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Simplicity and Success: Creating the Life You Long For

by Bruce Elkin

200 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #03-0665; ISBN 1-4120-0296-6; US$19.50, C$22.95, EUR16.00, £11.50

Simplicity and Success: Creating the Life You Long For helps you dicover what you love and create a life that shows it. Driven by vision, grounded in reality, and focused on results that matter, this simple yet powerful approach helps you simplify your life, achieve the success you long for, and feel energized, authentic and whole.

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about the book      about the author      sample excerpts       reviews       catalogue info

About the Book I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Crafting a simple life would be easy if getting rid of stress and clutter was all that simplicity seekers sought, but it isn't; we alos seek success. We long to create results that matter in our lives, work, and relationships. However, by defining simplicity as a solution to life's stress and complexity, many approaches point us toward relief rather than results. Because relief is usually temporary, we often oscillate between simplicity and success without realizing either. At best, the simplicity we achieve is the simplicity on this side of complexity. Simplicity and Success: Creating the Life You Long For will help you go beyond merely getting rid of what you don't want. It will help you discover what you love and create a life that shows it. It will help you integrate conflicting desires by shifting your focus from solving problems to creating what matters. It will empower you to embrace life's complexity, appreciate its richness, and move through its often chaotic "messiness" to the deep, lasting and fulfilling simplicity on the other side of complexity. Driven by vision, grounded in reality, and focused on results that matter, this simple yet powerful approach will help you simplify your life, achieve the success you long for, and feel energized, authentic and whole.

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About the Author Bruce Elkin has lived simply and successfully for twenty five years. He is a Personal, Professional, and Executive Coach and President of Summit Strategies, a Strategic Design and Planning Firm. He has taught his approach Simplicity and Success: Creating the Life You Long For to clients as diverse as single moms on welfare to Fortune 500 executives. He taught at Simon Fraser University, the University of Calgary, and the Banff Centre. For five years, he was Senior Trainer for The Institute for Earth Education. He was a founding Associate of the Action Studies Institute. For nine years, he studied and worked with Robert Fritz, author of The Path of Least Resistance and founder of the field of Structural Consulting . Bruce writes and publishes Simplicity and Success, a popular electronic newsletter. His firm but caring coaching and enthusiastic teaching and talks have helped thousands discover what they love and live a life that shows it.

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Sample Excerpts

INTRODUCTION

A Personal Odyssey

Downshifting. Cashing out. Living simply. Pundits such as Faith Popcorn tell us these trends are "hot." Fetzer Institute researcher Paul Ray estimates that twenty-four percent of US adults - forty million people, sixty percent of whom are women - are already "Cultural Creatives," strong advocates of self-creation, spirituality, ecology, and simpler lifestyles.

"The transformation," claims Ray, "is happening right in front of our eyes."

But wait! Haven't we heard such predictions before?

Yes. In the seventies, Harris polls claimed that most Americans wanted to consume less and preferred non-material pleasures. A 1976 Stanford Research Institute (SRI)report speculated there could be ninety million individuals practicing "voluntary simplicity" by the year 2000. "(A) major transformation," the authors suggested, could occur "in the coming decades."

However, instead of the predicted transformation, interest in simplicity quietly ebbed away. In its place, we got the eighties, a decade of unbridled greed, competitive consumption, and "looking out for #1." Although such oscillating behaviour confuses both pundits and simplicity seekers, it shouldn't surprise us. "Again and again," says David Shi in The Simple Life, "Americans have espoused the merits of simple living only to become enmeshed in its opposite."

Now, simplicity is hot again. It will get hotter as political and economic uncertainty grows. However, we'd do well to ask, will it last? This time, will we turn vision into reality?

A Personal Odyssey

I've been asking that question since the early eighties when I noticed myself oscillating between a desire for simplicity and a desire for success. I started living simply in the mid-seventies. A disgruntled high-school teacher, I lucked into a job developing an experience-based environmental education program for a new outdoor center in the Rockies. Inspired by SRI's Voluntary Simplicity (3) report and eager to participate in the coming transformation, I happily lived in teepees and camp trailers and made do with few possessions. I lived simply because it was the most direct way to live my new earth-friendly values and because environmental education didn't pay well. When I left the centre for a teaching job at a west coast university, I found it much harder to walk my talk.

