Keep Growing
You got honest. You got brave. You got closer. Now you build the version of yourself that keeps going after this month ends.
How This Week Works
Each week of the Heart-to-Heart challenge has two parts: a flexible creative anchor project you'll build your way this week, and a menu of heartbeat activities you can pick from. (Looking for Week 1, 2, or 3? Instructions are linked on that landing page!)
To complete Week 4 and enter the weekly raffle (winners for ALL anchor projects selected June 3), do the following:
- Work on your own interpretation of the anchor project (described below) — this is your creative throughline for the week and can be done however feels right to you!
- Complete at least 3 activities from the Heartbeat Menu (below; click the title of each activity for instructions) — select whichever ones interest you most and make the most sense to your life right now.
You can log your activities through the forms linked below all the way through 11:59pm CST on June 2, 2026. After that, all H2H Challenge winner raffles will take place!
All weeks can be found linked on the main challenge homepage. Work on the ones that interest you most, or do multiple to maximize your chances of being selected for a raffle: for any week where you complete the anchor + three Heartbeat Menu activities, you're eligible to be one of 5 winners to get their choice of a guide module, HG Membership, or HG merch.
All drawings to be completed June 3; one prize per winner.
Your Relationship Vision
You’ve spent a month getting honest about how you love, what you desire, and how you connect with others. This is where you keep the momentum going. Create a Relationship Vision — an artifact, in whatever form fits you, that captures how you want to show up in your relationships going forward.
Not a fantasy of perfect relationships you don’t control, but a picture of your part: your values, your principles, the changes you’re making, the person you’re becoming. What matters is that it’s specific to you, that it draws on the work of this month, and that it’s something you’ll actually return to when life pulls you back toward old defaults.
“Relationships” means whatever it means to you — romantic, friendship, family, community, your relationship with yourself. Your vision can be about one relationship that matters most, about a whole category you want to change, or about the kind of person you want to be across all of them.
Suggested Forms
Day 2 (May 26): Pick your form and brain-dump. Which form speaks to you? Once you’ve picked, dump everything that might go in it.
Day 3 (May 27): Make a plan for how to create it, including gathering anything you need. Aim for the minimum viable version.
Days 4–5 (May 28–29): Create your vision. Let it be honest before you let it be polished.
Day 6 (May 30): Finalize. Make it as real as you can. Perfect is the enemy of done!
Day 7 (May 31): Share and/or take it off the page. Document for the showcase, and/or do one real thing that lives your vision out.
This week’s heartbeat activities are designed to feed directly into your vision — look for the ANCHOR TIE-IN notes on each activity.
Heartbeat Menu
Pick at least 3. Each activity has a Solo, IRL, and/or Community (Discord) track — choose the version that fits your life this week.
When you're ready to log an activity, click HERE and fill out the linked form. You can also log your activities via react in the Week 4 Discord forum (no need to use both!) — just make sure to use the same email when you use /h2h join on Discord as you do in any forms!
HG Coach David’s Mario Kart analogy reframes growth as pass/fail into an experimental approach: form a hypothesis (“If I do X, I think Y will happen”), run the experiment, observe the gap between prediction and reality, and use that to design the next attempt. Every attempt is a lap, not a verdict.
🎬 Watch Coach David’s 6-Minute Video →🧘 Solo Track
Pick one of these options:
- Option A — Set a new experiment: Take one commitment from your anchor project and turn it into a hypothesis. “If I [specific action], I predict [specific outcome].” Plan when you’ll run it and what you’ll observe.
- Option B — Review an experiment you already ran: Think of one moment this month where reality didn’t match your expectation. What was your hypothesis going in? What actually happened? What explains the gap? What would you do differently next lap?
💬 Community Track (Discord)
Share either a hypothesis for a new experiment (“I’m going to try [X] and I predict [Y]”) or a review of one you already ran (“I tried [X], I expected [Y], and what actually happened was [Z]”).
🌍 IRL Track
Using David’s process, set a hypothesis, run the experiment, observe what happens, and come back with your review — what matched your prediction and what you’d do differently next lap.
- If the gap between predictions and reality was huge: The experimental approach doesn’t reward accuracy; it rewards observation. The wider the gap, the more you learned.
- If you don’t know what to experiment on: Look at your anchor project and pick the commitment that scares you most. That’s the one with the most learning available.
Most people come out of a month of this work understanding themselves better. Most also won’t immediately behave differently. Behavior changes when the insight is specific enough to point to a concrete action, when there’s something in your environment that cues the new behavior, and when it gets practiced enough to become the default.
🧘 Solo Track
Identify one insight from this month that you haven’t yet translated into behavior change. Work through three questions: Is the insight specific enough to point to a concrete action? Is there something in your daily life that could cue the new behavior? Has the behavior been practiced even once? Name the gap explicitly.
💬 Community Track (Discord)
Share one insight from this month that hasn’t translated into behavior yet, one thing you think you’d need to bridge the gap, and optionally, one thing you’d love suggestions on.
🌍 IRL Track
Design a cue for one behavior you want to change — a real, specific moment in your days/weeks connected to a new response. Make it smaller than you think you should. Practice at least once this week.
