When the effective leader is finished with his work, the people say it happened naturally.
—Lao Tse
The lounge was elegantly furnished, the lighting dim, the chatter soft. My wife and I could not believe we had been invited here. We pinched ourselves to make sure we really weren’t dreaming. Everywhere we looked, there was a headline, a Time magazine cover, a top story on the evening news. Sitting by the fire, the newly elected president of a Middle Eastern country was deep in debate with a former top official of the U.S. government. Over at the bar, the CEO from one of the world’s largest office-supply companies was having a drink with the CEO of America’s fastest-growing airline. And there, staring out the window lost in his own thoughts, was probably the richest and most powerful media mogul in the entire world. Working the rest of the room were national and international policy makers, celebrities, media giants, and corporate magnates. There were presidents of universities and founders of political think tanks. There were millionaires and billionaires. There were Lear-jets and Rolls-Royces. This was a room full of the most successful pack leaders in the human world.
Amazingly, I had been invited to speak to this elite group about dogs and calm-assertive leadership. Who, me? Telling these major power brokers about leadership? What could I, a working-class kid from Mexico, possibly have to offer them? Much to my surprise, I had a lot to offer. Because among all these international leaders, not one of them could control his or her dogs!
Hail to the Dog
If you ever wonder where the American people came up with the idea that the dog should be out in front of the walk, take a look at a film, video, or photograph of any president of the United States getting off Air Force One. Who’s the first one out of the plane? Who’s the first one into the White House? Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush—all of them trail behind their dogs on the White House lawn. In the animal world, position means a lot. And in all of these images, the dogs are going first. In my lifetime, I haven’t seen a powerful breed dog in the White House yet. I’ve seen Labradors. I’ve seen lots of terriers, a lot of the softer breeds. But a Rottweiler? A pit bull? Not since JFK have you seen a German shepherd in the White House nor Rhodesian ridgebacks, or Belgian Malinois, or mastiffs. If you had a powerful breed in the White House, no one would ever get to meet with the president. Why? Because if presidents can’t control their terriers or happy-go-lucky labs, how could they control a powerful breed? You’d have ten secret service agents trying to handle one dog, because it would be a dog without a pack leader. I got a lot of applause during one seminar when I suggested that everybody write letters to Congress and suggest that before anyone gets sworn in as president, he or she has to learn how to walk a powerful dog. Maybe even a pack of dogs! It would be a test they’d all have to pass. All world leaders of all countries should be able to do it. If that actually happened, then all of our human pack leaders would have to practice calm-assertive energy, because that’s the only energy that dogs naturally follow. I believe we’d have a lot more balanced people running the world if they based their leadership on calm-assertive energy.
You see, animals don’t follow unstable pack leaders; only humans promote, follow, and praise instability. Only humans have leaders who can lie and get away with it. Around the world, most of the pack leaders we follow today are not stable. Their followers may not know it, but Mother Nature is far too honest to be fooled by angry, frustrated, jealous, competitive, stubborn, or other negative energy—even if it is masked by a politician’s smile. That’s because all animals can evaluate and discern what balanced energy feels like. A dog cannot evaluate how intelligent a human is, or how rich, or how powerful or how popular. A dog doesn’t care if a leader has a Ph.D. from Harvard or is a five-star general. But that dog can definitely tell a stable human from an unstable one. We humans continue to follow the unstable energy of our leaders—which is why we don’t live in a peaceful, balanced world.
Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of people born to be pack leaders in the human world. But we all can be pack leaders in the animal world. We need to be, because like it or not, the human species has taken over the planet, and we have brought many animals into our civilized world with us. Domesticated animals don’t have a choice anymore—they’re here living with us—usually behind walls. Becoming pack leaders of our dogs is especially important when we bring them into environments with dangers that they don’t understand, such as traffic, electricity, and toxic chemicals. How can we expect them to navigate those hazards without our guidance? We need to lead them for their own well-being and safety. We also must become good pack leaders for the sake of other humans. Remember, dogs are predators. They are social animals, but they are also social carnivores—and deep in their DNA is the wolf in them that wants to hunt and kill prey. We need to have control over those instincts if we are to live in harmony among other animals and humans.
