Welcome to the Mindful Dog Parent, the podcast for overwhelmed and anxious dog owners who are doing their best but still feel like they're getting it all wrong.

I'm Sian, a trauma informed coach and ethical dog trainer.

I created this podcast because dog parenting isn't always cute reels and perfect walks.

Sometimes it's tears after training, guilt in the quiet moments, or just feeling like you're the only one struggling.

If you've ever said, I love my dog, but this is really hard, you're in the right place.

Each week I'll bring you calm, compassionate guidance to help you build confidence, regulate your emotions and reconnect with your dog.

Even when things feel messy because you're not failing, you're just overwhelmed and you don't have to figure this out on your own.

Today's episode is one that I have wanted to record for a while because I know how it feels to be feel that exhaustion, to feel the guilt and to feel stuck with your dog.

So those feelings where you're waking up dreading the walk because yesterday was rubbish, to carry around, the knot of guilt in your stomach or chest because you snapped or you lost your patience or you cancelled a kind of a meet up with a friend to go for a walk with them, to feel like the training tips that you've tried don't work.

No matter how many that you tried, no matter how much you love your dog, they're just not shifting.

Things just aren't feeling different.

So if you've ever thought to yourself, maybe I'm failing my dog, it's a really big thing to think, but a lot of people do think that.

I want you to hear me now, and I say this a lot because I want you to start to hear it all the time and I want you to start believing it.

You're on.

You're not failing.

You are not failing here.

You're human.

And I need to remind everybody about that because we can make mistakes as humans.

We learn from them, we move forward, we build resilience.

And being human doesn't mean that sometimes we can't get stuck.

It means that we do get stuck sometimes.

And that is okay.

That's absolutely okay to get stuck.

If we can start to figure out these little things that we can do, that starts to make a bigger difference and starts to build that momentum.

So in this episode, I want to share the truth about why that stuck feeling doesn't move, doesn't shift, and the three deeper changes that every dog parent needs if they want to finally move out of Exhaustion and guilt into the calm and confidence that I think everybody wants when they first bring a dog home.

And I'm not just talking about training hacks here.

This the biggest shifts.

I go deeper with all of this.

It's the kind of chain, the kind of things that kind of change how you show up, that change how your dog responds, and the change that kind of shows how you both feel together.

So let's get into the episode.

I've written some notes down because I want you to get a lot of benefit from this and start to start to feel those feelings of progress.

So I wrote down a hard truth.

Feeling stuck isn't about not loving your dog enough, and it's not about not trying hard enough.

Most dog parents that I work with are trying so hard that they're burning themselves out because they're doing more and more and more, and they're starting to add more things to the.

To all of the things that they're already trying to do to kind of deal with in the lot in the life that they have, Whether it's with their dog or not.

The life that they have with everything is just getting too much.

So why doesn't it shift?

I've written down three things.

Too much noise is the first one.

So you've probably tried the recall hacks, the loose lead tips, the reactivity fixes all at once.

And that overwhelm leaves both of you and your dog confused and just inconsistent.

All of those things all in one go is just way, way too many things to try.

So I can totally, totally understand why you would be inconsistent with all that stuff, because it feels overwhelming.

The second one is that emotional weight.

So when guilt and shame start to creep in, you don't just deal with your dog's behavior.

At that point, you're starting to deal with your own inner critic.

So.

So it starts to feed those negative thought patterns that you're.

That you're kind of hearing and feeling.

And I've been there myself as well.

I know how difficult it can feel, and it just makes everything twice as heavy.

Obviously, it will kind of be much more difficult if you start to have too many things that you're working on in one go.

It leads to that inconsistency.

It leads to that frustration that.

So then guilt and shame start to creep in.

And you don't just deal with that one thing of that.

It's not just about your dog's behavior.

And this is.

This is the crux of it for me.

It's not just about your dog's behavior.

It's not just the thing that your dog's presenting in front of you.

It's your own inner critic.

It's your dog's emotions.

It's how regulated you both are, that and how connected you feel as a result.