- If the framework felt overwhelming: Start with specificity. “I want to be more open” is too vague. “When someone asks how I am, I’ll say one true thing instead of ‘fine’” is specific enough to try.
- If you’ve named this gap before and still haven’t closed it: Sometimes the gap persists because the change requires giving up something you’re not quite ready to release. The gap isn’t always about strategy.
- If most of your insights are still in the gap: Totally normal. The goal isn’t to close every gap this week — it’s to name them clearly enough to keep working after the challenge ends.
To design how you want your relationships to look going forward, it helps to reverse-engineer the ones that already worked — not the relationships that looked good from the outside, but the specific moments when you’ve felt close to another person in a way you want to feel again.
🧘 Solo Track
Pick 1–3 moments when you felt genuinely connected to someone. Don’t summarize — describe. What did the room feel like? What was happening? What were you both doing? What allowed it? Then look across all of them for patterns: what conditions keep showing up? That’s your closeness recipe.
💬 Community Track (Discord)
Reflect on moments you’ve felt closest to others and look for patterns. Share at least one ingredient of what creates connection for you — a condition that seems present when you feel genuinely close. (Examples: “Doing something side by side, not face to face.” “Neither of us is performing.”)
🌍 IRL Track
Ask someone you feel close to: “What do you think makes our relationship work?” or “When do you feel closest to me?” Compare their answer to yours. The overlap is your shared recipe; the gaps are worth paying attention to.
- If your moments were all a long time ago: That tells you something about what’s changed. Ask: is the old recipe still possible, or do you need new ingredients for the life you have now?
- If you struggled to find moments at all: Start smaller. Not “I felt close” but “I felt less alone than usual.” Brief genuine presence counts.
- If the reasons feel embarrassingly simple: Connection often is. “We were both well-rested” is a perfectly valid recipe ingredient.
Choose one relationship that matters to you where there’s currently distance and figure out what the distance is actually made of: time, geography, resentment, fear, a specific unresolved thing, or just drift? Then design a bridge — a real, specific action that moves the relationship one step closer.
🧘 Solo Track
Pick one relationship where there’s distance. Journal about what the distance is made of — name it as specifically as you can. Then brain-dump possible bridges: actions that would move you closer. The rule: it has to be something you can do (not something you need them to do first).
💬 Community Track (Discord)
Share what you learned about the distance in a specific relationship when you examine it critically. You don’t need names or details — just the material: “The distance is made of resentment I haven’t named.” “The distance is made of me not reaching out first.”
🌍 IRL Track
Build the bridge and take the action. Send the message, make the call, have the conversation, show up. Or: reach out and get their perspective — ask what they think would help them feel closer, then figure out how to provide it authentically and sustainably.
- If you can’t tell what the distance is made of: Try: “If I’m honest, I/they stopped reaching out because…” Sometimes the distance has a very specific origin; sometimes it’s genuinely just drift. Both are workable.
- If the bridge requires their participation: Redesign. Your bridge should be something you can walk across alone. “I reached out more often” is a bridge. “We started spending every night together” is an outcome you can’t control.
- If the distance is there for a reason: Not all relationships should be bridged. If the distance protects you, honor it.
There’s something about yourself in relationships you’ve been avoiding looking at — you likely know roughly where it is. This activity is the practice of looking anyway. Not fixing, not solving, not planning. Just turning toward it and staying long enough to see it. The skill here isn’t insight; it’s tolerance.
🧘 Solo Track
Name one thing about how you show up in relationships that you’ve been avoiding examining. Set a timer for 10 minutes and look at it — journaling, meditating, however you process — without flinching, defending, fixing, or moving to a solution. Just keep your attention on it and notice the pull to look away.
💬 Community Track (Discord)
Practice being seen with this thing. Name to the community one uncomfortable truth about how you show up in relationships that you would usually keep hidden. (“I avoid looking at how much I need reassurance.” “I avoid looking at why I pull away first.”)
🌎 IRL Track
Ask someone who knows you well: “What’s something about how I am in relationships that I might not want to hear?” Then practice receiving it — no defending, no explaining, no immediate rebuttal. Just “thank you for telling me” and sitting with it.
- If 10 minutes felt impossible: Start with two. The point is practicing the move of staying when everything in you wants to leave.
- If you immediately started fixing: That’s avoidance wearing a productive disguise. Notice the urge to fix, set it aside, go back to looking.
- If looking surfaced something bigger than expected: You don’t have to hold it alone. The support channels exist for exactly this.
A lot of relational anxiety comes from not being able to read whether interest is mutual. Reciprocity has readable signals, and most have nothing to do with mind-reading. They’re about the flow of effort: who initiates, who follows up, whether bids for attention get met or let drop, whether energy comes back.
🧘 Solo Track
Observe a relationship you understand well — or one in a story, movie, or show you love. Ask: Who initiates contact, and how often each way? When someone makes a bid for attention, does it get met, matched, or let drop? Does effort feel roughly two-directional over time? Write what the pattern of effort tells you, separate from what you might hope it means.