Third-World Instincts
The world leader and captains of industry that I spoke to that day all had intelligence. They all clearly had fierce determination, ambition, and the ability to be pack leaders over other people. Many of them were very tough, very aggressive in the energy they projected. What they didn’t have was instinct. They weren’t very happy with me when I told them that, when it comes to Mother Nature, poor people in third-world countries were better pack leaders to their dogs than they were! In America, people are culturally conditioned to be intellectual and emotional. In third-world countries, many people are culturally conditioned to be instinctual and spiritual. Lower-to middle-income people (most of the people!) in third-world countries can control a dog without even thinking about it. I’m talking three-year-old kids with dogs following them and obeying them, no question. If you tell a three-year-old who lives on a farm anywhere in the world (including America), “Go get that horse,” he’ll go get the horse. And the horse will follow. My cowriter told me a story of when she was with a film crew in a rural oasis in the middle of the Egyptian desert. She and some other Americans on the crew were passing by a herd of camel, when all of a sudden a pregnant camel started to give birth. The camel was standing up and the baby camel was coming out of her—all hoofs and long legs. It looked as if the baby was stuck, and it couldn’t have been very comfortable for the mother. While all the Americans debated among one another, wondering what to do and totally without a clue, a six-or seven-year-old boy from a nearby farm came running up to the camel and without hesitating, grabbed the hoofs of the baby and started to pull. In a few moments, there was a newborn camel in the world. The mother camel lay down and cleaned off her baby, while the little boy wiped his hands and headed back toward home. The film crew could only stare in amazement. To them, they had witnessed a miracle. To the little boy (and to the camel), this was an ordinary, everyday occurrence in the world of Mother Nature.
In a third-world country or on a farm anywhere in the world, you’re more likely to be forced to rely on the instinctual side of yourself for survival. You’re relating to Mother Nature every day, much the way our ancestors interacted with plants and animals. You’re forced to be calm-assertive because you have to connect with Mother Nature on her terms, in order to survive.
In Southern California, there are a lot of legal and illegal Mexican immigrants. Many are from poor or rural backgrounds, with the same kind of instinctual-spiritual upbringing that I had. Wealthy Americans hire them to do work such as gardening, housekeeping, and groundskeeping. I also get hired by these wealthy people to help them with their dogs. If I see a bunch of guys from my country working in the yard, I might ask them their opinions on what’s really happening with the dog problems in that household. Nine times out of ten, they’ll tell me in Spanish, “Well, the owners just don’t tell the dog what to do. They treat him like a baby.” Simple as that. They get right to the point. They’ll say of their employers, “When they leave, we tell the dog what to do. He listens to us. But they don’t let us tell the dog anything when they’re around, because they’re afraid we’re gonna hurt his feelings.” The workers aren’t people who are hurting the dog—I’ll see right away that the dog likes and trusts them. Sometimes, it even seems the dog would rather be around the workers than the owner. When the owner comes home, that’s when I’ll see the dog’s instability and anxiety come to the surface.
One point that I want to make: though I believe that, in general, third-world people are more instinctual and tuned in to Mother Nature than Americans are, I’m definitely not saying that third-world countries treat their animals better than people do in industrialized nations. In fact, the third world often treats animals very badly. Part of the reason I am here in America is that dogs are not valued in Mexico, except perhaps by the very rich. The career I dreamed of did not exist there at all. Because many third-world people don’t exercise their intellectual-emotional side, they don’t always feel bad when an animal is hurt, and they don’t read books on dog psychology to learn about what makes dogs tick. In fact, in many third-world countries such as Mexico, the women are treated worse than all the dogs and cats in America. Until people in third-world countries learn how to value women, how can they even begin to see the dignity in animals? However, they do not have the difficulty communicating with animals that we do here. That’s because they live interdependently with animals. In urban America, we don’t need animals in our daily lives for survival. We have removed ourselves from our animal natures, blocking our connection with our illusions of intellectual and emotional superiority.
