Simplification & its discontents
+ summer vibe shifts, voting for upcoming workshops, the Autumn Business Development Cohort and Supercycle's tiniest community member
We’re awash with summer months! Many of us are at the point in our cyclical rhythms of being active, seeing people, getting out there, applying what we’ve learned, and generally leading more externalized lives…
…with the exception of Emily, who is homemaking and nesting while she awaits the arrival of a sweet baby girl — a different kind of summer adventure ❤️ 🎉 👶
And the Supercycle rhythms have shifted as well! Following our late winter launch and spring wave of workshops, our offerings are transitioning into a phase focused on helping our community bring its internal work out into the world.
Announcements
Supercycle community members are invited to engage in more group-oriented programs that are focused on applying what you’ve picked up in previous months from the course library and first wave of workshops.
Below you can find Groups subscription offerings for the summer beginning on the week of July 14, a great time for integration and application of content. Workshops with new content are coming in autumn.
Life Plans Incubation – group-based supported time to structure further explicit plans and investigations into one or more areas of your life (You can implement takeaways from your workshops and review sessions.)
Integration & Application Sessions – sessions to bring the depth of the workshop content to your leading edges or known trailheads in a targeted way, receive guided support, and get inspired by others (available to those who took workshops)
Group Study Sessions – workshop and course-specific groups similar to Integration & Application Sessions where you can work with others without Tee or Emily.
Office Hours – unstructured time to co-work, chat with Tee or Emily, ask questions, and connect with others.
Here’s more on how this enhances the workshop experience you may have already had and the reasoning behind the seasonal shift.
Pick up the Groups subscription for the option to join us multiple times per week!
Autumn Business Development Cohort
Our first announcement for late 2025 programs is our Autumn Business Development Cohort, a three-month pilot program beginning early October with a small group of freelance practitioners (coaches, therapists, consultants, creatives) who would like to enhance their offering by creating Supercycle course content.
Who would be a good fit? This program is for those with an existing practice. Here’s more on who would be a good fit.
When is this happening? Mid-October through mid-December
How much does it cost? $285 per month over three months (includes course library access for you and all of your existing clients for 6 months)
What is it?
Tee and Emily have continued their personal coaching practices alongside the launch of the Supercycle course library and workshops.
For Tee in particular, having clients work through course modules while also receiving coaching at regular intervals appears to have enhanced his practice.
He’s noticed:
More learning between sessions – clients learn from watching recorded modules designed by Supercycle, and have benefitted from bringing new concepts and modules into the one-to-one coaching sessions.
Additional loops of reflection – clients have benefited from additional reflective time between sessions, where the expectation to “do homework” as part of a recorded course is sometimes stronger than simply establishing it in a session.
Higher value add – because of the way clients synthesize module content with what comes up in the one-to-one sessions, there’s a stronger argument for delivering more value, and potentially charging more by extension.
Improved conversion rate – Tee has noticed a considerable spike in his conversion rate (+20 – 30 %). He suspects a large share of the explanation for this is because he offers the integration of free “In-community” (course library) membership as a benefit of working with him.
More doors opening – he’s come across more opportunities overall because of the credibility boost from Supercycle as a 501(c)(3) entity hosting his content.
And we would like to open this possibility to more people!
In short, the Autumn Business Development Cohort will be for practitioners to enhance their offerings by developing their own content hosted on the Supercycle platform.
Over three months, the cohort will build their own content that compliments their practice alongside several other practitioners with guidance and support from the Supercycle co-founders.
You might want to build your offerings with us because:
you’re interested in receiving guidance and peer support in the creation of materials to supplement and enhance your practice
the timelines, supportive cast and setting seem like great conditions to really focus on developing your content (some would call this a “forcing function” that plays a valuable role in advancing your practice)
develop your content with other practitioners at a similar point in their journey
we’ll offer weekly guidance and co-working as you develop your content
you keep all of your IP
your clients get 6 months of the full Supercycle course library free
we have a pool of subscribers that could get organically introduced to your practice
some instructors could even develop workshop content to participate in the Autumn wave of workshops.
you might want to diversify across several platforms for delivering your content
you see the long-term potential in building your offerings through Supercycle
you might want to contribute to this community we’re building
You can find more details on the program on our website!
Community Pulse
We closed out the Spring wave of workshops with “Perception in Business” over 8 weeks. (Now available in the course library!)
Here’s a highlight from Tee’s perspective:
The session that really stuck with me personally had to be “Simplification and its discontents.”
Supercycle often promotes enculturation and engagement with the complexity of experience, but in this fifth session of the workshop series, the participants were asked to set aside (temporarily suspend from consideration) much of the richness uncovered from the previous four sessions.
The group was asked to run a very popular branding conceptualization technique – StoryBrand – an approach that narrativizes building a brand by structuring the conceptualization process as a “hero’s journey,” where the insight-generating twist is placing your potential clients/customers as the protagonists in the story instead of yourself. In short, a story where your potential client (the protagonist) is in search of something, needs help, finds an advisor or guide, and then receives something that improves their life.
People in the workshop found that this process necessarily required a “flattening” or “simplification” on at least two fronts: i) their own presented persona, and ii) how they'd characterize their potential clients.
In embarking on this exercise, participants were encouraged to “set aside” or “suspend” some of the bigger philosophical questions about themselves and their practice that often cause them to get stuck. We wanted to see whether they could make some progress without getting tripped up in the same ways as before.
I didn’t expect that the act of suspending complexity would help people get better perspective on troubling philosophical questions about themselves.
In some cases, running the simplified branding exercise without addressing this class of questions reduced their “power” as hindrances. Some questions needed less resolution than previously thought, may have become less important than previously assumed, or were counterintuitively addressed or alleviated indirectly by simply moving forward.
In other cases, simplifying and clarifying created more issues to address, or underscored the importance of resolving important questions that people faced before moving forward.
For example, you could have a block like, “I can’t guide or help others if I haven’t yet figured out or resolved certain things about myself.” In other words, “how can I help someone with their life when my own shit isn’t in order?” Setting aside that concern momentarily and moving forward with thinking about what one could offer nonetheless can shed new light on a more appropriate or adaptive way to orient to these major questions.
The mixed effects of running this kind of exercise put into perspective how useful and appropriate it is to insist on simplicity within areas of life that are, in fact, quite complex. It also served to reveal some of the inadequacies of the more mass adopted forms of structuring this kind of brand building process.
A primary takeaway may have been the value in running different processes that ask different things of you as a means of achieving new perspective.
I was blown away by how those in the workshop rose to the challenge of investigating the innumerable ways that our interpretations of the world and ourselves affect our self-presentation, branding and the overall construction of our business.
Other workshop-related things:
You can vote for what workshop content you’d like to see in the autumn! Some number of our workshops will be based on these requests. This is open to anyone. No need to vote if you have already via the workshop feedback form.
If you’ve taken a workshop and have yet to submit feedback, you can do that here! We’ll soon be compiling testimonials (optional in the form) and they’re quite helpful for describing what we can offer to a wider audience.
That’s it from us! We’ll have added at least one (particularly tiny) new Supercycle member by the time we next make contact 👶
Hope the summer is good to you and thanks for taking the time,
– Tee & Emily
Supercycle.org