This chapter is about you.
Every chapter so far has ended in the same place. He reads your energy before he hears a word. The first thing to change in a house is never the dog. The wife's feeling on the sofa is part of the growl. I have been promising to explain where that calm and assertive energy comes from, and whether a person who does not have it can get it, and the answer to the second question is yes, because I did not have it, and I had to get it, and I am still getting it.
Start with the word. Energy, in the sense I mean, is your emotions. People like to say emotion is energy in motion, and for a dog it may as well be.1 It is what you are feeling, right now, with him on the other end of the leash, and it travels down the leash as surely as a pull does. Tense your hand and he feels the tension and starts to pull. Hurry, and he hurries. Be afraid of the dog coming towards you, and he is afraid of it too, and he may deal with it the way a frightened dog sometimes does, with his teeth. I tell the people I train that the leash is not for the dog. The leash is for carrying your state to him, and it carries whatever you have.
, open the figure largerCalm and assertive is not loud
People hear assertive and think aggressive, so let me separate them, because they come from opposite places.
Aggression comes out of frustration, and under the frustration there is usually fear. The man shouting at his dog on the road is not assertive. He is frightened of what the dog will do and angry that he cannot stop it, and the dog can feel both. Assertiveness comes out of calm. It comes out of confidence, and empathy, and love. You know what you need, you are sure you will get it, and you ask for it plainly, without suppressing it and without raising your voice, because you are not worried about the outcome. A calm and assertive person is not someone with no feelings. It is someone whose feelings are not running them.
, open the figure largerWatch Mahendra Singh Dhoni, India's calmest cricket captain, finish a match. Watch Cesar Millan walk into a house. Both calm, both completely sure, neither one loud. That is the material a dog follows. And here is the part that matters for you: calm is not a destination and neither is assertiveness. Everyone is born at some level of each, and everyone can cultivate more. We are each somewhere on it, and we both have work to do. The great people in any field have one thing in common, which is that they run their emotions rather than being run by them, and some of them were born that way and the rest of them built it.
The rest of the Foundation
The Six Rituals
When Something Is Wrong