You're listening to Pack Life,and this is your host Meli.If you're interested in a bigger,better,more fulfilling life for you and your companion animals,then you're in the right place. Let's Go!
Hello everybody today on Pack Life, we are talking about something that totally changed the way I relate to animals.This is a skill that I actually thought I was fantastic at. Until I got a dog and realized pretty quickly that I was terrible at it.
What I'm talking about is the ability to manage our own energy and internal state.
What I found absolutely fascinating is as I observed changing my own energy and internal state, I got to see how that was reflected in all of the animals in my vicinity. . . Including the humans. Really honing in on this as a skill and realizing that I could change and grow and improve at it had huge benefits, not only in terms of how the animals around me were responding to me. But also in all of my interactions with humans.
So I'm really excited to share this with you today and let's dig in.
Our dogs observe us all the time.They are constantly watching us and taking notes of all the little things that are happening with our body language. I used to joke that my own dog was a creeper, because I would see him lying on the couch, staring at me as I was cooking. Then 20 minutes would go by and I'd look up and he would still be staring at me, instead of sleeping.
Even if they're not physically looking at us with their eyes, they are always picking up on information coming from us.They can pick up on our heart rate changing and our blood pressure changing.They can smell changes in our hormones, or whatever chemicals we are putting into the environment.
There are dogs that naturally without any training have given physical indications to their families that someone is about to have a seizure and do it on a consistent basis.So they're just amazing with the amount of information that they are gathering from us all the time, using senses that we don't entirely understand.
I'm going to share a personal story that I think will give great context for the rest of this show.
I get my first dog and he was not the happy-go-lucky puppy I was expecting.He was already four months old and was terrified of everything. What would happen is when he got really nervous, either he would tuck his tail in panic and try to run away. Or, he would have a big barky reaction. This was typically in my ear or somewhere that was really inappropriate. Often on leash around a bunch of strangers and it was embarrassing. Regardless of which way it went, what would happen is his state would change, and then I would match him.
I would panic if we were on leash and he was loud or making people feel uncomfortable. I would get embarrassed. If he was trying to run away and he was frantic, I would get upset that he was so distressed. And then we would have two frantic creatures and nobody could help anybody. We were spiraling each other, and what would happen is we made each other worse. We got more into those energies as we picked up on each other and bounced back and forth.
Dogs are looking to us to be their ambassadors to this human world.They are watching us and checking in with us to see if what's going on in the environment is okay. And if they need to be concerned or if they need to get excited. They are constantly looking to us to tell them about the world through our body language and through our energy.
When a dog senses that we are coming from any place other than calm and balanced, they are one- much less likely to listen to us because it looks like we don't know what we're doing, And two- they're more likely to take things into their own hands in terms of making decisions about the environment.
The reason I thought I was really good at changing my internal state is my background is in fitness.I was teaching group fitness classes and on stage doing lectures from college on for most of my life. I got really good at pretending I was feeling calm and confident. Even if I was freaking out on the inside or wanting to pee my pants, I could come across like I knew my material and like I was doing a great job. Often people afterward would come up and say “wow, that was so great.You were so confident”. I would thinking “oh, thank God.I faked it and they bought it.”
It wasn't until I got a dog who can sense all of these different things that I realized, “oh, he's not buying it and actually we're making each other worse”, and that I needed to do some serious personal work.
I want to pause here briefly and just talk about the nature of emotions because I am not a believer that there is any emotion that is bad for us. I think they're here for a reason, whether it's fear, grief, or anger, these emotions all serve us. So I am not going through these tools to teach you to tamp down or repress emotions.I think emotions need to be felt fully.They need to be able to course through you or have an outlet or else they get stuck and cause us major energetic problems.This is a tool for when you need to impact your dog and you need to make a change in the environment and in your energy quickly.
To begin, we have a body-brain connection, and we know this right? When we are feeling emotions, typically we will think about something or see something and we start feeling a certain way and then the body reflects it very quickly with heart rate, blood pressure, posture.
We can also reverse engineer this on purpose. If I just of cave in and move into upset posture, soon enough, I'm not going to feel very good. I'm going to feel small, especially if I round my shoulders and crouch. If I stand confidently, after a little while, I will feel more confident.
