In life you come up against a lot of challenges that require you to be patient and resilient. It seldom feels like we have much choice. We don’t seem to have any option other than patiently waiting. To survive, we have to be resilient and flexible.
Sometimes it is hard to remember to bring both patience and resilience into our relationship with our dogs. It’s particularly difficult when time, performance or financial pressures hang over us. Yet, this is the exact moment we need the most patience and the greatest resilience.
On the flip side of that, we forget that patience and resilience need to be taught and built into our dogs and our relationships. Both are teachable/learnable skills for both humans and dogs, but like so many things – if the human hasn’t figured it out for themselves first, there is little chance of success for the dog.
Remember when you first got your dog or were in the process of selecting a dog? What were your expectations? Did you have dreams of what you and your dog would do or accomplish? How many of those dreams or goals have you achieved? How many ended up being abandoned? What are you doing now, that you never would have believed you would or thought you could? How has patience and resilience affected your outcomes?
Many of the happiest human/dog partnerships are the ones where the humans have no real expectations beyond companionship. They enter into various activities with no expectation of excellence other than excellent fun. But a shift can occur. Especially once a person starts doing dog sports or some other competitive endeavor with their dog and begin to feel the pressure of competition.
It is hard to turn off that internal voice of doubt, fear, envy and expectation when you have an audience and a measuring stick in front of you.. The perception of being judged, even when being judged is exactly what you signed up for, seems to break something inside of many of us. It can also break something in our relationship with our dogs.
The world of dog sports has, in many ways, exacerbated some of the more negative aspects of competition and started to shine a light on the importance and value of patience and resilience in both our every day life and our relationship with our dogs. The demands to perform that we place on both ourselves and our dogs, quickly erodes the fun that we’re supposed to be having. Dog sports quickly become expensive torture when we lose sight of why we decided to do it in the first place.
Don’t get me wrong. There are amazing benefits that come from competing with your dog. They far outweigh the negative. Yet, if the negative isn’t curbed early on, the toxicity of it can completely unravel the relationship with the dog.
I enjoy watching dogs that are particularly amazing and purpose built for a given task. I believe that every dog has something they are truly brilliant at. When the dog is a natural and the human is almost ancillary to the effort, it is magical.
But even more, I enjoy watching the teams – human and dog – working in concert with each other to achieve whatever they can at the endeavor they have set before themselves. They often aren’t the ones who perform the best, but they are the ones who exude the most joy and are a pleasure to observe in that moment. Often these are the humans who are the most patient and resilient and have shared that with their dogs..
How we face doubts, fears and challenges are a critical piece of success – not only in everyday life, but especially our experiences with our dogs, Learning to turn down or even tune out the internal and external chatter to be immediately present in a given moment with our dogs is a transcendental experience. It’s not easy to do, but it is an effort, well worth pursuing.
Let go of the ribbon, the title, the approval of anyone but your dog. Find the joy in the moment, the lessons in the failures and celebrate every success – large and small. Be a gracious loser – most of all to your dog. Be an even more gracious winner – remembering well how it feels to be on the other side. Kind words and actions go a long way in helping to build a better world and a better community – and help grow someone else’s resilience and patience.