Ok, I'm not going to lie to you, I did nothing with Juneau yesterday. It was only 10 degrees by the time I got home and it was so windy! I cooked dinner and I worked from home for a bit and then we watched tv. Not going to improve the dog, but at least I didn't make her worse.
I'm not going to feel bad because stuff happens and the weather is bad. Long term goals! Plus I'll probably have to work from home again tonight.
I find that it can be much easier to feel good instead of bad if you can avoid attaching what I will call "the permanence of time" (mostly because I need a name for the concept I'm about to describe to you) to an outcome. In other words, instead of saying to yourself "I'm going to train Juneau every single day!" (permanent time - every day) where, if you miss a single day you're suddenly a "failure" (A brilliant woman with a husband and a house and a good job who is living in a world full of miracles where her morning coffee comes to her from halfway around the world and she can share her dog training chronicles with a billion people on a massive computer network - everything about which screams holy successes, batman :) ) If, instead, you can learn to say "I am going to *see how many* days I can train juneau this week!" (Flexible time - how many can I get in? Maybe none, maybe one, maybe 7 - let's see!) then, if the answer for a particular week is "one, but it counted!" or "all seven, yeah baby!" they can BOTH be celebrated as successes! Because you didn't frame the one-day case as "Man I totally failed to train Juneau six days this week", you framed it as "Yeah I got one in! Let's go for 2 next week!" And when you rack up the little successes you can keep racking up the bigger ones. and you should CELEBRATE YOURSELF as much as you do your dog. Our "treats" are all mental tricks, mostly, but...they can make life a hell of a lot easier to slog through.
ReplyDeleteProgress is about taking steps from where you are, not falling short of where you think you should be. And every positive step you take from where you are should be acknowledged and celebrated, no matter how small. It can be a journey of your own to get to that place in your heart and mind, though.
Love you Beccy - I'll leave you be now, since I feel like I just wrote a cliche self-help book in your blog comment. I had a fairly heavy session with my life coach this morning covering most of what i just talked about and...it seemed like you could benefit, too, so I shared. sorry if it was kind of out of nowhere. lol.