Sometimes your best ideas will come to you in the moments that are the least comfortable.

The times when you may feel a bit confused, unsettled, frustrated, annoyed, and impatient.

When you’re wrestling with a complex business problem, it’s easy to want to just skip past all the hard parts. To get to that place where you know the answer, where you know what to do, where you’ll feel confident about the path forward.

But it’s those moments of creative tension that can lead to real breakthroughs in your thinking. The moments when you suddenly understand your problem from a new perspective, and are finally able to see past the blind spots that have been standing in your way.

These moments are when the real work happens. And yet, it’s easy to misinterpret creative tension as a failure, or a sign that you’re going in the wrong direction.

Until you get to the other side of “not knowing”—the treasure buried underneath all that dirt.

In my coaching conversations, my primary role is to guide clients to these moments of creative tension, and then help them hold that space long enough for new solutions to emerge.

You can follow a similar approach whenever you’re struggling to solve a complex business problem. Instead of rushing through the process and going with the first idea you can think of, take the time to explore the problem from different angles. Let the creative tension build, and hold that space long enough for that shift in perspective to happen.

Sit with that creative tension. Make friends with it. Know that it’s opening the door to breakthrough insights that you might never have anticipated.

What will you do today to start making friends with your own moments of creative tension?

Will you allow yourself to lean into the discomfort, so that you can discover what might be on the other side of “not knowing”?