Start With the Tension.
We were taught that learning begins with content — a topic to cover, a chapter to read. It doesn’t. Real growth begins with a tension: a friction you actually feel. And here is the quiet truth this piece is about — every real tension already contains the work it is asking of you. You only have to read it.
Think of a moment you genuinely grew — not when you memorized something, but when you became someone slightly different than you were before. If you look closely, it almost never started with a topic. It started with a tension. A pull between two things you couldn’t reconcile. Acceptance and resistance. Confidence and fear. What you believed and what you were seeing. That friction is uncomfortable, and we are trained to smooth it over as fast as we can. But the friction is not the obstacle to learning. The friction is the doorway. The tension you are trying to escape is the exact thing that has something to teach you — and, remarkably, it already knows what.
The Wrong Place to Begin.
Most people believe education begins with content and hope that the learner will care and do due diligence. However, many training professionals know education begins long before that with needs analysis, objectives, measurement, evaluation, and so on. That being said, a topic is named, material is assigned, and somewhere in the delivery, we trust that engagement will appear and the desired results will have an impact. Sometimes it does. Often, it doesn’t, because objectives and content alone make no demands on the person receiving them. You can read about a culture, a method, a discipline, and remain entirely unchanged — informed, but not formed! The information passed through you (literally) and left you exactly as it found you.
A tension inside you is different. A tension implicates you. “Should I accept this, or am I right to resist it?” is not a topic you can hold at arm’s length — it is a question that requires you to take a position, and taking a position is the first act of real cognition. This is why, when I built the frameworks at the heart of my book, Fostering Global Citizenship in Education and Leadership (2025), I did not begin the themes with topics. I began them with tensions, derived from a population of teachers, stated as live oppositions (tensions or perceptions): Acceptance versus Rejection. Understanding versus Misunderstanding. Fear and the unfamiliar. Each names a real internal conflict and perception a person carries into a difficult situation — and each, because it implicates the person, makes them have to do the work.
The Tension Already Knows What It Needs.
Here is the part that changed how I think about teaching, and about my own growth. A real tension does not just demand effort in general. It demands a specific kind of thinking — and which kind is written into the tension itself, if you read it honestly.
Consider fear of forfeiting the franchise — the quiet impunity of never being asked to answer for it. What does honestly dealing with that fear actually require? Not more facts. It requires you to take the fear apart — to examine where it comes from, what it is built of, which part is real, and which is inherited. That is analysis, in the precise sense. The tension is an analysis problem by its very nature; it could not be anything else. Now consider Acceptance versus Rejection of something culturally foreign. What does that require? It requires you to weigh, to judge against your own values, to assess your own bias (or not). That is evaluation. Again, the tension names its own demand. You are not assigning a level of difficulty to it from the outside. You are detecting the one that was already there.
You don’t impose the work on the tension. You read the work out of it. The tension was always asking for something specific — your job is to hear it correctly.
This is the move that matters, and it inverts how the famous taxonomy of learning is usually used. Most people use Bloom’s Taxonomy from the top down — pick a level, write an objective to fit. This works backward. It starts with a real tension and reads upward to the cognitive act that honest engagement with it already requires. It is diagnosis, not prescription. And the reason it produces learning that feels true rather than manufactured is simple: the demand was real before anyone named it.
Three Kinds of Demand a Tension Can Make.
When you read a real tension closely, you find it rarely asks for only one kind of growth. It usually asks for three at once, because a human being is not only a thinker. Bloom’s Taxonomy named these three domains a half-century ago, and they map onto the three things a tension can demand of you.
What you must come to value
The domain of feeling and worth — from first noticing, to responding, to valuing, to finally internalizing something so deeply it defines you. Most real tensions are affective at their root: bias, fear, openness, readiness to embrace.
What you must come to think
The domain of knowing — remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, create. This is the work you do on the tension: examining it, judging it, and ultimately building something new from what you’ve understood.
What you must come to do
The domain of skilled action — from imitation, to precision, to articulation, to naturalization, where a capability becomes so practiced it performs effortlessly. Growth that stays in the head was never finished.
The signature of real growth is that all three move together. A tension is usually felt first (affective), examined next (cognitive), and finally enacted until it becomes second nature (psychomotor). The richest learning lives exactly at that seam — a feeling, examined by thinking, until it changes what you can do.
