Course
Library
Leadership & Management
Energy Management & Flow
This module is designed to help you understand where your energy is going throughout the days, weeks, and seasons of your life and move into a position to be proactively designing and cultivating the energy economies you move through. Though there are a lot of ways to invoke the concept of “energy” in a mind-body context, we will start with the typical concept from physics of “the capacity to do work” and find areas where that aptly bridges to our human cares — such as modeling energy sources, sinks, and cycles — and where it leaves something out — such as the differing social valuations of different forms of energy. Through all of this, we will be pursuing a deeper understanding of how skillful energy management helps us access experiences of flow and other forms of non-depleting productivity.
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Instructor: Emily Dama
Planning
Whether we consciously set aside time for planning or not, whenever we come up with ideas of how things will get done we’re engaged in an activity that could broadly be thought of as planning.
This module will introduce a range of strategies for making and improving plans, from step-by-step explicit planning to designing plans around the phases and energetic patterns present in your life.
The broad goal is to open up new possibilities for what planning can be, and help you develop new confidence in making plans you can trust yourself to follow through on.
Instructor: Emily Dama
Group Dynamics
This theory-forward module will introduce a framework for modeling, anticipating, and guiding the behavior of purpose-driven groups.
We will look at key roles that have disproportionately large effects on the group, and how people in different positions throughout a group might act to influence the people in these roles to improve outcomes across the group.
We will also look at ways groups can fall into dysfunctional equilibria, and considerations relevant to risk-opportunity assessments around staying or leaving.
Finally, we will look at key preparation and choices worth prioritizing when forming your own groups.
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Instructor: Emily Dama
Power Dynamics
How comfortable are you with holding power? With yielding to power?
In life, we don’t have the option to avoid participating in power dynamics, but we don’t have to like it. When we don’t like it, it’s very often our bodies and our health that suffers.
This module aims to help you increase the ease and comfort with which you embody different roles in power dynamics, and notice and adapt to social dynamics that may be pressuring you to participate in power dynamics in ways that may not be serving your own best interest.
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Instructor: Emily Dama
Personal Development
Retrospectives & Planning
Session 1: Telling the Story of the Year
Drawing inspiration from Jungian ideas of personal symbolism, we will seek to develop a set of symbols and narrative patterns or stories to describe the year just past.
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Session 2: Aligning With How Things Actually Happen
We use 2024 to look for vivid examples of things that "actually happened" in a way quite different from how we expected they would. From those, we'll look for unrecognized or misunderstood causal mechanisms already acting in our lives, and then explore how to align with and potentially deploy these mechanisms more effectively in 2025.
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Session 3: The Phenomenology of Uncertainty
This session will seek to bring the phenomenology of this boundary of knowing to life, starting by looking for major sources of uncertainty in the year to come, then looking back at the prior year for examples of what it was like to go through the learning process of unknown to known.
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Instructor: Emily Dama
Self & Identity
Who and what we think we are touches every aspect of our lives and experience. It is also frequently the site of a lot of confusion and social contention, with many impacts on mental health and well-being. Without trying to answer ultimate metaphysical questions on the nature of the being of individuals, this module will seek to observe and explore the boundaries and interactions between places where genuine self-authorship, autopoiesis, is possible, and those where identity is complexly and contentiously socially constructed. Through this, we will seek to develop a concept of “identity resources” and explore ways these can be pursued, won, and integrated into the evolving self.
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Instructor: Emily Dama
Self-Initiating Into Personal Development
“Every initiation into psychology is a self-initiation,” writes Edward Titchener, one of the early developers of the discipline of experimental psychology, in the early 1900s. It seems as true now as when he was writing that no matter how many people make the choice to explore the dynamics of their own psychologies, there is something about the journey that is inevitably personal.While there is something about this that is certainly reassuring — that our minds retain some wilderness not easily mapped by those who might seek to profit off of us at our expense — it can also be frustrating, confusing, and isolating. This module seeks to ease the transition into the world of personal development, looking at common experiences, philosophies, strategies, and pitfalls, and sharing opportunities we have found for embarking on this work with grace and confidence.
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Instructor: Emily Dama
Symbols, the Unconscious, and Creativity
This practically oriented module aims to unfold the concept of the symbol, specifically as developed by Carl Jung, into a set of strategies and techniques for connecting to meaning, solving deep life problems and problems of maturation, and rejuvenating creativity. Exploring the distinctive relationship Jung posited between symbols and the unconscious mind, we will find that symbols can create portals for the unconscious to provide new meanings, information, and associations to our conscious experience — and that this is something that doesn’t merely happen passively, but that we can actively participate in it for our own development and benefit.
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Instructor: Emily Dama
Introspection
Introspection, literally “inward looking”, is the process of examining one’s inner experience, often guided by questions, prompts, reflections, or techniques. Looking at the general concept of introspection, surveying of four different classes of introspective techniques, and considering limitations as well as contraindications for introspection, this module will encourage participants to consider how introspection works and how and when introspection can facilitate personal development.
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Instructor: Emily Dama
Emotions and Embodied Meaning
There aren’t literally as many interpretations of emotions as there are emotions themselves, but there are still an awful lot of ideas out there about what emotions are and what to do about them.
This module will dive into the layered reality of emotions as well as some of the more salient and informative controversies surrounding them.
We will offer some of the views and perspectives that the Supercycle founders have especially found helpful in their own development and that of their clients, while also offering pointers to places to discover alternative views and build out your own ideas and intentions for how to approach cultivating your emotional life.
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Instructor: Emily Dama
Coaching Training
Beliefs and Psychological Structure
People often talk about the mind as something that “processes information”, but there is also an important sense in which the mind (and, in some perspectives importantly and equally so, the body) organizes and maintains information in meaningful structures.
Experientially, these structures may manifest as assertions about what is and how it works. In this manifestation, they can be called beliefs or world-model representations. These representations are important for our sense of meaning and the structure of our motivation, for finding alignment with people and persuading them of our perspectives and plans. They also contain logical relations and implications, which can be mapped and understood in a coaching context to help us understand the structure of our client’s lived experience of what is possible, discover limiting beliefs, and build out what concrete paths to change could look like.
Over the course of this module, we will look at strategies for identifying and mapping beliefs, correlating beliefs to important psychological structures, and using belief maps to discover possibilities for meaningful change in our clients’ lives.
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Instructor: Emily Dama
Structuring a Session
A short, introductory module to help coaches develop a basic structure for their sessions that they feel comfortable implementing and adapting in their work with clients.
In addition to a basic session template with time breakdowns, we will be discussing sources of material for filling out different sections of a session, feedback mechanisms and strategies for modifying sessions on the fly, and some additional back-up structures for when sessions take a turn into the unexpected.
Instructor: Emily Dama
The Transformational Context
When something good happens for a client in a coaching session, what actually happened and why did it happen?
There are many theories of mind and theories of change that coaches use to help guide their clients towards important updates, insights, and behavioral changes. In addition to the model of the client and the client’s capacity to change, however, the coaching environment itself is an important and, for some people, necessary catalyst of that change.
How can a coach consciously set up their coaching sessions to be optimally favorable to change? We will look at factors like safety, trust, permission, and encouragement as elements of the coaching context that can be shaped and optimized for each client to facilitate and support their growth.
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Instructor: Emily Dama