Find the Needle: Tension

[This article is one in a series designed for our Find the Needle community coaching opportunity, but of benefit to anyone. The 2025 application is now closed.]

There is a force that, when properly utilized, can construct and create. It pulls and stretches and, contrary to what it can feel like at times, has the potential to build. That force is tension. It can make great bread, taffy, bridges, and muscles, but what about communities?

We don’t usually welcome tension when building communities. But what if we did? What if we were okay with tension out of a vision for what it can lead to if handled well? This isn’t enduring with no end goal. The invitation is to stay in the discomfort of repeated and extended tension for the good that can result.

The building of muscle includes microtears in the muscle fibers. Muscle mass is developed by the growth in size and number of muscle fibers from those microtears. This process is called hypertrophy, the opposite of atrophy, muscle shrinking. Hypertrophy has many more factors, but the micro impacts of this tension are part of muscle growth. The key is ensuring that over-tensioning doesn’t happen, leading to the damage of macro tears. What’s important here is that tension can create growth.

Tension is also a force utilized in the majority of bridge designs. Often mixed with the force of compression, tension provides the stability necessary for the bridge to work, but it also provides enough flexibility to withstand external forces such as wind and earthquakes. As contradictory as it sounds, some of the strongest bridge-building in our communities comes from not giving up in times of momentary or extended tension. More on that later.

Searching for answers, resources, partnerships, shared goals, and even defining the problem to solve can become quite intense. To be intense is to be in tension. Is that really something to work with?

Relational discord can have various causes. One common cause, whether between two people or two thousand, is differing points of view on the definition of a problem or the approach to a solution for that problem. A multiplicity of goals that seem impossible to align can make a community quit trying to work together. Life has enough tensions on its own; why step into more?

If you were to peruse the library of my blogs, you would find much about relationships. Why? Because if your work is about people, relationships are pretty inescapable. Positive community impact without relationships will never happen. Where there are relationships, tension will be a companion. It’s just reality.

The unknown and unclear make us tense. Feeling helpless, powerless, and impatient for action can be crushing for our heads and hearts, saying, “Just do something! Anything!” “Just anything” isn’t necessarily the wisest idea.

If we have started including others in that search, it is either because we have been looking alone and still haven’t found what is missing, or there is urgency. A search party seeking a missing person or a bomb has a different atmosphere than a family looking for missing keys. Either way, there is tension.

At the first sign of dissonance, discomfort, or division, most people want to move away from the tension, desiring the path of least resistance. Interestingly, resistance to tension creates new tensions regarding finding answers, solving problems, and making progress. Ignoring it all doesn’t make it go away. Sadly, we will often live with the tensions we know rather than step into new ones that could propel us forward.

Movement in life necessitates resistance, which requires tension. Legs resist gravity to walk, wings resist gravity to fly, and determination resists inactivity in order to find a way. So, how do we navigate the tensions in our search for a better life and world for ourselves and our neighbors?

First Signs
How do you feel about suspense? My wife and I are at opposite ends of the spectrum in our desire for movie suspense. If she can know the end ahead of time, it empowers her endurance, but it’s still very uncomfortable.

Close your eyes, sit, and think about the most recent tense moment you had with a person or in a meeting. What happens with your thinking, your emotions, your heart rate? Is your jaw clinching? Tension often creates physiological discomfort in the chest and gut. The response could go to the point of feeling nauseous. When people are in the mix, there is another layer of uneasiness.

Silent staring or raised voices with hand signals are opposite ends of a continuum of tension responses. Personalities, life experience, and personal choices are significant in people’s reactions to tension.

Post-traumatic stress disorder can intensify these first signs, making some people’s responses seem over the top. In a sense, they are, but those reactions to the tension are from a trauma-driven interpretation that the tension is dangerous and insurmountable. That person has a story that is possibly connected to the topic. That means they may have unique insights to at least be heard and perhaps guide the work.

Fear’s Resistance
Snakes, cliffs, flying, eating something new, starting a new relationship, rats, public speaking, spiders, death, and calling a meeting of people you don’t know much about all create levels of feeling when you think of them. Chances are, at least one of them stirs significant fear in you.

When fear arises within you, do you move toward what makes you afraid, run away, or stand frozen in place? It probably depends on the level of fear. I propose another option: be available to the fear. I’m not saying risk your life, although some thrive on that level of fear-fueled adrenaline. Most of the time, fear fosters resistance: “I don’t want to go there!”

