Roughly paraphrased quote of the day

"Success is more intimidating than failure."



Yesterday, when I was out in the countryside working Moss, Dianne and I chatted, like we always do, while another student was working her dog. (Good lord, what a horribly constructed sentence! And I'm a grad student... in English... yeesh!)

Anyways, in the course of our conversation, Dianne mentioned the above quote, or something to that effect. I can't for the life of me remember the exact wording or who said it. But it really stuck with me... obviously, because I'm still thinking about it today :).



Get ready for a bit of super personal confession time and some gratuitous whining... :-P

In many ways, this quote cuts right to the heart of a lot of my insecurities, especially as a dog trainer. I tend to be (annoyingly) self-deprecating and incredibly insecure about a lot of things. I'm incredibly hard on myself, and ultra competitive. A total Type-A control freak personality. I mask a lot of my insecurities with humor... mostly at my expense. Not good, I know.

It's much easier to be the "newbie" than to identify yourself as someone knowledgeable. I suppose that by identifying yourself as a beginner, it's easier (in theory) for others to forgive any mistakes or "stupid" things you do.

I still consider myself a beginner at stockwork... but I don't think I'm a "newbie" anymore. I've been doing this for about 2 1/2 years now, and have a general idea about what's up. It seems like I've been using this mindset to give myself excuses for mistakes I make working my dog. Instead of analyzing my handling, I am quick to dismiss rough patches as "newbie mistakes." The problem is, I keep doing the same things over and over again. I need to be more accountable for those mistakes so that we can move on to doing different stuff. However, a part of me is worried that if I master these steps, I won't be able to do the "harder" exercises. I'm afraid to succeed because I'm ultimately afraid of failure? That doesn't make any sense. I wish I was better able to just "go with the flow"... and that I didn't want so badly to be good at this.

Agility is another place where I hide behind the label of "newbie"... even though I've technically been involved with agility for eleven years. However, since I've never competed outside of match trials, I still classify myself as a beginner. What's up with that? I would not classify myself as an "expert," but I am at least an intermediate handler and trainer (even THAT was hard for me to type!). Again, I'm too caught up in my insecurities about looking bad to actually strive for my full potential. Cedar and I have a BLAST in agility and have the potential to be very, very competitive. I am motivated to get there with her. I just need to get past myself :)

Now, all of this sounds pretty bad, I suppose. Just the semi-coherent ramblings of a wannabe emo-chick. But I'm trying very hard to identify those self-defeating aspects of my personality and actively trying to overcome them. I owe it to myself, and to my amazing dogs, to do so.



So, what am I going to about it?

I'm going to put myself out there and stop hiding behind the crutch of "newbie status." I'm going to start standing up for myself when I feel uncomfortable and stop taking myself so seriously. I'm going to try reaaaaallly hard to stop putting myself down all the time. It's not constructive and does nothing but cut down my confidence and diminish my effectiveness to train and learn. I love my dogs and love spending time with them. After all, that's why I have dogs in the first place: because I enjoy them, not because they are just vehicles for me to compete with.

Basically, I'm going to try to give my ego the ol' heave ho... which returns to some of the ideas from Don Blazer's book. After all, what has my ego ever done for me except undermine my success and confidence?

Moss doesn't have a problem with confidence. He's quite pleased with how he did on sheep yesterday... this is a photo of him on the ride home. He's quite tired :)



Oh, and if you didn't put two and two together, these are pix from our work yesterday. :)

Cheers!