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.

You know those days where you look at your dog's lead and you just think, I can't today.

You love them endlessly.

It's not about how much you love them, but the thought of another walk, another training plan, another should just feels far too heavy right now.

You tell yourself you'll start again tomorrow, and then the guilt starts to creep in.

If you've ever had that moment, you're not lazy and you're not failing.

You are likely overwhelmed in all the things emotionally, mentally and physically.

Your nervous system is quietly asking for a reset right now.

This is the Mindful Dog Parent podcast.

It is for overwhelmed and anxious dog owners who really do love their dogs, but sometimes feel like they're getting it all wrong.

Today we're going to be talking about why you might have lost motivation to train, what that actually says about your nervous system, not your willpower, and how you can gently find your spark again without forcing yourself to do more.

Which is, I think, what a lot of people do.

We get stuck in this thing of we need to do more, we need to do more.

It's not working.

We're not motivated enough, and it starts to just feel more and more and more.

So if you've been stuck in that cycle of guilt, fatigue, and pressure, to be consistent, I just want you to take a breath right now.

You're not behind.

You're only human.

I do need to remind you of that because although we know it logically, we have these expectations and these kind of thoughts of perfection and all this kind of stuff that we just can't keep meeting because these expectations of perfection just.

They're just not gonna.

It's just not gonna get us anywhere.

But there is a calm way forward, and that's What I want to talk about today.

So I do want to start with something that's really important, and it is that a lack of motivation is not the the same as a lack of love or effort.

It might feel that way, but it really isn't because you might have gone for weeks or months or years, even pouring energy into your dog, that could be working on reactivity, it could be working on recall, or it could be confidence or all the things.

But your body and brain are not built to stay in go mode forever.

So what's happening underneath all that is when your nervous system has been in a long stretch of activation.

So that's stress, worry, pressure, all the things it starts to want to conserve energy.

So your brain shifts focus from growth and learning into just keep us safe.

And that is what it's created to do.

So our nervous system is there to create the safety that we need when it feels threatened, when it's under that constant pressure, it goes into safety mode.

And that is doing its job.

It's doing what it's created to do.

But that is why your enthusiasm that you might have had previously suddenly starts to feel like you're wading through mud.

So it's not that you've stopped caring.

You actually care a lot.

But it's that your system stopped having the capacity to be able to keep doing this same thing over and over.

So I want you to think about it like this.

Maybe you have opened the treat pouch three days in a row, told yourself, I'll go over that recall later, and then you just couldn't.

So that isn't your body being stubborn.

It is your body telling you, I need to pause before I'm gonna burn out in a minute.

It is a message to you.

So instead of judging that lack of motivation and telling yourself that you're lazy and you're not good enough, and all the things that our body likes to tell us, start listening to that message.

It's.

It is that message from your body that tells you, I need to reset.

It's not a mistake, even though it feels like it is.

It's a message that's telling you, we need to slow down right now, we need to reset here.

It's not going to keep working this same way.

So when your body's feeling under threat, even emotionally, it activates the go, go, go system.

The adrenaline, the cortisol, and the readiness, that is super useful in short bursts.

So it's really useful when we need it to work in the moment, like reacting quickly.

If your dog lunges Unexpectedly, say they're walking next to a road and they go to lunge into the road.

That is what's happening.

Our body is doing what it feels it needs to.

It activates the adrenaline, the cortisol, the readiness in order for us to stop our dogs getting hurt or us if they're dragging us into the road.

But when life keeps you in that mode, those endless decisions, the training plans, the guilt, your system is never, never fully landing.

You're going to be staying half word, half flat.

So it's in this kind of limbo.

That is when you start to feel like, I can't do this anymore.

That's that sensation.

It's not a lack of discipline, it's not you kind of not being able to follow through with the things that you need to do, but it's your body trying to protect you.

And like I said, that is what it's created to do.

Our nervous systems were created to keep us safe.

So here is what's going to help you with that small reset through the day that brings your body back to safety and calm.

Things like slow exhales, they are super useful and really easy to do whenever you need to do them.

If you can actively tell yourself that you're going to do starts to activate the parasympathetic nervous system.

When you exhale slowly through your mouth, specifically when you do that and the parasympathetic nervous system is activated, that is the rest and digest that our body needs.

That is the mode that we need to be in in order to feel safe and calm.