Instead of teaching experiential education, cutbacks forced me to supervise student teachers in conventional classrooms. I hated it. I came home tired and frustrated. As joy and meaning in work went down, spending went up. Going to a restaurant or sending for pizza was easier than cooking. Buying a bottle of wine, a record, or a book would ease my bad feelings for a few days or hours. No longer forced to make do, do without, or do something else as I'd done on a low income, I purchased pleasures rather than created them. While I espoused the value of simple living, the trajectory of my life swung away from acting on that value.

Why, I wondered, did I seem to have so little control over my own actions?

After two years, I left the university, moved to a little island, and spent the winter writing. I traded handyman work for a small cabin and lived on $500 a month to show myself that I could live simply. I wasn't very handy and the job only lasted until spring. So I left the island and became an associate of the Action Studies Institute, a think tank that developed high-level action skills for individuals, business, education, and government. Over the years that followed, although I lived a simpler life than most of my contemporaries, I oscillated between my desire to live simply and my desire to craft a successful career. Sometimes my life was simple and uncluttered. Sometimes it was complicated and stressful. Oscillating between the two states confused me. So did the behaviour of those who abandoned the simple life in the eighties to join the orgy of upscale consumption that characterized that "decade of greed."

To counteract the despair I felt as I watched the simplicity trend ebb away, I read and re-read the classics of the simplicity and self-help literature. They inspired me. They motivated me. They validated my ideal of a simple life. However, they didn't help me build momentum toward the kind and quality of life I truly wanted. I'd try, make progress, and then slip back. I used willpower, guilt, and positive thinking to force myself to practice what I preached but I felt as if I was swimming upstream. Why, I added to my list of questions, could I not consistently walk my talk? How, I wondered, did people make real and lasting change?

Throughout the late eighties and nineties, I devoted myself to exploring these questions. My Action Studies project involved researching the generic skills underlying practical creativity. What skills and structure, I wondered, underlay the ability to create?

Many experts described "creativity" as an inborn attribute, a gift from God to a special few. Others believed it was a breakthrough process to higher consciousness. Some associated it with mental illness. Others suggested that well-placed kicks or whacks to vulnerable body parts led to creativity. None of these explanations satisfied me. My understanding of generic skills convinced me there must be basic skills and principles that applied to any act of creation.

In 1985, when I discovered The Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz, the title put me off. However, the subtitle, Principles for Creating What You Most Want to Create, intrigued me. I was delighted to find that Fritz's approach was not about taking the easy way out. Nor was it about "creative thinking" or "creative problem-solving." It was about the act of creating. Fritz showed how, by using a common form - an organizing framework and set of generic skills - creators consistently bring into being real and lasting results, in spite of the problems and circumstances they face.

Structure: The Key to Real and Lasting Simplicity

Just as water follows a path of least resistance laid down by the shape and structure of a stream bed, Fritz argues that our own energy and action follow a path laid down by the structures underlying our lives. In some structures, the path of least resistance leads to what we want; in others, it does not. In some, we advance toward desired results; in others, we oscillate.

Our life structures result from the way we arrange the relationships between our perceptions, ideas, values, beliefs, desires, fears, and external reality itself. If we're not aware of these relationships, it's easy to get stuck in structures that don't support our most important values and desires. Either/or structures, for example, give rise to oscillating patterns of behaviour. Moreover, there is a fundamental difference between the structure of problem-solving and the structure of creating - and between the kind and quality of results those structures produce.

Most problem-solving focuses on the intensity of a problem. Thus, it merely relieves the feelings associated with the problem. Taking aspirin provides relief from the pain of a stress headache but does nothing to change the behaviour that caused the stress or the structure that caused the stress-producing behaviour. Relief gives us the illusion that the problem is "solved." It allows us to keep doing what caused the stress and the pain. When the aspirin wears off, the pain returns. We're back where we started or worse, well on our way to ulcers.

So, "why not just solve the stress?" Again, because this kind of problem-solving focuses on the intensity of the problem, the same pattern unfolds. If we relieve the stress but don't change the structure that gives rise to it, we keep doing what caused it in the first place. Research shows that stress management programs can turn chronic burnout into acute breakdown by teaching people to cope with ever-increasing amounts of stress until they break.

By shifting our focus from solving problems to creating desired results, Fritz shows how to set up structures that guide energy and action toward what we most want. Instead of taking aspirin or solving stress, we can create structures that lead to stress free lives and work.