Dominance and Submission—Two New Definitions
Third-world people, homeless people, and farmers all relate to animals in terms of survival. They also aren’t afraid to assert dominance with animals. In rural environments, the concept of dominance isn’t politically incorrect. On a farm in America, the farmer knows that only he can create harmony among all the animals. In order to do that, someone has to be in control. The animal with the biggest brain, the one that can study and understand all the psychologies of all the others, gets that job. On a farm, even though animals are domesticated, they all work for food and water. And they all live together in harmony. The farmer created that harmony, with calm-assertive energy and leadership. Leadership, by definition, means some degree of authority. Of influence. Of dominance.
Unfortunately, dominance seems to have become a dirty word in the United States. When I use this word in reference to our relationships with our dogs, it seems to make people feel very uncomfortable and bad about themselves, like I am asking them to behave with their dogs like dictators of a banana republic. The fact is, dominance is a natural phenomenon that cuts across social species. Mother Nature invented it to help organize animals into orderly social groups, and to ensure their survival. It does not mean one animal becomes a tyrant over another! In nature, dominance is not an “emotional” condition. There is no coercion, no guilt, no hurt feelings involved. Any animal that wins the dominant status in a dog pack must earn his or her place at the top—and just like being a leader of human beings is sometimes a thankless job, recent studies seem to hint that being a pack leader in nature isn’t all wine and roses, either.
Wolves, and many other members of the canid family, are cooperative breeders—that is, the dominant pair get to do most if not all of the mating and reproducing. In a 2001 study, research endocrinologists wanted to find out if being subordinate members of a cooperative-breeding social pack caused the follower animals to have more stress. After all, they lose most conflicts and don’t get to choose their mates. But studies of the stress hormones in African wild dogs and dwarf mongooses (both social carnivores) had a surprising result—the dominant animals actually had much higher stress hormones, across the board! If these early studies prove correct, researcher Scott Creel of Montana State University writes that “being dominant” might not be “as beneficial as it might first appear. Hidden physiological costs might accompany the access to mates and resources that dominant individuals enjoy. If so, this would help to explain why subordinates accept their status with perplexing readiness.” In other words, dominant animals don’t take on leadership roles for the cash and prizes involved. They are born with the energy to lead, and they naturally take up the baton. With dogs, it’s all about the good of the pack. That’s the same reason that dog owners need to learn pack leadership—and yes, that means expressing dominance—with their pets.
Being a pack leader is not about showing your dog “who’s boss.” It’s about establishing a safe, consistent structure in your dog’s life. Natural pack leaders do not control their followers by fear. They sometimes have to challenge or display their authority, but most of the time they are calm, benevolent leaders. In Never Cry Wolf, his famous account of living among the gray wolves of Alaska, naturalist Farley Mowat describes George, the dominant male wolf of the pack he observed for two years: “George had presence. His dignity was unassailable, yet he was by no means aloof. Conscientious to a fault, thoughtful of others, and affectionate within reasonable bounds, he was the kind of father whose idealized image appears in many wistful books of human family reminiscences, but whose real prototype has seldom paced the earth upon two legs. George was, in brief, the kind of father every son longs to acknowledge as his own.” Sure, Mowat is humanizing the wolf. That tendency helped make him a popular writer. But if you have misgivings about being your dog’s pack leader, reread that beautiful description of George. Think about it. Wouldn’t you love your dog to see you that way?
