Everything up to here has been input. This module is output.
Since Lesson 0.1 you've been quietly accumulating a pile of material: twelve true-or-false answers written in a hurry, six inventory scores, three Mars/Venus moments you were told to keep, a gut answer at the start of every module, and a first journal entry about the conversation you keep having that never goes well. You may not have looked at any of it since you wrote it.
Now you go back and get it.
The capstone does three things. It closes the loop on the two self-assessments, so you can see what actually moved. It turns everything you've learned into two documents you'll keep: a user manual for yourself, and either a couple's agreement or a dating playbook. And it hands you a thirty-day plan, because the single most reliable way to lose a course like this is to finish it.
A warning about the second of those. The manual and the playbook are not journaling exercises. They're documents other people are meant to read, which means writing them is harder and more useful than it sounds. Most people discover, somewhere around the fourth section, that they've never actually put into words what they need when they're upset, and that they've been quietly expecting the people who love them to have worked it out.
The Driving Question
If someone who loved you had to learn how to reach you, what would you tell them?
Before you start
Get your journal and find five things: your twelve true-or-false answers from day one; your six inventory scores; your three Mars/Venus moments from Lesson 1.1; the gut answers you wrote at the start of each module; and the first entry, the conversation I keep having. If you skipped some, that's fine: do what you can with what you have, and note what's missing. If you skipped all of them, start with the current versions and treat today as day one; the exercises still work, you just won't get the before-and-after.
What You'll Be Able to Do
By the end of this module you'll have:
- retaken both self-assessments and compared them with day one, including an honest reading of what a changed score does and doesn't mean;
- re-examined your three Mars/Venus moments with a course's worth of evidence, and sorted the sex-difference explanations from the personality and situation ones;
- completed your Not You? audit: where you match your sex's average, and where you plainly don't;
- written a one- to two-page personal communication manual covering stress, love, support, hurt, conflict and repair;
- written either a Couple's Communication Agreement (six parts, all of which you already have) or a Dating Playbook (five parts, same);
- built a 30-day practice plan, one skill a week;
- rewritten the conversation you keep having, with the version that would actually go somewhere.
Time
About 1.75 hours of reading and writing: two 45-minute lessons plus the check-out. The writing is the lesson, so give it the time: a manual drafted in eight minutes is a manual nobody will recognize you in. Many people do 9.1 one evening and 9.2 the next.
A note on the format
Every lesson in this course has had a Reality Check (a popular claim put on trial) and a Translation Table. The capstone keeps both, and hands them to you. In 9.1 you write the Reality Check, on a belief of your own, and fill in the Translation Table with four lines that are actually yours. The last one the course writes for you is in 9.2, and it's about this course.
Three Templates
The writing in this module is supported by three fill-in templates, which you can copy into your journal or print:
- Personal Manual Template: for Lesson 9.1
- Couples Agreement Template: for Lesson 9.2, couples track
- Dating Playbook Template: for Lesson 9.2, dating track
And the Toolkit has every formula from the course in one place. Keep that one.