Exploring Life & Business with Kris Beardsley of Kbinsight Astrology and Consulting

Today we’d like to introduce you to Kris Beardsley

Hi Kris, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
At an early age, I knew I was different, not quite fitting in with the other girls in my neighborhood. As they played with their barbies, I preferred Army soldiers, Star Wars figures, and touch football. When I was 6, Dad signed me up to play soccer in Metuchen, New Jersey, in a boy’s league, the only option at the time, and I loved scoring goals as the only girl on the field. In high school, I earned varsity letters in soccer and volleyball and was captain of both, enjoying my advanced placement classes, but preferring physics and philosophy. At the heart of things, I was curious about how life worked and how to live it to the fullest.

My leadership, grades, and athleticism got me recruited by the Army Women’s Soccer team as their goalkeeper, and in March of 1989, I accepted a nomination by my congressman to attend the United States Military Academy. I earned MVP during my first season of playing Division I soccer, even though the same year, I also lost my mother to lung cancer.

After 4 tough years of military, physical, and educational studies, I earned a bachelor of science and was commissioned as an Army intelligence officer. In the summer before I graduated, a high-speed Lieutenant Colonel Army Ranger took me and 10 other cadets on a pilgrimage paid for by West Point across New England, beginning at Walden Pond and ending on the Appalachian trail. We studied Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and learned about group dynamics, walking portions of the Appalachian trail. During that life-changing trip, I got my first exposure to concepts of mindfulness, discussed the origin of our “soul,” and how to embody love.

After 7 years running around the globe in the Army, from assignments in the Republic of Korea to Egypt to Ft. Bragg, North Carolina., I took a job as a manufacturing supervisor, while I awaited the call from the FBI to become a special agent. Within a couple months of the 9/11 terrorist attack, I reported to the FBI Academy.

Within 2 years of my FBI assignment in Los Angeles (LA), I was selected as the third largest FBI field offices’ Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Coordinator, a position responsible for preventing and responding to WMD threats across 40,000 square miles and seven counties. In 2004, mail laced with anthrax was a real threat, and I flourished in a job that required working with local, state, and federal assets, as well as the public and private sectors. I partnered with LA Department of Health to get a signed memorandum of understanding between the largest sheriff’s department in the nation (LA Sheriff’s Department), the LA Department of Health, and the FBI to improve response in the case of an intentional bioterrorism attack.

My efforts received recognition, and I was promoted to run the bioterrorism program at FBI headquarters (FBIHQ). I took LA’s best practices and implemented them across the nation, and within 2 years, we trained over a thousand first responders, law enforcement, and public health officials to work together in the event of a release of a biological agent. The trainings proved useful when COVID-19 hit years later, which was the first time since the early 1900s those efforts were truly tested across US cities and public health departments.

My work in the FBI got the attention of the White House and in 2010, I was selected as the National Security Council’s Director of Countering Biological Threats, serving under President Barack Obama and Ambassador Laura Holgate. Ambassador Holgate charged me with creating a Presidential policy on bioterrorism and after working with numerous policy experts and scientists, we unveiled the Global Health Security Agenda, highlighting joint efforts between the security apparatus and ministries of health necessary to protect from disease outbreaks.

I learned from the greatest public servants of all time – and was lucky enough to work with the infamous Dr. Tony Fauci, who was a fireball and committed to improving the lives of all people. I assembled a major White House event, bringing together the first time in US history the Director General (DG) of the World Health Organization, Margaret Cho, and Homeland Security Advisor John Brennan, bridging gaps between gun-toting, security conscientious officials and public health-conscious government officials. Director General Cho knew firsthand the benefits of such cooperation, being that she was in charge and on the frontline in Hong Kong during the SARS outbreak.

Following my time at the White House, I went back to FBI, and after witnessing senior leaders across the Bureau respond to the Boston Terror attack, I felt an instant calling to be among them, realizing my unique and unconventional approach may be the very thing needed in my organization. The heads of the FBI looked nothing like me, just like when I had been playing soccer as a six-year-old girl in New Jersey. I was soon promoted as a Supervisory Special Agent in charge of 10 special agents to protect Chicago against top Counterintelligence (CI) threats. From there, I rotated between the field and FBIHQ, creating strategies to counter the growing CI threats of foreign state actors, like the Chinese and Russian governments. In all, I went from working Weapons of Mass Destruction, the number one threat at the turn of the 21st Century, to Counterintelligence, a threat that took center stage after Russian interference in our 2016 election.

I finished my 21-year career as an Assistant Special Agent in Charge, circling back to where I originally started – in Los Angeles. But this time, instead of being a young, brand-new agent, I was now in charge of a Counterintelligence Branch of over 75 FBI employees. Realizing this was the final promotion for me, I turned my attention toward building future leaders who embody vulnerability and moral integrity. I gave talks on resilience, love, and compassion, and encouraged the organization to move in a direction that was a bit unfamiliar to many – towards love, humanity, kindness, and raw honesty.

With extra personal time because of COVID, I signed up for an online astrology class and learned how to read my own chart, opening my eyes in unanticipated ways. And for the first time in over 31 years, I saw a new future. Rather than being charged with protecting our nation from threats, I was ready to empower individuals to recognize their own greatness, that each of us has the capacity to achieve our destiny and life purpose and the capacity to heal. My job now is to show you how.

