A mate of mine travels a lot, and when he does, I look after his dog.
So when he started working with a trainer on the dog's behaviour, getting involved was the obvious next step.
What I didn't expect was how humbling it would be.
Watching someone train a dog, I kept seeing my own work coming back at me in a different shape.
The same principles I've built fifteen plus years of coaching clients over 50 on, and the last seven coaching the coaches who work with them, showing up in a completely different species.
Trust first. Then relaxation. Then safety. Nothing gets built on top of a nervous system that hasn't settled.
You'd think a dog would be harder to coach than a person.
No language, no ability to explain the plan, no way to ask "how does that feel?" But I found the opposite. Take language away, and you're left with the actual mechanics of coaching, stripped down to what they always were.
With a human, there's decades of life experience sitting between you and the person you're trying to help. What made them feel safe as a child might make them feel patronised as an adult. What reads as encouragement to one client reads as pressure to another.
All of that has to be read and adjusted for in real time, and most of it never gets said out loud.
With a dog, none of that noise exists. What's left is the coaching itself, and it's a lot simpler than we make it.
A few things stood out that week, and they were as much a refresher as a lesson.
- Having a plan matters. But the ability to abandon that plan the moment the dog in front of you needs something else matters more.
- Consistent focus throughout the session is non-negotiable, but the structure has to be held loosely enough that it bends without breaking.
- And when something isn't landing, you don't push harder. You find another way to present the same idea until one of them gets through.
I said to my mate at one point that we weren't really training the dog. We were training ourselves. Training our own behaviour, our own patience, our own timing, so the dog could relax enough to trust that we had things handled.
That's the sentence I keep coming back to.
Because if you take the dog out of it, that's the job.
Managing yourself, well enough and consistently enough, that the person in front of you can relax enough to let you coach them, rather than managing the client's programme.
The client's success was never really about how good your plan was on paper. It's about whether you built enough safety that they'd actually let you guide them somewhere new.
Coaches come into this work believing their over-50 clients are fragile.
That they need protecting, wrapped in cotton wool, kept away from anything that looks like real load or a real challenge. So the exercise selection gets watered down before the client's even walked through the door, based on an age on an intake form rather than the person standing in front of them.
It comes from a good place, but none of it is what keeps a client for four years instead of four months.
What keeps them is whether they trusted you enough to stay relaxed while you asked them to grow, whether that growth looked like a heavier deadlift or a movement they'd never have attempted a year earlier.
Get that right, and the sessions get better; the relationships get deeper. The results that actually stick follow on their own.
If you want the structure behind building that kind of trust from the first conversation onward, reply and use CONVO as the title.
I’ll send you something that will help
Paul
