Attitude

I know, I know. Easier said than done.

The truth of it is that there will always be reasons to doubt your abilities or your dog’s potential. You won’t always feel supported. You won’t always get back the effort you put in. You won’t always receive the validation that you feel you need. You won’t always feel that your team is “ready” for the opportunity before you.

Those feelings and thoughts are a part of everyone’s agility journey at some point in some way. To work through the discomfort of self-doubt and to give your best effort in the face of unknowable outcomes is part the journey. To survive those feelings and learn to thrive despite the odds you need to cultivate a sense of belief in yourself and your dog.

If you’re struggling to believe in your team, check out the daily drills below to help you change and strengthen your beliefs.

1. Write Out Your Reasons to Believe

5 reasons your dog is a great a teammate.

5 reason you’re a great teammate for your dog

5 reasons you and your dog are a great team

Go big, go small and list every reason in between. Often handlers struggle to see the “evidence” that they’ll be successful in reaching their goals, training this dog or being the type of handler their dog deserves. It’s much easier for your mind to focus on what you’re lacking, rather than acknowledging how far you’ve come and all you’ve gained so far.

This listing activity helps you build evidence that you, your dog and your team are worth believing in. This exercise should be done daily or weekly to gain the most benefit.

2. Set Process Goals

If you’re struggling to see your teams progress or don’t feel that you’re getting results you want, this drill is for you. A goal can be “results oriented” or “process oriented”. Results are often out of our control; someone else can have a better performance, the judge makes a bad call or the weather just fucks up everything. For this reason of uncontrollability, results oriented goals can cause more frustration than inspiration.

A process goal focuses on actions or tasks within your control that you can always succeed at completing as long as you put in the effort. A process goal is trackable task that you do daily or at every competition that benefits your performance and your dogs performance.

For example…

“This week I will reward my dog’s sit stay behavior 5x per day.”

“I will play with my dog for 5 minutes after every run regardless of how the run went.”

“This week I will train and reward my dog’s weaves in three different locations.”

Now, actually check off that you complete this goal each week, day or every run of the weekend.

Introduction to Emotional Agility

Emotions are a part of the journey for every handler. From moments in the ring that thrill you to training conundrums that leave you confused, the emotions you feel in any given moment inform your mind and body of what to do next.

Being aware of your emotional reactions can help you better navigate your emotional experience and help you do the next best thing possible, whatever that may be in the present moment.

In psychology, your ability to experience and process emotions in a way that allows you to meet your needs and adapt to the situation is known as “Emotional Agility”.

When people are driven by their emotions they react to a situation.
For example, when someone cracks a joke, you’re amused and react with laughter. The appropriate emotional response to the situation is followed with beneficial behavior, in this case, laughing. Yay, the brain did a good job responding.

Unfortunately, your mind isn’t always the best at pairing an appropriate or beneficial response to every situation, sensation or thought you have. When cut off in traffic an angry driver can quickly feel intense emotions of rage, the thoughts and actions that follow are likely impaired by this intense emotional reaction.

This emotional reaction does not help meet the needs of this individual OR help them adapt to the situation. In fact, this driver’s likely thinking or acting in a way that intensifies their unpleasant emotions further, such as verbalizing that they “hate” the other driver or screaming profanities.

However, the feelings that well up inside of you do not have to dictate your thoughts and actions. By becoming aware of your emotional experience you’ll be better able to respond to a situation, sensation or thought appropriately. A momentarily pissed off driver that’s practiced emotional awareness can shift their emotional response from enraged to calm, thankful, relieved or any pleasant feeling that would best support them in that moment.

The same is true for handlers in training, competition and beyond. The ability to respond rather than react enhances resilience after mistakes, reduces stress, improves decision making and a host of other benefits for your performance in the ring and personal life.

Becoming Aware of Your Emotions

While it can be easy to lump your emotional experience under broad terms like happy, sad or angry, these base level emotions don’t provide enough depth to articulate your experience. By exploring and using different sub-categories of emotions to describe your feelings in the moment, you’ll be better able to choose actions and thoughts that shift your emotional response.

Your emotions may vary in their complexity, such as experiencing the combination of excitement and anxiousness on your first trip to nationals. Your emotions can also range in their intensity. A vague feeling of annoyance after overhearing a comment from the crowd is a different experience than feeling animosity towards someone for making a blatantly offensive statement about your dog.

The complexity and intensity of your emotional experience can make it difficult in the moment to manage your response to what is happening. Consistently drawing awareness to these aspects allows you to reassess if the complexity of your emotions and the intensity of your emotions are beneficial for you in the moment.

Additionally, you’ll want to pay attention to non-feeling words that can be used to make sense of a situation, sensation or thought that are not representative of your emotional response. 

For example, a handler may say they feel bad after their handling performance in the ring. While you can phrase this as “I feel bad” this is an evaluation of your performance, rather than an accurate description of your emotions. 

Often people assess a situation by evaluating or judging their behaviors or the behavior of those around them, rather than assessing how those behaviors made them feel. This can often be a barrier when trying to shift out of one emotional state to another, as the evaluation is likely not amendable to change. You can’t make a “bad” performance “good”. However, you can take actions or use certain thought processes to change your emotions from stressed to curious OR heartbroken to grateful in response to that experience.

