We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Brittany Anderson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Brittany, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

My husband, Geoff, and I have been married almost 17 years, but our 11th anniversary was almost our last.

In 2019, shortly after Geoff had reached the peak of his career as a Presidential Pilot on Air Force One, I asked him for a divorce.

There’s a reason the divorce rate in the military is nearly double that of the general population. Military marriages are hard. Military life puts a massive burden on the spouse that is often unrecognized and uncelebrated.

Between moves, deployments, and having to make significant sacrifices in terms of my relationships and my career, it all came to a head in 2019 when I began struggling with dissociative issues. I truly felt like there were two versions of myself: there was the devoted wife on the rare occasion he was home, and then there was the single working mom who had to function on her own.

I was seeing a therapist. Geoff was seeing a therapist. We were seeing one together. Yet none of it was helping, because for me in particular, it held me in a victim state. And in 2019, I’d really lost who I was, so much so that I thought the only way back to myself was apart from my husband.

But that was one of the biggest lies I’ve ever believed.

Thankfully, I met a coach at the STORY Conference in late 2019, and after several months of working with her, I began to realize the power of healing and growing WITH my husband – through a purpose and vision for our marriage and our family, and through a deeper understanding of who each of us inherently, uniquely are.

This work has dramatically changed our lives, so much that I started the journey of becoming a certified coach and started Renala to design programs that provide all the support families need to more deeply connect and step into lives of purpose and vision.

What makes us different is our focus on entire families (yes, parents AND kids) as well as our playful and experiential approaches – using our expertise in LEGO Serious Play, CliftonStrengths, and more – to help families accelerate the process toward better and more sustainable habits and mindsets.

Brittany, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Renala is another name for the magnificent Baobab trees that are iconic across Africa. Renala trees are known as the “Tree of Life,” and they are a beautiful metaphor for a family in that they create their own ecosystems, thrive in almost any condition (even fire), can live up to 5,000 years, and produce some of the most nutrient-dense fruit in the world.

The tree metaphor is powerful because, at Renala, we ask big questions like, “What if your family tree could become less about the past – and more about the future?”

Our signature program is our Yes Retreat, where, over 2.5 days, we guide families with school-aged children through a powerful and playful process that helps them more deeply understand themselves and each other and enables them to create a vision, purpose, and set of values for their family.

I am a LEGO SERIOUS PLAY certified facilitator, so our retreats leverage the power of play through LEGOs, art, storytelling, and more to facilitate a transformational process for families. Families even close out the weekend by creating a modern version of a family crest, which we then pass off to a graphic designer to create as a beautiful piece to display in their home.

Play is not only key to engaging children in the process. Research has proven that play shortens the path to sustainable habits and transformation, which is why our approaches are so powerful for families.

We also provide tailored Strengths coaching to families. We have developed our own set of tools and resources that leverage the CliftonStrengths assessments for parents and children. Our resources – including a tailored Strengths report and a Family Strengths Mapping Mural Board – help families better understand one another’s unique genius, needs, and conflict patterns through the lens of their unique Strengths.

The likelihood you share your top five Strengths in the same order as someone else is 1 in 33 million, so you can imagine how powerful this work is for helping families really understand how to support each other well. Strengths are also proven to help parents and children cope with negative emotions – and even reverse them.

Finally, we offer a virtual online community for families called The Family Circle. For less than the cost of one forgettable drive-thru meal, families gain access to an on-demand course that helps them develop a vision for their family, as well as weekly family connection prompts, and our monthly Family Yes Planning Party, where we talk about what’s working and what’s not in their family and brainstorm what they want to say ‘yes’ to in their family in the coming month. We also have threads inside our community to hold families accountable to their vision and commitments.

All of our programs are geared toward playfully disrupting broken generational narratives to create a different future for your family, thereby making your family tree less about the past and more about the future.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

In 2024, we partnered with Istoria Collective, led by award-winning illusionist, bestselling author, and producer of the popular STORY Conference, Harris III.

Partnering with Istoria was a full circle moment for me because I met the coach who changed my life in 2019 at the STORY Conference. Istoria’s vision is to be the most disruptive force for the power of change through story, and transforming families and family stories is a key component of that vision. Harris has served as one of my coaches since 2022, so when he approached me on the idea of partnering, it was an easy ‘yes.’

Together, we are working to expand Renala’s work with families into companies and nonprofits because we believe that world-changing leadership begins at home. In 2025, we are also focusing more deeply on work with military families, foster and adoptive families, as well as those who are transitioning out of prison and integrating back into their families.

Together with Istoria, we are extremely passionate about all of the spaces Renala’s work can touch. We have a vision for the future that includes a foundation, a family cruise, as well as a hotel intentionally designed for family play and connection.

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

I started Renala in 2021 while I was serving full-time in leadership at a large consulting firm, where I led a booming facilitation and strategic planning practice supporting federal agencies. In 2023, I had the courage to leave behind this job with a great salary and tons of growth potential to focus on Renala full time.

Absent that move and the financial sacrifices it required early on, I’m not sure our focus would have shifted to serving families – at least not as quickly as we did.

Renala began as a transformational coaching firm focused on serving working moms, but as I began serving more clients after leaving my job, one thing I noticed was that while these moms experienced tremendous growth and transformation, it was leaving them frustrated because it was widening the gap in their relationships, especially at home. If your entire family isn’t growing with you, it can cause conflict, resentment, and a host of other challenges.

That’s when I began to explore what it would look like to create a company focused on serving entire families, leveraging my 20+ years of facilitation and strategic planning expertise along with my coaching skills to facilitate a similar process for families.

We all desire to work for organizations or start businesses that have a powerful vision, mission, and set of values, and yet we overlook the power of that same work in our families. We’re proactive at work and reactive at home – and that’s a missed opportunity because our families hold the keys to the leader and human each of us longs to be.

Leaving a job I truly loved was one of the hardest yet best decisions I ever made because it gave me the freedom and focus to create an entirely new category of services and products. Aside from my family, serving our families through Renala is the greatest joy of my life. It never feels like work, and while running a business is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, I never run out of energy or passion for it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://renalacoaching.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/renalafamilies/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renalacoaching/