Accounts from households in Johor Bahru who have attended the workshops. Written in their own words — not shaped by us.
Back to HomeA selection from feedback collected between April and May 2025.
My husband and I came to the three-hour workshop not really knowing what to expect. The exercises were straightforward and the facilitator was careful not to turn it into a counselling session — which was exactly what I had been worried about. We left with things to try at home. The prompt card was more useful than I thought it would be.
I am not the kind of person who attends workshops. My partner convinced me. The session on silence — session three of the series — was genuinely difficult and the most useful. I did not expect to find an exercise where we just sat and did not speak to be the part I kept thinking about afterward. I would attend again.
We have been in the Year of Conversation Practice subscription for five months now. The monthly sessions keep the practice from slipping. What I value most is that it is not open-ended group talk — there is always something specific to do. The quarterly reading group is a pleasant addition, though that is not the main reason I am here.
Clear format. The facilitator knew when to speak and when not to. My wife and I walked out having had an actual conversation about the exercise rather than the usual discussion about whether we communicate well. That shift — from abstract to specific — was what made the afternoon worthwhile.
We drove from Kluang for the series, which tells you something. The drive was not the issue — finding a workshop that does not promise personal outcomes or try to fix you is harder than you would think. This one does what it says it will. Four sessions, a workbook, and we went home with something to practise rather than something to feel about ourselves.
I am in the subscription now, eight months in. The rhythm of it suits the way I want to work on this. Monthly sessions are frequent enough that it does not slip, but not so frequent that it feels like an obligation. The annual reflection note in December will be interesting — I have been keeping a small record since January.
Three accounts with more detail on what brought households here and what shifted.
Two siblings in their thirties, both based in JB, had fallen into a pattern of keeping conversations superficial after a period of family difficulty. They wanted to rebuild the habit of speaking plainly to each other but were not sure how to start without it becoming a conversation about the difficulty itself.
They attended the three-hour workshop as a pair. The exercise structure meant they practised listening to each other within a clear frame — not as siblings working through history, but as participants working through an exercise. That frame gave them enough distance to be useful to each other.
One sibling wrote in feedback: "We talked on the drive home for an hour. That is not something we had done for a while." They subsequently enrolled in the series together. We do not know what happened after that, which is as it should be.
A married couple in their forties described a pattern where decisions got made by default rather than by actual agreement — one person would wait for the other to act, and the other would act to avoid the waiting. They were not in conflict; they just wanted a better way of arriving at shared choices.
They found the fourth session — arriving at shared decisions — most directly useful, but both said session two (hearing what is said) was the precondition for the fourth session to work. The series is sequenced for that reason.
"The thing that shifted was not the decisions we make. It is that we now have a small vocabulary for describing how a decision is being made, which makes it easier to stop and name what is happening." They received the follow-up note in May 2025.
The accounts above are useful, but the better way to know whether this suits your household is to come to a session. Send us a note to find out when the next workshop runs.
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