ep 70 disappointment
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[00:00:00] If you train, compete, teach, or simply love the sport of dog agility, you're in the right place. Hey there, I'm Megan Foster, creator of Fostering Excellence and Agility. Join me as we explore training, communication, handling, mindset, and all the little details that help build stronger and more confident teams both in and out of the ring.
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Hey there. Welcome back to the podcast, episode 70. This topic was requested, and I hope that it will get you thinking about how you respond to disappointment. So I'm going to quickly go through kind of my three-step process when something bums me out, um, in relation to agility, and training, and [00:01:00] competing.
Things like an injury, um, the the lows of learning, right? Agility is full of highs and full of lows. Like, for example, like, really good results one weekend, and then your very next trial a couple weeks later and it's kind of a mess, right? Really high highs, really low lows. We have to be able to deal with them, process them, and move forward with them.
And disappointment, like not qualifying for an event. Um, these are things that I think come up pretty frequently, and they do weigh a little bit differently depending on, um, where you're at in your journey, but I wanna talk about it. Like I said, this is my three-step process and how it has worked for me, and it's not...
Three steps sounds easy, but it's not like, oh, it's over in five minutes and we can move on. Each [00:02:00] disappointing thing takes its own amount of time for me to, like, move through it, and these are sometimes the times where I'm joking with my friends of, like, "I'm gonna quit agility." Like, "This is it. I'm not doing this anymore, you know, other things can serve me better."
But I still think that that's a part of the process and can be important. So the first step is to be disappointed. It's really common for people to, like, encourage you to think positively and think on the bright side and... Yes, but no. We can't just box up our disappointment and put it aside because it will, like, rot inside of you and be gross.
And it's also really hard to fake being happy about something. Like, absolutely, if something disappointment, disappointing happens, and you can [00:03:00] very quickly see a silver lining to this, that's also telling. If, if you are experiencing relief when something disappointing happens, that's an invitation for you to go, "Why was that my goal?"
If I'm relieved that it didn't happen, right? So if finding the silver lining is, like, almost too easy, it could just be too good to be true, right? But I also don't think we should be forcing ourselves to find the silver lining. It is okay that agility and dog sports are important to you. They are very important to me.
I am very competitive. I want to be the best that I can be at it. I want to give my dog the best experience of agility that I can. It's very important to me, so when something does bum me out, that is real. And when the, when an injury happens or when that [00:04:00] low hits or when you don't reach that goal, it is okay to take time to grieve that loss.
And I don't really care for myself how long this takes, but I will give myself time to be disappointed, and that works for me. Step two in this process is to take responsibility, and this one can be a little bit hard sometimes. This one takes practice. It, um, is not always the first thing that I wanna do.
It's not... It doesn't feel great all the time, but that's why it's step two. Um, it's not about placing blame on any one thing or owning shame about the disappointing thing that happened, but it is about owning my part in why something [00:05:00] disappointed me, or why it was able to disappoint me, or how this could have happened.
So an example is, you know, if you've been around me a while, you know that, like, Sprint has a paw pad saga. Like, it is never-ending. She has very soft pads. Her feet do sweat a little bit. She also has environmental allergies. So there's a lot of things that make keeping her feet kind of in one piece pretty difficult.
And so it's very easy for me to try and be angry at something else or place blame on something else when she has a paw pad injury. However, taking the responsibility of, Megan, you decided that giving her off-leash freedom and nature without [00:06:00] her boots on was really important to her wellbeing, and if that results in a pad injury, I have to own that responsibility.
So I have to own the choices that were made, even if they led to disappointment. The same way that we should be taking credit for our success and recognizing this choice led to this choice led to this choice, and yay, I won something, or yay, I got the outcome I was looking for, we also can do the same for when something disappointing happens, and it's oddly liberating, right?
Then we're less angry about it. I, I am. I should not talk about, like, a collective we, because this is my process, and I have no data other than my own personal experience that this works. However, it is very liberating for me to [00:07:00] say, "No, I actually made these decisions for a reason, and they were the right choices for these reasons, and it's okay that it didn't work out."
Because this directly helps me in step three, which is deciding what is next. And there's a few questions that I can ask myself to help me decide what's next. And the first one is, do I even still want the goal I was chasing? I've been through this grieving process. I've kind of analyzed the decisions that got me here to this disappointing outcome.
Do I even want to do that again? Do I still want that thing that I was chasing? Do I still wanna go to that event that I was trying to qualify for? Do I want to run at that event? Those types of things. Second question is, [00:08:00] is there a better goal, better outcome, that fits my life and values right now? I am constantly evaluating what is best for myself and for Sprint and agility.
Constantly. I'm constantly running down, you know, what does this look like in a year? What does this look like in two years? What does this look like in five years for the both of us? And trying to choose the right paths that get us to the best outcomes. So if there is suddenly a better path that fits into our life, I need to consider it.
And the third question is, how can I adjust my actions without taking on more than my life can allow? So this is a very important question for me, because I'm very prone to just saying, "Well, just do more. Just say yes to more. [00:09:00] Train more, train harder," blah, blah, blah. And that is dangerous for me. So it's very important that I make sure that I'm not adding more to my plate than is possible, right?
I love what I do as my job, and I wanna make sure that I can continue to give quality experiences to my clients, and I also want to make sure that I am giving a quality experience in agility to my dog and myself. And so I have to be careful to not take on more than is actually possible for myself while maintaining my physical and mental health as well.
Okay? So three-step process for dealing with disappointment: be disappointed, take responsibility, decide what's next. This is what helps me, and I hope [00:10:00] that it can get you thinking about how you can deal with disappointment, because it will happen. All right. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
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Remember, excellent agility is built one training session at a time, and every small step forward matters. Until next time, happy training
