Turn Creative Tension into Your Daily Driver for Growth

You’ve dreamed of leading your team toward a bold new market, but every budget meeting reminds you how far away that goal still is. On Monday morning, you pull out your notebook. In one corner, you sketch your vision—your product in customers’ hands, five-star reviews rolling in. In the opposite corner, you write down last quarter’s sales figures and the projected shortfall. The space between them crackles with what we call creative tension.

Most of us avoid this tension—I know I used to. I’d either pretend the goal was unrealistic or convince myself the numbers didn’t matter. But when I let that tension sit, it became a source of energy. It fueled my focus, sharpened every decision. Instead of dreading the gap, I treated it like a steering wheel guiding each action.

On that Monday, I wrote down one next step: call our top prospect and ask for feedback on the pilot version. It was small, but every day’s step turned those cracks of tension into pathways forward. In a month, the product had improved, and our sales forecast looked dramatically different. That gap hadn’t crushed me—instead it drove me.

When you hold vision and reality together, every morning you’ll feel that electric pull. It’s not stress or anxiety—it’s your signal that you’re on the edge of something big. Embrace it, and let it guide you.

Picture your goal clearly, lay out the facts of where you stand today, and label the space between them ‘creative tension.’ Then, without lowering your aspiration, choose one specific step you can accomplish by tomorrow morning. This small move harnesses the tension, turning it into forward motion.