Get Closer
Closeness isn't just about proximity — it's about what happens when you choose to let someone matter to you, and let yourself matter to them.
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 or 2? Instructions are linked on that landing page!)
To complete Week 3 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. But remember. a new week of activities releases on May 25.
All currently released weeks visible on the main challenge homepage. Work on the weeks that interest you most, or pace yourself throughout the month 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.
The Gift
Choose someone in your life and create something for them — a real, specific gift that draws on what you’ve learned about yourself and about how you connect. The gift can be anything, including a planned experience or a favor/act of service! What matters is that it’s specific to this person, that you invest something in choosing or creating it (time, thought, vulnerability — not necessarily money!), and that it’s informed by the work of this month: getting honest, getting bolder about connection, and getting closer to others.
The person this gift is made for might be anyone you know IRL or online, or it might be for an alternative recipient: your past self (what would have helped 5 years ago?), your future self, a community (ours or a different one!), a pet, a future some-day relationship, or anyone else you dream up!
Suggested Forms
Day 2 (May 19): Brain-dump ideas and then pick one. What would actually resonate? What’s feasible for you to create?
Day 3 (May 20): Make a plan for HOW to create this, including acquiring any supplies you might need. Aim for the minimum viable version.
Days 4–5 (May 21–22): Create your gift!
Day 6 (May 23): Finalize. Make it as real as you can. Perfect is the enemy of done!
Day 7 (May 24): Deliver your gift — and/or document/photograph for the showcase. Delivery is encouraged but NOT required.
Several of this week’s heartbeat activities can double as inspiration or material for your gift — 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 3 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!
Your brain quietly prioritizes relationships that feel like problems, while the solid ones fall into the background. The mental habit to counter this? When you catch yourself ruminating about someone who isn’t reciprocating, use that as a trigger to reach out to someone who IS.
🎬 Watch HG Coach David’s 3-Minute Video →🧘 Solo Track
For 48 hours, track where your relational mental energy actually goes: who do you think about? Who do you rehearse conversations with? Then make a separate list of people who are actually solid. Compare the two lists. Are they similar? If not, the gap may be fueling a distortion about your social life.
💬 Community Track (Discord)
Watch David’s video and respond: does this pattern resonate? Do you spend more mental energy on people who aren’t sure about you than on the people who are? How does this reframe land with you?
🌍 IRL Track
Run the habit: when you catch yourself ruminating about someone who isn’t reciprocating, notice it, stop, and use it as a trigger to reach out to someone solid instead. Track both sides: how many times the trigger fired, and what you did with it.
- If your list was mostly non-reciprocators: That’s the distortion working exactly as described. Seeing it is step one.
- If you couldn’t think of solid people: Either you genuinely lack them right now (worth addressing) or they’ve faded into the background. Try: who would be hurt if you didn’t respond in 6 months? Those are your people.
- If the redirect felt forced: It does at first. Coach David describes this taking months. One week won’t complete the rewiring, but it will show you the pattern.
Attachment styles are patterns of how you approach closeness, formed early and often running on autopilot. Anxious attachment pulls you toward people but makes you hypervigilant about rejection; avoidant pulls you away when things get too close. Secure attachment lets you move toward and away as needed without panic, while disorganized attachment leads to wanting closeness and fearing it simultaneously.
First, take this attachment style quiz: Take the Quiz →
Then choose one of the below tracks as you look for the pattern in your actual life. The point is recognizing your specific version of the pattern: the moments you pull away when you want to get closer, the times you chase people who aren’t available, the ways you test whether someone will stay.
🧘 Solo Track
Take the quiz and get your result. Then write about the last time you saw your attachment style show up in real life. Not the abstract “I’m anxiously attached” — the specific moment, like “I texted them three times when they didn’t respond for two hours, and the story I told myself was [specific story].” What did you do? What were you trying to protect? What did it cost you?
💬 Community Track (Discord)
Share your attachment style and one specific way it shows up for you — the kind of moment where you can see the pattern running. Or, if it doesn’t fit, share why and what feels more accurate instead.
🌎 IRL Track
Have a conversation with someone you’re close to about attachment styles. Share yours if you want, or just use the framework to talk about how you each approach closeness differently. The goal isn’t to diagnose them — it’s to make your relational patterns visible to each other.
