Find “The Expert”

When a dog owner can wrap their heads around this, call me, because it means you’re ready to become your dog’s best leader.

1. Go look for someone you’d call “The Expert.”

    

2. You’ll go looking for “The Expert” outside of you.

    

3. You’ll find that expert.

    

4. However, when you find that expert, you also will have found that place inside of you where your understanding of “The Expert” exists.

    

5. Your understanding of “The Expert,” that you projected from inside to outside, existed inside you before you did step 1. You projected your internal expert outside of you before you were aware you were projecting it, before you read step 1. You projected it before you started step 1.

    

6. With this understanding, “The Expert” is inside of you, and has always been inside you—not on the outside.

    

   The human culture doesn’t readily acknowledge this.

Here’s the thing: as you read through the list items, your attention moved. It moved from outside of you, to inside of you, then back and forth between outside and inside, multiple times, and each time it changed, lines of your own making were crossed. Some are shocked. Some are surprised. Some shout, “Invasive!” Others accept yet another thing happened, and call to ask about training.[1]

Who moved your attention?

You did.

Some will know that and notice it, and some will not. It’s the crossing of yet another line. It’s a deciding factor.

It’s “Turtles all the way down.” When you understand that, you’ve done the inside work that makes you the best leader possible, because you have done the work, and that work includes the attention and awareness that keeps the levels visible and acknowledges them. It self-corrects your finding of your “Expert” back to a place inside yourself, not to something or someone on your outside. Nature demands that a dog’s leader come from inside the leader, not from their outsides, and Nature always wins.

Stop looking outside of yourself for the leader: be the leader. Be your dog’s leader. Be “The Expert.” That’s how it happens.

Now call The DOuGTrainer, 725.222.3686.

[1]“Something happened ‘to me’” versus “something happened” is the difference between taking things personally and NOT taking things personally. Multiple books could be written about that one sentence. It’s called “psychology.” 

Another Way of Finding “The Expert”

There are no experts. We’ve been told by the culture that there is and are experts, but that’s a mirage—they’re not really there.

Clients will ask me, 

• “Should we ______ (fill in the blank) when it comes to training our dog?”

and I’ll respond with,

• “We should (or not) ______ when it comes to training our dog.”

Clients learn to turn their own questions directed to me into their own questions directed inwardly to themselves, becoming their own experts and in that process they become expert. They are their dog’s expert, they have been, and they will always be the experts at being their dog’s most knowledgable expert.

“Switching the first two words” is the mental activity and the intangible reminder to stop looking on the outside for the expert. It reminds owners and leaders to recross that internal line they unconsciously crossed, grasp the title of expert, and become their dog’s expert. This is what clients are paying me for. It’s what they’re paying me to help them do. It has to be done from the heart, it must be done with it’s done with humility, from a sense of community, and from a culture of unconditional love. 

When you go looking outside yourself for the expert, and when you think you’ve found that expert, what you’ve found is the person on the outside of you who you project your stuff onto, who is helping you locate the same spot within yourself where that same set of beliefs originates.

You can continue to believe

• the expert is real, true, final, and separate from you—which keeps you split from yourself—
• or you can continue to believe that you’ve found the place inside yourself where the same values exist.

The choice is yours, and the consciousness surrounding those two decisions and those awarenesses is a big part of the paradox of training that’s inescapable and can be dealt with. Dealing with it or not dealing with it is yet another paradox in the paradoxes of training.

Don’t do what *I* tell you to do, do what Nature tells you to do, that which She tells you to do through the use of your common sense, having a balance of what’s on the inside and the outside, not trusting the the human expert, and instead deferring to the Nature we all have on our insides, contrary to what the current, human culture has been trying to tell us.

The current, human culture is approaching a dead end and is in need of change. 

Respectfully submitted.