If you are just getting started and you don’t feel comfortable going to someone else for a spirit guide reading, I would advise you to start out by doing meditation and journaling. Tell your guides you want to get to know who they are and how they work with you and you will have some amazing results. It may take a little bit of time, but when your guides feel you are ready, they will reveal their names. It even helps if after you enter in your meditation, you can use dowsing rods to get their physical names.
You may have one spirit guide or you may have many. It all depends on what you are supposed to learn and the guides that are appointed for each lesson. For me when I first started to do mediumship, I met my gatekeeper/doorkeeper during a dream state and she was literally in front of a large door. She was very straight to the point with me which I liked and said, “now I’m going to tell you I believe in Jesus.” I told her, “that’s fine”. She was a psychic medium when she was on the earth plane. Right after I met her, then it dawned on me who she was, this would be the guide that would help me develop my mediumship.
Weeks later my father-in-law passed and came to visit me and I would be told to contact his wife. He gave me her phone number to call her because he was worried about her. I delivered the message to her and so I began my journey. Did I have a name for my guide? No, I just knew her as my gatekeeper, the one to open the door from the spiritual world to this world.
So don’t be discouraged, allow the meeting of the guides alone to be significant.
Now my healing guide was very different, I actually received a name for them in clairaudience. So depending on how you receive your information can also determine how they will communicate. Maybe they show you just symbols, take notes, and the pieces will fit together when they are supposed to.