Cook With the Ingredients You Have

On dogs, dignity, and the courage to be fully ourselves

“Cook with the ingredients you have.” said a wise person, in fact, my yoga teacher, Norman Blair referenced this in one of his Yin yoga classes last week. He attributed this to a wise 13th century monk.

Wisdom indeed.

It sounds simple. Almost obvious. And yet, it might be one of the most radical pieces of wisdom we can live by — in dog training, and in life.

I cannot expect my working-line Malinois to be a Malinois for training…
and then, for the other 23 hours of the day, to behave like Rosie — the peaceful Golden Retriever of my childhood.

I cannot expect Gracie, my Aussie — opinionated, loud, explosive in her arousal, and yet not built for endless, grinding intensity — to work with the same drive, duration, and fire as dogs who were literally bred for that purpose.

Different dogs.
Different nervous systems.
Different needs, thresholds, capacities.

Different recipes.

And yet how often, in dog sports and training spaces, do we quietly (or not so quietly) compare?
How often do we look at another dog — or another handler — and wonder why ours doesn’t look like that?

As a wise person once said: we cook with what we have.

Our work is not to force the ingredients we have into someone else’s recipe.
Our work is to find the secret sauce that works for this dog.
This body.
This temperament.
This nervous system.
This truth.

And, inevitably, this brings us to ourselves.

The dignity of being who we are

The same principle applies to us humans.

We all deserve the dignity of being accepted as who we are.
We all deserve to show up as our most authentic selves — in all our complexity, power, sensitivity, intensity, contradiction, brilliance, and mess.

But here’s the part that’s harder to sit with:

Sometimes, being ourselves means we are not a fit for everyone.

And that can feel terrifying.

So many of us have learned — consciously or unconsciously — that belonging is conditional. That love, safety, and approval come at a price. And that price is often shrinking.

We learn to soften our edges.
To quiet our voices.
To regulate ourselves not into safety, but into palatability.

And I have just woken up to the fact that I've been doing this all my life! In every part of my life, and in my dog training life, I made myself small. My trainers made fun of me and shamed me when I brought my whole self to my training, so I learned to diminish myself in training. Why did I do this? So that I could belong in the group. I valued the camaraderie, the friendship from the group. But this came at a huge price to my spirit.

As Brené Brown writes,

“Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.”

And yet, self-acceptance is not something most of us were taught. Especially not those of us who were “a bit much.”

Square pegs and quiet self-abandonment

When we spend our lives trying to change ourselves — or our dogs — to belong, we often end up twisting into shapes that were never meant for us.

Square pegs.
Round holes.
Endless effort.
Quiet exhaustion.

We compromise, slowly and subtly, until one day we realise we are living several steps away from our own truth.

I know this because I have lived it.

I can be “too much.”
I have big energy.
A loud laugh.
I can be inappropriate, annoying, intense, and often, plainly weird.

So I learned to shrink.

I learned to take up less space.
To make myself easier to digest.
To try to be the peaceful Golden Retriever…

…when in truth, I am an intense Malinois.

And the cost of that self-abandonment wasn’t dramatic at first. It rarely is.
It showed up as frustration.
As resentment.
As a quiet, ongoing belittling of my real self.

Glennon Doyle puts it perfectly:

“We can do hard things — but we don’t have to do them alone, and we don’t have to do them by abandoning ourselves.”

Yet abandoning ourselves is exactly what many of us do in the name of fitting in.

It is only now, at 50, that I can clearly see how much of myself I gave away trying to be acceptable. How often I prioritised other people’s comfort over my own integrity.

Turning up the volume on the secret sauce

So for 2026, my intention is this:

🔥 Turn up the volume on the secret sauce.

Let my Malinois be the King Kong he wants to be.
Let Gracie be the obnoxious barker and enthusiastic head-butter she was born to be.
And let me be the full-power version of myself.

This does not mean being unkind.
It does not mean being reckless or unregulated.
It does not mean disregarding others.

It means being true.

It means letting go of the belief that our worth is measured by how easy we are to handle.

As Audre Lorde so powerfully wrote:

“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”

Being fully ourselves will not make us universally liked.
And that is not a failure.

It simply means we are no longer contorting ourselves to be consumed.

Authenticity, dogs, and nervous systems

This is where it comes back — again and again — to dog training, dog sports, and mindset.

The real magic does not come from shrinking, controlling, or pretending.
It does not come from copying someone else’s style, energy, or emotional tone.

It comes from being fully ourselves.

Truthful with ourselves.
Aware of our own nervous systems.
Willing to regulate without erasing.
Empowered to stand in our own energy — and to allow others, human and canine, to stand in theirs.

When we stop trying to make our dogs something they are not, they soften.
When we stop trying to make ourselves someone else, we do too.

And that is what I stand for.
That is the heart of my work.
And that is what the Mindset Mastery space is truly about.

Not fixing.
Not shrinking.
Not fitting in at any cost.

But dignity.
Truth.
And permission to be fully alive.

The Mindset Mastery motto is 'we can do hard things'. Because we can do these things together. And it feels hard. And we will never, ever, ask anyone to shrink to be a more palatable version of themselves. We will never shame, make fun of, different voices and experiences.

All of us are welcome. Every part of us. Even the parts which so many of us have been hiding.

A final question

So I’ll leave you with this:

Who would you be if you turned the dial up just 10% on who you really are?

If instead of dimming your light to fit in…
you allowed yourself to shine a little brighter?

As Marianne Williamson famously wrote:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

Perhaps the bravest thing we can do — for ourselves and for our dogs — is to stop pretending otherwise.

Let's be ourselves. And be more of ourselves than we ever thought possible.

After all, everyone else is taken.