And that is.

That is the point that all of the things that I'm doing is leading to.

And it will obviously make everything so, so much more heavy.

So then we're going into the third one and it's running on empty.

So you're juggling work, the family life generally, which is what I've mentioned, just.

And training your dog starts to become another drain, another thing on your to do list, another thing that's draining your energy, another thing that you have to try and tick off instead of it being something joyful.

Because we want to enjoy life with our dogs.

We have them hopefully in our lives for years and years.

You know, we want that to be a joyful thing.

So the result, as a result of all of that stuff is that spiral.

So you try, it doesn't stick.

You feel worse, and then you stop, which feeds more guilt and frustration.

And then the cycle starts again.

So does that sound familiar?

I want you to think about that and sit with that question and sit with what I've just said.

If you're listening back to this, rewind this section and just go through those points and write some stuff down.

It can really help when you write things down to get to the, like, the deeper root cause of it all.

It's not just my dog is reactive.

It is much deeper than that.

What are your dog's feelings?

What.

How are you feeling in those moments?

How do you feel about going out on a walk?

All of that stuff?

How regulated are you?

How many things have you got on your plate?

Are you trying to spin too many plates all in one go?

And that is where it can lead to that burnout which we've spoken about before.

So what actually helps?

So we've kind of understood and we've gone through the points.

So what actually helps?

And it's not definitely not about more.

It's not about doing more or trying harder.

It's trying to do something differently.

So this is where what you were already trying is not working.

We need to change something.

Because I've said it before, if you always do the same thing, you'll always get the same result.

If I say it right, you will always get the same results if you keep doing the same thing.

So we need to do something differently for things to change.

So here are My three changes that I see make the biggest difference when I'm working with clients.

So the first one I've written from scattered, because we're trying all the things in one in one go for all the different behaviors that our dog's presenting on a surface level.

And we go from scattered to focused.

So instead of trying to chase 10 different training methods, choose one clear goal, stick with it for two weeks.

Now, I've mentioned this in a previous episode as well, maybe a couple, because it makes a massive difference.

We want to make sure we're taking steps incrementally with progression in there, but we want to just stick with one clear goal initially and just stick with it for two weeks.

Two weeks is a time frame where habits start to form.

We need to give things two weeks in order for things to make difference and to feel different.

So one cue, one context, one measure of progress.

So that this is what we went into on a deeper level in the previous episode.

That is when your dog starts to feel safe enough to learn.

And that's the important bit from this.

If our dogs don't feel safe or regulated, emotionally connected to us, their ability to learn is going to drop, just like with us.

I use the analogy if there's something in the room that you're scared of, and then if someone is trying to teach you something new, there is no way that new information is going to go in because your sole focus is going to be on the thing that is scaring you in that room.

So it's the same thing for our dog.

It doesn't have to be something fearful either.

It can be something super exciting for them.

If there's somebody doing something funny and it's distracting, you're going to put your focus on whatever it is that's taking over and being funny, exciting, fear inducing, whatever it is.

It's the same thing for our dogs.

So that is what we want to do.

We want to make things as simple as possible for our dog and for us to be able to implement something consistently for two weeks in one context, which is just practice it in the same place for two weeks and start to see that difference.

And the second one I've written down is from self critic, self criticism to self regulation.

So every sigh, every tense step, every move, every movement, every moment you brace for your dog's reaction, your dog's gonna feel that.

So the.

I do a lot of work with clients for reactivity on this.

So I go out on a walk with them.

Once we've started to build this emotional stuff.

And the regulation in to their sessions, we go out when it's a reactivity case.

We start to, I start to kind of look at what is happening, what's the dynamic between dog and human.

And I start to spot things that the human is doing with the lead potentially or with their tone of voice, how it changes or whatever it is.

I look for those signals that start to feed into how the dog is feeling as well.

So that's where you then start to spiral into guilt.

So instead of that, the shift is to regulate yourself first, which we've done before.

So that one deep breath breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth.

The out breath needs to be longer than the in breath.