We’ve already established that dogs do not desire to live in a democracy. They also do not always equate submissiveness with weakness. I like to explain dog submission as open-mindedness. A submissive animal is open and willing to take direction from a more dominant one. In humans, open-mindedness creates the willingness and possibility to learn and take in new information. You are usually calm-submissive when you are reading a book or seated quietly, watching a concert or a movie. Do you consider yourself “subservient” when you are in this state? Of course not! You are, however, relaxed and receptive. When I give seminars, most of my audience is in a calm-submissive state. They have come to be open, to hear and learn new information. When humans go to church, you can have all the races—white, Latino, black, Asian—sitting peacefully together in the spirit of prayer. The pack leader is the religious leader—or God—and everyone is calm-submissive. When the congregation goes to coffee hour afterward, everyone is in a good state of mind and able to get along together socially. It’s only once they go out the door of the church that all the old issues and differences and prejudices come back to haunt them. We want to create such a world like the shelter of the church for our dogs, to make them feel safe, relaxed, and free to engage in social behavior. In order to produce that environment, we must become masters of projecting calm-assertive energy.
The Secrets of Primal Leadership
Calm-assertive leadership is the only leadership that works in the animal world. In our own world, human beings have followed leaders who have coerced us, bullied us, acted aggressive toward us, and filled us with fear in order to control us. But even among humans, research has shown that calm-assertive leadership—primal leadership—is really a better way to go. Daniel Goleman (author of Emotional Intelligence), Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee have spent decades researching the role the human brain plays in creating the most powerful and effective leadership behavior. Based on everything we have learned about how energy works in the animal kingdom, what they learned and recounted in their book Primal Leadership should not surprise us at all: “Great leadership works through emotions.” This, they tell us, is because the root of our emotions—the limbic system in the brain—is an “open-loop” system; that is, it depends on sources outside the body to manage itself. “In other words, we rely on connections with other people for our own emotional stability.” In this way, we are exactly like other social animals—especially dogs. We mirror each other’s emotional signals, “whereby one person transmits signals that can alter hormone levels, cardiovascular function, sleep rhythms, and even immune function inside the body of another.”
Remember Warren, my client with the negative energy so powerful it was affecting his dog, his fiancée, and me? That energy we were feeling from him wasn’t in our imagination. Not only can a person’s negative mood or emotions affect us; the stress hormones secreted when they make us upset take hours to be reabsorbed into the body and to finally fade away. That’s why it took me hours to come down from my encounter with Warren. According to the authors of Primal Leadership, “Researchers have seen again and again how emotions spread irresistibly in this way whenever people are near one another, even when the contact is completely nonverbal. For example, when three strangers sit facing each other in silence for a minute or two, the one who is most emotionally expressive transmits his or her mood to the other two, without speaking a word.” The results of negative energy can literally have lethal consequences: Nurses in cardiac care units who were grumpy and depressed had a four times higher death rate among their patients than those in units where nurses’ moods were more balanced.
As we’ve learned, animals are even more attuned to these emotional-mood-energy signals than we are. They are called “emotional contagions,” and they are the very reason that my “power of the pack” form of rehabilitation works so well for “impossible” dogs in cases where human intervention hasn’t helped at all. Since the dogs are communicating with one another without words, using only energy and body language to have “conversations,” inviting an unbalanced dog into a balanced pack can turn him around almost instantly—as long as he is in a calm-submissive state, which is an open-minded state—ready to learn and absorb the new energy. In a pack of dogs, instability is not allowed. It is targeted for some sort of group action—often, an attack. I talked earlier about how my coauthor experienced the way in which the ripple of emotional contagion passed through my pack in a split second, practically the very moment she changed her thoughts and state of mind. If you’ve witnessed any animal pack or herd in action, in person, or in a wildlife documentary, it is one of the most visual, dramatic examples of how emotions and energy work together to regulate all the social species of the animal kingdom.
