Summary: Andrea Harrison is the people trainer on the FDSA team, working with dog sports teams to help handlers train themselves for better performance. She teaches classes on unleashing your personal potential, mental management, planning, goal setting, and more. She’s here today to talk about mental management, self-care, and dealing with failure. Next Episode:  To be released 8/31/2018, featuring Julie Flanery, talking about Heeling. TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we’ll be talking to Andrea Harrison. Andrea is the people trainer on the FDSA team, working with dog sports teams to help handlers train themselves for better performance. She teaches classes on unleashing your personal potential, mental management, planning, goal setting, and more. She’s here today to talk about mental management, self-care, and dealing with failure. Hi Andrea! Welcome to the podcast. Andrea Harrison: Hi Melissa. It’s so nice to be here. Melissa Breau: To start us out, can you just remind listeners a little bit about who you are and who the dogs are that you share your life with? Andrea Harrison: Sure. I’m Andrea Harrison, I am Canadian, I live in an island in the middle of Lake Ontario … well, not quite the middle, but close enough on the Canadian side. We live with 32 animals, five of whom are dogs. We’ve got two older dogs, Thea and Sally, who are a Chihuahua and a Border Collie mix. You will have seen both of them in photos of mine, I bet, and they are retired agility dogs, largely. Sally’s done a lot of stuff, actually. She’s been a film star, and she’s been a spokesperson for the SPCA’s spay-neuter program, and all kinds of different things. And then Tom has a farm dog. He has a Golden Retriever, Samson, who is 9 now; we can’t believe it. And then my two young dogs are 6 and 5, and they’re a toy American Eskimo, Yen, also known as the flying squirrel, and Dora, who’s a Cairn Terrier mix, who’s 5. My dogs mostly do farm dog, agility, scent work, and a little bit of playing in whatever kind of sport captures my fancy when I’m working through some concept for one of my students. They’re all really good sports about being flexible. Agility has been my passion for a long time, nosework’s a close second, and I play with some obedience stuff just so I keep my head in the game. So that’s our current crew. I keep expecting one of these days I’ll be telling you about a puppy, but I’m certainly in no rush for that. Melissa Breau: Well, I look forward to it. Puppy pictures are the best. Andrea Harrison: They are. Melissa Breau: I know we have a couple of things we’re hoping to get to today, but to start us out, I want to talk about motivation. If someone listening has a goal they really want to reach, but they’re struggling a little bit to stay motivated to work on it day by day, do you have tips you can offer for continuing to make progress? Andrea Harrison: There are tons of tips, and I think we’ll probably cover lots of the more specific tools, but one of the things I encourage people who have that sense of “I don’t know what to do” is to do a really good self-check. That means thinking about your head, your heart, and your gut, and listening to what those three things tell you. Your head: You’re going to look and make sure that you have a plan in place and that you’re trying to actually honor your plan, that you have some goals set that are both process goals and outcome goals, that you’re meeting both of those needs, and that you’re taking small enough steps to really continue to move forward. We get these big, big goals sometimes, and when we don’t see that we’re progressing towards them, it’s really easy to give up and think, Oh, I’m never going to [fill in the blank]