Women In Wellness: Author Beth Anstandig On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s Journey Towards Better Wellbeing

An Interview With Candice Georgiadis

Build more awareness within your own internal system. This might mean setting reminders throughout the day to pause and notice where you are feeling pressure in your body. Learn what pressure sounds like in your thoughts. When you have more awareness, you can make more frequent adjustments to pressure which will quickly reduce and prevent stress. These small acts of awareness will allow you to be more present and at ease.

As a part of my series about the women in wellness, I had the pleasure of interviewing Beth Anstandig.

For more than 25 years, and with an ever-growing menagerie of animals at her California ranch, licensed psychotherapist and lifelong cowgirl, Beth Anstandig has worked with human herds providing leadership, corporate culture, and well-being programs through The Circle Up Experience. She’s trained thousands of CEOs, managers, and teams from Fortune 1000 companies, universities, and nonprofits, helping them tap into their Natural Leadership to live, lead and work with genuine connection. Beth is also the author of the upcoming book, The Human Herd: Awakening Our Natural Leadership.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to “get to know you” better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?

My animals have always been my teachers. I live with a herd of horses. I spend long hours in the pasture with them, in their home, grazing alongside them, and learning their way of life, their state of being, and their patterns in relationships. The lessons in which they have to offer and the gentleness in which they teach I have yet to find in a human-led classroom.

I’ve built a life with animals at the center of it so I can continue listening to the voice of my own animal, reclaiming the mammalian signal system that is alive and well within each of us. Because we are human animals, yet in today’s world we suppress the natural signals of our mammal bodies as we move through life on autopilot, ignoring our instincts and reacting to the latest dilemma.

As human animals, we have a super power, and when we reclaim this innate mammal power it allows us to access a new source of information to better respond to life’s extraordinary pressures and build more authentic relationships in our lives and work. This is our Natural Leadership, and it allows us to move through the world with a keen advantage that benefits our entire human herd.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? What were the main lessons or takeaways from that story?

Earlier in my career when I was teaching, I always brought my dogs with me to the classroom because it provided a great bridge between me and my students. It helped them trust me and develop our relationships faster and more deeply. I started to do that as a therapist too, bringing my dogs into the therapy room, and this was around the time that I was shifting to incorporate animals more into my work.

An adult client wanted to train one of my dogs to do tricks. He even brought dog treats to our sessions. A traditional therapist likely would have pushed back, but I thought, I’m okay, I guess this is what we’re doing. I began to listen and watch what was going on with him and the dog. Sure enough, he connected with the dog and the dog with him. As therapists, we’re trained to ask what’s happening right now and what’s my role. Well, I had no role. I was just an observer of this relationship. And that felt right.

One session as he’s sitting on the floor with the dog, he has a breakthrough insight on his own with a lot of emotion, which he normally doesn’t have. I hadn’t asked a single question. As the session was ending, he looks me right in the eye and says this wasn’t you, you had nothing to do with what happened here. He wanted to make sure I knew it was not traditional therapy that caused his breakthrough. It was the dog.

It was an incredible moment of realizing there are certain things humans can’t fix for other humans. The dog gave him something that me nor any other therapist would have been able to provide. Plus, the fact he could express that changed our relationship and opened things up in a new way.

For me, it was another sign that I had to break out of the “therapy box” and its artificial Freud-constructed living room scenario with the chair, couch and questions.

Can you share a story about the biggest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

We need to pay attention to the signs and signals that our human animal body is sending us because incredible innovation comes out of crisis. It’s about resilience, adaptability, and what natural part of us drives pivot and change. Our innate capacity to adapt to our needs and changes in the environment is a core survival trait.

My shift from a traditional clinical practice to providing leadership, culture and well-being programs at my ranch, with my horses and other herds, is one of those examples. I had a successful and thriving office practice with a waiting list for clients.

But there was something in me that felt like it wasn’t enough. Something was missing from the office setting. I would open all the windows and go outside in between sessions. I needed to move and needed space. At first, I thought something was wrong with me — that I wasn’t happy at work. It was a pressure inside of me that I could feel.

I also started to realize there was this other part of me that I’ve had in my life forever — being outdoors, in nature, and with animals. That’s where much of my learning and healing happened. Yet, it wasn’t part of my work. So, I started to bring my dogs to my office and that was long before it was even fashionable to provide emotional support animals.

I came from an alternative kind of family — a hippie family. As such, I also wanted to present myself as a polished professional. When I started to move out of the therapy office with the diploma and the license framed on the wall, I thought I was letting go of this thing that validated my work.

Ultimately, I realized the human development piece and the therapy I was providing needed to be done at my ranch, in nature and with the horses. I had to push myself beyond my fear that this was not going to be accepted or it was going to come across as too weird.

But I knew the animal piece was essential to the kind of work I wanted to do because it had been essential to my own healing and growth process. When I moved to my ranch, it completely transformed me. I knew that by having experiences here with me and my animals in human groups that some of those same transformations would also be possible for my clients.

