Start at the Beginning

How to teach yourself cool tricks!

I like watching those videos of Australian Shepherds doing high-level tricks. Yoga? Yes please. Dance routines with their owners? Sign me up. Play Midnight Sonata? I’ll watch it five times, and then make you watch it, too.

When we adopted Pants, I couldn’t wait to start her on a training regimen – how cool would it be if she could herd sheep? Run obstacle courses? Read my mind?

We don’t know Pants’ history, only that she had been picked up as a street dog in Texas. She had zero skills when we got her, which could either be because she never got trained, or because she lost it in the trauma of ending up a stray, living at a shelter, being shipped to Oregon, and then living in a couple more shelters before two strange ladies took her home and started yelling clothing items at her.

The day we brought her home! She was stressed.

So Pants didn’t know squat (well, she did know to squat outside, so that was a small mercy). I may have had grand plans for our little party mix, but the fact was, we had to start at the beginning.

Starting at the beginning sounds simple, but it’s not. How do you even know where the beginning is?

When I decided to take up running, I put on my fancy new tennis shoes and tried to run a mile. A mile’s a good goal, right? Not too long, anyone can do it!

No.

The experience was so bad, I went to the doctor because I was sure I had exercise-induced asthma, cardiac failure, and maybe only one lung. “You’re out of shape,” my doctor told me. “Keep working at it.” Rude. Also, correct.

When you need to start doing something, whether that’s exercising, cleaning the house, getting to work on time, or managing your stress, you might expect too much of yourself. Case in point: trying to run a mile cold. That is not the beginning.

Pictured: Suffering. (Quino Al)

So where do you start? What is the beginning?

Wherever you will be successful.

You’re not teaching yourself a new skill. You’re teaching yourself that you can learn a new skill. If you set out to run a 10k but skip all your training runs, you’re going to fall over at mile two and also never run again and also probably have running nightmares for the rest of your life. You’re going to tell yourself that you’re bad at running, when actually you just misjudged what your beginning should be.

The next time I set out to run a mile, I took a different approach. I ran for 30 seconds, walked for a minute, and so on until I reached a mile. That was something I could do. It was even – dare I say it? – enjoyable. What I took away from the experience was a sense of achievement and ability rather than suffering and failure.

The next time I thought about going for a run, I felt excited and capable, and I ran for 40 seconds instead of 30. Now that I had demonstrated that I could do this thing, I was more confident in challenging myself a little beyond my ability. In psychology, this is called self-efficacy, the belief that I have the tools, knowledge, and ability to achieve the thing I want to do. I had to build a foundation of self-efficacy for myself so that when running got hard, I could fall back on the belief that I was capable of a hard thing, and keep going.

One day, Pants is going to be able to herd sheep, run agility, and alert us that Timmy has fallen down the well again. What we started with was sit. After that I taught her down. Then she learned wait, leave it, and watch me. Now she can turn in circles, stick her tongue out at me, and file her own nails on a scratch board. She can’t play the piano - yet. We’ll just take it one step at a time.

Giving herself a peticure (not sorry)