My best business investments have been with people who model for me how to be a steady, centered, self-led entrepreneur.
As I keep learning, over and over again, if I want a calm, secure business … I first need to cultivate calm security within myself.
And the same goes, it turns out, for leading your dog.
**
I grew up around big dogs, and I spent two years volunteering at a rescue, often working with the reactive German Shepherds and Pitties. I thought I’d handle Bobby Socks with no issue.
But as soon as we got him home and I started walking him around our urban pocket of Los Angeles, I became uneasy about his size and heft, my mind calculating how many pounds I had on him and whether it would be enough.
The pressure, it seemed, was higher now that I was solely responsible for this dog.
Some people, seeing him approach, picked up their little fluffy Malteses or wobbling toddlers and crossed the street. One woman jumped into the bed of her pickup truck to avoid him walking by.
(Others lit up, appreciating him, intrigued by him. Beautiful dog, they’d say, keeping their distance.)
**
The first time Bobby Socks lost his shit, I had taken him out to pee early one morning.
Glasses in hand to rub my eyes awake, I was wearing a t-shirt, my boyfriend’s boxers, and slippers in front of our apartment building. In that sleepy, half-blind moment, I felt Bobby explode.
Hair standing up, he was trying to hurl his raging body at a blurry husky nearby, barking with a scrambling ferocity I’d never seen before. “Vicious attack dog” might have crossed your mind if you saw him out your window.
In response, I tripped over my feet and was dragged by the leash through the grass, wet with morning dew and dog piss.
Maybe one day, this will be a hilarious anecdote (currently, I still can’t quite manage to tell it without making it weird), but this moment shook me up pretty good at the time.
It was exactly what I worried would happen. I had lost control, rang through my ears.
I began to view Bobby Socks through the prism of this incident. I worried about him looking at other dogs, in fear he’d explode again. I worried about dogs looking at him, in fear they’d trigger him.
Walks became minefields. Reactions became mini emotional traumas.
In essence, I became as reactive as my dog. My fear confirming his and his confirming mine.
Something had to change.
**
I watched as the trainer didn’t become emotionally involved.
He held Bobby Socks — yes, literally by the leash, but mostly … energetically.
Calmly gripping the leash, pressing Bobby into a sit, keeping his own body still against Bobby’s thrashing. And when the reaction would end, he would simply redirect and reconnect. As though it had all been no big deal.
The most important thing, the trainer said (with his words and his body language), was to not add emotion to the situation.
As I trained myself to do this, I felt things shifting within me first, and then Bobby followed suit.
Reactions would occur, and you can handle this would be my mantra. I’d picture the trainer in my head, the groundedness he had exuded around himself.
It worked: The flood of adrenaline lessened to a trickle, my heart wouldn’t pound so hard, and I found my center faster and faster amid his freak-outs.
In tandem, Bobby’s reactions also became less frequent and less intense. Eventually: only occasional.
The trainer’s calm became mine and my calm became Bobby’s.
**
I recognize this energetic chain as something that has happened to me before in business, with coaches, service providers, and even clients.
Like I did with the trainer, you’re seeing someone move through the business world with confidence, presence, love, joy, boundaries, whatever — a more holistic experience than the step-by-step actions they’re typically teaching or doing for you.
And it’s like it happens by osmosis that you begin to change.
Until you’re making decisions, taking actions, and responding like a new version of yourself, someone who now has that confidence, presence, love, joy, boundaries, whatever inside you.
***
There was a time in my life that I dismissed this as woo-woo nothingness. I wanted only the advice, the service, the product, the template, etc. Something I could wave around like a receipt — proof of a sound investment.
But over the years, I’ve come to see these embodiment shifts (tangible outcomes as a result notwithstanding) as evidence of money and time extremely well spent. It’s almost like … giving yourself a Business Parent.
Someone who models how to be.
What value does a kid get from having a parent who models healthy ways to regulate, engage with the world, to be?
I think most would recognize it as a whole, whole lot.
***
I don’t think I would have gotten Bobby Socks to improve so quickly had the trainer just told me what to do. Imagine: “Hold the leash tight, don’t move.” Okay?? How on earth will that help??
Looking back, I thought I needed to know what to do. But once I was practiced in how to be, the specific what-to-do’s became simultaneously intuitive and less important.
As an entrepreneur, I remind myself of this often. The answer is rarely in the what (the strategy, the business model, the how-many-times-to-post-per-week, the copywriting framework).
If I find myself believing that a what will change everything … I know I’m missing something much more fundamental.
If I want a calm, secure business, I need to cultivate that within myself first.
P.S. pic of Bobby Socks