When we're in the opposite mode, which is the sympathetic nervous system activation, that's, that's when we're in this go, go, go mode.

So we don't want to be in that for long periods, like I say.

So that slow exhale through your mouth, the box breathing, the 4, 4, 4 breathing.

You've heard different labels for it probably before.

I've gone through it in previous episodes.

So again I'm going to link everything that's relevant from previous episodes in the show notes because they're really useful.

It's my 6 62nd reset.

All those things that is going to really help.

And it's so easy to do gentle movement.

So a tip that I've been given before from a lovely nervous system strategist, Georgie Shears.

Shout out to Georgie.

She has recommended rocking from side to side.

So if anybody's watching me right now, I am rocking on my seat, so that's a really easy one.

And when we're Rocking.

We are bringing our body back to a place of safety again.

So that is something that's really easy to do.

We can start to see the benefits of it.

So literally rocking from side to side just for 30 seconds or so can really just bring ourselves back to a place of grounding.

So grounding your senses when you're outside on your walk really helps as well.

So that could be.

It's basically being mindful.

So what is happening around you?

What can you see?

What can you hear your footsteps?

If you're walking, noticing what the smells are that you can smell.

So can you, you know, is it just been raining?

Are there wet grass smells?

Has the grass just been cut?

You can smell the grass that's just been cut.

Can you smell if you're like holding a coffee when you're walking, can you smell that?

All those little things are going to help bring us back to a place of mindfulness, which is what we need to stay in the present and start to help us ground ourselves.

So you can notice what your dog's doing.

So the rhythm of their breath, you know, that kind of thing.

Watch them and notice what they're doing.

You don't have to overhaul your life to do all these things.

They're just these small little things that are going to help you reset and bring you back to that place of feeling safe again.

So you just need to make space for your system to come down.

So motivation then can start to naturally come back up.

We can create motivation in ourselves and our bodies can get back to that place again.

But those little small things are gonna help you get back to that.

So I wanna talk about how you can get your spark back.

And it's not about doing more, but it's about doing less better.

And I've said that before, we want to take things off our plate, not add more to it.

So one of the biggest things that helps us get to that place is micro wins.

Now, I've mentioned this in previous episodes because it's a really big one that see so much progress with.

They're tiny visible signs of progress that retrain your brain to see success again.

So when we are in this mode of not feeling safe and we're in the sympathetic nervous system state, we are spotting the negatives.

We are telling ourselves we're not good enough.

We are feeling stressed and wired and the adrenaline and the cortisol are running through our systems on an ongoing basis.

That is where we are not gonna spot any wins easily.

Our bodies are gonna be wiring us to spot the Negatives and to nitpick and start to just.

That's where we start to lose the motivation.

So when we do these little resets and have those little reset moments and do these little small micro resets through the day, we are gonna find it so much easier to spot the winds.

And the wins are micro wins.

And I use micro wins a lot rather than just saying, look for the biggest thing that's possibly happening right now.

And if there are big things happening, brilliant, amazing, celebrate that.

But when we're in this state of not having motivation, they're super difficult to see.

So we start with micro wins.

Tiny, visible signs of progress.

That helps to rewire our brains to see success again, because it needs to get to that place through doing what we're doing.

So it could be your dog is settling five seconds faster after barking.

That's a really small thing that you can spot as a micro win.

But it's actually quite a big thing that's happening right there.

So your dog is actually resetting much faster than they were before.

You're remembering to breathe before reacting.

That is a big awareness thing.

And if you can take a breath before reacting, that is a micro win that you want to celebrate.

A calmer start to the walk.

So if you are going out of the house and you're quite, like, flustered and you kind of thinking, oh, I've got, you know, I've only got so long to do this walk, and you're rushing around, you grab their lead out and they're all, you know, they're getting a bit frenzied as well.

Just try to create a calmer start to the walk.

So try and get.

Get ready for the walk.

10 minutes before you leave, wait for your dog to start to relax again and.

And then go out.

That's a calmer start to the walk.

So they may have got frenzied when you were putting their harnesses or leads on, but then you've kind of re.

You've just kind of paused and you've said, right, I'm just gonna.

Just gonna sit and look outside into the garden for a minute.

And your dog's gonna go, what's happening?

Why aren't we?

