For counsellors, coaches, pastors and educators
The session is yours to run. I will co-host the first one so you can watch it done.
Forty-five minutes on one conversation about money, with a fictional person, in your room with your people. The whole thing is written out — the promises that open it, the line that starts it, what to say when it lands close to home, how to debrief it, and what to send three days later. You can read all of it before you decide anything.
I will co-host the first one live on Zoom if you would rather see it before you run it. That one is $24.95 CAD per participant, and I am charging deliberately rather than for the revenue: I am trying to find out whether rehearsing a conversation is worth anything to people who do this work properly, and free would not tell me that. A decision to pay is the only version of your answer I can trust. Free places are offered at John’s discretion — founder events, and any time the fee would be the reason not to run it. Ask him; it is not a negotiation. There is no checkout here. It is arranged in the same email that books the session: bill it however you already bill your people, or he will invoice you.
The sheet is a different thing and it carries no price at all. It is free, unlicensed and yours whether or not you ever book a session, and there is no software to install and nothing to sign up for: there is no dashboard, no login, no licence, no seat, no group report. Not one of those exists today.
Nobody has run this yet, and 9 things in it are still unconfirmed. They are marked as such wherever they appear, which is the only honest way to hand a draft to somebody who is going to stand in front of a room with it.
Nothing is asked of you to read the kit — no address, no form, no download gate. Writing to me gets a reply from a person, usually within a day, and nothing is added to any list.
What happens in the forty-five minutes.
All of it, so you can decide before you agree rather than after. Nobody is asked to disclose anything about their own money at any point. The situation is made up and the person running the room is the one playing it.
The three promises at 0:00 are close to John’s own words. Every other block is a reconstruction he has not confirmed, and is marked as one. The full kit gives each block its source and the question still open on it.
0:00
Frame and consent
The host introduces you, briefly. Then the three promises, in the words on the consent card.
Then say the thing that makes the rest of it work: nobody is being put on the spot, and we are going to listen to one conversation and talk about how it went.
0:04
Why this oneNot confirmed
Money is not the hardest conversation because of the numbers. It is hard because of what the numbers reveal — how someone was raised, what they are ashamed of, and what they think a partner owes them.
One short concrete example. No statistics you cannot source on the spot.
0:09
The line, liveNot confirmed
Read it in role, once, without preamble. Then one question to the room, and nothing else: what is the first thing you would say?
Everyone writes their answer down before anybody hears anybody else’s. Collect them before you comment on any of them.
0:17
What the answers revealNot confirmed
Read them back without names, grouped by the kind of move they were. Use the response card.
Say it clearly, and more than once: there is no correct answer here. The useful question is whether what you said matches what you say you value.
Nobody is asked to own theirs out loud. If somebody volunteers, that is theirs to do.
0:27
The gapNot confirmed
The one insight of the session, and it is delivered as a question rather than a verdict: if you rate financial responsibility as one of the things that matters most to you, and your first response reassured without asking a single thing, what does that gap tell you?
Not a diagnosis. A thing to be curious about.
0:36
The bridge, and it is youNot confirmed
Where this goes next is a real conversation with a real person, and in this room that person is the host. Name them.
This is not a courtesy. They have the ongoing relationship and the duty of care, and a visiting voice that keeps the room’s attention has taken something that was not on offer.
0:42
Close, and the two questionsNot confirmed
Thank them. Ask the debrief questions live if there is time, and send them the same day if there is not.
End on time whether or not it felt finished. Overrunning somebody else’s evening is not a way to earn their trust.
And then the Tuesday after.
One evening and then a gap is not a programme, and it is the fair objection to everything above. So here is the whole arc, and none of it needs software, a licence or a second visit from me.
Before, if you want
Send your people the written rehearsal. They do it alone, in a browser, on their own time. Nobody sees what they answered — including you, including us.
The forty-five minutes
The session above. John co-hosts the first one if you would like to watch it done, and after that it is yours and he is not in the room.
Three to five days later
A short note to your people, written out for you, sent by you in your name. It asks one question about what they noticed rather than anything about what they wrote.
Your next ordinary session
Three questions to open with. Not a new topic — the same one, with a week of noticing behind it. Every one can be answered without disclosing a single thing anybody typed.
After that
The next conversation. Which one it is depends on your people rather than on us, and telling John which one you would actually use is the entire mechanism by which one gets written.
One thing that arc will never contain: you finding out what any one person wrote. In the written rehearsal nothing anybody types is kept at all. In the room, what is collected carries no name into anything you keep, and it goes to no leader and no partner. That is not a feature being withheld from you — it is the reason they answer honestly rather than performing an answer, and every question in the kit is built so it can be asked without it.
What you have to do, and what you do not.
This is the co-hosted one, the first time. When you run it yourself the left-hand list gets shorter, not longer.
You do
- Invite your own people, in your own words. It is your room.
- Send the Zoom link, or send a time and John will.
- Stay in the session. You are the person they trust and he is the stranger.
- Tell him beforehand if anything about your group means he should run it differently.
You do not
- Prepare anything. There is no pre-reading and no homework, for you or for them.
- Learn a tool. Nobody needs an account, a login, or a device beyond the one they are on.
- Give him your client list. Registration stays with you and he never needs a copy.
- Endorse anything, before or afterwards. If it was not useful, say so and that is the end of it.
What you keep
The whole session, written out, so you can run it yourself without John — and you do not have to wait for a session to get it. It is on the site now, unlicensed, with nothing to fill in first. Your couples keep the rehearsal itself; it is free and it stays free, whatever you decide about him. The fee is for the live session, not for the rehearsal and not for the sheet.
What he keeps
Anonymous notes on the kinds of first responses people gave. No names, no emails, no identifying detail, and nothing that trains anything. You see attendance. You do not see your clients’ answers, and neither does anybody else — that is the reason they will answer honestly, and it is worth saying to them out loud.
Who would be in the room.
John Moelker has been a pastor in Ontario for fifteen years. In that time he has walked couples through Prepare/Enrich dozens of times in premarriage counselling.
He is not a certified counsellor and he is not a therapist. He holds one unit of Clinical Pastoral Education. Nothing here is therapy, nothing here is a clinical assessment, and he would say the same thing in person. He writes the software himself.
If something in a session suggests a person needs more than a workshop, the session stops being a workshop. He acknowledges it without exploring it in front of the group, moves the room on, and afterwards points at you — the professional with the actual duty of care — or at their doctor. He does not follow anybody up himself.
Before you put your name near this
If you want to know where this stands on a question of theology or sexuality before you put your name anywhere near it, ask him directly and he will answer you plainly. That is a conversation for a person, not a paragraph on a website.
Take the kit. Write only if you want to.
The session kit asks nothing of you — no address, no form, no gate on the download. If you would rather have John co-host the first one, tell him roughly who your people are and roughly when suits. That is the whole intake: no form, no discovery call, no calendar to fight with.
The kit costs nothing and never will. The co-hosted session is $24.95 CAD a head, and that number is a measurement rather than a margin — free would not have told me whether any of this is worth having. Free places are offered at John’s discretion — founder events, and any time the fee would be the reason not to run it. Ask him; it is not a negotiation.
And if you would rather feel it before you read about it, the written rehearsal your people would do asks nothing of you either: try the debt conversation.
The rehearsal exists to get somebody to a person like you. It is not built to replace one, and it never will be.