- If your result surprised you: Attachment styles can shift by relationship and context. You might be securely attached with friends but avoidant in romantic relationships. The quiz is a snapshot, not a life sentence.
- If you want to understand WHY you have this pattern: This free HG Memberships video on attachment styles goes deeper than pattern recognition — check the pinned comment for a worksheet with more exercises from a previous community challenge.
A voice chat space with other challenge participants who are also here to practice relational skills, awkwardness welcome. Nobody’s expecting brilliance. Nobody’s keeping score. You’re just here to have a conversation in a place where it doesn’t matter if it feels a little weird.
💬 Community Track (Discord)
Go to the Conversation Dojo voice chat and start or join a conversation. Try one of these starters:
- What’s a weird way you’ve gotten closer to a loved one at some point?
- What made you sign up for this challenge?
- What are you doing for your anchor project this week?
Ask, listen, maybe ask a follow-up. When you reach a natural lull, practice gracefully excusing yourself.
- If you don’t get much response: That’s fine! This is about getting more comfortable, not creating deep intimacy in a first exchange.
- If starting feels paralyzing: Use one of the topic points above. “Hey, saw the question about [X] — what’s your take?” is a perfectly fine opener.
- If the conversation stalled: That happens. It’s a two-person sport and sometimes the timing doesn’t click. Try again later or thank them for the time.
Some people pathologize their real need for alone time. Others use “I’m just introverted” as cover for withdrawal driven by fear. Genuine solitude is restorative. Self-isolation reinforces itself over time. Figuring out the distinction matters.
🧘 Solo Track
Think about the last 3 times you were alone for an extended period. For each: did you come out with more energy or less? Were you choosing to be alone, or choosing to not risk a social encounter? Were you resting or hiding? Write honestly about the difference.
💬 Community Track (Discord)
Share your honest assessment: how much of your time alone is genuine solitude vs. self-isolation you’ve rebranded as introversion? What’s the signal that tells you which one you’re in?
🌎 IRL Track
Pay attention to your energy across a full week. After time alone, check: am I recharged or depleted? After social time, check the same. See if you can map which situations are restorative vs. draining — and whether this matches the story you tell yourself about your social needs.
- If most was self-isolation: Naming it is the first step. More withdrawal makes people feel harder. This is useful to know.
- If most was genuine solitude: Great! The question isn’t whether you need more social time; it’s whether the social time you do have is actually nourishing.
Most people who want more support have a strategy: hint at it, withdraw, express frustration indirectly, or just wait. This activity is about naming what you specifically need and asking for it out loud. Not “I just need you to be there for me” but “Could you [specific thing] right now?” Specific requests give people something to actually do — and give you information about whether they can.
🧘 Solo Track
Think of something you’ve needed from someone recently that you didn’t ask for directly. Write out what you actually needed — specific enough that if you said it, they would know exactly what to do. Then write the ask itself: not a hint, not a complaint, not an apology. A direct request.
💬 Community Track (Discord)
Share one type of support you find genuinely hard to ask for directly — phrased specifically enough for others to understand. Read others’ and react to the ones that seem clear and direct.
🌎 IRL Track
Make one direct ask this week. It can be small: “Could you just listen without giving advice right now?” or “I need someone to check in on me about this in a few days — could that be you?” The skill is the specificity and directness, not the scale.
- If it felt demanding: Asking for what you need isn’t demanding. Demanding is insisting regardless of their capacity. A direct ask is still an ask — it creates space for “no.”
- If they said no: That’s painful and it’s also clean. It tells you something clear about capacity that vague hinting would have kept you unclear on.
- If you don’t know what you need: Sometimes we’re so practiced at not-asking that we can’t even identify needs. The need is often underneath the frustration.
In every relationship, there is a world only those inside it can see. Inside jokes. Rituals that don’t make sense to anyone else. Shared history. This activity maps those worlds — seeing them makes the invisible labor of closeness visible.
🧘 Solo Track
Pick 2–3 of your closest relationships (any kind). For each, list the “shared world”: inside references, rituals, history, recurring jokes, things only you two would find funny. Is there anything to learn from how the differences in depth match up with the relationships you’re comparing?
💬 Community Track (Discord)
Create a “starter pack” meme for your shared world in one specific relationship. Use 4+ images that show the texture: inside jokes, rituals, specific things that wouldn’t make sense to an outsider. What would the “starter pack” items be?