That is how we start to regulate.

We do one soft cue and one calmer state.

So this is the stuff that we've done in the calm connection challenge.

So that's something that I did this week.

It's my free four day challenge.

We have started to implement this stuff into and into our day, into our week, into our month and starting to make it a habit.

So that is where connection starts to begin.

That's where you start to see the difference.

And then the third one is from pressure to presence.

So your dog doesn't need perfect, they don't need to be perfect either, they just need you.

And the shift in this one is letting go of pressure to have flawless walks.

The walks that you kind of imagine that you're going to have with them or the walks that you see on films that people are, you know, with the really well behaved dogs and that kind of thing, that's what we want to get out of our minds.

That isn't realistic.

So that's what we want to start to change.

And we don't want instant flawless results either.

So things that we're working on with our dogs not going to make a massive change really, really, really quickly.

It's not about quick fixes here and it's just about showing up consistently with presence.

So that just means we want to make sure that when we are doing one thing, that one thing that I've mentioned above, that one context, that one cue, that one goal, that we just do it consistently.

It's not about doing more and more and more stuff consistently for me, just means you do the same thing.

So if you're playing a recall game, for example, you go to the park, that's the one context.

You pick one recall game and you play that one recall game in that same spot on the park for two weeks.

That's, that's all it is, and it's not even every day doesn't have to be an everyday thing.

But even five minutes of quality low pressure time is so much more powerful than an hour of you kind of getting stressed, both of you getting frustrated, trying to work through all of that in a training session for an hour that is, that is far, far easier than to do all that stuff.

So now there three changes that, now those are the three changes in broad strokes, but each one goes much deeper than that.

And when you put them together, they create a framework that's genuinely transformational in how you and your dog feel day to day.

And that's exactly what we are going to unpack in detail in my upcoming live masterclass, which is from overwhelmed to calm.

Three shifts every dog parent needs to finally feel confident.

It's happening this Monday, 22nd September.

It is free and it's your chance to learn the deeper tools and step by step strategies behind the shifts that I've mentioned earlier on in the podcast so you can finally feel like you're moving forward with your dog instead of staying stuck in that same cycle that you are probably in and have been in for a while.

I would absolutely love, love, love for you to join me.

If you can join me live, that would be amazing.

Or if you can't join me live, you can watch the replay.

So the link is going to be in the show notes.

Do check that out because I would really like you to go deeper on this and really start to make those shifts.

So before I sign off, I want to just kind of go through what we've kind of gone through in the episode and recap everything.

So the challenge for you for this week is to choose one small shift that you can start today.

Maybe it's pausing before you react on a walk.

So.

So really be mindful of what's happening with that.

Maybe it's deciding to track a micro win instead of focusing only on the failures.

That's a really big one.

Or maybe it is about committing to a single goal for the next seven days.

Even if two weeks feels overwhelming, just for seven days, try and stick to one single goal.

Write it down, tell someone, keep it really simple and notice how both you and your dog feel.

Feel when you focus are less on fixing everything and more on changing that one thing.

So here's what I want you to take away from today.

You're not failing.

You're not broken.

You're carrying that exhaustion, guilt and stuckness.

But they don't have to be permanent.

They don't have to be something that you just live with, and I don't want it to be where you just exist with your dog, because that is not a life that anybody deserves.

So shift your focus, shift your state, shift the pressure, and you're going to find the calm and confidence aren't as far away as they feel right now.

So thank you so much for listening to the Mindful Dog Parent.

Please do hit follow so that you don't miss what's coming next and make sure you join me for the masterclass on Monday.

I cannot, cannot wait to see you there.

See you then.

Thanks so much for tuning in to the Mindful Dog Parent.

If this episode gave you something to think about, or it just made you feel a little less alone, I would love it if you followed the show and shared it with another dog parent who needs it.

You'll find all the links and resources mentioned in the show notes@lavendergardenanimalservices.uk podcast and I would love to stay in touch, so head there if you want to explore more ways to work with me or get support.