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.

Hello, welcome to the Mindful Dog Parent.

I am Sian, and as always, I'm so glad that you're here with me today.

I'm coming to you from my summer house on a glorious sunny day.

You might hear some background noises.

Hopefully you'll hear the bird singing, because that's exactly what I can hear right now.

But anyone watching on YouTube, that is where I am coming at you from today.

So if you listen to last week's episode, which was episode 41, we talked about the evidence that you're doing better than you think that you are or think that you might be, that progress is there, but your brain keeps glossing over it.

And in summary, it's a really natural thing.

It's a very human, natural behavior.

Our brains were wired to pick up the negatives.

But if go listen to that episode, I'll link to it in the show notes because it's very relevant to what I'm going to be talking about today as well.

So there's a little bit of a follow on a lot of the listeners that I had last week to the episode who were kind of going, okay, yeah, I. I can see the evidence that we're making progress that I didn't think we were making, and that's amazing.

That's what's happening.

But then at the end you're thinking, okay, but it's still just taking so long.

And I know that that's the case in lots of scenarios, because understanding that you're making progress and feeling like things are moving fast enough are just two completely different things.

And today I want to cover that second one specifically.

So that's the waiting game, that, like, slow crawl that you feel like you're doing at the minute.

The will things ever actually change that feeling that creeps in, especially like those questions start to come up more on the hard weeks or the hard days or the hard walks, more so than any other time.

So if you're in the middle somewhere of that messy middle, like we like to call it, of a long journey with your dog, whether that's through reactivity, anxiousness, difficult behavior generally, whether you're kind of like halfway through that period of having a new puppy and you know that you've still got the teenage times ahead of you, or you're in the teenage times right now and you know, it's.

It's the long game with teenage dogs with difficult behaviors that can crop up during that time, and you're not where you'd hoped you'd be yet.

In your brain, you kind of thought, this is where I thought we'd be right now.

But you're not there yet, and you're tired of waiting for it to get better.

This episode was especially for you because I hear you.

I totally get it.

I want to give you something real, like, real and tangible today, just like I always try to do.

It's like last week was about reassurance and starting to tell yourself a different story and paint a different picture to what you maybe had pictured before.

This week is about giving you something really tangible to take away and start to work on.

So the first thing I want to do is acknowledge something that I think just gets glossed over or just completely missed in dog training generally.

And that's in, like, the content that you see online especially nervous system recovery, is genuinely slow.

This is like, we're coming at this.

We can come at this from a dog training perspective because that's what.

That's what I'm here for, to help dog parents with their dogs.

But when we kind of pan out a little bit and look at life generally, when we look at how we're trying to heal our nervous systems, it's genuinely slow.

Or when we pan out, we're thinking about some other scenarios of when we try to make progress in other areas of our life with different things.

We think, like, how quickly have you genuinely made that progress in it?

It won't have been quick if it was something that was a bit of a bigger goal that you were going for.

It's not because you're doing anything wrong.

It's not because in this scenario with your dogs that your dogs are broken in any way, but it's just the nature of how nervous systems heal and change.

And we're thinking about nervous systems we're thinking about how our brains work.

So neuroplasticity is something we need to consider.

How our brains kind of pick up and learn new behaviors and build habits and that kind of thing.

So when a dog's developed anxiety, reactivity, fear based behavior, any kind of like fill in the blank any kind of thing that you're going through with your dog, what you're working with isn't always a habit that needs breaking.

Sometimes there is habitual behavior there.

Absolutely.

And sometimes it's a habit that we need to change and make diff have a different response.

But you're working in the long term with these bigger things that are going on.

With a nervous system that's learned that the world just isn't safe and it's trying to protect itself in the only way that it knows how.

And it's doing it in the right way.

It's doing all the right things, it's giving you all the right messages when it feels that way because that was what it was designed to do.

But changing that takes time.

Real time, not days, not, not like hours.

Sometimes people say they can transform dogs behavior in minutes.

It's often months or sometimes years when we're thinking about these bigger things that are going on that have been.

There could be some trauma in the background of the dog.

There could be, you know, your dog might be eight and they've had separation anxiety for as long as you remember since you brought them home, you've rescued your dog and you don't know their background.

There are so many things that have kind of contributed to.

It's not as quick as snap your fingers and it's done.

It's long term.

Change takes time.

And when I, when I pan out and talk about this from a life perspective and a personal perspective, I think about my journey with therapy.

So I'm not somebody who is against talking about mental health.