In their studies, Goleman, Boyatzis, and McKee defined two types of leadership. The first they called dissonant leadership, and in American workplaces, it’s responsible for 42 percent of workers reporting incidents of yelling, verbal abuse, and other unhappy behaviors. “Dissonant leadership,” they write, “produces groups that feel emotionally discordant, in which people have a sense of being continually off-key.” Many movers and shakers still swear by this form of leadership, the argument being that it keeps people “on their toes.” The documentary film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room depicted a company where dissonant leadership was absolutely the norm. If you can imagine a Wall Street trading floor where traders are constantly competing with each other and yelling at each other, blood pressures and tempers are high, and everyone is exhausted and jittery at the end of the day, wondering if they’re going to make enough profit to keep their jobs—that’s dissonant leadership.
Unfortunately, that is the kind of leadership my clients often exhibit with their dogs. They are emotional, easily upset and frustrated, panicky, weak, or angry. They are also inconsistent with the messages they send, so their dogs don’t know what to expect from one minute to the next. Is my owner the pack leader? Am I the pack leader? A confused dog is an unhappy dog. Although it might still be the norm on Wall Street, dissonant leadership does not cut it in the animal kingdom.
The other kind of leadership the authors describe is resonant leadership: “One sign of resonant leadership is a group of followers who vibrate with the leader’s upbeat and enthusiastic energy. A primal leadership dictum is that resonance amplifies and prolongs the emotional impact of leadership.” This is the kind of leadership that I call “calm-assertive leadership,” which of course arises from calm-assertive energy.
Creating Calm-Assertive Energy
It is one thing to understand what calm-assertive energy is, but how do we create it—and how do we maintain it, whether we’re with our dogs, our families, our bosses, or our coworkers? In Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman tells a fascinating story of a firefight between American and Vietcong troops early in the Vietnam conflict. Suddenly, in the middle of the shooting a line of six monks appeared and starting walking along the rice paddies that separated the two sides—directly toward the line of fire. One of the American soldiers, David Busch, later described the amazing incident: “They didn’t look right, they didn’t look left. They walked straight through. It was really strange, because nobody shot at ’em. And suddenly the fight was out of me. I just didn’t feel like I wanted to do this anymore, at least not that day. It must have been that way for everybody, because everybody quit. We just stopped fighting.”
What did the monks do to create this miraculous event? They sent powerful emotional signals—peaceful signals that apparently were more powerful than the hateful signals of the warring soldiers. Although this is a very extreme example, it gives you an idea of how the strength and intention of the energy we project can profoundly affect and change the others around us. Goleman describes this as “setting the emotional tone of an interaction,” which is “a sign of dominance at a deep and intimate level; it means driving the emotional state of the other person.” What the more powerful person does to control the energy of the other is to actually “entrain” their biological rhythms so that they are working together, not separately: “The person who has the most forceful expressivity—or the most power—is typically the one whose emotions entrain the other…. Emotional entrainment is the heart of influence.”
In order to gain this gift of emotional influence and become a resonant leader, a person must master the four domains of emotional intelligence. The first two involve mastery of self-awareness and self-management. These abilities are what make all humans able to be pack leaders in the natural world if they desire it. “Self-aware leaders are attuned to their inner signals. They recognize, for instance, how their feelings affect themselves and their job performances. Instead of letting anger build into an outburst, they spot it as it crescendos and can see both what’s causing it and how to do something constructive about it.” This is an advantage you have over your dog, because humans are one of the only species on the planet able to accomplish this process. Your dog cannot reflect on how his feelings make him feel. He can only react. You, on the other hand, can recognize an emotion and redirect it before it becomes the energy you are spreading on to others. The self-management part of the equation means getting your own emotions in control before you act.
The other two domains of emotional intelligence as described by Daniel Goleman are social functions that your dogs practice among each other all the time. I call them instinct. Social awareness, or empathy, means being tuned in to the emotions and energy of the other animals around you. Relationship management involves the tools of leadership itself—managing the emotions and interactions of your followers. When a dominant dog gives eye contact to another dog that is moving toward his food dish and the other dog stops and turns away, that is relationship management. When a submissive dog responds to a dominance display by rolling on his back, that is relationship management. It’s only humans who often use these tools to manipulate or hurt other people. With dogs, relationship management is done for the good of the pack—to preserve social harmony, reduce conflicts, and ensure survival.