And you're gonna relax, and then they're gonna start to relax, and then you can go, really easy thing to do there.

And then it could also be one last moment of frustration.

So spotting these little things, write one thing down every evening.

It takes 30 seconds.

It's not something that's going to take more time for you.

It's going to take 30 seconds to write down that win.

And the benefits that you have off the back of that 30 seconds are endless.

So you're going to start to notice that motivation isn't something that you find, it's something that you start to rebuild.

One tiny.

I did that at a time.

And if you write them down, like set an alarm on your phone for a time that you know you're gonna have time to be able to do it.

So I saw a post the other yesterday, I think it was Natalie Potts, who is a strategist that I've worked with before as well.

She wrote something I can't remember.

I think it was we can watch 28 hours of TV over a week.

So if we're watching on average as humans, if we're watching 28 hours of TV a week, there is definitely going to be a 30 second window in that 28 hours of us watching TV that we can start to write these micro wins down.

We just have to start to do it.

So set a reminder on your phone, put it on your notice board in your kitchen if you've got one.

Something obvious that you can get that little, oh yeah, I need to do that.

And it will take 30 seconds.

So if we can find 28 hours a week to watch TV on average, that is just an average, we can take 30 seconds to write down that one little thing.

And this is what the fascinating bit about this, this is why it's important when your nervous system recognizes safety and reward dopamine, which is the reward motivation chemical in our bodies that you hear quite a lot.

So you get dopamine hits from things that actually starts to rise naturally.

So that is why calm always comes first.

It's not just a nice thing to have, it's actually neurological.

So it's something that we want our brains and bodies to have in our systems that is created naturally through spotting the safety and reward things that we can start to create.

So that list that you write, whether it's on your phone, it would be great if it was more visible.

So if it's like on your fridge, if it's somewhere where, like in the hallway, if you've got a board in the hallway somewhere that you can see it every day, that is what's going to keep motivating you to keep adding to it.

And then when you start to see the list that you're building, that's when you're going to start to see that motivation come back.

So if this is landing just as a little aside if you think that you want to build that calm consistency again, that's where I can help you with the Confident Dog Parent Blueprint.

It's not currently open, but I'm giving you a little teaser that early next year it is going to be open again.

It's my self paced online course that I walk you through step by step and I'm there holding your hand all the way through it.

That you can rebuild confidence, regulate your emotions, train your dog in a way that actually feels good for both of you.

You're going to learn how to recognize your nervous system cues, calm faster after setbacks, and create small wins that actually start to add up.

So I'm going to put the link in the show notes because I've kind of created the sales page for that already so you can see that and you can kind of see how it works and the wins that you're going to get from it.

I'd love for you to explore it after the episode.

So go check it out if you think it's something that you're interested in.

Join the wait list and you'll be the first to hear when it opens next year.

But you'll hear all, all about it.

You'll hear more details.

But I just wanted to give that as a little aside because it is relevant to what we're talking about right now.

So I want to give you, as always, something to take away from the episode to do, but again, not to add more to your plate.

So this is my three step plan to work with your body and not against it.

So the first thing that I want you to do is reset before you restart.

So I've said it in that way because it's a bit of a tongue twister.

Before you jump into training again, I want you to give yourself a decompression day.

Now I recommend this for clients and lots of trainers do this as well.

When there's chronic stress, when there's some ongoing things, decompression days.

So basically not taking walks can help some dogs.

Not always.

It's very nuanced.

Some dogs actually would be better to go out rather than staying at home because the stress might actually be at home and not outside.

But when we need it, those decompression days help us too.

So it could be walking without an agenda or focusing on connection over correction.

So what I like to do for this is walking without an agenda are my freedom walks.

So if you follow me online, you'll have heard me mention this before already.

So on Instagram, I tend to record videos when I'm out on my freedom walks with my dogs.

And what does that actually mean?

So it's really simple.

I book a paddock, a different paddock each time for me and my dogs for an hour to go and just be together.

There's no expectations on those guys to do anything.

I know there's not going to be random strangers coming around the corner.

No random dogs are going to come and approach us and people aren't going to say, oh yeah, my dog's friendly.

And then it's going to end up with this heightened stress that I can clearly see.

The dog's not friendly, but the body language is tell, is very telling.

But all of that starts to add more to our plates and start to create more stress.

