Tension

First of all, Happy 2009. After taking the last couple weeks "off" from working on this blog, I am really ready to get back into it on a fairly regular basis. I am excited about all that 2009 will have to offer in the midst of the difficulties that we will surely face.

As I have been pondering a new year and the last couple of entries I have starting thinking about vision, shifting the bell curve- and tension. Tension is what creates action. When I originally wrote "playing the bell" back on December 4th, I was really thinking of how a person can drive change withing a community - large or small - but it dawned on me recently that the standard bell curve applies to our PERSONAL actions every bit as much as it applies to a community of people. We have our personal upper and lower ranges of deviant behavior - and by deviant I simply mean that it deviates from our "normal" - and a range of behavior that we consider to be comfortable or normal. We can shift our own normal just like we can shift the normal at a group level.

Both shifts have to do with tension. I don't mean the kind of tension that exists between 2 co-workers that don't really like each other, I am talking about the state that is created when where is ARE is different that where you WANT to be. It is why vision and goals work. You create an internal force that recognizes the difference between the states of being. Having an understanding of where you want to be, and not being there is uncomfortable. It creates a restlessness...a tension. Movement toward the desired outcomes ease that tension, because it narrows the gap.

We don't like tension. We don't like to be uncomfortable. We don't like change. The beauty of the standard curve is that we only have to endure the discomfort for a short time - then the new behaviors become the new normal, and we have to look for the next stretch.

Obviously I still have some more to work on with this, but I'd rather post something rough and keep working on it than wait until its perfected. It is uncomfortable for me to put something not "done" out into the public sphere, but that is precisely why I am doing it.