💬 Community Track (Discord)
Share one reciprocity signal you’ve learned to read. What’s one way to tell that interest is (or isn’t) mutual without mind-reading? Maybe it’s “If I stop initiating and contact dies, that’s information” or “Follow-up questions = real interest.”
🌍 IRL Track
Spend a few days quietly observing reciprocity in interactions around you — at work, among friends, in public. Build the muscle of seeing the flow of effort without hyperanalyzing your own relationships.
- If you realized you’re always the engine: One-directional effort you’re interpreting as mutual is the single most common source of “I misread the situation.”
- If the signals were genuinely mixed: Mixed signals are sometimes “they’re unsure too.” When in doubt, a small, low-stakes bid and an honest read of the response beats months of analysis.
Humans across every culture use rituals to signal endings to the body and brain. We tend to think closure is something another person gives us — but rituals work whether or not the other party participates, because closure is a state you enter, not a gift you receive.
📖 Dr. K’s Guide to Love, Sex & Relationships →🧘 Solo Track
Identify one ending you’re still waiting on closure for. Write down what closure you’ve been waiting for the other person to provide. Then ask: what would it mean to give yourself that closure instead? You don’t have to do the ritual yet — just tease out the distinction between closure-you’re-owed and closure-you-can-make.
💬 Community Track (Discord)
Share one thing you’ve learned about making your own closure — a ritual, practice, or realization that helped you mark an ending without the other person’s participation. Or share what you’ve been waiting for and what it might look like to stop waiting.
🌎 IRL Track
Mark an ending with a small, real-world act that signals “this is over” to your body: returning an object, deleting a text thread, taking a walk to a place that meant something and leaving the feelings there. Notice whether doing the thing shifts something that simply thinking hadn’t.
- If making your own closure felt fake: Rituals work on the body regardless of whether they feel meaningful in the moment. Do the act; let the feeling catch up.
- If this stirred something difficult: That’s often the ritual working. If what surfaced feels like a lot, don’t white-knuckle it alone — support channels are open.
Telling people they mattered to you is a skill that actively helps sustain and grow relationships, but many people wait for the perfect moment or the perfect words. This exercise removes both barriers.
🧘 Solo Track
Write down 3–5 people who helped you with something in the past month or two — directly or indirectly. For each, write one sentence about what they did that mattered.
💬 Community Track (Discord)
Thank someone in the challenge community publicly for something specific they said or shared — in the replies, in Community Shout-Outs, in the Conversation Dojo, or wherever else. Tag them if you can. You don’t need to have engaged much; inspiring you or making you reflect is enough.
🌎 IRL Track
Send a message of gratitude to one person from your life. It doesn’t have to be long or recent. “Hey, I was thinking about [thing you did/said] and it really helped me. Thanks.”
- If it feels weird: That just means you’re doing something new. Weird is where growth often lives!
- If they didn’t respond: You said what you needed to say. Their response isn’t required for it to count.
Not all relationships cost the same amount of energy, and not all give energy back. But we don’t always consciously look at which interactions leave us recharged vs. drained. This audit turns a vague feeling into actionable information about which relationships make you feel what — information you can use strategically to make connection more sustainable.
🧘 Solo Track
List 3–5 people you’ve interacted with regularly. For each: do you usually feel more energized or more drained after talking to them? Is that because of something they do, something you do, or something about the dynamic? Write one sentence per person.
💬 Community Track (Discord)
Share (without names) ONE pattern you noticed — for example, “I feel drained by conversations where I’m always the listener and never get asked about myself” or “I feel energized when someone matches my humor.”
🌎 IRL Track
After your next three social interactions, pause and rate your energy: up, down, or neutral. Write one sentence about why. At the end of the week, look at the pattern. Is there a type of interaction you should have more of? Less of?
- If everyone drains you: Might be introversion (you recharge alone) or a sign you’re not in the right relationships yet. Either way, the data is useful.
- If you feel guilty rating someone as “draining”: A person can be draining and still be someone you care about. This isn’t a ranking of worth — it’s information for managing your energy.
Sometimes it’s easiest to hear the wiser parts of our inner voices when we give them a different part of ourselves to push back against. These parts usually want different things, rarely talk to each other, and most relational patterns are the result of one winning without the other getting a say.
🧘 Solo Track
Write a dialogue between two parts of yourself: ask for advice from the version of you that’ll exist 6–12 months from now if you keep growing, OR let the part that pulls back from connection ask for advice from the part that wants to get closer. Use whatever format: script, text exchange, letters.
💬 Community Track (Discord)
Using ifaketextmessage.com or similar, create a fake text exchange between two parts of yourself: the you-of-now asking the you-of-6-months-from-now for advice, OR the protective part talking to the reaching part. Share in the thread.
🌎 IRL Track
Write the dialogue between your protective part and your reaching part about a risk you’ve been considering. Let them argue until they negotiate: the protective part keeps one safeguard; the reaching part takes one small risk. Do that negotiated version of the thing.
- If you couldn’t imagine the future version: Start with one change. You don’t need the whole transformed person — just the version who did one thing differently.
- If the future version sounded too perfect: Give them problems too! The difference is in how they handle it, not that they’ve transcended it.