What We Believe
At Naming The Real, we believe in the transformative power of naming and storytelling to foster personal and collective growth. Our mission is to guide individuals, couples, and groups toward a life of flourishing and purpose.
Our approach is deeply engaging, focusing on knowing your story from new perspectives, understanding the impact of your background, and developing flourishing practices. We emphasize the importance of promise-keeping, honesty, and living in abundant mindsets.
How We Help
Individual and Group Coaching
Led by Brandon Cook, our coaching services are tailored to help individuals transcend limiting beliefs and habits. We specialize in coaching executive-level individuals, high performers, and faith leaders, offering a path to achieve extraordinary results in various aspects of life, including work, family, relationships, and personal goals. Learn more about coaching.
Training Experiences
Leadership Coaching Academy: the LCA is focused on enhancing leadership skills, blending coaching techniques with personal development strategies. This program is designed to empower individuals to become more effective, transformative leaders.
[re]storied PLUS: our flagship training is a 2.5-day transformative experience designed to equip you with tools and practices for moving from survival living to a flourishing life. It combines lectures, exercises, and somatic practices like breath work and ice baths, allowing participants to re-create and re-story their lives.
Unlimited: an experiential couples growth weekend that brings together physical, emotional, relational, and sexual health to tap into the unlimited possibilities for you, your partner, and your relationship. You will walk away with simple but profound practices that will change your life and your relationship.
Resilient Souls: a one-day retreat for navigating chaos with clarity and courage — guided practices, soulful teaching, and communal wisdom for living with presence and purpose amid the storm.
Educating the Heart: a 1.5-day retreat for rejuvenation and reawakening, designed to replenish and resource you, empowering you to rewrite the story of your life.
Online Course
The Path to Flourishing: this course offers simple and practical processes for changing your thinking and revolutionizing your life. It covers high-level concepts such as the power of naming and the importance of grief, making them accessible and actionable for real-life application. It's free.
Podcast
The Naming The Real Podcast: hosted by Brandon Cook, exploring spirituality, psychology, culture, and the courageous work of becoming whole — with honesty, compassion, and room for mystery. Free to everyone, wherever you listen.
The Book
Learning to Live and Love Like Jesus: Brandon's book of fifty-two readings — a discipleship journey to take over a year or at your own pace, alone or with a small group.
Why Naming The Real?
The world around us is, in the words of Edwin Friedman: chronically anxious. Increasing complexity, technological overload, loss of discourse patterns—that is, our ability to listen, think, and respond thoughtfully, disagreement escalating to outraged conflict, loss of civility…these are markers of our anxious world.
These dynamics are transformed by individuals who live whole, abundant, generous lives; by becoming who we are made to be—a powerful force of life and freedom—the world is made new.
We stand with individuals to step into who they are made to be by developing life-changing resources and delivering life-changing coaching.
Both involve a journey in courage, into thoughtfulness, celebrating beauty despite the world's despair, and facing whatever pain or past trauma would prevent us from fully stepping into our future and our true, God-given self.
The Two Halves of Naming
The idea behind “Naming The Real” is two-fold. Firstly, the spiritual journey is about receiving your true name, becoming who you are already made to be, and living out of that identity for the sake of the world. Names may be bestowed, but they are also something we live into.
Secondly, as a Chinese Proverb says, “The right naming of things is the beginning of wisdom.” The spiritual journey involves naming your true self, given in God, and your false self (your small, self-focused, only-focused-on-survival self).
Through holistic, formation-based resources and first-class coaching, we help challenge our inaccurate assumptions about God, Scripture, the world, and ourselves, we help people name reality rightly, and, in doing so, this releases a renaissance of love and compassion in individuals and into the world.
Biblical Foundations
The biblical basis for Naming The Real is the journey of Abram who becomes Abraham. The spiritual journey is about receiving your true name—becoming who you are made to be—and living that out for the sake of the world. When God tells Abram to go, he says (in Hebrew), “Lech lecha,” which can be translated, simply, “go.” But lech lecha can also be translated “go to yourself.” The spiritual journey, then, is about going and becoming; in faithful going, we become who we are made to be. So Abram receives a new name and becomes Abraham.
In Scripture, this re-naming happens time and again. Mary becomes “the exalted one.” John becomes “the beloved.” Peter is branded, “the rock.” But the journey always involves disorientation. The spiritual journey is, in the words of Walter Brueggeman, a pilgrimage of “orientation, disorientation, and new orientation.” The spiritual journey is about deconstruction and reconstruction. This is, in fact, the resurrection pattern. We must face the unknown, leaving what is behind to receive what is ahead. This is how Abram became Abraham. It is how Jesus became the glorified one.
Christianity is being refined and made new all around us, but only through a journey of deconstruction and reconstruction. To reconstruct our faith means to enter into a cloud of unknowing, a time of disorientation. This is totally normal, but it can feel overwhelming. So we call people through the cloud of disorientation into a renewed faith. This takes courage! In the process, our lives become a contemplative journey in which we see and relate to God in entirely new ways. This transforms us. This transforms the world.