Announcing Supercycle: a personal & professional development community informed by coaching EAs

Tee

Overview

Try enough personal development and you’ll notice that expending willpower feels very different depending on how your surroundings respond.

Inhospitable circumstances can make effort hard to summon and maintain.

In an encouraging world, willpower can feel almost unrecognizable, something like the wind being at your back, entering an energetic jet stream, and/or gaining net positive energy with your efforts.

Easy to say, but less easy to address, is that our environments and contexts, including social realities, are integral to pursuing our life aspirations.

We’ve grappled with this puzzle in our years-long pursuit to bring what’s good about our coaching to more people: coaching can be a vehicle for radically reshaping someone’s context for the better, but is often underpowered.

A coach is but one person, working with another person for a very small amount of time. Sometimes not enough influence to affect the overall context. On top of that, the timing isn’t always right for coaching.

– But what if we could make accessible multiple versions of what’s good about our coaching? That way, there’s a better chance of providing the right offerings at the right time.
– And what if we could nest all of those offerings within a community of others also working toward developing themselves? That way, there’s more opportunity to get momentum from a supportive environment.
– And finally, what if our offerings helped people become more savvy in perceiving and shaping their own context? That way, they can feel increasingly able to develop themselves wherever they go.

Well, that’s what we’re shooting for with Supercycle. We’re hoping that this more comprehensive structure of personal development offerings can ultimately lead to more people leading better lives.

It’s a nonprofit community platform that includes free community access with free content, a course library, workshops, and coaching for individuals, pairs, & groups. We’ll even have 'study' groups, town halls, open office hours, fireside chats and other public & community events.

Our courses, workshop and coaching cover three areas:

Leadership & management
Personal development
Coaching training

<> Join the community platform & get content for free.
(You’ll never be asked to pay for this and we’ll constantly be adding new material)

<> Inquire about scholarships for free subscriptions

<> Check out our course library, upcoming workshops, and see the ways to support our work by subscribing.

––

Update: About 60 people have joined. For those who would prefer smaller groups, we have chats specific to membership types, interests and workshop cohorts.

––

Our approach

Supercycle embodies an approach where the road to greater agency and betterment comes from:

astute and sustainable investments in inner work, and
skillfully factoring into your perception the larger forces at play in life, such as timing, momentum, cyclicality, and contextual influence.

Nearly everything in our experience fluctuates, including our wants, our needs, our identities, our fortunes, our energy, what we're capable of, and what the world provides us.

You could call these the various cycles in the experience of your life. Zoom in further, and you could probably find sub-cycles of your life. (Get granular enough and you’ll find cyclicality in biology.)

Being increasingly in tune with the cycles and sub-cycles of your life can greatly improve the overall coherence of your experience and actions — the overarching Supercycle of your life.

Generating creative inspiration is our primary approach to gaining fluency in perceiving and navigating the cyclicality of life.

Said differently, it’s the practice of continuously applying creative inspiration to improve our lives (and hopefully those of others).

Sensemaking and cognition play a pivotal role, though this approach is not purely intellectual. Sources of creative inspiration can come from the body, felt experience, perceived connection through virtues, principles, spirituality, etc.

A second major component of Supercycle is using creative inspiration to craft better lives within circumstances that are distinctly modern.

In many ways, we’re only living out the current version of what human life has been like for eons. But in other very clear ways, the challenges in our life are a product of modernity.

What we’ve encountered over years of coaching people in varying proximity to EA and rationalist spaces roughly accords with mental health survey findings, signaled demand, and a litany of relevant posts found in the forums.

There’s a lot to unpack regarding what people want for themselves and where they feel they’re currently at in the modern world. What we’ve built brings from coaching what seems to work for people in proactively addressing many areas cited as important to EAs further illustrated by the survey results below.

Recent results from our collaborators VIVID/RISE surveying EA community interest in several areas covered by our courses and workshops.

What’s widely known as “burnout” could be an instantiation of a uniquely modern condition. How is it that a person can experience world-historic abundance in so many ways and yet become depleted to the point of not functioning?

Some answers can be found in inherited notions regarding work in society. Some answers can be found in how we interface with technology, particularly technologies that only a small number of human generations have encountered.

Harmonizing our inner work with forces larger than ourselves often means grappling with the distinctly modern challenges and conditions we find ourselves in. It begins with making sense of our experience.

Supercycle is a space to make sense and hopefully take increasingly well-calibrated action for ourselves and others.

Our vision is to cultivate a community of individuals increasingly capable of carving out better lives for themselves and others in modernity.

Programs

You can get a sense of what these courses and workshops will be like by checking out the various course introduction videos and this sample of videos and materials from one of our Leadership & Management courses.

Courses Library

These are recorded video courses that you can work through at your own pace

Leadership & Management

See course descriptions and a sample of videos and materials

Energy Management & Flow
Planning
Group Dynamics
Power Dynamics

Personal Development

Retrospectives & Planning
Self & Identity
Self-initiating into Personal Development
Symbols, the Unconscious and Creativity
Introspection
Emotions and Embodied Meaning

Coaching Training

Beliefs and Psychological Structure
Structuring a Session
The Transformational Context

Workshops
Please feel free to inquire about one-off workshops for your groups or organization that can cover our workshops, course library or a custom arrangement.

Leadership & Management

Motivation & Burnout
Human Relationships

Personal Development

Retrospective & Planning
Rejuvenating Creativity
Trauma & Self-regulation
Structure of Experience

Coaching Training

Modeling Other Minds
Perception in Business

Epistemics around Supercycle

It was the epistemic curiosity of my clients that I have to thank for getting to test the effectiveness of my coaching throughout the years.