🌎 IRL Track
Ask someone you’re close to: “What are the things that you think of as just ours?” Include a favorite of your own. Notice what they name that you’d forgotten, and what you name that surprises them.
- If you don’t have anyone to map with: You can map a shared world with someone from your past, a mentor, an online friend, or an entire community (including this one).
There’s a skill to surfacing interpersonal issues productively. In the Communication portion of the NEW Dr. K's Guide to Love, Sex, and Relationships, Dr. K points to the difference between behavioral criticism (“you didn’t do the dishes”) and identity criticism (“you’re lazy”). When someone feels you’re attacking who they are, they defend their personhood. Behavioral language keeps the conversation about an action they can change.
📖 Dr. K’s Guide to Love, Sex & Relationships →🧘 Solo Track
Write down 3–5 identity-level criticisms you’ve said or thought recently: “they’re selfish,” “they’re unreliable.” For each, rewrite it as a behavioral observation: what specifically did they do? The shift: from “you’re lazy” to “you didn’t take out the trash after saying you would.”
💬 Community Track (Discord)
Share one identity criticism you’ve caught yourself thinking/saying — and the behavioral version instead. React to others whose reframe shows a thought pattern you’ve gotten stuck in too.
🌎 IRL Track
When you feel frustration with someone this week, catch the thought: am I thinking about what they did, or who they are? If the latter, rewrite it in real time. Instead of “you’re always on your phone,” try “you’ve been on your phone for most of this conversation and I’d like your attention.”
- If you can’t find the behavioral version: Ask: what would I need to see them do differently? That action (or its absence) is the behavior.
- If the behavioral version felt too soft: “You said you’d do this and didn’t” is quite direct — it just doesn’t attack character.
- If they got defensive anyway: Some people will defend regardless, especially if criticism has historically come as identity attacks. But the information is different.
Your community includes the barista who knows your order, the neighbor who waves, the person in Discord who always reacts to your posts. Researchers call these “weak ties” — and people who notice and appreciate them tend to report lower loneliness and higher life satisfaction. This activity is about seeing the community you already have.
🧘 Solo Track
Make a list of 5–10+ people who you wouldn’t call close friends but who would likely recognize you on sight — people who’d notice if you disappeared from a routine. The cashier, the neighbor, the bus driver. Write about what it means that these people exist in your life, even if you’ve never counted them as community.
💬 Community Track (Discord)
Share one “weak tie” you’ve been undervaluing — a connection that isn’t a close friendship but contributes to your sense of belonging. If you can, tell us one thing that’s special about this person.
🌎 IRL Track
Deliberately acknowledge a weak tie this week. Not a grand gesture — use someone’s name, ask a follow-up about something they mentioned once, say “I always look forward to seeing you here.” Notice what happens when you add one degree of warmth.
- If your list was very short: That’s real information about how your time is structured — remote work, online shopping, headphones in public, lurking in digital spaces. Worth sitting with the trade-offs.
- If acknowledging a weak tie feels awkward: Most people are surprised and pleased when someone names the connection. The threshold between “stranger I see often” and “person in my world” is extremely low.
People often love talking about their thoughts, experiences, and interests — when asked the kind of questions that signal genuine curiosity rather than polite filler. This activity asks you to design your own collection of conversation starters based on what you’ve found actually creates connection.
🧘 Solo Track
Create a list of ~5–10 questions you personally have found (or think would) deepen real connection. Base these on conversations that have worked, questions you’ve wished someone would ask you, or instinct about what makes exchanges feel real. Write questions that can’t be answered in one word.
💬 Community Track (Discord)
Share 1–3 of your best conversation starters in the thread — these replies will serve as the Conversation Dojo conversation starters this week! (Bonus: try one of someone else’s starters in the Dojo and report back.)
🌎 IRL Track
Use one new conversation starter in a real conversation this week. This can be with someone new or someone you’ve known for years, but pick a question slightly braver or deeper than your usual opening moves.
- If you can’t think of good questions: Start with questions you wish people would ask you. Those tend to be the ones that create real conversation.
- If your questions feel too intense: This is an opening, not the full depth. What question might have been asked five questions before the intense one?
Intimacy doesn’t feel the same to everyone. You might experience emotional, physical, intellectual, spiritual, or experiential intimacy — or something else entirely. Most of us have never mapped the conditions. This inventory makes them visible so you can identify what closeness you have and what you wish to develop.