From Problem-Solving to Creating

Grasping the impact of structure on my behaviour changed everything. Recognizing the difference between problem-solving and creating made a huge difference in my approach to simple living and self-creation. I saw that a rich and simple life was not a solution to a problem, but rather a creation to bring into being. Over the next nine years, I studied and worked with Robert Fritz. I taught his approach to thousands of participants and hundreds of organizations. Using the principles of creating, I found it easier to transcend the either/or, problem-driven strategies that underlie so many quick-fix self-help and simple living approaches. Using his approach, I wondered, "Could I integrate simplicity and success? Could I create a simple yet rich, engaging, and successful life - and sustain it?"

As the eighties gave way to the nineties, interest in simple living grew. Paul Ray's "Cultural Creatives" report claimed that many of us were already advocates of self-creation and simpler lifestyles. I hoped he was right. Still, I remembered the enthusiastic but faulty predictions of earlier pollsters. Could the growing interest in simple living be sustained? Or would it again ebb away on a changing tide of public interest?

Embracing Complexity; Creating What Matters

As my understanding of structure grew, I realized why I'd oscillated. I valued a simple, healthy, and sustainable life. I also valued "a good life" complete with challenging work, financial security, comfort, convenience, and respect. Unconsciously, I'd arranged my values into a dichotomy of desires, an "either/or" structure in which I pitted a simple, sustainable life against a rich, engaging, and successful one. In this simplicity vs. success framework, my values competed. Satisfying one increased the pull of the other. Attending to that value increased the pull of the first. Back and forth I swung, caught in an oscillating pattern generated by the unseen structure. As I focussed on getting rid of the frustration associated with that oscillation and fought against the complexity it generated, I lost sight of the results I most wanted to create.

Eventually, I realized that there were two kinds of simplicity: voluntary (freely chosen) and involuntary simplicity (poverty). I also realized that there were two types of complexity. Driven by unwanted problems, involuntary complexity leads to distracted effort and stress. Merely getting rid of (or relief from) what we don't like and don't want - clearing out clutter, for example - wastes precious life energy. Too often, it results in the reactive, temporary simplicity on this side of complexity. Clearing the clutter out of our lives and homes brings us relief, but, by itself, it does not bring the results we long for. Life is simpler and more successful if we freely embrace and transcend complexity by creating what matters.

Voluntary complexity is freely chosen and focussed. A potter throwing a thin-sided pot, a writer crafting a poem, or an entrepreneur growing a socially responsible business all experience complexity. However, because they embrace that complexity, it brings a focussed simplicity to their tasks and to their lives. Similarly, simplicity seekers who embrace life's complexity as the raw material of creating can create the deep, lasting, and satisfying simplicity on the other side of complexity. If clutter-clearing is driven by a vision of a well designed space such as a meditation corner - because you'd love to have such a space in your life - the space you create will be clutter free and stay that way.

Although creating a meditation space is more complex than clearing out clutter, that complexity is also more engaging. A clear, compelling vision of a space you'd love to create not only motivates you, it helps build the momentum you need to follow through to completion. Out of the gap between vision and reality, a useful, creative tension emerges. Creative tension is the engine of the creative process. You can use it to take actions that support your result. By focussing on a vision of what you want while embracing reality as it is, you set up a framework that contains and guides the resolution of creative tension. You also avoid the stress that comes with fighting against what you don't want. By working with the path of least resistance that forms between vision and reality, your actions naturally and easily flow toward what you want.

Creating Makes the Complicated Simple

As I shifted my focus to creating what matters, something remarkable happened. Not only was I able to create what I wanted, but my problems began to fade away. Carl Jung explained this phenomena when he said, "All the greatest and important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble .... They can never be solved, but only outgrown." Real change, he saw, resulted from a shift to a new level of consciousness. When patients embraced a more powerful interest, he explained, "the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms but faded when confronted with a new and stronger life urge."

By adopting a creating stance - by simultaneously focussing on what matters and embracing reality - simplicity seekers shift to a new level of consciousness and tap into one of life's most persistent urges: the urge to create. Creating, said jazz great Charlie Mingus, makes the complicated simple. The creative process, freely chosen, is simpler yet more powerful than problem-solving. The structure - the framework - of creating includes and transcends problem-solving. Thus, creating is a more reliable and effective structure in which to create results that matter. The enduring results on which civilization rests (art, music, literature, science, etc ...)were not solutions to problems. They were creations that someone loved enough to bring into being. "All the great things," said Robert Frost, "are done for their own sake."