So those paddock walks, nobody's gonna appear, no dogs are gonna appear.

There's nothing that I can think.

I need to be super aware of in the environment.

Because we're in an enclosed space.

My dogs aren't gonna go and follow a sniff and get lost in the woods or whatever.

Like all these little niggles that we haven't seen happen.

But we always think it's a potential to happen.

It adds more to our plate.

So when we book the freedom walks, I don't practice any training with them there.

They can go off and sniff and run and be dogs and roll and whatever it is they want to do.

And I can just walk.

I just walk around the paddock with them and I don't do anything, I don't really say anything.

I just take in the environment and ground myself.

And it's so, so, so, so helpful.

So that reset before you restart anything, that decompression day, try and add that in.

If it's not something that you're doing already.

And those freedom walks, booking a different paddock.

So I book like big five acre paddocks.

They're amazing.

In the middle of nowhere.

We can go to a paddock that's just down the road.

And again, it's got a woodland area in it.

So it varies kind of the environment that they're in.

The they get lots of sniffy time, lots of time to chase each other, lots of time to just be a dog without expectation.

And it's so, so helpful for everybody and they love it just as much as I do.

So that's the first one.

The second one is to reduce the list.

So I want you to pick one skill or one moment to focus on for the next two weeks.

So it could be karma walks, it could be recovery after barking Your energy is going to come back so much faster when your brain isn't juggling 10 different goals.

Now, previous episode does talk about this in a lot more detail, so I'm going to link it in the show notes.

If you want to go and listen to that and you haven't already.

I go through this in a lot more detail and how to set this plan up, but that is something that really helps.

And if it's something you feel you need more help with, here to ask.

So come and message me.

Email me if you feel like you need some support in actually implementing those things.

So I'm here to help with that.

The third one is to reinforce yourself as well.

So I want you to recognize every time that you show up with softness instead of pressure because that's progress.

I want you to treat yourself the same way as you treat your dog when they try.

That would be with warmth, encouragement, support, kindness.

That is something that we don't do for ourselves, but we do for everyone else very often.

So give yourself something as a little treat.

So you have.

You've done this three step thing that I've gone through this three step plan and that is something to say.

I've done it and you've wrote your micro wins down.

When you write your micro win down, do something nice.

Listen to your favorite song.

Like give yourself, I don't know, a chocolate bar or something, or a biscuit or whatever it is.

So you can see it's very telling.

I'm motivated by food and it's the sweet stuff that gets me the most.

So that's just a me thing.

Think about what you enjoy and reinforce yourself because it's going to keep that motivation.

It's not a switch.

It's that relationship with your nervous system.

So you can't push it back on.

You can't just push through and just keep trying to do the same things over and over.

But you can start to treat the conditions for it to reappear with the micro wins with the three step plan that I've just mentioned.

So if you've been feeling flat or heavy or uninspired lately, that is absolutely okay.

It's not a bad thing thing.

It's not something you want to feel guilty for or bash yourself for.

Your body has been doing its best to keep you safe and that is what it's there to do now.

It's time to thank it for that and remind it that things can feel easier again.

Start with rest.

Add one micro wind tracker.

Focus on connection over perfection as always and if you want guided help to rebuild that confidence and calm down, I am here.

Come and ask.

Message me.

I love hearing from you all when you do come through and send me messages about kind of the progress that you're making.

I've had some lovely feedback from the podcast, which is amazing.

So thanks so much for sending that through.

I do really appreciate it and I'll read every single one.

Remember, the Confident Dog Parent Blueprint is there to go check out for early next year.

It's designed to meet you where you're at and I walk beside you through this next chapter.

And that's what it's there to do because you and your dog do deserve that calm.

It's not just when things are perfect, but it's when things are ordinary, when things are messy, those beautiful moments in between.

So that's it for today.

Thank you so much for listening to the Mindful Dog Parent Podcast.

If this episode has helped, please please share it as always with a friend or family member who you might need think might need a gentle reminder today.

And do follow the show so that new episodes land in your app every single Friday morning.

You are doing better than you think and I'll see you next week.

Thanks so much for tuning in to.

The Mindful Dog Parent.

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Love it if you followed the show.

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You'll find all the links and resources mentioned in the show notes@lavendergardenanimalservices.co.uk podcast and I would love to stay in touch.

So head there if you want to.

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