The Path Within

Some people spend their entire lives not knowing what they’re meant to do in life, but not Anthony Santen, founder of The Path Within, a therapy and counselling service in Toronto. From the time he was eight, Anthony started thinking about his own life in a different way. He was convinced he was broken and set out to fix himself, which was a concept that took him decades to shift away from. “I’m still ‘fixing’ myself,” he says, “although now, I know that nobody’s broken, so I think that’s actually a complete 180.”

This desire to change his life course meant repeated trips to the library, where Anthony was just old enough to understand the material in the adult books, but too young to check them out. So instead of lugging them home, he spent hours curled up with books to learn everything he could. “I started studying human interaction and behaviour and psychology [in the 1970s],” he recalls. It wasn’t long before those around Anthony saw he had a knack for stepping in and saying the right things, and came to him for advice. Although he wasn’t actively thinking of pursuing it as a career at that point, helping people was something he says, “got me started.”

And once he got started, he kept going with his training, receiving multiple accreditations including becoming a Counselling Certified Life Coach, a Certified Master of Consulting Hypnotherapy and a Global College of Natural Medicine Nutritional Consultant.