A Timely Offering

Simplicity to Success comes at a critical time. Many of us hunger for a way to transcend the complexity that comes from coping with jobs, careers, children, ambitions, fears about retirement, and the desire to leave a lasting legacy. Tired of seesawing between competing values, we are ready for a new approach, one that integrates values into an easy-to-manage whole. This book speaks to those who want to integrate personal freedom with intimate relationships, career achievement with healthy families, and personal fulfillment with work that provides meaning, challenge, and grace. It also speaks to those seeking to integrate spirit and soul into their everyday lives and work. Many of us are intuitively moving in this direction. For example, while browsing my local bookstore, I was surprised to find books on money displayed beside bestsellers on simplifying life and enriching the spirit. "What kinds of people," I asked my bookseller, "buy these different books?"

"The same people," she said, smiling sweetly.

I must have looked perplexed because she touched me gently on the arm and said, "There's a convergence of interests, dear, a kind of shared vision emerging."

It's my hope that Simplicity to Success will help you realize your part in this shared vision. I hope it will reinvigorate the simplicity movement, and elevate simplicity-seeking to a new level of mainstream interest. It provides critical next steps for the millions who have downshifted and millions more who contemplate doing so. It provides "simple-livers," downshifters, and "the rest of us" with a way to align vision, values, and actions so we more naturally and organically walk our talk. It will show you how to create results that honour who you are even as you strive to become the person you imagine yourself to be. And to enjoy the process.

The road to lasting simplicity and authentic success leads through new territory. To travel that road successfully requires new skills. We must master the higher-order skills to learn from our experience and to better apply the skills we already have. We need to:

• Understand the structure and dynamics of the creative process.
• Master the generic skills and practices common to all creators.
• Develop a life-long practice, a discipline if you will, of daily creating.

Together, these skills can empower and enable us to create - and sustain - the lives we most want. This book is about mastering these skills, integrating simplicity and success, and creating what matters most.

In Chapter 1, we'll examine the differences between solving problems and creating desired results. We'll see how one couple learned to transcend "dichotomies of desire" in favour of an integrated approach to creating what matters.

In Chapter 2, we'll examine overly-simplistic approaches to life-creation that produce the partial, temporary, and relief-driven simplicity that is found on this side of complexity.

In Chapter 3, we'll explore the deeper, more authentic and long lasting form of simplicity that is found on the other side of complexity. We'll see how creators embrace and transcend life's messy complexity and use it's energy to produce results that matter.

In Chapter 4, we'll explore the question "Simple Enough for What?" and see how two long-time simple-livers embraced complexity and created deep and lasting simplicity.

In Chapter 5, we'll explore the reasons why problem-solving is not a solid foundation on which to build a simple, yet rich and successful life. We'll examine six flaws in the problem-solving approach that make it a shaky foundation on which to create a life.

In Chapter 6, we'll shift our focus from solving problems to creating results that matter. We will examine the differences between creativity and creating and see that there is much more to creating what matters than just creativity or merely being creative.

In Chapter 7, we will explore the form of the creative process. We'll examine the basic structure - the framework - within which creators bring into being the creations they most care about. I'll outline the ten basic skills for creating almost anything and show you how they fit into the overall framework of the creative framework. I'll also show you how the core components of creating - vision, current reality, and action - interact with each other to make up the organizing framework - the container for creating - that is the creative process.

In Chapter 8, we'll explore Vision. I'll give you guidelines for getting clear about what matters, specifying the results you want to create, and crafting clear, compelling visions for those results.

In Chapter 9, I'll show how to assess current reality objectively and accurately. I'll explain why (and how)by holding Vision and Current Reality in mind at the same time, you can set up and tap the gentle but consistent power of creative tension.

In Chapter 10, I'll show how to use the dynamic tension inherent in the creative framework to orchestrate results through choices you make and actions you take. You'll see how creative tension works as the engine of creating and sets up a container for creativity.

In Chapter 11, we'll examine choice in the creative process. We'll see how creators set up hierarchies of choices in which smaller, less important choices support larger, more important choices. We'll see how commitment leads to action and to results no one could have imagined.

In Chapter 12, we'll look at Action Steps and the art and craft of everyday creating. We'll see how practice and planning interact. We'll see how creating is a learning process and how creators invent the processes that move them from where they are to where they want to be.

In Chapter 13, we'll see how to build momentum and follow through to final results.

