Holding Two Truths at Once

Why the rush to resolve tension often costs us more than the tension itself.

Sometimes the kindest thing and the right thing seem to point in different directions. What if they aren’t as far apart as they look?

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The year I served as national accreditation project manager at Magellan Health, our Pennsylvania office faced two audits within months of one another: NCQA, then URAC. I was already based in Florida by then, and flew to meet the folk in the office just three times that year.

The first audit came back a success, with a handful of adjustment projects. That was good news, and kudos to the team. They had earned a breather.

Instead, they got me again.

We were already partway through collating evidence for the next audit. As I walked into the office, heads began popping up over the tan fabric cubicle walls. The scene was as conspicuous as an Arizona desert cowboy with clinking spurs walking into a silent Quaker meetinghouse. A visit that rare was never a casual check-in. It meant the audit had come back for more: more files, more documentation, more decisions to explain.

There was an acute sense of embarrassment, and I had a genuine instinct to just hide away from it all. These were good people who had already given a great deal, and adding one more administrative burden felt almost cruel. Yet the second audit was just as real as the palpable fatigue filling the room. The evidence still had to be gathered, and completing that task was an inescapable responsibility. 

Standing there, two truths pulled me in opposite directions. The work needed my authority, and the people needed relief from it. Everything in me wanted to choose one and make the other go away.

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When two truths pull against each other, the urge to resolve them can feel like responsibility. More often, it’s a longing for relief. Here are three shifts that help us hold competing truths long enough to see them clearly, and to meet the weight with more wonder than worry.

From Right to True

When two truths collide, the first question most of us reach for is “Which one is right?” It sounds responsible, and it feels like leadership. Yet it quietly assumes one truth has to lose.

Psychologists have a name for the pull behind that question: the need for cognitive closure, a desire for a firm answer that nudges us to seize the first workable conclusion and then hold on tight.¹ Pressure and fatigue only strengthen that pull. A deadline looms, a team is tired, and the mind starts auditioning verdicts.

Think of the project that has to ship on Friday and the colleague whose family needs them home to prepare dinner. Or the budget that must shrink and the program you know is working. “Which one is right?” puts both truths on trial. “What is true here?” invites the fuller picture. The deadline is real. The family is real. Both deserve to be seen before either is decided.

The shift sounds small, but it widens what you’re looking for, from a single winner to the whole landscape.

From But to And

Listen to how tension usually sounds in a meeting: “The audit matters, but the team is exhausted.” Everything before the “but” gets quietly erased.

Researchers who study organizations describe certain tensions as paradoxes: elements that contradict each other yet stay connected, show up together, and persist over time. Their work suggests that tending both sides over time, rather than permanently choosing one, is what keeps an organization healthy.² Tension like this is built into the work itself.

So here’s something to try this week. Choose one leadership situation where two truths are both real. Write them down, side by side, joined by “and.” The deadline matters, and the team is tired. The standard must hold, and these people have already given a great deal. Then stop. Don’t solve it yet. Let the sentence stand.

It may feel unfinished. That’s fine. It’s honest, and honest is a far better foundation than fast.

From Relief to Wonder

Once both truths are on paper, something surprising happens: the urge to resolve begins to ease. The weight is still there, yet it no longer presses on the chest. It starts to look like something worth studying.

The poet John Keats called this capacity negative capability: being able to remain in uncertainty and doubt “without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”³ Leonard Meyer, who studied how music moves us, argued that emotion rises precisely when an expected response is held back.⁴ The suspended chord is where the ache and the beauty live. Rush it, and the music goes flat.

There is older wisdom here, too. The theologian J. I. Packer described an antinomy as an apparent contradiction between truths that seem equally necessary, and he urged his readers to hold both rather than trim one to fit the other.⁵ We don’t have to master every tension to be faithful within it. That frees us to meet hard things with intrigue instead of dread.

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Competing truths are part of the weight that comes with leading well. We can ask what is true instead of who wins, join our truths with “and” instead of “but,” and trade the quick relief of a verdict for the slower gift of wonder.

Looking back on those cubicles, the audit and the people were never really enemies. They were two parts of the same work, both asking to be carried with care. That may be joyful excellence at its most grown-up: the willingness to look at the weight with open eyes, and even a little wonder.

What two truths are you carrying right now that you’ve been trying to turn into one?

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