Women In Wellness: Tati Garcia Of Be Calm With Tati On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s Journey Towards Better Wellbeing
An Interview With Wanda Malhotra
Balance is not just a “nice-to-have”, it is a necessity for your mental health.
Today, more than ever, wellness is at the forefront of societal discussions. From mental health to physical well-being, women are making significant strides in bringing about change, introducing innovative solutions, and setting new standards. Despite facing unique challenges, they break barriers, inspire communities, and are reshaping the very definition of health and wellness. In this series called women in wellness we are talking to women doctors, nurses, nutritionists, therapists, fitness trainers, researchers, health experts, coaches, and other wellness professionals to share their stories and insights. As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Tati Garcia.
Tati Garcia is a Licensed Professional Counselor and coach specializing in high-functioning anxiety, the host of the podcast Calmly Coping, and has more than 13 years of experience in the field of mental health. Her passion lies in guiding ambitious achievers to overcome anxiety, self-doubt, and burnout so they can feel calmer and more confident from within. Tati has thousands of hours of experience helping clients and uses evidence-based approaches including mindfulness, self-compassion, and positive psychology to help high-achievers make improvements in their mindset, self-care, and work-life balance.
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?
I have struggled with exactly what I help people overcome. I have had struggles with anxiety for as long as I can remember, but I didn’t actually know that it was anxiety until I started college and began studying psychology. This was also when I had my first serious experience with panic attacks.
When I graduated with my Master of Arts in Mental Health Counseling, I started working with high-risk youth. This was when my high expectations and the fear of failure really started influencing me. I would often overthink things, feel anxious before client sessions, and incessantly rehash meetings in my mind afterwards to reflect on what I could have done better. I was promoted after this and the anxiety followed me, along with the pressure I would put on myself to do it all and never make mistakes.
This inner anxiety, along with the pressure of my new job led to me reaching a point of burnout. It took me reaching a breaking point to realize that this job was having a negative impact on my mental health, and I knew that something needed to change. This was when I fully pivoted into my private practice, where my anxiety then started to show up differently as somebody who is self-employed and fully responsible for everything.
I had more freedom, but I also was confronted with my fear and self-doubt, and I knew I had to be intentional with the way I worked, cared for myself, and balanced my time and energy.
This led me to discovering the term high-functioning anxiety and realizing this was exactly me. After my healing journey and research on the topic, I focused on specializing in helping other ambitious professionals stop putting themselves last and healing their mindset and fear from within so they can feel more calm, balanced, and confident.
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?
When I first started my career as a therapist, I was working with high-risk youth who were at risk for suicide. I was incredibly green and anxious about saying the wrong thing during sessions. On top of this, I also had to conduct family sessions that were initially very intimidating for me. One time during a family session, a parent directly said to me that I was “too young” for this role and this made me feel like even more of an imposter, compounding my anxiety. Although this time of my career was difficult, I believe that it was my perseverance and willingness to learn and grow that allowed me to improve and build my skills during this time, rather than allowing this experience to bring me down and keep me stuck.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about a mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I expected perfection in everything I did: every podcast episode had to be the best and most comprehensive episode on the topic, my website had to be the best, my courses had to be perfect, etc. This also meant that I feared making mistakes: what if I said something that I would later regret? What it I looked stupid? This was a challenging place to be in as a new business owner, because the entire process is full of experimentation and failure. Through experience and my expertise in working with individuals struggling with perfectionism, I had to recognize this tendency within myself and reframe every step I took as an experiment that would never be perfect. This has allowed me the freedom to try new things and be vulnerable without the fear of making mistakes or needing to be perfect.
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?
The work I am doing in helping ambitious professionals struggling with high-functioning anxiety is shining a light on an under-recognized problem. Just because you appear to be doing well and are successful on the outside, does not mean that you are feeling well on the inside. So many people have learned to sacrifice themselves and push themselves harder in order to get where they are, survive, and accomplish their goals. But this behavior is not sustainable and it leaves many professionals, including executives and entrepreneurs, feeling anxious, overwhelmed, and burned out. My mission is to positively transform workplaces and businesses by teaching people how to cultivate self-care and self-worth from within so they can feel happier and achieve with purpose and intention.
