Goals and Intentions for Rumi

I’ve been diving deep into goal setting and intention setting, and setting Rumi’s goals. He's my 16 month Malinois. I got him, on purpose, to train in IGP dog sport. I've so enjoyed doing IGP with Gracie, I wanted the challenge of experiencing IGP with a purpose-bred dog. And he really does make me get out of my comfort zone, he is a challenge, so that's already achieved!

But this year I'm pondering his first trials, and thought I might share my goals and intentions for my trials with Rumi.

The way I set goals isn’t the traditional, achieve this, do that, blah blah, get to trial go to the the World championships. I set them the other way round.

I look inside myself first. After all, goals must come from me, and be something that I’m proud of forever, not a quick win and then moving on, but something that I can commit to deeply and get behind. I know that even achieving the best goals has an illusory quality, and the feeling deep down doesn’t change. Do I care that Shanti became a Champion, now she is gone? Absolutely not. All the effort and pressure to win all of those prizes, was it worth it? Not for the title!

Do I care about the way that I pressurised her back in 2019 when I felt the pressure? Yes I do. I do have regrets. So feelings of accomplishment are short and illusory. And that's what buddhism teaches. These glitters of gold we see, the shiny tities and medals, they are all 'Maya', based in illusion.

 But staying true to ourselves, that’s something that lasts forever. I was told by my trainer I would have to ‘force her or retire’ Shanti when things got sticky. That was my wake up call that I had lost my way. There was absolutely no way I'd force a dog to compete. And I just knew in myself that retiring her wasn't about not reaching our goal, it was about listening to her. And I knew that I had more to learn if I listened.

And so it is with dog sports, we can get carried away, we listen to our trainers, instead of our own inner compass, our own values and our own knowing. Learning to listen to our own intuition, our own inner compass, is the most valuable lesson we can learn when we train and compete our dogs, and when we set our goals for the future.

My core values (amongst other things!) are kindness, connection and courage. This means that my intentions and goals for our path together, Rumi and I, will be forged from this path. It means that, at the end of our dog sports life, when he retires, I’ll be able to be proud of myself and say that, above all else, I put these things first. 

What does that mean for our intentions of the way we work together? It means that however, whatever I train, i shall train with kindness. Which to me means clarity and fairness. I will never, for any sports dog training, do anything to intentionally hurt him, cause him pain or discomfort, or seek to intimidate or pressure him. The sport itself and the scenarios that he’ll maybe go in, if we compete, will do enough of that! That’s what kindness means to me. 

Connection means that I’ll always put our relationship first. I’ll know that our beating hearts are always connected, our spirits intertwined on the same path. What is done to him is also done to me. Connection means acknowledging that I am not one separate person and he another, but we are united together, and our dog sports path is of deepening my sense of connection to him above all else. 

And courage means that I will not be afraid to advocate for him. Stand up for him and myself even when my values and my methods go against traditions and conventions. I will endeavour to do all I do from love, not fear, and that will require huge courage because it is so different to the traditional values of the sport. So my intentions are to train, every single time, as if we were one, as if we were united and together in our endeavours. To train as if we were connected with a beautiful golden thread. To feel only kindness and love for him. To acknowledge that all other feelings are just mine to own and to deal with, and have nothing to do with him, or the behaviours he is showing on any particular day. To be unafraid to stand up for what I believe in, to share the fun and adventure of training with no goal in mind, except to live with integrity to my own values.

Does this mean that i’m not setting the traditional goals of ‘do his BH’ and ‘get his IGP1/2/3’. Well, I’ll be hoping to do those tests, all being well. And successfully, I hope.

But whether or not he achieves them can be down to factors outside of my control. 

So better, more lasting, and more meaningful goals to me are to train and to compete him in line with my values. I would be much more proud of building a very strong connection with him, rooted in kindness as my training method, rooted in mutual understanding, and two-way communication, rather than ‘telling him to do this’ and then being proud of myself that he had done it.

I overheard a conversation in IGP which went like this

‘I’m training positively (which is unusual for the sport), and I only hope that when things get serious, and I have some real chance of World championship success, I can stick with my method.’

I thought how very sad that is. Because if those are real values, then surely the win is sticking to the values. Personally, would I even value a place on the podium if I knew that my dog had gone through pain or discomfort to get there? No, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t be proud of myself and I know that I would regret my choices. I see it in competitive obedience. Winners whose dogs I would never, ever swap places with, their dogs working because they have to. Whereas mine work by choice.

But that’s me and my values, that’s me who just loves dogs, loves training as a method for getting to understand them more, and loves dog sport as a way to get to train more! 

It’s very tempting, and very normal, to hope and dream of World Championship success, or success in the highest echelons of whichever dog sport we’re competing in. Those are the normal goals which people set themselves. But for me, my goal is to stay by my values, no matter what. And that's the harder goal, but it's the more rewarding, because then I'm living a meaningful life.

I would absolutely love for Rumi to achieve the highest possible awards at the World Championships! Don’t get me wrong, I really am fiercely competitive.

And I really do have the 'Audacious Goal' of achieving the top 10 in the World IGP Championships using kindness as my method. What fun that would be! And to showcase that a dog of this strength and drive can be controlled with two-way, kind communication rather than force. What an adventure that would be!

But, I only want to achieve this by sticking to my values, otherwise it’s no achievement to me.

What about you? What are your values? And what’s your ‘why’ for why you’re competing and training your dog?

And would it be helpful to you to have an Inner compass, to know that no matter what happens, no matter how close you get to winning, these are the values you never, ever compromised? After all, it'd be great if you could have that feeling of no pressure and winning every single time, because you know you're living your values, rather than each time you compete your feeling of success being contingent on a whole load of factors out of your control!