I am very open about it.

You know, therapy is something that I, it's not, doesn't work for everyone, but it's definitely really, really helped me.

And we think about that journey in terms of difficulty and that non linear nature of things which I'll talk about in a minute.

And it's not an easy journey.

It's really, really bloody difficult.

And it's something that I don't regret doing at all in any way, shape or form.

But it doesn't mean that it's not been like really difficult and really hard to work through.

And that's the thing that makes the timelines feel so hard.

When we're thinking about our dogs and their behaviors as well.

It's the non linear nature of it all.

So progress is like when we're thinking about nervous systems doesn't look like this steady upward hill, like upward climb.

So we're looking at a hill.

We're not going steadily upwards.

There's dips and knocks and kind of taking steps back as part of that.

So it could look in your world like two step forward, one step back.

That's generally a lot of the time, a lot of people come come out with that one.

I feel like I've made two steps forward, but then like today I feel like I've taken one back or three back.

Sometimes it looks like a good week followed by a week that makes you wonder whether that good week actually existed.

And if you, if you'd imagined could look like a breakthrough on a Tuesday and then regression on a Friday.

So that's, that's what I'm talking about.

So when I think back about my again panning out in a wider perspective, I think about my therapy journey.

I absolutely felt like I was making inroads in some aspects.

So people pleasing, perfectionism, setting boundaries, or lack of in my case previously and being like it being very difficult.

And I started feeling like I was able to do some of those things better.

I wasn't thinking I had to be perfect in all aspects of everything that I did.

I can make mistakes and it's not a bad thing to do that and failure is a lesson and I can set boundaries and it's actually a healthy thing to do.

It's not something that means somebody's not going to like me.

I.

And if they don't like me because I've set a boundary, then I have to consider whether they're my people.

And that doesn't come naturally to me.

And it wasn't a linear thing.

So I felt like I was making inroads with that.

But then, you know, a few weeks later I'd start to realize that I was going back into those old patterns again.

And that made me think, okay, why am I going back so much?

But it's not that I'm going back so much.

It's actually the progress was there because I was aware that I was doing it previously.

I would, I was doing it for so many years and not aware that I was doing it.

Then I became aware that I was doing it.

I was not setting boundaries very effectively.

I carried on wanting to people please, all those things.

And I realized instead of just carrying on feeling really unhappy but not really knowing why I knew why this time.

So that is how it works when you.

When you're in the middle of it, though, when you're the one walking.

So in this scenario with your dog, when you're the one walking your dog every day, you're doing the work and still not seeing those consistent results that you were hoping for.

It is genuinely exhausting and it can be disheartening.

And I think it's okay to say that out loud.

So when I think about my journey, like, I was disheartened and I felt exhausted at points when I was trying to do things that didn't come naturally to me through my therapy journey, but it didn't mean that I hadn't made progress, but it was still okay for me to start to say this feels disheartening and exhausting.

It's okay to say that.

And when I bring it back to a perspective of life with my dog, Bonnie's reactivity, for a long time I walked that path with her, and there were periods where I was genuinely feeling, and I just didn't know if.

If we were getting anywhere.

I would have walks where I'd felt like we'd were taking steps forward.

And then two days later, she'd react to something she'd been fine with for a couple of weeks, and I'd just feel like we'd got to go back to the start.

And that's.

That's really, really hard.

And the waiting is hard.

And I'm not going to pretend that it isn't.

It's not about saying these things are easy.

You've just got to do this, this and this, and then it will be easy.

It's not that at all.

It was something that I definitely had to work through.

And I was coming home and I was upset after walks and all of that stuff when I was just a dog mom and not a trainer as well.

And I didn't know what I knew what I know now and a little caveat, I felt like we were back at the start again, but we weren't.

There was progress there.

And that's like when I talk about it in episode 41.

So last week's episode, that's where I talk about.

I'm looking for evidence.

There's evidence there that there is progress, but it's just not super obvious, super big, and what society tells us we should mark down as progress.

And I want you to think about this in a different way, and I want to give you and offer you a different way to think about the waiting, again, it's not about making it feel easy than it is, but it's because I think the story that most people, dog parents, tell themselves about the waiting is actually what's making it harder than it actually needs to be.

So most dog parents interpret that slow progress as the evidence that something's wrong.

And it can either be with your dog.

So it could be you're saying to yourself, my dog's too damaged, my dog's too anxious, my dog's too reactive, my dog's too far gone.

