s go more deeply into it, to understand the powerful place of tension and risk in your creative process. Because getting your sacred work to its rightful audience is above all a creative process.
IN PRAISE OF CREATIVE TENSION
Here are the top motivations for learning to love your creative tension:
1. True creativity happens outside of your comfort zone. Period. You know this. It is in the stretch, the tussle with your wild ideas that the magic happens. Comfort is nice, but it is not where the spark lives. Creativity is bringing something new into being. Comfort is not new; it is the familiar. To bring the new into being, you have to be willing to be UNcomfortable.
2. Creative tension is the fire that forges your idea. Imagine the days of the village blacksmith. Forging a new thing by heating and hammering it into shape.
Now think of a female blacksmith. Her feminine nature adds that touch of nurturing and relating to the new thing.
There may be sweat streaking down her underarms, but there is a grace and beauty as she raises the hammer above the anvil again and again. She needs that fire to forge her new thing.
That fire is the creative tension that burns inside us … if we don’t try to snuff it out, to be comfortable.
3. Creative tension is about holding the opposites. Maybe our target audience will not like our idea, blog post, product offering, program, webinar, ebook … but then again maybe they will.
Maybe we really are crazy, but wait, maybe actually we are not crazy.
Maybe our new offering is full of shit; yet maybe it will actually serve others who need just this touch, right now on their path, to their fuller expression … of Essence.
You can’t possibly know where the journey with your Big Idea is heading; so relax and trust the process a little deeper as you embrace the creative tension.
Holding these opposites named above will make you more creative. Stretch out your arms wide to your sides, draw in a deep breath, and BE both sides of the equation.
Use the tension.
Let it lead you to the fuller expression of your idea. Hang with the ambiguity and the unknown. Let the magic of the creative process, including the tension, carry you around the bend in the river.
How has embracing your risk and tension paid off for you? Please comment below …
P.S. This is the second article on tension and risk. You can read the first article in this series. Risk & Tension: Part 1 – It Comes With Putting Your Work Out There