Can you share your top five “lifestyle tweaks” that you believe will help support people’s journey towards better wellbeing?
1 . Increase your emotional awareness because this impacts everything: your decisions, your thoughts, your mood, and your behaviors. When you can become emotionally aware, you can make intentional choices throughout your day rather than reacting to the stressors that come up. A simple way to start this is by naming your emotions as you feel them.
2 . Prioritize yourself first regularly. This allows you to not only achieve sustainable success, but it will help you feel calmer and more fulfilled in the process, and give you the energy to be fully present for your loved ones. This can look like just carving out intentional time for yourself at least once daily (no matter how short) to fill up your cup and recharge: cozy up with a book you’ve been dying to dive into, binge-watch your favorite TV show guilt-free, or mindfully drink your morning cup of coffee or tea. It doesn’t matter what it is, just that you are setting aside time for yourself intentionally.
3 . Listen to yourself and take regular breaks. We often ignore our need for rest and continue pushing through and being harder on ourselves. Taking regular time for breaks and recharging will allow you to be more productive and less stressed throughout your day.
4 . Flex your positivity muscle. As humans, we have a negativity bias that primes us to focus on the negative more than the positive as a way of keeping ourselves safe. Although this can keep us alive, it often makes us feel worse, especially when we’re not met with life or death dangers on a regular basis. Practicing your positivity muscle can look like naming 3 things you are grateful for daily, replacing complaints with gratitude, and celebrating your progress rather than fixating on what you haven’t yet done.
5 . Remind yourself that you are enough daily. You don’t have to prove yourself to anybody. You don’t have to stay busy to be worthy, and your worth is not contingent upon your productivity. You are worthy and enough exactly as you are.
If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?
I would start the movement of being kind to yourself and others as a necessary component of success. We are often are own worst critics, and the attitude of self-criticism and excessive pressure permeates our culture, workplaces, and families. Replacing this criticism and harshness with compassion is the wellness shift that we all need.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?
- Remember that you are doing better than you give yourself credit for.
- Celebrate your wins and progress more than you focus on your failures.
- Fulfillment comes from within: not from achievements or external validation.
- Lower your expectations: you can’t do it all at once, and that’s okay.
- Balance is not just a “nice-to-have”, it is a necessity for your mental health.
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 I am of course a mental health professional, and because your mental health informs the way you approach everything in life. People will often ignore caring for their mental health in order to be productive, accomplish more, and survive in their day to day. But this isn’t sustainable. Caring for your mental health allows you to improve your relationships, improve your work, and feel more fulfilled in your day-to-day — there is nothing to lose.
What is the best way for our readers to further follow your work online?
Readers can listen to my podcast, Calmly Coping, wherever you listen to podcasts or on YouTube (https://www.becalmwithtati.com/podcast/). My website is https://www.becalmwithtati.com/. And you can follow me on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/tatianaglpc/) and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/tatianaglpc/). I also have a free Facebook community for ambitious professionals with high-functioning anxiety, Calmly Coping (https://www.facebook.com/groups/calmlycoping).
Thank you for these fantastic insights! We wish you continued success and good health.
About the Interviewer: Wanda Malhotra is a wellness entrepreneur, lifestyle journalist, and the CEO of Crunchy Mama Box, a mission-driven platform promoting conscious living. CMB empowers individuals with educational resources and vetted products to help them make informed choices. Passionate about social causes like environmental preservation and animal welfare, Wanda writes about clean beauty, wellness, nutrition, social impact and sustainability, simplifying wellness with curated resources. Join Wanda and the Crunchy Mama Box community in embracing a healthier, more sustainable lifestyle at CrunchyMamaBox.com .
