Have you ever played down how much you want “it”?
Somebody at a trial asks what you’re working toward, and you hear yourself say “oh, we’re just out here having fun.” Meanwhile you’ve been training for this weekend for months.
Or maybe you’ve thought it about somebody else. You watch a handler who is clearly ALL in, and a little voice says, I bet that poor dog never gets to just be a dog.
So why do so many of us do that?
Part of it has a name: tall poppy syndrome. The poppy that grows taller than the rest gets cut down. Stick your head up, and somebody’s going to take you down a peg. So you learn to keep your head at the same height as everybody else’s.
And if you’re a woman, which most of us in this sport are, there’s actual research on this. Girls get raised to be modest, and studies going back to the late ’90s have found that women who talk openly about their abilities tend to get liked less for it. So we learn to see it coming, and we get ahead of it. “Oh, we’re just out here having fun.”
It doesn’t feel like a lie when you say it. It feels like good manners. And it’s safer, too. Nobody cuts down a poppy that never stuck its head up.
There’s an idea that floats around our sport. If you’re not “just for fun,” you must be too serious. And if you’re too serious, you must be hard on your dog.
As if every ounce of ambition you have gets paid for by your dog.
I don’t buy it. Wanting to excel and loving your dog are not in tension.
What wanting to excel actually looks like.
Not on the podium. On a Tuesday:
- You warm your dog up properly, and cool them down after.
- You keep them fit, because a dog with a strong body is a dog who stays sound for years.
- You learn to read stress, because a stressed dog doesn’t run fast.
- You work hard on how you communicate, because a confused dog slows down, looks back at you, and starts knocking bars, missing contacts, weave entries, etc. etc.
- You make sure they get rest.
- You film your sessions, even the ones you’d rather not watch.
Look at that list. Wanting to excel, even wanting to win, done well, mostly looks like taking REALLY good care of your dog.
Because your dog is the one doing the running. You don’t get a fast, confident, happy dog in the ring by making that dog miserable at home. It doesn’t work. It never has.
So where does “mean” come from?
Okay, I’m not going to pretend it never happens. You’ve seen it. The handler who walks out of the ring and takes the run out on the dog. The leash pop on the way back to the crate. That’s real, and it can be uncomfortable to watch, and I’d be lying if I said I’ve never experienced OR displayed uncomfortable frustration publicly.
But that isn’t ambition. That’s frustration with nowhere to go. And usually it belongs to a handler who doesn’t have a plan for when things go sideways, so the dog ends up wearing their bad day.
The fix for that isn’t wanting less. It’s getting clearer. Clear about what you’re asking for, clear about what happens when your dog gets it right, and clear about what happens when they don’t.
And for the record, “just for fun” doesn’t protect a dog from any of that. I’ve watched plenty of frustrated “just for fun” handlers too.
Your dog has no idea there’s a ribbon.
Your dog doesn’t know what a Q or a clean run is. They don’t know what level you entered or what your goals are for next year. What they know is whether the game made sense, whether you were fair, and whether it was fun to do it together.
So the question was never “how badly do you want it?” The question is what that wanting turns into by the time it gets to your dog.
If it turns into better preparation, clearer communication, and a dog who is fit and confident and knows their job, then want it as much as you like.
And just so we’re clear, that does NOT look like perfection. It doesn’t look like no bad days. You’re still going to have the run where you get lost, and the weekend where nothing holds together. Wanting it doesn’t mean you never fall short. It means you come home, figure out what happened, and go work on it.
I think that’s the greatest gift dog training and dog sport give us: ENDLESS opportunity for self-improvement. You will never run out of ways to get better, as a trainer, as a handler, as a person. The best part? Your dog is going to LOVE that version of you.
So tell me in the comments: what’s one thing wanting to win has made you do FOR your dog? One line is plenty.
Wanting “it” AND doing right by your dog is pretty much the whole culture we’ve built. The whole system lives inside The Agility Challenge. Door is here.