Understanding and achieving skill in these four domains is the key to creating the right kind of energy to project with your dogs.
Techniques
Becoming a calm-assertive pack leader usually doesn’t happen overnight. Many of us have been conditioned from a young age to doubt ourselves, to have low self-esteem, or to believe that being assertive is the same as being aggressive. We are often ruled by our emotions or are simply unaware of our moods and emotions. My clients all take their own, individual routes to nurturing this energy in themselves, and there is no easy step-by-step route to achieving it that I can give you. Calm-assertive energy comes from the inside out, however, which is why the following techniques can be helpful in cultivating it in your life.
Before the nineteenth century, most theater performances were very “external” things. Acting styles were large, emotional, and over-the-top. Actors’ voices were loud and boisterous, which was necessary to project into large theaters and auditoriums. Most plays were written in exaggerated or lofty language. In twentieth-century Russia, however, actor and stage director Konstantin Stanislavski pioneered a new acting method. His revolutionary idea was for actors to go within themselves and act from the inside out. Acting would be a psychological and emotional experience, a truth-based experience, and the actor’s objective was to be believed by the audience. Stanislavski and later American Lee Strasberg taught that the power of the imagination can be used to alter an actor’s consciousness. Actors were trained in relaxation, concentration, and “sense-memory” techniques, so they could call up emotions from their pasts in order to bring the characters they are playing to life. Method acting, as it is now known, is more than just “pretending” to be angry, or happy, or grief-stricken; it’s learning to call on deep, buried memories of the actual emotion and apply them to the dramatic scene you are playing. When you’re watching really gifted actors perform a scene, you can actually feel the contagious energy of the emotion they’re portraying.
This is why, when training my clients to harness the power of calm-assertive energy, I often suggest they use acting techniques. Long before I had even met an actor or knew what Method acting was, I would ask people to remember a time in their lives when they felt powerful, try to call up that feeling, and use it when they are walking their dogs. When I came to Los Angeles, I learned that what I was suggesting is a very simple form of the intensive training most professional actors go through. Many actors base the fictional characters they play on real people they have known. In Cesar’s Way, I recommend imagining yourself as a person or a character who signifies leadership to you. For Sharon, an actress who was trained to use her imagination in this way, it was the role of Cleopatra that gave her confidence and helped her to feel in charge when she was walking her fearful dog Julius. For other clients, it’s been everything from Superman to Bruce Springsteen to Oprah Winfrey…to their own mothers! In fact, I channel my own mother every time I use the sound “Tsssst!” There’s nothing magical about that sound, it’s just that it has a big significance for me, since that was the sound my mother made in order to get us kids to behave!
If you want to learn more about these techniques, there are many books about the basics of Method acting. You can take a beginning acting class, or if you know someone who is an actor, take her to coffee and ask her the tricks she uses to bring a character to life. It’s not like you have to learn to perform Shakespeare. Remember, your dog is not a theater critic, but he has to believe your performance!
Much like acting exercises, visualization techniques are another behavior I suggest to clients who are struggling with the concept of calm-assertive leadership. Though some may find this approach simplistic, thousands of athletes, CEOs, world leaders, students, military officers, entertainers, and others would never even think of doing their jobs or even starting their days without visualization. Sometimes, visualization involves taking a moment before an event to play the whole thing out successfully in your mind, writing a story with a happy ending. If clients are having trouble with their dogs on the walk, for example, after correcting their physical techniques, I tell them to “script” their walks in their imaginations. As Tina Madden—NuNu’s owner—tells us in her “success story” in Identifying Instability, when she was in the process of transforming NuNu (and her life), it was important for her to visualize passing by barking dogs and ignoring them. She had to do it over and over again, but when the real situation occurred, she was able to “switch over” in her mind to the visualization. Some people take visualization to its extreme, self-hypnosis. Much has been written about both visualization and self-hypnosis by psychologists, psychiatrists, and self-help gurus. They will all tell you that visualization takes practice to be truly effective. You will probably not get it right the first time you try it. But the mind becomes more and more powerful every time you do the exercises.
