COVID-19 drove many of us to our breaking point—especially us moms. Parenting during a pandemic has left us burned out, bone-tired, and emotionally drained. We know it takes a village to raise a child. But many of us have lost ours in recent years.
We need our village and real connection. And we don’t just want to survive motherhood, we want to thrive.
Beth Anstandig’s new book—The Human Herd: Awakening Our Natural Leadership—answers this need.
Part guidebook, part manifesto, part wake-up call, The Human Herd offers mothers a framework (“Natural Leadership”) for living, parenting, relating, and leading a more empowered, connected life.
Natural Leadership integrates wisdom from several disciplines that Beth, a licensed psychotherapist, studied and practiced for over 30 years. A lifelong cowgirl, she also draws from the wisdom of her horse herd, sheepherding fields, meditation circles, and rooms of recovery.
For more than 25 years, Beth 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 companies, universities, and nonprofits, helping them tap into their Natural Leadership to live, lead and work with genuine connection. Beth has also been featured in global media including BBC World Service, PBS, and Forbes. She lives on her California ranch with her family and an expanding community of animal herds.
Mother’s Day Magazine talks with Beth about The Human Herd, her first book.
In the book, you talk about how we’re in a self-care crisis. Why do you think so many moms are struggling right now?
Moms have been struggling for a while, but the pandemic made us more aware of how much we’ve been struggling. The pressures we were facing increased and became more evident. We’re acutely feeling the pain of an invisible labor imbalance that’s always existed in households, and parenting has now become very visible. Especially if you are leading a household and working.
Moms are holding too many pieces of awareness to keep processes and people moving and trying to take care of everything. As a result, moms have bypassed taking care of themselves first. Sadly, our culture teaches and models martyrdom. We celebrate those who over-give.
What is the Natural Leadership model that you pioneered? How can it help moms with self-care?
Now more than ever, humans—moms especially—need to awaken and utilize our Natural Leadership instincts and skills inherent to us as mammals including signals, sensations, and sensors about well-being and needs. Our body is signaling to us from the very moment we open our eyes that our pressures and paces are not sustainable. Natural Leadership helps us tune in to those pressures and to our pace so that our body, mind, and relational selves can find a more sustainable rhythm.
When we’re aware of the pressure or problems with pace, we can start to make micro adjustments—we can start to practice self-care. We need to re-define self-care so that it’s about the very small adjustments we make to take care of our basic need for ease all day, every day. Part of the reason we have a self-care crisis is that we see self-care as a one-off experience, a luxury, rather than a necessity to fulfill our basic needs as mammals so that we’re taking better care of ourselves all day, every day.
In the book, you talk about how animals have always been your teachers. What are some of the things that horses—in particular—teach us about Natural Leadership?
Horses teach us where we’re holding pressure and tension in our bodies. They help us move past our thinking and talking so we can see and feel the pressures we’re holding inside of ourselves. Once we’re aware of those pressures and tensions, we can make immediate adjustments, attend to our needs, and release tension. Every moment that we do that, we get closer to a state of ease and the ability to conserve energy, which is the source of our nervous system health.
As prey animals, horses are radically committed to conserving energy so that they have energy when they need it to forage for food and protection from predators. Horses teach us how to conserve our energy by identifying where we’re holding pressure and tension, where our pace is faster or slower than what is needed, and they give us gentle feedback about how to share space with each other and how to need each other.
Can you share some common misconceptions and realities about self-care?
It’s seen as selfish. But the truth is that a stable nervous system and calm mammal is actually much better for everybody else to function alongside. So, one of the most selfless things we can do is to take better care of ourselves.
If a mom is feeling overwhelmed and burned out right now, what’s the first thing you think she should do?
Start to talk about it out loud with a trusted other. And, commend herself for being honest with herself. Ask herself if she’s ready to change. Unless we’re in a life-or-death survival situation (or being victimized), we do have the power to change our situation. If a mom discovers she’s burnt out, she needs to ask herself if she has hit rock bottom. If she has, it’s incredibly painful, but it’s a great place to begin the work of change.
I’m a big fan of rock bottom and the power of hitting these moments where we are inspired, oftentimes through big waking up experiences, to transform and develop and grow. Those have been the biggest shifts in my life—when I’ve been in a crucible of change and there’s no going backward.
In the book, you talk about how we often ignore signals from our body and mind when things are off-balance and we forge ahead on autopilot. Moms are so susceptible to this—as we often put everyone’s needs ahead of our own. What can animals teach us about paying attention to our needs?
That our life depends on it.
I think one of the things that motivates us as moms is to develop our children into healthy members of society. Yet, if we’re not taking care of ourselves, that’s what we’re teaching them. We’re going to send them out into the world thinking that adult life consists of people who are limping along, under-functioning, overwhelmed, and stressed.
Practicing basic self-care and letting our children know about our needs not only increases their capacities because they start to understand us as needing mammals (which will make them better partners, workers, and friends), but it will also teach them about their own needs.
If we only model self-care once a month, that it’s something you squeeze in, rather than tend to every day, all day, then we’re not teaching our children how to take care of their own lives. They’re not seeing it. They don’t know what it looks like. And that’s a parenting crisis.
If you think this only affects you, then you’re living in denial. Our kids watch our every move. What they’re seeing is that we don’t tend to our own needs as mothers. By not teaching them to think about our needs, we’re teaching our kids that adults ignore our needs.
Motherhood can often be very isolating, even more so in a pandemic. How can Natural Leadership help us build real connections with others?
The first, last, and most important step is to be open and honest about our own needs and not afraid of being shamed for it. (Anyone who does shame us is not going to be a healthy form of support. It’s okay to move on from them.) We need to start by being a leader in that conversation about how it is hard to be a mom and find other moms who support how we take care of ourselves. Mammal groups are matriarchal. That means females create the group culture. We are wired to be very collaborative and interdependent.
We need to see other women as allies in self-care and caring for each other and approach our friendships and our mom communities from that perspective (versus competitive). Right now, that’s not at the heart of our culture so we’re not leaning into the part of us as female leaders that takes care of ourselves and each other with a kind of sisterhood.
We’re afraid to tell each other we’re struggling because we don’t want to be judged. That just leads to more isolation. Yet, we’re all struggling, and that’s okay—that’s just part of being a mom. But we have to talk about it, work with each other and use each other as resources. Those groups of moms are out there. And once you find them, those are the women whose children you want your kids to play with. Because those kids will get their needs met and they will be good friends to your kids.
Besides animals, you talk about how children can be great teachers when it comes to Natural Leadership. Why is this? Can you share some lessons your child taught you?
Emma, now 11, has taught me the exact same thing as the animals but she, and children in general, are able to put words to it. We just have to listen to them. Our kids are telling us they have a radical commitment to their own needs. They’re trying to show us how and where we’re out of balance and where our environments and our systems are out of balance. Anytime their wheels squeak, they’re showing us a pressure point and we should be listening. They’re always right. They might not say it well and it might come with an earful of emotion, but they are communicating about pressure and needs and they are always right.
What drove you to write this book?
The animals have been powerful teachers for me my whole life. And I’ve had the privilege of sharing their stories, lessons, and concepts with my clients, my friends, and my immediate community. But I want to make those teachings more broadly accessible. I feel a responsibility to pass on those lessons. Writing The Human Herd: Awakening Our Natural Leadership was a way to channel those lessons. This book is an invitation back into the world of our human animal, to learn how to care for it and become inspired to use it as a guide in all that we do.
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