Since retiring, I opened an astrology business and provide natal, location astrology, and relationship readings to individuals and couples. At the organizational level, I work with corporate suite leaders across the private sector to use astrology and my leadership development experience as a framework to build stronger teams and improved business strategies. I am also enrolled in a three-year facilitators’ training program that uses higher states of consciousness tools, like breath-work, to help individuals recognize their own wholeness and ability to heal from past trauma.

Committed to providing my 30+ years of national security expertise and FBI knowledge to others, I teach a class on Homeland Security and Public Policy at the University of Southern California. I also provide consultation services, response planning, and exercise planning on law enforcement, WMD and pandemics, counterintelligence, and cybersecurity to public and private sectors, as well as film and media.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I have lived a happy life, mostly because I was lucky enough to have been born to a middle-class family, who valued integrity, honesty, and hard work. My athletic skills and persistence to excellence, handed down to me from Dad, opened doors and opportunities, teaching me from an early age how to lead and be a team player.

But I had some setbacks, the first of which was losing my mother to lung cancer, four months after reporting to the United States Military Academy at West Point. I was a young 18-years-old, and she was only 42, at the prime of her life, and the central figure in our family.

I won’t forget when Dad rented a van large enough to carry her and her wheelchair to one of my West Point home soccer games. There was Kay Beardsley, bald and worn down from the chemo and radiation, cheering from the sidelines, her strength of character on full display. Unfortunately, her physical body succumbed to the fast malignant growth, and it killed her one month later.

Years later I was surprised to find Mom asked for a book on reincarnation before she died, despite having been a life-long Catholic. I don’t know what it’s like to leave as a young mother your kids at such a young age, but I can imagine how must resistance she felt about not seeing us grow up. It touches my soul now to think the book offered her some solace and a level of understanding we would always been connected, even after death.

At the age of 40, a month after being assigned to my new job at the White House, I embarked on my own cancer journey after a Stage 3 breast cancer diagnosis. A year of chemo, radiation, and surgeries ensued. I relied exclusively on my family, my friends, and the FBI, a community I had taken years to build, to support me through the ups and downs. I was resolved to give back to those facing the same diagnosis, if I ever made it through. Since then, I have given my best cancer fighting tips to dozens of women, who have heard the same anxiety-laden news.

I faced my hardest times as an FBI agent when I decided to seek middle level leadership positions. The concept of discrimination – either because I was gay or a woman – had been completely foreign to me. I remember reading Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and almost put the book down because I refused to believe using the name “Kristine” vs “Kris” on a resume gave me less a chance in getting the job. I thought by acknowledging discrimination I was playing a victim card, which had been ingrained in me and most of society.

Nevertheless, a friend encouraged me to pick the book back up, and so I did, and my perspective grew, waking me up to our world’s harsh reality, but also to my desire to pave the way for others, despite the hurdles and pushback.

In a two-year timeframe, I put in for numerous promotions, witnessing less experienced male colleagues get selected. I received feedback like, “She was too serious and needs to smile more.” As a result, my ego suffered significant blows, almost enough for me to stop applying for promotions altogether. Eventually the stars aligned, and I put in for my dream job – the very place I got my first start in the FBI – in LA – and my reputation as one of the top national security experts in the world paved the way for my selection.

Months after my promotion, I saw results of a barrier analysis study overseen by the FBI Diversity and Equity Section, which highlighted shocking statistics, showing dismal numbers for minorities earning the same level promotions, especially as it got closer to the top of the organization. I cried when I saw middle level promotions was the second highest barrier, only second to minorities being promoted as heads of FBI field offices. It was a profound moment of realization; I indeed was not broken – the system was.

These challenges were difficult, but they grew me in ways our Western society does not often emphasize – embracing qualities and characteristics I had not yet grasped in my formative years – likely and maybe because I lost my mom at too young of an age.

After years of fine tuning and excelling in an “accomplished” and “results-oriented” way, I find much more satisfaction in nurturing my relationships, in displaying compassion, in service to others, and dropping my intense focus on “winning” and “achieving.” My action-oriented, purposeful-driven, anything is possible attitude served me well, but needed to be integrated with its opposite. I have found joy in embracing my intuitive side, the humanitarian side, that which is bound by love and the idea everything in this universe is intertwined and connected, like my enduring connection to Mom, who occasionally whispers in my ear sage advice, if I listen hard enough. There is grace in letting go of the belief that I control everything, which is one of the greatest lessons of all, helping me to open more widely to creative insights and visions.

At the age of 53, I am the happiest I have ever been, and I am 100% committed to giving back to the world what the world has fortuitously gifted me, through my years of experience, knowledge, and learned lessons, as well as my family, friends, colleagues, students, and clients.

Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I own my own astrology business kbinsight astrology and provide natal, location astrology, and relationship readings to individuals and couples. I walk clients through their natal charts, helping them see their gifts and challenges and use somatic healing tools to help address past trauma. By combining forces between the client and myself, we create tangible ways to use the energy of the universe, planets, and stars and practical steps to fulfill their life purpose and manifest their dreams. It is truly a remarkable and life-changing experience for my clients and me! At the organizational level, I work with corporate suite leaders across the private sector to use astrology and my leadership development experience as a framework to build stronger teams and improved business strategies.
I also provide consultation services, response planning, and exercise scenario development on law enforcement, weapons of mass destruction and pandemics, counterintelligence, and cybersecurity to the public and private sectors, as well as to film and media. I support response and national security preparations, exercises, and hardening of critical infrastructure for the upcoming LA Olympics and the World Cup.

Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
Compassion, integrity, enthusiasm, strategic thinking.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://kbinsight.net
• Instagram: @kbinsight