My mistake was not doing it sooner. Not being brave to say I need to do things differently. It took a while, and it was painful for me. If I had been able to make that transition faster and really owned who I was — who I am — I could have done better work faster. By expanding my scope and broadening it outside of traditional therapy, I’m able to reach more people — including those who wouldn’t normally seek out help.

Let’s jump to our main focus. When it comes to health and wellness, how is the work you are doing helping to make a bigger impact in the world?

When I was doing traditional therapy, I could only see so many clients a week in my office. And most of the time, when working as a marriage and family therapist, I was focused on marriage and family issues. But I knew every client that experienced transformation, evolution and growth would then go into their world and impact others in a positive way.

I realized I could broaden the reach of that impact by working with groups and organizations and on workplace relationships, in partnership with the horses and other animals at my ranch. As a therapist and as a leadership and culture consultant, my job is to create groups that agree to operate with ease and interdependence. By working with whole teams and helping them to experience more happiness at work, they would then infuse that well-being into their jobs and that would positively impact their colleagues. Additionally, those team members would then bring home happier selves to their families, spouses and lives outside of work.

That ripple effect is my impact, my social activism. It’s how I’m changing the world. By shifting the way one person experiences the world and inspiring them to pass that experience onto others. And that’s how I talk about it with clients. Change starts within. When you take care of your own animal being and change how you lead yourself and then how you relate with others, you are shifting culture. You are affecting change.

Can you share your top five “lifestyle tweaks” that you believe will help support people’s journey towards better wellbeing? Please give an example or story for each.

1. Think of yourself as a mammal and ask yourself what your animal body needs to feel a state of ease.
2. Build more awareness within your own internal system. This might mean setting reminders throughout the day to pause and notice where you are feeling pressure in your body. Learn what pressure sounds like in your thoughts. When you have more awareness, you can make more frequent adjustments to pressure which will quickly reduce and prevent stress. These small acts of awareness will allow you to be more present and at ease.
3. Commit to daily behaviors and activities that release pressure and stress. Stress needs to move through the body for us to be relieved of it. The more we do this, the more we are allowing our own biology to balance itself.
4. Pay attention to the pace with which you do things. And notice if you slow things down just a little bit if you have more energy and more awareness of what’s happening within and around you.
5. Start a daily practice of Noticing Things. A few times per day (again, you might need to set a reminder) slow down and look around. Take note of what you see, hear, smell, and feel in your body. Notice your surroundings. It’s amazing what you can see, feel, learn, and experience if you just slow down and LOOK around.

If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?

That self-care and relationship “how to” are skills that are taught and mentored throughout our lifetimes. No one really teaches us how to take care of ourselves as a human animal, to attend to our own needs and to learn how to speak up for them. And we certainly don’t teach how to do relationship anywhere. It’s not part of a basic curriculum and that’s why we have mental health crisis right now. Divorce, alcoholism and other addictions are all problems that stem from a lack of self-care and relationship know how.

Relationships are live, dynamic systems and if we don’t nurture stability and ease in our relationships, they get off balance and that creates stress. The same is true with our own individual organism. Our lives depend on it. Consider the military. They take care of themselves because their survival depends upon showing up and being in service to their troops. They’re relationship bonds are unbreakable because they learned how to need each other as part of an interdependent group. That’s what being a herd is all about.

I named my business The Circle Up Experience because “circle up” is what we used to do. We circled up our wagons to share resources and create safety in numbers. We have the instinct, as human animals to form herds — to form community. I’ve always been a community organizer, the one in the group that tries to bring people together for a common good. I learned this from my animals. We have it in us to be good to ourselves and to each other, to look for ways to be of service. But we must nurture these instincts and practice these skills daily.

Sustainability, veganism, mental health and environmental changes are big topics at the moment. Which one of these causes is dearest to you, and why?

Mental health because mental health is physical health. We’re in the middle of a profound mental health crisis and it stems from not taking care of our mammal needs — our self-care — and not attending to the stress in our relationships.

Mental health is a major healthcare issue and the costs for medical treatment outweigh the costs for building positive support systems. We can start to pay attention to signs and symptoms and walk toward conversations and solutions rather than ignoring or denying the realities around us. COVID-19 woke us up, sharpening our senses to the delicate nature of our physical and mental health, the need for community and real connection, and the desire for a new way to experience life.

Lessons from nature and animals are incredibly relevant as we face this crisis. Now more than ever humans need to wake up and utilize the Natural Leadership instincts and skills inherent to us as mammals including signals, sensations, and sensors about well-being and needs. We must return to the human animal, the inner mammal, we lost as we became busy adults.

When we apply animal models to our own lives and learn how to tune into our Natural Leadership, we have a wise and primitive power to respond to pressures within and around us and take better care of ourselves and our human herds.

What is the best way our readers can follow you online?

My website https://www.thecircleupexperience.com. On Instagram and Facebook @thecircleupexperience.

Thank you for these fantastic insights!