THE HUMAN HERD

A self-help book that taps into the wisdom of animals in an effort to improve readers’ emotional health and leadership skills.

“One of the casualties of a busy and technological modern life,” writes leadership coach Anstandig in this heavily autobiographical work, “is that we have lost our sensitivity to pressure as a central signal system for taking care of our needs.” One of her book’s many lessons details how she learned from the various animals in her life how to deal with these pressures and become “a pure and free version of me.” She relates many stories of having been, as she puts it, “raised by wolves,” referring to her childhood dog companions. Her narration of her deep emotional connections with these and other creatures, including horses, undergirds a greater discussion of a concept she calls “Natural Leadership,” which is based on “our innate signal systems as mammals and on phenomena that occur in the natural world.” There are various channels that all feed into the integrated awareness of Natural Leadership, Anstandig says, and she maintains that making an effort to truly listen to these signals give us “a more honest story about who we are.” Overall, the author’s decision to ground so much of her motivational insights in her friendships with members of other species turns out to be a compelling one, as it allows her to discuss the workings of pressure without getting distracted by the typical, everyday rationalizations that tend to stick to the subject when discussing human interactions. Her animals, she engagingly points out, insist that she meet them “where they live: in the present, in honesty, and in the body.” Her extensive passages describing these relationships—their “verve and aliveness,” as she puts it—are the high points of the book.

A vivid, offbeat, and thought-provoking look at ways of dealing with the stresses of life.