Like, whatever it is, whatever those fill in the blank words would be for you and your own dog, or it could be about themselves.

So I'm not doing this right.

I'm not consistent enough.

I'm not the right person for this dog.

But slow progress is almost never evidence of either of those things.

And I say almost never because it's not about.

It's not about saying that you're wrong and your dog's beyond repair.

It's sometimes that it's just not the right fit.

So that's why it's almost always not.

It's almost always never evidence.

So it's evidence that your nervous system is actually working with another nervous system.

That's taken a long time to get to where it is right now.

When you thinking about that extreme anxiety or the reactivity, it's taken a long time to get to that point.

And it's going to take just as long and it's going to take or longer a meaningful amount of time to shift that.

It's not a reflection on either you or your dog there.

It's just that biology.

It's how our nervous systems work.

It's how our brains are wired.

That is just what it is.

But sometimes, and I've said this in previous episodes, it's not going to be a good fit.

It might be that you're.

You're not a good fit for your dog or your dog's not a good fit for you.

And it's okay again to say that out loud and have the conversations that need to be had around that.

It's not, again, about pushing through and saying, okay, well, there is some progress, but.

And that means I need to keep going.

If it's just not feeling the way you.

You want it to feel or it should feel.

When you feel like that progress is actually there, it's a conversation that you need to have again.

So I'm not here to tell you that you've got to pretend that everything's good just because you have Started to see some progress here.

But there is also something else that I wanted to mention, and it's something that I come back to quite a lot in my nervous system aware, dog parenting framework.

And that waiting period, whether it's like, it looks really slow and it looks really unglamorous and it looks really unremarkable, that messy middle of the journey, it's just not wasted time.

I really want you to hear that.

It's not wasted time.

It's the work.

It's where the actual changes is happening.

And things are changing even when you just can't see it yet.

So think about what's happening under the surface during those weeks where that feel, that feeling is like nothing's changing.

So your dog is accumulating positive experiences.

They're building a slightly larger bank of, this was all right, this was good.

This was okay.

Their nervous systems, like, slowly, incrementally recalibrating those threshold shifts that you're making.

Even those tiny ones that you can barely notice are laying down new neural pathways.

So that's a tongue whisk, tongue twister.

So your brain is building pathways based on things that have been experienced and all the things, and it's building that new neural pathway.

None of that is going to show up as this big dramatic transformation overnight, but it is genuinely happening.

Those neural pathways are what is building that new response, that new behavior, that new feeling about a particular thing, whatever it is, and you are building something as well.

So all of those walks that you are taking, even when you don't wanna, every time you choose to turn around on a walk instead of trying to push through because there's too much going on, all those moments where you're choosing to regulate yourself before responding to your dog can be easier said than done sometimes.

But even when you are trying to regulate yourself before responding to your dog, every time you're showing up, even on those days where nothing much has really happened, that's the work.

That's where everything eventually becomes change.

That's the messy middle, and that's where it's not talked about enough.

So I want to think now about what you actually do when you're in the middle of that wait.

So, you know, things are slow, you understand the biology, but it still just feels really heavy.

I want to give you four things that genuinely, genuinely help.

So the first one is to measure things differently.

So if you're measuring progress by whether your dog's had a perfect walk this week, this is that perfectionism that I've been talking about.

Because that would have been how I would have previously measured progress.

Has your dog had a perfect walk this week?

You're almost always gonna feel like you're failing because that's just too coarse a measure for the kind of like fine grained change that the nervous system work produces.

So measure it differently.

It's not did they react?

But how long did recovery take after they reacted?

That's a different question.

We're reframing the question.

We're saying actually they might react, but how long did their recovery take?

Was that recovery faster than it had been before?

It's not, were they calm?

Because again, that's a very broad kind of highly unachievable question when you potentially working with a dog who might be reactive out on walks and you've only just started doing the work.

Not when we can't ask where they calm, but actually what was their threshold today compared to three months ago?

So if you've just, if you've been working on this for a while and you're in the messy middle and you can't see an end, actually think about has a threshold shifted compared to what it used to be three months ago?

And it's not was the walk good?

That's again, it's too broad a question.

Was the walk good?

Like good in what respect?

But actually, what did I notice?

What was I noticing on the walk that was different to how we've walked before?

Did they give you a check in and they haven't done that before?

Did they stop to sniff?

That was a big one for me with Bonnie.

Did they stop to sniff?

If they did, great.

Because that's not something they were doing previously.

