Tension is the goal, traction is the how.

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To understand why people do anything, you have to understand the concept of tension. And when you understand tension, you’re able to design changes. You’re able to design situations where people are compelled to take the action that you suggest. All right? And go back to ethics. Tension can be very powerful. You can use it to make people take actions that aren’t beneficial to them or you can use it to make people take actions that are bene beneficial to them. Right? So be very conscious with

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how you use this. And the problem is that we aren’t. We just kind of throw tension around everywhere. I’ll get back to that in a second. But what is tension? Tension is this idea that we are going through life and there is a variable up and down. um feeling that we get, right? And and my tension with my dental health might be very different than my tension with my dating life, might be very different than my tension with um my academics or um my education or my business, right? These are all in flux.

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Tension grows typically and the only way to relieve it is to take action. So, as tension grows, we develop a feeling that I’ll call a current feeling. How we feel right now. So, if I’ve been gradually noticing my tooth hurting more and more, that’s tension growing. At first, I might just feel a little numbness and a little sensation. And then I take a bite of ice cream and I realize there’s pain. And then I started to I start to notice the pain every day and I start to notice gums swelling.

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That is tension growing. The what is the action that we’re going to take? Well, it’s to go to the dentist. But why do we take that action? Why do we take that action of going to the dentist when that tension was created? So, here’s the idea. Tension causes our current feeling. Our desired feeling is also a part of the equation. Tension is the gap. It’s the gap between our current feeling and our desired feeling. So, back to the tooth analogy. My desired feeling is painfree. Or if it’s

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if it’s an example where we’re not moving away from pain, it could be moving towards feeling more confident, feeling more beautiful, feeling healthier. Right? That could have been our our current feeling could be um my tooth doesn’t look good. I don’t like smiling. I feel I feel insecure. And then the desired feeling is the opposite. And tension is this. So our job is not to create tension. We’re not going out there demeaning people, pushing their current feelings down or increasing the desire. We’re not

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necessarily trying to change beauty standards. All we’re doing is we’re trying to illuminate the tension. So, a good example is YouTube videos. I make pretty terrible YouTube like titles and headlines. If you think about tension in the traditional sense, you’re supposed to evoke feelings of a desired situation. And the idea is that by clicking by taking action, by taking action, I promise the other person that hey, you can close this gap if you take the action. So if you click on my YouTube

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video and you’re feeling a certain way, you might feel this way. And there’s a lot of tactics on how to do that. There’s whole books um oggov on advertising, cash advertising, just all concepts uh breakthrough advertising all on just the head the headline or the title, right? And and by extension the thumbnail. So we go out and we start to relieve a lot of tension or we promise to relieve tension which is which we’re going to get into traction now which part of the problem. When we are unintentional with the

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tensions that we promise to relieve, we start to create broken promises. The current someone comes with a current feeling. They come a and a desired feeling and we say, “Hey, by engaging with us, by taking the action that I tell you to take, we’re going to get rid of this tension, right? We’re going to relieve your tension.” And back to the idea of being specific with who we’re trying to serve and back to my analogy of being intentional with who we create YouTube titles for. Like

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these are all the same, just different scales. When we’re unintentional, we make promises to people that we can’t uphold because we haven’t designed our system for that person. And the selfish approach is to get as many people into that system as possible. To promise to as many people as possible a certain result. Yet this action is only going to work for a specific few people. Right? So when we do that we create a lot of broken trust and that is affecting our traction. And traction is the people who take the

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action that we want them to take. It’s our engagement with our audience. When we create a lot of stuff that is generic, a lot of stuff that is mass appeal, we lose traction. Sure, you’ll get a lot of awareness, you’ll get tension, but get them to take action and you’ll find very little of that. versus if you’re very specific, you create tension in very specific people and then you ask them to take action in order to close this gap. You make them a promise. What you’ve done is you’ve created

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brand. You’ve made a promise and you’ve upheld it. And now there’s a certain expectation about you, a positive brand association. And we leverage that to create traction to get them for me it would be to get them to take the next step. Right? What would happen if I told a lot of people to come into my video making very general promises? I wouldn’t get any traction. I wouldn’t get people to be able to take the next step. Right? So tension. Be very aware of where you’re causing

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tension. Tension is how you get people to take action. But don’t try to be be be treat people’s attention with more respect. Right? Once you make something, be very aware of who it’s going to serve best and have the respect to tell other people that it doesn’t it won’t help that it’s not for them. All right? And because traction is so important. So this one is a bit more theoretical. Um, if you take my course, I think I I do a better job of explaining and breaking it down. But, um, I also think

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this is a valuable concept to understand that there is that how we get people to take action is by illuminating the difference between their current situation and their desired feeling. And making a promise that them taking the action, buying our product, engaging with our service is going to help them relieve the tension and close the gap, get them to that desired feeling. But then there’s the idea of traction. We have to do more and more and more in order to get people to take larger and larger actions.

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It’s easy to do a click. It’s easy to click onto a YouTube video. If I break that promise, then they won’t take the next step, which requires a larger investment of trust. Right? If I do deliver on my promise here, then I’m able to build bigger and bigger actions. I’m able to ask more of them to to to trust me with my next promise. All right, I hope you you follow here. So, in a dental practice, you’re going to have to use tension. There’s a patient journey. There’s several

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decisions that people are going to have to make that grow, that increase in the level of trust they need with you. When they click onto your website, they trust that your website is about dentistry. They trust that you’re local. When they decide to book an appointment, they’re trusting you with the um promise that you made. That booking is going to help them get closer to their desired feelings. When they come into the office, when they decide to show up, that’s another decision, right? They’re

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trusting that they’re going to have a good experience inside the office. And then when they accept treatment, another decision, right? At all those decision points, we’re creating and relieving tension. And if we’re not creating and relieving tension properly, we’re going to be breaking a lot of trust. We’re going to be ruining our brand. We won’t get traction. Hope that makes sense. Please apply it. Check out our strategy course. And thanks for watching.