Some on the Forum have attempted to try making the general case for coaching and/or therapy,^[1] or certain traditions of coaching and therapy,^[2] which I believe is a worthwhile endeavor and wholeheartedly appreciate.

My approach to giving people in this community a glimpse of something that could really enhance their personal growth has been more narrow in scope, partly because how broad “coaching” as a concept is means that making determinations about its value is fraught with definitional tangles.

In my past Forum posts reporting on trials with a dozen EA leaders and writing up the results of the coaching training program, I’ve provided a varied collage of quantitative and qualitative indicators that provide reasonably good signals for the demand and effectiveness of this particular work.

Our influences

Supercycle courses and workshops are largely comprised of techniques, heuristics, methods, concepts and personal growth traditions that we’ve repeatedly seen encouraging results from applying them in our client work and training of other coaches.

A non-exhaustive list of some domains and example notable figures we draw from:

Continental Philosophy (Heidegger, Nietzsche)
- Phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Heidegger)
American Pragmatism (James, Mead, Dewey)
Analytical philosophy (Wittgenstein, David Lewis, Anscombe)
Critical Theory (Rosa, Habermas)
Sociology (Arendt, Bordieu, Beck)
Internal Family Systems (and other “inner multiplicity” traditions)
Cognitive & Emotional Developmental Theories (Piaget, Kohlberg, Kagan, Fischer)
Somatic traditions (Feldenkrais, Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen)
Meditation (especially Zen)
Coherence Therapy
Depth-oriented Psychology & Therapy (Gendlin, Jung, Ecker, Grove)
Polyvagal Theory (especially through Deb Dana)

It is true that we have not yet gathered data on delivering this information in course library, workshop, and group coaching forms. That is something we plan to do through the launch of this project.

How we got here

Reflecting on the completion of our coaching training program in 2023, my co-founder Emily Dama and I were reasonably happy with how the program went, but decided against running another cohort.

In short, a 6-month program designed to bring people from “0-to-1” as a coach required engaging people at a level of intensity that wasn’t always workable.

We accelerated a lot of people’s skill acquisition and career exploration timelines. We linked more than 100 applicants up with low-cost coaching that they might not have otherwise been able to find. But we felt that the program didn’t meet the cohort coaches where they were at in terms of readiness and personal development. Some relished the intensity. Some didn’t. Some eased in just as the program was ending. And some got a glimpse of just how deep coaching can be and wished to process it on their own terms, needing time in their lives to create space for it.

It wasn’t the right touch. Sometimes, we want to do intense things for reasons of ensuring follow-through, but it doesn’t necessarily result in repeatedly doing something sustainably.

Despite the very positive cohort coaches' reflections on the program, ultimately the first iteration wasn’t sustainable for people. Rather than being disappointed, we view it as a worthwhile experiment, and are grateful for the ongoing relationships we've been able to sustain with many of the participants..

In particular, it seems to validate philosophies and techniques we’ve seen work quite well numerous times in our personal practices as coaches. Namely, that pushing against higher-order forces, such as the momentum each individual person had in their lives in this case, isn’t sustainable for long.

It turns out that we were attempting, ironically enough, to pass along this organic approach to personal growth within an inorganic and unsustainable structure.

While we did our best to modify the structure according to the wishes of the cohort, including suspending workshops by two weeks so that people could ‘catch up’ with everything they had to juggle, we were nonetheless constrained by hard limits on the 6-month structure that we designed.

Fast forward to today, Supercycle is our way of attempting to build a sustainable structure that can meet even more people where they are at in their personal and professional development journeys.

Instead of only coaching training, we have three stands of programs – leadership and management, personal development and life coaching training.

There’s a natural thematic resonance to each of these, where for example, you can imagine that many great managers could use effective coaching techniques. Great managers also likely need to invest in their own personal development in order to be able to effectively lead a team. Great coaches need to invest in themselves personally and (for particular audiences) also need strong models of excellent management.

Across the three strands – the content and programs range in intended audience, purpose, intensity, skill level, and subject matter.

These are some of the many ways that we’ve crafted the structure of Supercycle to meet the natural rhythms of personal development for more people.

About us

Our video intros can be found on the Supercycle “Meet us” page

Co-founders Tee Barnett & Emily Dama have been refining their coaching practices together for more than 5 years.

Emily supported Tee in trialling his coaching with more than a dozen leaders (mostly within EA).
(Testimonials)

Their last co-founded project was a coaching training program that had a cohort of 9 coaches learn the craft over a six-month period.
(View the full report on how it went)

Here is Emily's written bio and Tee's written bio

Q&A

What is the philosophy and ethos of Supercycle?
- Please see the Our Approach section
Is Supercycle free? Is it for-profit?
- Some offerings are free (see the answer below).
  
  For the parts of Supercyle that aren’t free, we believe the offerings are substantially underpriced for the benefit of the community.
  
  We’re a nonprofit that runs on a combination of donor funding and revenue generation from our subscriptions.
Are you ultimately trying to get me to buy something?
- We are not. There are several ways to be a part of the Supercycle community, only some of which includes subscriptions.
  
  We also have scholarship offerings for the paid subscriptions.
  
  In joining the community platform, you’ll always have access to free content, public town halls, open office hours, fireside chats and other free community events.
  
  And finally, we’re always on the lookout for guest instructors (express interest in being an instructor at Supercycle!), collaborators and anyone supporting what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.
  
  Core to the ethos of Supercycle is having more optionality in engaging with personal development in a way that’s right for you, which includes financial fit.

Effective Altruism Forum
EA Forum