That means they're engaging with their environment in a healthy way rather than being really hypervigilant and getting quite stressed, but not showing obvious big signs of that.

So that shift from measuring outcomes to measuring indicators, that's what all these things are, they're little indicators is one of the most important mindset changes in the work to kind of work on this.

Because those indicators are going to move faster than the outcomes are going to move.

And seeing them move is what keeps you going, it keeps you motivated.

And I've talked about motivation in previous episodes as well.

And I kind of went deeper, a little bit deeper on that.

So I can link that in the show notes because I think that's going to be relevant.

Motivation isn't something we have naturally.

We have to create it.

And in creating it, we've got to look for stuff like this.

We've got to look for those indicators of progress rather than the out, like looking for the outcomes of what we're doing.

So that's number one, measure differently.

The second one is number two, find the before and after.

When you're in the middle of a really long journey, it is really hard to see the change because you are really close to it, sometimes too close to it, and you need a longer time horizon.

So think about your dog six months ago or a year ago.

And we're not just thinking about their behavior here.

We're thinking about their body, their eyes, how they moved around the house, how they responded to you, how long it took them to settle after something difficult happened.

I promise you there is a before and after.

Even if the distance between them feels smaller than you hope that it would, finding that is going to matter a lot.

And it's not about like performance, but it's accurate data that you need to tell yourself and start to spot more and be more consistent with spotting because the story your brain is telling you about.

No progress is almost certainly not the whole truth.

There is going to be progress in there somewhere if you're working on all the right things and doing the right things here.

So that's the second one.

Number three is protect your own nervous system during the wait.

And this is the one that generally, generally gets missed the most because you can't carry a dog through a nervous system recovery journey when your own nervous system is running on empty.

It just doesn't work.

It, you can try and try and try, but if you're not starting to regulate yourself and feel calmer in some situations and offering co regulation, it's not going to work.

You're going to go around in circles.

And it's not because you're not trying hard enough, but because your nervous system and your dogs are in that constant conversation together.

What you bring to every walk and your interactions with your dogs and those moments that are difficult, your dog's going to feel that.

So protecting your own nervous system during that wait isn't just a lovely thing to have or a cherry on the top, it's part of the work itself.

So that might look like the five minute debrief after a hard walk.

So if you don't know what the five minute debrief is, go and check that out in another episode that I did a couple of episodes ago.

I think it was episode 39.

I will link that in the show notes as well.

That five minute debrief after a walk is gonna be something that you can go back to and Stop yourself from having another difficult walk or a difficult week with your dog.

It might look like having a person in your life that you can be honest with about how life, like how hard life is and how life isn't going how you'd planned with your dog.

Somebody who you can talk to honestly without judgment.

Having somebody like that in your life just makes so much of a difference.

And that's where therapy helped me.

So my therapist was that person for me at the time.

And that was what helped me to start to feel safe in my nervous system again.

It might look like deliberately having moments of joy with your dog that actually have absolutely nothing to do with the training.

It's just connection that you're, that you're creating.

So if you feel disconnected from your dog, I'd probably focus on that one because you want to feel connected to them in order to then be able to start to feel like there's progress there and it starts to feel like ease instead of really, really hard slug walking through mud kind of thing.

You matter just as much in this equation as your dog does.

And your nervous system matters just as much as your dogs does.

So I don't want you to forget that.

And that, that is a.

The takeaway for point three.

Protect your own nervous system during that wait and try and find a thing that's going to help you to do that that's personal to you.

And then the fourth one is let the time timeline be what it is.

And this can, this can be like the hardest thing to do.

And I say it not to be glib, but because I think this, the suffering and the waiting is, is just.

It can be made even worse by fighting the timeline.

So I've worked with clients in the past who've had a thought in their mind about what it's going to look like and how quickly it's going to be.

And a couple of times it's been what's really held them back from making the progress because they've got a really clear in their mind by this time it's going to be looking like this.

And when it doesn't, that's the hardest bit.

By the, it should be further along by now.

And the why isn't it fixed yet?

And the comparison to other dogs and other dog parents and other timelines that have just got absolutely nothing to do with your dog's specific nervous system and your specific journey, that's.

That's what is going to make it difficult.

Your dog's timeline is your dog's timeline.

It is what it is.

It's something like if you.

Your energy that you're spending, fighting it, wishing it were faster, catastrophizing about what it means, if it isn't feeling that shame about how long it's taking, that energy is going to cost you and it costs your dog.

