ed: This is a guest post by Janine Adams.
I consider myself a bit of a risk taker. I haven’t had a steady paycheck (beyond a magazine column) or employee benefits in fourteen years. I’ve built two successful businesses. So I’m someone who’s willing to step out on a limb. But my dogs recently taught me a lesson on how fear can keep me from trying new things.
I have two standard poodles, Kirby and Pip. Kirby is scaredy dog. He’s afraid of many things, including, literally, his own shadow. If he sees another dog on a walk, he figures the best defense is a good offense and he turns into a seventy-pound, barking, lunging fool. And sometimes he barks, and even lunges, at strange people.
Pip, on the other hand is calm and confident. Except when Kirby’s carrying on. Then she barks and lunges as well. Together they outweigh me and my control over them at these moments is tenuous at best. So about four years ago, after an incident in which the poodles lunged at an elderly woman on the sidewalk and Pip grabbed her coat, I stopped walking them together. It seemed like the prudent thing to do.
I took to walking each dog separately in the morning, then again at night (though often my husband joins me in the evening and the four of us walk together). For four years, I was spending almost twice as much time walking dogs than perhaps was necessary. That’s time I could have spent building my organizing business. Or knitting. Or catching up on my sleep. But I did it out an almost martyr-like sense of obligation. I felt it wasn’t wise to walk the dogs together if I couldn’t control them.
The trouble with that philosophy is that I never stepped back to consider whether circumstances might have changed. I never once dipped my toe in the water to see if maybe I could actually handle my dogs. Four years is a long time in the life of a dog. They’ve matured. Pip’s now ten years old.
Then a dogsitter who is barely larger than me ignored my suggestion that she walk them separately. She successfully walked them together twice a day for several days. No incidents. She encountered nothing she couldn’t handle.
That was enough to get me to try it. And you know what? Nothing bad has happened. I can actually control the two dogs, even when there’s another dog around. The poodles are slightly more calm. I’m slightly less scared. And we’ve had four years to practice what we do around other dogs.
I took what felt like a big risk walking the dogs together. And I succeeded. And now I’m kicking myself for not trying it earlier. Why did I stay on autopilot? I think it was fear, plain and simple.
This little lesson translates into so many other parts of life. It’s scary to try out new business models, but what if they take your business to the next level? It’s frightening to invest in new advertising opportunities, not knowing whether they’ll pay off. But they might pay off big. It’s scary to have an honest conversation with a partner, colleague or someone else you have a problem with, but isn’t it better than letting the problem fester?
Pip and Kirby (and our petsitter, Rebecca) taught me to step out of my comfort zone and try to let go of the fear. Next time I’m facing an enticing opportunity that I’m not quite comfortable with, I’m going to reflect on all the time I spent with those extra dog walks and consider that maybe the benefits outweigh the risks. And I’ll repeat my new mantra: Live, risk, and prosper.
Janine Adams is a professional organizer in St. Louis, Missouri. She blogs at www.peaceofmindorganizing.com/blog. Follow Janine on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/janinea
8 Responses to “Life always changes: a lesson my dogs taught me”
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Hi Janine and Alex - What a great lesson learned. Thank you for passing it on. It’s a great reminder for me to look at aspects of my life where I may be doing things out of habit without considering an alternative.
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@Barbara
I also try to look at what I’m doing to check in to make sure I’m not doing things out of habit. Fortunately I get bored easily doing the same thing the same way so I have a built in alarm clock for check-ins like this.
With gradual change, it’s harder to really notice that things have changed sufficiently for us to try things that have failed before. We just dismiss things without thought because we always have.
I like this story. Particularly because I hate the argument “because we always have”. But it’s tricky when it’s your thinking, the human mind works by making these things unconscious, and bringing them all up to the forefront is a lot of effort.
Still, taking the time on a regular (if not too frequent) basis, to review the details of what we do in different areas could be one way of catching these.
Oh yey! Lots of thoughts being sparked.
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I’m a dog lover. And I don’t wanna lecture too much. But I think the moral here is that it shouldn’t be so much the DOGS teaching Janine a lesson. She needed to teach THEM.
Lunging at people….!? That’s downright dangerous! Someone could have got hurt!
Dogs should not be allowed to act like that…ever! I’d add “Lead” to the list of “Live, Risk, Prosper”.
I’m relieved to read that story has a happy ending, and that the situation is under control now.
Friar´s last blog post..Grampa Friar Remembers Telephones
Friar, I appreciate your comment. What I should have made clear in the blog post was that when I walked the dogs individually, I could work with Kirby, using training techniques and management, to control his behavior. It was when I had both dogs together I couldn’t. Happily, that’s changed.
@Janine
I didn’t mean to lecture too much…just that I guess mabye I’m a bit sensitive.
I got attacked by a dog this summer by an owner who assured me he was “friendly”.
He lunged at my face and I was lucky enough to only get a small cut that needed First Aid at Emerg.
I”m glad to hear your puppies walk nicely together now. Sometimes we just need somoene to show us how (like your petsitter did!)
Friar´s last blog post..Grampa Friar Remembers Telephones
I found this post to be inspiring, so much so that I wrote about it today on my own blog. This is what I said:
“This post made me think about how difficult it often is for me to motivate myself to work outside of my own comfort zone, and yet how much I grow and change when I’m actually able to do it.
One example is my (almost) daily 3.5 mile trek into town. The first time I ran a significant portion of that (significant for me being maybe half a mile) without stopping, my legs were wobbly and I thought my lungs would explode. But the next day was so much easier (plus I knew I wouldn’t drop dead).
Meditation is like that for me too. To sit down for 15 minutes twice a day and breathe–it seemed ridiculous. Useless, even!
But, persisting through the mind-chatter (What are you doing? What good is this? You should get up right now and add almonds to the grocery list before you forget!) has paid off in terms of clarity, focus and a small measure of inner peace.
As a matter of fact, reading “Life always changes…” is what inspired me to write my own post today. This exercise of a daily post is definitely outside my comfort zone. But, like so many other endeavors in my life, I know if I dance on my edge wisely, pushing just enough (but not too much), I will grow and change because of blogging, too.”
Thank you.
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I agree - life is not static.
> The trouble with that philosophy is that I never stepped back to consider whether circumstances might have changed.
That’s exactly the key!
I think it happens when we lean into a Dip and really focus, but over time the landscape changes or we change, but we just didn’t notice along the way. That’s why I’m a fan of periodic reflection.