Now not every event, experience or thought will elicit an emotional response from you. Watching your dog sniff a blade of grass or the sensation of taking a gulp of water probably won’t leave you feeling one way or another. Reading a thread of comments online about border collie breeders, that’s another whole story.

You may feel irritated or frustrated by one comment. In the same thread, comments about your breeder’s lines may leave you feeling secure in your decisions or curious to learn more. 

Awareness of your emotions is not only about knowing what emotion you’re experiencing in the moment, but also why that emotion arose in that moment and whether it is beneficial to your wellbeing and your goals.

Awareness of your emotions requires you to practice non-judgement towards your emotional experience. Often, we start making judgements or having feelings about our feelings (also known as, meta emotions).

That was a total disaster, I am so embarrassed. Ugh. It is stupid to be sad about it, it’s just a game with my dog. But, I feel totally humiliated and uncomfortable going back to the building. What’s wrong with me? I should just get over it and be happy. 

In an instant, the judgement placed on oneself for feeling the “wrong” emotion digs the hole much, much deeper than it needed to be.

Experiencing an unpleasant emotion is not wrong, stupid, bad or anything else.

All of your emotions, pleasant and unpleasant, are an important part of your journey in this sport and in life. The goal isn’t to eliminate unpleasant emotions or to only feel pleasant emotions, but to have compassion for your everchanging emotional experience. 

Shaming yourself for feeling a certain way leads to suppression of your emotions OR avoidance of situations that make you feel unpleasant emotions. Unpleasant emotions, like anxiousness, frustration, discomfort, or confusion, are necessary for you to learn, grow and develop. You can’t reach your goals without them! 

To start developing your own emotional agility, practice awareness of your emotions and begin making choices that help you feel or think in ways that support your goals and uphold your personal values.

“Tunnel! Go tunnel!” You’ve sent your dog into the last tunnel and are well ahead for the four jump end line. As your perfect run becomes three jumps and then just two, you begin enthusiastically waving to your friends sitting ringside and then crack a joke to the judge. Sound truly outlandish? Absolutely! You would never focus on friends or the judge while your dog is running on course. You know how important it is to keep your focus on your dog.

What do you focus on right before your run, during the walk through, or while you were driving to the trial?

As a competitor, your thoughts are important and how you use your attention matters. You do not want to waste time and energy focusing on things outside of your control. Every weekend we see our students spend their time and energy on things they cannot control like the running order, course design, weather, trial schedule and results. 

Now, you might feel like some of these challenges warrant your attention and you’re not wrong as long as you use your attention responsibly. Attention is one of your most valuable resources. During a trial day, attention is a combination of your time and energy; mental, emotional, and physical.

Many handlers spend their attention on the uncontrollable – panicking about being first in the running order, fussing about potential ring conflicts, complaining about the course design, or stressing over the results. When your reactions and thoughts are not managed, you are using your attention frivolously. Stress, complaining and focusing on problems that don’t have solutions is costly and will leave you feeling mentally and physically drained. You need to save your attentional resources so you can focus on your teammate and your runs.

To use our attention responsibly, we need to be response-able. This means focusing on the problems that are within our control and for which we can create solutions. 

For instance, when you’re first in the running order, you can control your time by warming up your dog before the walk-through. When the course design is unappealing or seems dangerous, you have choices within your handling plan or you can talk directly to the judge about a change or you can make it a training run. When you feel stressed over the results, how many points you earned (or didn’t) or where you placed in a round (or didn’t), you can control your attitude and can create new training goals to work through frustrating results. 

All of these examples and many more are positive responses to events and thoughts. Focusing on what you can control ensures the time with your dog will be rewarding and fun. 

In a recent podcast I listened to, the host asked, “What will you say after 2-3 months to friends and coworkers to the question…
what did you do during the quarantine?”

My type A personality loved this question and multiple possible answers popped into my mind. Did you write a book, start a blog, run a mile or five or ten, learn to cook new exotic foods, train your dog to do 101 new tricks, read a dozen new books, or….?

The next day a friend pointed out that while my reaction was full of energy and enthusiasm, others might actually feel additional stress and despair if this question was pointed at them. Her concern was that having to have “accomplishments” would add pressure to some people whose new life changes were stressful enough. It was a fair argument and made me consider how we think about accomplishments during this time.

An accomplishment is defined as the successful completion or achievement of a task. We assign value to tasks which influences how worthwhile we believe that task to be.

However, almost anything can be an accomplishment.
Finishing a home renovation, resurrecting an old hobby, homeschooling two kids for four months, or walking your dogs every day. These tasks all hold immense value for the individual and completing them is undoubtedly attaining success. 

Your time in quarantine should not be defined by what you do or don’t do; it is the intention behind your actions that matters. Rather than worrying about how to strive for accomplishments that hold societal value, consider what simple tasks will add value to your life each day. While writing a novel might sound impressive, making a commitment to call your mom or an old friend each week can yield more significance to your life.

When life gets more difficult and is full of unknowns and inconveniences, it is important to pause and recognize the immense value in your daily accomplishments.