What you want to do is put the energy into actually doing the work that's going to start to make those things happen, start to give you those indicators so that you start to get that momentum a little bit more and get the motivation to.

To start to feel more like you can be consistent with the training.

And then you start to see the progress.

Letting the timeline be what it is doesn't.

It's not about giving up and saying, well, I've just got to give up here.

It means redirecting that energy that you were spending on wishing it were different into showing up for what it is.

That's.

That is going to be where you start to see the change.

I promise you that is going to be.

It's the hardest thing to do, but it's one of the biggest things that's going to start to help you build that momentum that you need to keep moving forward.

So those are the four things that I want to give you to take away and work on and implement in your own way with your own dog.

But I want to say one more thing before I leave today, and I want to say it carefully because I don't want it to sound like a platitude thing here.

So things do change.

It's not always going to change for every dog.

Sometimes, sometimes management is the thing that needs to happen.

You can put all the training in, you can do all the work, but sometimes management is the thing that's going to make the biggest difference and it's the simplest, most effective thing to do.

But the platitude isn't something that I want everybody to think is what's happening.

Things do change.

It's not always in the way that you'd hoped or on that timeline that you might want, but the dogs I've worked with who were really kind of shut down, as rescues from abroad can be sometimes, or a dog that's had a lot of trauma or a dog who's been like super reactive and if they'd have had the opportunities, they would have bitten my legs apart, that kind of thing, or the most stuck.

So dogs who have been stuck and they've been trying to implement stuff and they felt stuck, the one ones that made the humans wonder if anything would actually ever Be different.

Most of them changed.

It was slow, it was non linearly.

So like I said, it's not an upward kind of step by step by step going up.

It was just in ways that took longer sometimes than anyone actually wanted it to happen.

So somebody wanted something to change within two months.

And that's just, that wasn't realistic.

And I'm not scared to kind of say that.

I don't think something like that is achievable when we've got the most extreme shutdown, extreme reactions going on.

So your dogs may be reacting to other dogs from a really far distance.

That's not going to be a quick thing to change.

But they did change because their dog parents kept showing up because the work got done.

That was being implement that, that was advising to implement that.

And we were trial and like doing trial and error with things.

It was quietly, it was day after day, even when it was really unremarkable and remarkable and unglamorous and nothing seemed to be happening.

And if I were to film it, it would look like the most boring TV show ever.

Because it was.

That's how it should be.

It's not about these big things that you start to see these big reactions become no reaction within a space of two weeks.

Like, like the TV shows sometimes show.

It's that slow and remarkable, unglamorous, like the boring stuff that doesn't get televised because it is boring.

So it just makes us make this glamorous view of what it should be and these big things that should be happening.

And I want it for you because I don't want it to be perfection.

I don't want it to be this dramatic transformation.

But I just want it to be enough to keep going so that you can start to see that there is light at the end of that tunnel.

Because the going is what's going to get you to the result that you were aiming for and what the plan is created to achieve ultimately.

So that's what I want to leave you with today.

And I also want to say thank you so much for being here and listening to the episode.

I know this episode is one that some of you really, really needed and I hope it gives you something to hold on to this week.

If you know another dog parent who is in the middle of the wait, the messy middle, who's really tired and just a bit hopeless and wondering if things are ever going to change with the dog, please, please share this episode with them, send it to them directly, tag them, post it somewhere.

They're going to see it because I've often found the dog parents who need this podcast the most are often the ones who don't know it even exists.

And you sharing it is how they're going to find it.

And if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, I would absolutely love it if you could take just 60 seconds to leave a quick review.

The reviews are where Apple decides which podcasts to show to new listeners and every single one helps another overwhelmed dog parents find my show.

So search for the Mindful Dog Parent on Apple Podcasts.

Just scroll down a couple of scrolls and leave a rating and a review.

It literally takes 60 seconds and it genuinely, genuinely makes a big difference.

And finally, if you are ready to go deeper to have proper support with the nervous system work, the self compassion, the building of real calm and confidence with your dog.

The Dog Parent path is my journey that I've created for dog parents and it was for built it was built for exactly this scenario.

Go check it out on the link that I'm going to put in the show notes.

It's a free three part private podcast series.

It's a really nice place to start where it's not an episode that's just out there.

It's a private podcast episode.

So go live.

Go give it a listen.

The link.

I'll always put it in the show notes.

Do take care of yourself this week and I shall see you in the next episode.

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

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Think about or it just made you.

Feel a little less alone, I would.

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