Creative Tension

Creative Tension…

They call the strain that manifests itself when you’re trying to reconcile your “Current Reality” – where you find yourself in life at any given moment – with your Vision for the future, “Creative Tension.”

Tension, because of the pressures leaving your comfort zone to do new and different things brings with it: creative, because of the new and different things you generally have to do in order to transcend your current reality.

Most of us have experienced “Creative Tension” at one time or another in our lives; we just didn’t know it had a name. It’s that uneasy, uncomfortable feeling that washes over us every time we challenge ourselves with something new, something different, something more.

My entire professional life has been filled with creative tension. It’s an integral part of the changing technology that is the automotive service aftermarket and the many different hats I’ve learned to wear moving from ‘pump jockey’ to ‘driveway salesman;’ ‘mechanic’ to ‘technician’ and, then, ‘shop owner;' ‘trade journalist’ to ‘seminar facilitator’ to ‘author.’ It’s become a natural element of remaining successful in an infinitely changing environment, a survival skill in an ever-changing world.

A natural element of my creative tension is leaving the shop. I say that as if leaving is a ‘bad thing.’ It’s not… Not if you’re leaving for training, education or to expose yourself to new and different ideas all focused on creating a better experience for everyone involved in your business: clients, associates, vendors… everyone.

OK… Leaving for vacation every once in a while isn’t such a “bad thing” either! But, either way, leaving still involves not being there and not being there is still stressful. 

Being someplace else, doing something else – regardless of what that ‘something else’ might be. Even in a digital world, your physical absence still involves some loss of connection, which is generally accompanied by a fair amount of discomfort.

The stress I feel isn’t due to lack of confidence in our people… Nothing could be further from the truth. We have a great crew and as different as our backgrounds and experience might be we all have one thing in common. We all have a profound and very personal sense of what it is to serve. We’re all proud of the profession we’ve chosen as well, and approach what we do deliberately with enthusiasm and a real understanding of the responsibility we’ve accepted when it comes to the service, maintenance and repair of our customer’s vehicles. We also understand how important it is for our clients to have the freedom to go wherever it is they want to go with the security and confidence of knowing they will be able to return home safely.

This is what you think about at 35,000 feet on the way home from two meetings focused almost exclusively on “Best In Class” automotive service delivery. It’s what you think about after almost a full week spent discovering new and different ways to improve and enhance the relationship you share with your client base – improve and enhance it from the client's perspective as the purchaser of automotive service: the client's perspective as a customer.

Something else you think about is how you are going to balance the creative tension you know will accompany integrating these new concepts into your service mix without compromising the same high quality customer care our client’s have come to expect from us. 

The good news is the kind of creative tension I’m feeling as I consider everything I’ve experienced over the past ten days: everything I’ve listened to and learned, is every bit as exciting as it may be stressful. Things like moving toward a more Customer-Centric service delivery model: looking at the whole process and every conceivable interaction through the customer’s eyes, managing diversity in the workplace, engaging Generation “X” and Generation “Y” clients, coping in a web-enabled world and much, much more.

As far as I can see it’s all good and more than exciting enough to drive us into a shared and mutually beneficial future: a future much more consistent with the Vision I have for all of us. A Vision worthy of the Creative Tension that is certain to accompany its achievement…  

Absent With Good Cause...

I just finished writing a piece for Auto-Insights, our newsletter at the shop, and “tweaked” it just a bit so it would work here in Counter-Intuitive. It is titled, “Creative Tension.”

Creative Tension is the sensation we experience as we move from the “Current Reality” we know toward our Vision for the future: a Vision whose reality, no matter how clear or carefully thought out will still remain largely unknown and as a result uncomfortable.

It’s hard to write about something like that without considering your own “Current Reality” and the “Creative Tension” that seems to fill every empty crevice of your life: hard, if not impossible. Especially, when that “Creative Tension” is always more stressful and anxiety-laden then you think it ought to be. One of the primary sources of that tension has to do with another interesting principle – something I try mention every time I’m in front of an audience doing the presentation work I do.

The principle is “Loss of Opportunity” and it’s something everyone doing presentation work is familiar with. The concept is simple enough… If I say I’m going to be somewhere, doing something – what I’ve really done is acknowledge the fact that I can’t be anywhere else, doing anything else; at least, not at that at that particular time or place.

It’s so much a part of the world of presentations and speakers it is generally addressed in the contract requiring the host to compensate the speaker in the event of a cancelation, recognizing the difficulty “filling” that space at the last minute constitutes. However, Loss of Opportunity impacts just about every one of us.

All of us are forced to make difficult choices when it comes to allocating our time, especially today when with the intense pressure of so many worthwhile and competitive demands. Doing this means we can’t do that… Being here means we can’t possibly be there… And, not doing that: not being there, almost always means we are ultimately going to frustrate or disappoint at least one other person, even if that one other person is us!

I experience the frustration, disappointment and tension associated with Loss of Opportunity all the time, especially when I’m trying to reconcile “Want To’s” with “Have To’s.”

Unfortunately, one of the best examples of that is this blog – Which is, most assuredly a “Want To!” I like writing here and experience a fair amount of frustration when the fates and my own lack of planning forces large gapping spaces between entries. It doesn’t matter how important the reason, how necessary the absence… You just can’t be in two different places doing two different things at the same time no matter how appealing or important. It is both physically and emotionally impossible.

This time, it was a ten-day business trip to Florida to both attend and present at two different, yet very similar automotive aftermarket conferences. I suppose I could have found a little time to write at least something. But, quite frankly, I was so immersed in everything that was going on around me - including a little R&R at the 'Happiest Place on Earth" - it never occurred to me; at least, it never occurred to me when I had the time or the opportunity to think of something I felt worthy of sharing. Before that, it was the weeks of preparation ramping up for the conferences combined with constantly thinking about actually getting up in front of hundreds of my peers the eleven times I would be sharing the two presentations I created for both events.

It seems there is always something looming in the background: some “Have To” that inevitably takes precedence over this very enticing “Want To.” And, while I’d like to think I was absent with good cause, the fact remains that for whatever reason, I was gone, nevertheless.

I’ve decided that going forward I’m going to try my best to be more consistent, even if it means just checking in as often as I can with what “Sweet” Dick Whittington, an old L.A. drive-time Disc Jockey, called “Clean Thoughts on a Dirty Wall.” That way, even if I am absent with good cause, we can still keep in touch and you can still remain an integral and important part of my life…