The proposal, in his own framing, is groups in every city that meet weekly and serve the function church used to serve — real people in a real room, freely associating, pushing each other, at no cost. There is no official register of them. This is an attempt at one.
Read this before you go anywhere. This directory is not affiliated with Owen Cook, and no listing here is endorsed or vetted by him, by this site, or by anyone else. Groups are added by whoever submits them. A person is checked for spam, not for character. Meet in a public place the first time, tell someone where you are going, and give out your address to nobody you have not met.
Your location is used in this browser to sort the list and is never sent anywhere — the whole directory is downloaded first, and the distance arithmetic happens on your device.
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The directory starts empty, and an empty directory is useless on its own. So this is the other half: every city where somebody has raised a hand. If you are the fourth person in your city, the room already exists — it just has not been booked yet.
Nobody's name, email or address appears here or anywhere else on this site. This is a count of people and nothing more.
One line, and you are on the count above. If a group is ever listed within 60 miles of you, somebody emails you once to say so.
Free, in person, and open to people who have not met you yet — those are the only conditions, because they are the ones he actually names. Anything with a price on it belongs somewhere else.
Which, at the time of writing, is nearly everybody's situation — and it is not a consolation prize. It is the actual instruction. Build the room is where a person implements any of this at the only scale they control.
Groups in every city that meet weekly and serve the function church used to serve.
Owen Cook — Women Will MAKE YOU BETTER Or DESTROY YOUR LIFE, from 39:54
Free, weekly, in person, peer-run, and aimed at building leaders rather than followers — those five are his, and the reasoning behind them is on the study page. The seven items below are not. They are ordinary organising, written down here because “start a group” is the point at which most people stall.
Pick the slot before you pick the people. One weeknight, the same night every week, ninety minutes, a hard finish. A group with a fixed time survives losing members; a group that negotiates the time every week dies in about a month.
Three is a group. Not eight. Waiting for eight is how it never starts — and the first three set the tone that everyone after them inherits.
Somewhere public and free. A library meeting room, a park, the back of a diner at an off hour, a gym's spare corner. Not a house, at least not until people know each other. It keeps the door open to strangers, which is the entire proposal, and it keeps everybody safe while they are still strangers.
Run the same four questions. Each person, in turn, no crosstalk until they are done: what did you commit to last week; what actually happened; where did you flinch; what are you committing to before we meet again. That is the whole agenda. It needs no facilitator training and it makes the meeting impossible to fake your way through twice.
Charge nothing, ever, for anything. Not a fee, not a course, not a book you wrote. The moment there is a price the room becomes a funnel, and he is specific that the cost is what broke the existing self-development industry for the people who needed it most.
Rotate who runs it. Different person each week. This is the mechanical version of leaders, not followers — and it is also the only real protection against the group quietly becoming about whoever founded it.
Challenge, then get specific. Support between people who take this seriously runs through being called out rather than agreed with. The failure mode in the other direction is a room where everyone performs how awake they are; if it starts sounding like that, go back to item 04, which is deliberately made of facts.
A weekly group of people pushing each other has an obvious failure mode, and it is worth naming rather than pretending otherwise: a room with one charismatic person and no rotation stops being a peer group and turns into an audience. Item 06 is the guard against it. If yours has drifted that way, that is what it drifted into.
When it has met twice and you know it is real, put it on the list. Not before — a directory of groups that met once is worse than an empty one.