Joy

"Let go of winning and losing and find joy."

Over the weekend, my wife and I and two of our dogs competed in an agility trial. This involves full grown adults (and some children) paying good money to run around a room with doggie playground equipment for seconds at a time, with the goal of not knocking anything over, or jumping off of anything tall, and doing things in a certain order in the shortest amount of time possible.

The reason I and a lot of people do this is to have a fun activity to do with your dog. It gives you a chance to learn how to communicate with your canine partner (as in letting them know which obstacle to take or avoid, as opposed to having a conversation with them about the merits of eating cat poop and chasing squirrels.)

That being said, it wasn't always like this for me and it is not like this for many competitors. What happens is the obsession with winning and the anxiety of performing in front of a group and being judged (by an actual judge) as well as by the peanut gallery.  It didn't matter how well we did, I was never happy. If a run was less than perfect, I'd obsess over what went wrong. If the run was clean but we didn't place, I'd be upset. If we'd place, but it wasn't first, I'd be upset. If we got first, but someone at another jump height did it in a shorter time, I'd be upset. On top of that, I'd worry about how people were perceiving my handling. I was so self-conscious of being judged that I actually bought a shirt that said "Hey, you try running my dog."

I finally got a self-help book about these issues. Yes. Enough people get themselves upset about running around in circles with their dog that there need to be self-help books to address this. What I learned about was dealing with anxiety and recognizing and rejecting perfectionism, as I was allowing those two things to rob me of the joy of running my dog.

I'm paraphrasing Tony Robbins here, but he says that the worst type of standard is that of perfection, because it's unattainable and as such, it's worse than having no standard at all.

So I learned how to take deep breaths before going out there. I reminded myself of what is important, the dog/handler bond. I rearranged my thinking to see each run as both a lesson about what is working well and areas we can still train. I saw success as more of what percent of that run went well. Qualification (running cleanly enough to get credit for the attempt) and placement became things that I could appreciate and be proud of, but not the end goal.  I now focus on on my time with my dog, on improving my technique, and in having patience (most of the time), and you know what, the joy of this activity has returned.

Think about one thing in your life that used to be fun and now is not and see if anxiety and perfectionism have crept in and think about how useful those things are do you. If they are not and if you drop them, I expect you'll find the joy that you once had.

A Joyful Agility Run