There are also studies about the effect of smiling in the mirror for four minutes,which I did once and it was wild.It was very difficult actually.But after four minutes of consistent smiling, you feel happy. So we can use this to our advantage. We can change our physiology intentionally to then change our internal state.
We're gonna discuss one tool on this podcast. If you like this content, let me know. There are many other tools,but I wanted to start with a simple one,and the first step is awareness.Anytime you're in a situation,whether you're frustrated,Angry and agitated, nervous, anxious and your dog is present- as soon as you have the awareness that something is going on, you have the ability to change it.
I'm gonna do one more personal share. I went to a self-development workshop where we were asked to identify what our core question was,and the presenter said,we always have a question that's kind of running in our mind on autopilot. And what is yours?And when I thought about it I was like “ah.I'm always thinking,what do I have to do next?What do I have to do next?Okay,this is here.That's there.What's next?What's next?” And I was always preparing for that next future step,which means 1. I wasn't in the present moment.2. ,the phrasing of “what do I HAVE to do next?” Added an element of anxiety because I HAVE to do something versus “what do I choose to do next?” “What do I want to do next?” Or best of all “what do I want to do right now?.” There are so many other questions that could be running on autopilot unconsciously that would give me a very different experience in the world,and I had no idea that this was happening.
One of the many, many reasons I think dogs are amazing, is they can be our best teachers and often what we are experiencing internally is reflected in our dogs. I started to notice that whenever I'm rushing or quickly glancing around the room or thinking and falling into this pattern, I'll turn and my dog is panting.Or if I'm in the car and notice he is panting and think “why is my dog stressed?” Then I realize “Oh,I'm brooding” about something. In this scenario I’m either going down some kind of mental,emotional rabbit hole in my mind, or I'm living in the future and getting anxious about something upcoming and typically this is at a level that’s unconscious.
When you have the awareness that you're like, “oh,I'm not in a calm, balanced state where I could impact my dog positively, even if I wanted to” that IS step one awareness. Give yourself a cookie. That's a big deal.
Step two. Breath. There is a reason that so many practices like meditation and yoga,s o many mindful practices that help us to calm ourselves start with the breath.The first reason is it is with us always.We don't have to have an app or a phone.It is constantly here.The second is it has a natural rhythm that you can tune into,and it's autonomic,meaning automatic.We don't have to think about it.It happens in the background,or we can choose to intervene and impact it. When we impact it, we can use that system of changing our physiology to change our state to our advantage.
When we take slow deep breaths with smooth inhales and soft longer exhales, we can slow down the heart rate. Decrease the blood pressure,and we can actually start to take our energy to a place that our dogs can recognize as that calm leadership.
I don't have anything fancy for you today. This is simple,but it is powerful. If you can start building awareness,especially in situations where your dog is doing something and it's bothering you. As an example, you want to focus on the zoom, but your dog is barking,or jumping,or whatever they're doing, it's just bothering you., When you notice this happening, if your dog is doing soemthing dangerous, address it immediately.If it's not dangerous, see if in the midst of that chaos, you can slow down your breath and change your state.
The other thing that happens when we change our state is we can think more clearly. When we're agitated, For whatever reason, we're not quite as logical. Typically the choices we make are not as effective. So as soon as you're able to calm yourself down, take a second to think about what your dog is doing, what you want your dog to do,and then make a different plan.
Maybe the answer is you guys need a five minute time out from each other so that you can have more space to get a little calmer before you reengage.Maybe you can switch up something that's going on in the environment so your dog is entertained by something else.There's a lot of ways it could go, but you will be more effective at figuring out what to do when you're calmer AND just getting calmer may change what your dog is doing.
I really was shocked the first time my dog was barking like crazy at a garbage truck. And I'd really struggled with the training for garbage trucks because it felt like they were always sneaking up on us. Also motorcycles, garbage trucks are louder, but the motorcycles would just sneak up on us. I struggled with teaching my dog not to bark ridiculously and embarrass me when the motorcycles were going by. And when I just started really getting calmer and treating it like, “oh, it's a motorcycle.It's not a big deal, he would start barking but it would deescalate so much faster. A lot of it was just looking to me to tell him what was going on with the motorcycle.
So I hope you find this helpful.I hope this supports you.If you like this content,please subscribe,and if you have any questions,I'd love to engage with you.Feel free to reach out,I hope you have a great day and I'm looking forward to the next show.