But let’s consider context. As was mentioned above, responses have a continuum of intensity and expression. If you are in an area of a shooting with the perpetrator on the loose, that’s one level of fear. But how we respond to our fear of tension doesn’t need to be equal to that response to danger. For instance, your reaction to fear of failure should not be equal to your response toward a crazed shooter.

When attempting to work together as a community, and tensions begin to arise, don’t treat the manifestation of information like an infestation of rodents. Let the tension inform and guide. This attitude and approach lead to the “what” and “why” questions I often raise.

“What is causing the tension?”

“We disagree on what the problem is.”

“Okay, why do you disagree? What is the difference in perspective? Why does each person hold their given perspective?”

This exploration doesn’t have to be feared when the attitudes and atmosphere of availability to learn are present. It can lead to some helpful connections, which will be discussed below. The attitudes and atmosphere of availability indeed need to be cultivated, but all it takes is one person willing to step beyond the line of fear to model the way.

False Unity
One way we often address tension is by ignoring it. Pretending the strain isn’t there allows one to believe in the presence of unity that actually isn’t there. “Fake it ‘til you make it” doesn’t work when unity is the goal. Does faking it ever make it? (That’s another article.)

Some people choose to create tension just for the sport of it. For others, tension may be the nature of their being. They are uptight people who, when present, tension is there. Navigating all of the human distinctions of a community creates tension all by itself. “Like herding cats” can easily be the description of community efforts. Why pretend that unity is there when it isn’t?

Another interesting point of tension to consider is what lies between our current and desired reality. It’s the tension created by the question of how we get from where we are to where we want to be. The greater the distance between those realities, the higher the tension level. It is a dis-integrating feeling, which is not unity. Why not acknowledge the discombobulating presence?

When tensions of division and disintegration are present, please don’t ignore them or try to crush them. Sit with them. Acknowledge they are there. I get it. That seems weird. But when there is availability to the tension, it can teach you. The tension produces signs that can lead you to possibilities.

Finding Connection
The presence of tension on one issue that a community of neighbors is working on doesn’t demand tension on every issue. Look around for connections that the presence of tension may be distracting you from. Tension can actually lead you to possibilities. It may be that the point of great tension is the point of great need. Differing on ideas doesn’t demand a total disconnect. The genius of collaboration is at its best when what once separated you is mixed to create something beautiful.

We must resist the proclivity to allow tension to build resistance and let it help build a bridge instead. Let tension connect you to what most needs your attention, and then work through the points of resistance.

Tension, by definition, stretches. Interestingly, bridging a gap often demands stretching out, so why not allow the tension to help you? The first step for that connection is to choose not to be offended by the tension.

It may be that none of the people are causing the tension, even though it seems like someone is. Causation may be all about an issue being faced or the surrounding conditions. The frustration of the unknown can be a significant force that stretches the fiber of our being to its limits. Be okay with the stretch that leads to new bridges being built.

Follow Through
You may feel like you are drowning in tension’s effects, but in the kindly determined words of Nemo’s blue friend Dory, “Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming, swimming, swimming.”[i]

One source for empowering follow-through is an openness to learn. This openness brings an attitude willing to pay attention in and to the tension. This isn’t passivity. Learning that cares isn’t just building a library of knowledge to tout. When one wades into the waters of community development and impact with a desire to build bridges, there is a teachability that stays the course of tension out of a heart and vision for what is better.

I have learned that all it takes is one person willing to stay in the tension, one willing to be stretched in searching for one more who is determined to find answers. There is power in an example. Will you be the one?

[i] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Hkn-LSh7es

Do you desire to strengthen your CharityTracker or OasisInsight network and achieve new levels of collaboration and impact? Reach out to Chuck today to schedule your conversation: chuck@simonsolutions.com. 

Dr. Chuck Coward serves as Community Impact Specialist for Simon Solutions, Inc. Chuck has invested over 35 years in fostering human and community development from a variety of places and roles, including as a pastor, non-profit Executive Director, Director of Development, businessman, consultant, university professor, The Struggle Coach, and the founder of Entrusted Foundation. Serving to make people and communities stronger is his great passion. Chuck is the proud husband to Anita, dad to four, and granddaddy to eight.