If you think of yourself and your spirits as a family, you will be able to co-create a future with better success. A family is a social unit formed for mutual protection and support. If you say to your spiritual companions that you consider them family, I can almost guarantee that this will make them feel happy.
There is great power in identifying your group of spirits as a family instead of merely companions or guides. Only a family has names for all of the different relationships that exist between you and the spirits who have chosen to bond and associate with you.
A spiritual family is not connected by bonds of blood but by agreements for the co-creation of a future existence which involves mutual protection and support. Those of us who are communicating with spirits daily find new reasons to form kinships with the spirits we meet. Kinship, in this usage, means a feeling of being close enough or similar enough to others that we will support them and protect them. They are the beings we desire to co-create a future with.
The group of spirits traveling with you needs a unifying purpose and if you do not inform them they are family, they can remain an unruly mob working at cross-purposes. Simply informing your spirits they are part of a family seems to bring them into present time and make them instantly cheerful. At this point, they usually begin to organize themselves to act as a family, and changes occur without you being involved in every decision that is being made.
(I am leaving this with you guys to ferment and produce usable rules for the future)