Inner dialogue is another powerful technique that can greatly improve the communication between you and your dog. So many of my clients talk to their dogs constantly. They talk in full sentences, on subjects ranging from what the dog wants for dinner to the state of international politics. This is good therapy for the human, of course, but it’s not usually an effective way to get better behavior out of your best friend. Many times, when you are asking your dog to do something using words, you really should be talking to yourself. For instance, Brian and Henry, the owners of Elmer, a beagle with a chronic howling problem, were setting themselves up for trouble before they even left the house for their daily walks. Elmer would be excited and hyper before they even finished putting on the leash, then he would always try to get out the door in front of them. Since they had watched my show, they knew the owner is supposed to go out the door first. So what did they do? They talked to Elmer, nagging at him! “No, Elmer. Us first. Us first.” All the time, they were letting Elmer try to push them aside! Of course, Elmer couldn’t understand the words they were saying. He could, however, understand that the energy behind the words was a frustrated, helpless, weak, and uncertain energy. Their inner dialogue went like this: “Oh my God, Elmer’s going out first again, we’re not the pack leaders! We have to stop him!” Who was in control? Elmer, of course. His energy and intention was much stronger than theirs, even though intellectually, they knew they should be the ones in front.
When calling up the calm-assertive pack leader inside, some people are more emotional, some more visual, and some more verbal. The verbal types often prefer to use words first, before they can access their emotions or senses. That’s why I suggest that these clients have a conversation with themselves any time they find themselves wanting to have a verbal conversation with their dogs. Dogs often respond better when there’s less sound involved, and you are strengthening your energy by turning your thoughts inward. When claiming a piece of furniture, for instance, focus your mind, and then tell yourself, “This is my sofa.” Use your body to claim it, repeating that thought in your mind over and over again. By talking to yourself, you are gradually changing your brain, your body, your emotions, and in turn, your energy. It is your energy that speaks to your dog. In other words, talking to yourself is a much faster way to communicate your energy to your dog than trying to use human language to reason with him—no matter how persuasive you are, or how loudly you yell, or how nicely you ask.
There are other powerful methods that champions in many walks of life use to help themselves feel more confident and powerful. Some of them listen to motivational tapes, like those by Anthony Robbins. Some repeat positive affirmations, or write them on pieces of paper and leave them in places all around their house, like on the bathroom mirror, on the refrigerator door—or above the hook where they hang their dog leashes. Others read motivational quotations and books with daily inspirations in them. Music is one of the most potent sources that can trigger emotional responses. My coauthor makes different compilations of music on her iPod based on her mood—some that she plays before business meetings or stressful situations to motivate herself; some to calm her down when she’s anxious, or to cheer her up if she’s blue. Clients have told me they do yoga, meditation, and tai chi, and read spiritual texts such as the Bible to connect with their spiritual sides and call up their intuitive inner strength. When, at eight years old, I started developing frustration and aggression at home in our city apartment in Mazatlán, my parents wisely sent to me to martial arts training, where I first learned to focus my energy and turn negative energy into positive. Brandon Carpenter, the renowned horse trainer with similar views to mine about the human-animal connection, also studied centuries-old martial arts techniques where he learned to control his emotion, energy, and body all at the same time.
SOME TECHNIQUES FOR ATTAINING CALM-ASSERTIVE ENERGY
• Clear and positive intention
• Method acting techniques
• Visualization
• Self-hypnosis
• Inner dialogue
• Motivational recordings
• Positive affirmations, written or verbal
• Motivational quotes or readings
• Music
• Yoga, tai chi
• Martial arts
• Meditation or prayer
And prayer, of course, is the most powerful force of inner dialogue and intention on earth. Even modern science is becoming open to research that shows that prayer, meditation, and faith can influence events in ways most “realists” never dreamed of.