AI can help you diagnose the tension — not feel it, and not become through it.
Here is where artificial intelligence has a real and honest role, and it is a narrower one than the hype suggests — which is exactly why it is trustworthy. The hardest parts of this work are profoundly human. Surfacing the real tension — naming the friction you actually feel, not the safe version of it — takes self-honesty no machine has. And the becoming itself — the slow internalization that changes who you are — cannot be delegated to anything. Those two ends of the work are yours alone.
But the middle has a genuine assist. Once you have named a tension, AI is remarkably good at helping you diagnose what it is asking for — at reading a felt friction and helping name the cognitive act it demands, the domain it lives in, the level it reaches. You bring it “I keep avoiding feedback from people who see the work differently than I do,” and it can help you see that the demand hiding in that sentence is evaluation in the cognitive domain and valuing in the affective one — that the tension is asking you to judge your own resistance and decide what you actually hold dear. That is diagnostic help. It turns a vague discomfort into a nameable, actionable target for growth.
Think of it the way a good diagnostician helps a patient: the machine does not have the condition and cannot do the healing. It helps name what is actually going on so that you can act on it precisely instead of flailing. AI amounts to an assist in diagnosing the problem. You still have to face the tension, and you still have to become.
Diagnosis Is Not Transformation.
It is worth being precise about the line, because it is easy to let a helpful tool quietly take over more than it should. A diagnosis is not a cure. Naming that a tension demands analysis does not perform the analysis. Knowing that a fear is built of three inherited assumptions does not dissolve the fear — you still have to sit with it, take it apart, and live differently on the other side. The machine can hand you the map. It cannot take the walk, or as the African elder might tell you– “you must walk the path.”
This is why the role has to stay bounded. If AI ever moves from naming the work to doing the work for you, it has stopped helping you become and started preventing it — because the becoming is the doing. A diagnosis you didn’t earn changes nothing about who you are. The assist is real, but it ends precisely where transformation begins. Use the machine to see the tension clearly. Then put it down, and climb.
The Climb to a New Becoming.
Once a tension is surfaced and its demand is read, the work is to climb it — through the levels the tension named, until you reach the top. And the top, every time, is the same kind of act. It is not a fact stored or a task finished. It is the creation of something that did not exist before: in the cognitive domain, Create; in the affective domain, an internalized value that now defines you; in the psychomotor domain, a skill so owned it performs without strain. These are not three different summits. They are three names for one thing — a capability so fully internalized that it expresses itself originally, authentically, and as a matter of who you now are.
In my book, every theme climbs to exactly this point: the learner does not finish the unit holding more information. The learner develops a personal philosophy that reshapes how they will act from then on — they become a different teacher, person, or organization. The same is true for any learner. A learner working through the tensions of data work does not finish having memorized techniques; if the climb is real, they become an analyst with judgment and integrity. A learner working through the tensions of governance does not finish having learned the rules; they become someone whose decisions carry earned trust. The tension was the doorway. The climb was the journey. And the person who reaches the top is, quietly, a new self — which is to say, a new becoming, ready to begin the next orbit.
How to Use This This Week.
You do not need a curriculum or a course to try this. You need one real tension you are currently living inside.
Name the tension honestly
Not the topic — the friction. State it as an opposition: the thing you’re drawn to versus the thing you resist. Be honest enough that it makes you slightly uncomfortable. That discomfort is the signal you’ve found a real one.
Read the demand — and let AI assist here
Ask what honest engagement with this tension actually requires of you. Does it ask you to take something apart (analyze)? To judge it against your values (evaluate)? To build something new (create)? This is exactly where a thinking partner — human or AI — earns its place: helping you name the demand precisely. The naming is the assist; the facing is yours.
Climb until it changes you
Don’t stop at understanding the tension. Move through its levels until you’ve made something — a decision, a practice, a small philosophy you’ll act on. When the tension has reshaped how you’ll behave next time, you haven’t finished learning. You’ve become.
The tension was never in your way. It was the way.
Every real friction you feel already contains the work it is asking of you. A good thinking partner — and yes, sometimes a machine — can help you name that work.
But only you can face the tension. And only you can become.