In Chapter 14, we'll conclude with a word on commitment and completion.

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Reviews

"This is a very informative and fun book for those looking to balance simple living with the demands of the workforce and modern family life. Elkins starts off with a personal history of his own personal odyssey from academic workaholic, to simple living eccentric living in a teepee, to a more balanced approach combining reductionism with an enriching professional life and financial security. We are also led through the lives of Elkin's clients Celia and Al, a late 30s couple who are experiencing the same crazy bounces as Elkin had before. Elkin successfully coaches them back to a balanced life of simplicity and success and manages to save their marriage at the same time. Obviously very Zen-inspired, but fortunately not too New-Agey, Elkin makes a great contribution to the fields of Psychology and Mental Health."

- www.bookpromotion.net

"Bruce Elkin does a great job showing that simplicity doesn't mean doing without - rather, it's about fine-tuning your life to achieve your most important dreams."

- Janet Luhrs, author of THE SIMPLE LIVING GUIDE, SIMPLE LOVING and editor of SIMPLE LIVING at www.simpleliving.com

"Bruce's approach to integrating simplicity and success is exciting and challenging. By outlining a simple yet powerful way to create the "simplicity on the other side of complexity," he shows you how to discover what you love and create a life that shows it."

- Wanda Urbanska, co-author with Frank Levering of SIMPLE LIVING: ONE COUPLE'S SEARCH FOR A BETTER LIFE, and host of the PBS series "Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska."

"In the Age of Adversity nothing is more compelling than achieving Simplicity and Success. Bruce Elkin provides a life-organizing framework with which you can dramatically refocus your life on what matters most. Don't read this book unless you're prepared to reduce your stress, dump extraneous burdens, and re-energize your life."

- Dr. Paul Stoltz, author of ADVERSITY QUOTIENT: TURNING OBSTACLES INTO OPPORTUNITIES

"Bruce Elkin does the simple living movement a great service by presenting practical tools for realizing the values that make life better. Elkin takes us beyond what we want to get rid of and helps us focus on what we want to get at-creating lives high in richness and challenge, yet low on the food chain."

- Mark Burch, author of SIMPLICITY and STEPPING LIGHTLY: SIMPLICITY FOR PEOPLE AND THE PLANET

"Bruce Elkin is a coach who studied for many years with Robert Fritz, whose distinctions about creativity and creating have made frequent appearances in this newsletter. Bruce's book applies Fritz's principles to creating a life that is both simple and successful. In the process, he demystifies Fritz's work, giving practical examples and clarifying the principles. Highly recommended."

- Molly Gordon, Publisher of the 17,000 subscriber NEW LEAF E-ZINE

"All too often coaches guide their clients towards desired change only to find old habits creeping back to prevent a full transformation. Even coaches may find it difficult to walk their own talk. In this 200-page paperback, Bruce Elkin, tells his own story and the story of some of his clients with regards to how they used vision, creative tension, choice, action and momentum to bring about simplicity and success.

Elkin makes a strong case for the inadequacy of problem-solving approaches and backs it up with real life stories and reflective exercises. He also clarifies the concept of maintaining balance, an often-misunderstood goal in coaching. While it may seem paradoxical he shows how embracing complexity can actually lead to creating simplicity. He reveals the key elements from 25 years of simple living that enables his clients to gain what they truly want and create what truly matters. And he shows how he helps clients sustain deep and lasting change. This book is available at www.BruceElkin.com."

- Rey Carr, Ed., THE PEER REVIEW

"Bruce Elkin's new book does a great service for the simple living movement. Elkin draws on his extensive expertise as a personal coach and organization development trainer to engage the power of creative process to the work of fashioning a simple and fulfilling life. Intimate, practical, and positively focused, Elkin's book moves well beyond "hairshirt simplicity" and even simplicity as a "leisure expansion movement" to challenge readers to identify what really matters in their lives (their positive visions) and then set out methodically to realize them. In emphasizing creativity over critique, the book echoes Gandhi's sage advice that "we become the change we wish to see in the world." Elkin intuitively grasps the principle that only positive action has staying power; only authentic visions leading to fully creative acts can move us beyond consumer culture and help forge a constructive alternative to it."

- Mark A. Burch, author of SIMPLICITY: NOTES STORIES AND EXERCISES FOR DEVELOPING UNIMAGINABLE WEALTH

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Catalogue Information

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