These are all means to access the calm-assertive side of you—the leader within. With calm-assertive energy in your life, you have not only the power to change your dog’s life, but if you so desire, your own as well. As for the movers and the shakers I addressed at the conference, some of them will learn to become calm-assertive pack leaders to their dogs. Perhaps it will inspire them to share more calm-assertive energy with the people who work for them and the rest of the world. Others, of course, will keep doing things the way they have always done them. President Theodore Roosevelt once said, “People ask the difference between a leader and a boss…. The leader works in the open, and the boss in covert. The leader leads, and the boss drives.” In order for your dog to follow, you cannot be just a boss. You must be a guide, an inspiration, a true leader, from the inside out.
SUCCESS STORY
CJ and Signal Bear
I was working as a contractor in a fenced maintenance yard (about the size of a city block) when a supervisor came into our office and told us, “We can escort you to your cars for lunch. There is a wild, pregnant Chow dog loose in the lot that is terrorizing everyone. We just called Animal Control to come and get her.” I thought, Ahh gee, a Chow, pregnant and wild? They will put her down for sure, as that was the policy of the local animal control people regarding feral dogs. I felt compelled to go take a look at this poor victim of a certain death sentence. When I got to the lot, however, I saw a male dog who was scared out of his mind! He was in a panic, barking, snarling, and running around. As an environmental safety and health risk manager with thirty-five years experience, my first thought was, Can I safely help this dog without endangering myself, the other workers, or even the dog himself, if he escapes from this secure yard and runs out into the street?
I had recently been watching the new Dog Whisperer show with Cesar Millan. Working with rescue and show dogs all my life, I thought I was capable of safely trying some of the techniques he had talked about on the program. I specifically remembered two things Cesar had said: “Depression and aggression are often really frustration” and “Discharge the energy first; let the dog wear himself out.” That’s just what the dog did, finally hiding between the storage shed and concrete wall, changing his energy from aggressive confrontation to fearful retreat. Next, I followed steps I had seen Cesar take in his red-zone cases—even though I knew the show tells people not to try these things at home. Take control of the space. (I blocked the dog’s way out, sat down in the entry, claimed the space.) No touch, no talk, no eye contact. (I sat sideways blocking his exit, in 105-degree heat for two hours.) Finally the dog came up to me. I ignored him. He bumped me with his nose—his energy had shifted to calm-submissive, quiet, balanced energy. Without looking at him, I reach my hand out to massage his shoulder and finally pulled him to me, then carried him to the car to introduce him to my pack of four dogs at home: I did it Cesar’s way.
Signal Bear, as I came to call him, was the first dog in my “pack” to be raised “Cesar’s way” from his first moments with me. I have been astonished at how much easier it has been simply working with a dog using Cesar’s techniques, than with all my other dogs that I had humanized for the past ten years. Since that time, I have become inspired to facilitate a Dog Whisperer fans and friends e-mail list on Yahoo! and have rescued, rehabilitated, and placed four other dogs (so far!) who were about to be put down for supposedly “incurable” behavior problems, but all of whom changed with the consistent application of Cesar’s formula of “rules, boundaries, and limitations.”
Cesar’s philosophy and techniques have not only given us a better life with our dogs, but have actually helped both my husband and me in our workplaces. I had a client who had been a raging emotional tyrant for years. Recently, when he was unjustly blaming something on me, I decided to change my approach. Instead of feeling and acting like a victim, I mentally let go of my long past history and usual emotional/fearful reaction to this man. I took a deep breath to calm myself, then did an energy distraction technique that I have seen Cesar do while walking dogs. Though I couldn’t exactly say “Tsssst!” to a client, I used the same energy that Cesar uses, and simply said the man’s name while firmly touching his arm. He stopped cold—his rage stopped—and he actually looked at me. I then continued addressing the project decisions. My client simply followed along calmly. I had made him part of the team (pack) again!
Millan, Cesar, Peltier, Melissa Jo
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