🧘 Solo Track
Pick at least 3 dimensions of intimacy. For each, list one condition that makes it feel safe and one that makes it feel unsafe. Be specific: not just “trust” but what trust looks like in practice for you. Not just “pressure” but what exactly the pressure feels like.
💬 Community Track (Discord)
Share one dimension of intimacy where you clearly understand what makes it feel safe/unsafe for you — and one where you’re still figuring it out. Read others’ and react to those whose framing unlocks something for you.
🌎 IRL Track
Recall a few recent moments where you felt drawn toward or away from someone. Write down 3 specific moments, what form of intimacy moved, and what triggered each shift. The goal is data, not judgment.
- If you haven’t experienced a form yet: These are framed as what makes you feel safe on purpose — that can be hypothetical. Your gut feeling matters here.
- If everything felt unsafe: Look closer: is it the intimacy itself, or that variety with specific people, or intimacy without specific protections?
- If you couldn’t separate the dimensions: Start with the easiest to name (usually physical or emotional) and work outward. The categories are scaffolding, not rules.
Getting closer to other people often requires getting closer to yourself first. The same practices that build closeness with others — attention, curiosity, non-judgment, following through — can be turned inward. What would it look like to show up for yourself the way you show up for someone you care about?
🧘 Solo Track
Journal about what “being close to yourself” would actually look like for at least five minutes. Write with curiosity. What would you do differently if you treated yourself the way you treat someone you’re trying to get or stay close to?
💬 Community Track (Discord)
Share one way you practiced closeness with yourself this week — could be as simple as “I actually listened when my body said it needed rest” or “I let myself want something without immediately talking myself out of it.”
🌎 IRL Track
Do one thing purely for yourself this week that has no productivity justification and no audience. Not for photos, not to become a better person, not to check off a list. Just because you wanted to.
- If “closeness with yourself” feels like therapy-speak: Try reframing it as reliability. Would you show up for yourself the way you’d show up for a friend? Do you listen to yourself? Do you follow through?
- If you’re harsh with yourself: That’s a closeness gap. Practice extending to yourself the same patience you’d extend to someone else.
- If you already feel close to yourself: This might be about maintaining rather than building. Still counts!
Live Events This Week
You can count one event as a heartbeat menu activity ("Learn," Community Track). Interact in the chat using the same username you're using for this challenge, and/or share one thing you learned afterward via the form or in the Discord thread, so we know you attended enough to get something out of it.
Doki Doki Cardio Club: Why Your Heart Needs a Training Arc (Recording)
Your heart supports your energy, focus, stress tolerance, recovery, confidence, and even how you show up in relationships. When your cardio capacity is low, basic life can start feeling expensive. In this workshop, we talk about heart health, why cardio belongs in everyone’s life, and how building your aerobic base can make daily living feel less exhausting. Originally aired during the last day of Week 2 — the recording can be used as a Week 3 event.
Creative Mode: Draw Me In (Wednesday, May 20 — LIVE ONLY)
This week we’re getting closer WITH ART! Come hang in VC and draw with us. The prompt: “What does connection look like to you?” No skill level required. We’ll have a shared canvas and an open show & tell — bring anything you’ve made, old or new, finished or not.
Ask-A-Coach: Love, Sex, and Relationships + Text Message Court! (Friday, May 22 + Recorded)
A FREE Ask-A-Coach event where HG Coaches talk through YOUR questions relating to love, sex, and relationships — plus a special “text message court” segment where coaches evaluate real text messages and suggest what might communicate more clearly.
Submit your texts anonymously: Text Message Court Submission Form →
Risking Being More Authentic to Find Your People (Friday, May 22 + Recorded)
Masking our authentic selves can keep us from finding the people who would like our authentic selves. This event discusses using shadow work approaches to explore what the authentic self is and approaches to dealing with the anxiety and/or safety concerns with being more authentic.
How to Not Blow Out Your Back (While Trying to Burn Out Your Partner’s Back) (Sunday, May 24 + Recorded)
Training is not just for looking good under gym lighting. It is for building a body that can handle rhythm, tension, fatigue, awkward angles, and whatever deeply questionable choreography life throws at you. In this workshop, we’re talking about how fitness supports sex, intimacy, confidence, and the suspiciously athletic parts of being human.