Mental Skills Coaching for Dog Agility Competitors
Mental skills coaching for Dog Agility Competitors is available in the following cities: Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Hamilton, Tauranga, Napier, Hastings, Dunedin, Palmerston North, Nelson, Rotorua, New Plymouth, Whangārei, Invercargill, Whanganui, Gisborne, Blenheim, Timaru, Taupō, Ashburton, Levin, Masterton, Pukekohe, Queenstown, Cambridge.
Mental Skills Coaching for Dog Agility Competitors
Confidence. Focus. Resilience. Enjoyment.
You know you can do it.
You’ve done it in training. Your dog is capable. You’re capable. Yet when competition day arrives, something changes.
Maybe you become nervous before your run. You start thinking about results. You worry about making a mistake. You compare yourself with other competitors. Your confidence disappears after one bad run, or a small mistake happens and suddenly everything feels different.
Sometimes the problem isn’t your agility skills.
Sometimes it’s your mental game.
The Australasian Leadership Institute provides individual mental skills coaching for dog agility competitors who want to perform with greater confidence, focus and enjoyment.
Because your dog isn’t the only athlete on the course.
Do You Perform Differently in Competition?
You train hard.
You work on your handling. You walk courses. You practise sequences. You analyse what went wrong and work on improving it.
Yet many competitors spend considerably less time developing the mental skills required to use all that training when it matters.
Does any of this sound familiar?
You perform better in training than you do in competition.
You become nervous before entering the ring.
You worry about what other competitors might think of you.
You put pressure on yourself to get a particular result.
One mistake affects the rest of your run.
A disappointing competition affects your confidence at the next one.
You struggle to stop thinking about previous mistakes.
You become frustrated with yourself when things don’t go according to plan.
You know what you should be doing, but somehow you don’t do it when you’re under pressure.
Or perhaps you’ve simply stopped enjoying competing as much as you used to.
These aren’t necessarily technical problems.
And doing more technical training won’t always solve them.
Mental skills need training too.
You Train Your Dog. You Train Your Handling. You Can Train Your Mind.
Mental skills aren’t something you either naturally possess or you don’t.
They can be developed.
Confidence can be strengthened.
Focus can be trained.
Nerves can be managed.
Resilience can be developed.
The way you respond to mistakes can change.
And you can learn to focus less on outcomes you can’t completely control and more on the behaviours that give you and your dog the best opportunity to perform well.
This isn’t about eliminating nerves or convincing yourself that you don’t care about the result.
You care because what you’re doing matters to you.
The objective is to learn how to manage those thoughts and emotions so they help rather than hinder your performance.
Your Mental Game Is Individual
Two competitors can experience exactly the same situation and respond completely differently.
One person may struggle with nerves.
Another may be confident until something goes wrong and then find it difficult to recover.
Someone else may become too focused on results.
Another competitor may constantly compare themselves with everyone around them.
Some people struggle with self-doubt despite considerable evidence that they’re capable.
Others place such high expectations on themselves that competition gradually stops being enjoyable.
That’s why individual coaching is at the heart of our approach.
Your mental game is individual. Your coaching should be too.
How Individual Mental Skills Coaching Works
Mental skills coaching gives you somewhere to talk openly about what happens when you compete.
Together, we identify what is getting in the way of your performance, understand why it is happening and develop practical strategies that work for you.
Depending on what you are experiencing, coaching can help with:
Competition nerves
Learning how to understand and manage the physical and mental responses that appear when you’re under pressure.
Confidence and self-doubt
Building confidence based on evidence and preparation rather than waiting until you happen to feel confident.
Focus
Learning where your attention needs to be before and during a run and how to bring it back when your mind starts focusing on distractions.
Recovering from mistakes
Developing the ability to respond effectively when something goes wrong instead of allowing one moment to determine everything that follows.
Outcome pressure
Moving your primary focus away from placings, qualifications and results towards behaviours that are within your control.
Visualisation
Learning how to mentally rehearse situations and behaviours so that you’re better prepared when you enter the ring.
Resilience
Managing disappointing performances without allowing them to define what happens next.
Expectations
Challenging the stories and expectations that create unnecessary pressure.
Enjoyment
Remembering why you started doing this with your dog in the first place.
Your Dog Doesn’t Know What’s at Stake
Your dog doesn’t know whether this is a championship final, a qualifying run or a Tuesday evening training session.
But your dog may notice that you’re behaving differently.
Your breathing changes.
Your movements change.
Your timing changes.
You may become tense, hesitant or frustrated.
Mental skills coaching isn’t about removing emotion from dog agility.
We compete because we care.
It’s about learning how to manage your thoughts, emotions and behaviour so that when your dog looks to you in competition, they get the same confident and supportive handler they know in training.
You can’t control everything that happens on the course.
You can work on the person your dog takes onto it.
Mental Skills Coaching Isn’t About “Fixing” You
You don’t need to have a serious confidence problem to benefit from mental skills coaching.
Elite athletes don’t work on their mental game because something is wrong with them.
They do it because performance is both physical and psychological.
Dog agility is no different.
You already train technical skills because you know they can improve.
Mental skills deserve exactly the same approach.
The objective is simply to help you become more aware of what happens in your mind when you compete and give you practical tools for responding more effectively.
Work With Mark Wager
Mental skills coaching is provided by Mark Wager, Chief Leadership Coach at the Australasian Leadership Institute.
Mark has more than three decades of experience coaching people in leadership, mindset and high-performance environments and has worked with leaders, athletes and competitors throughout New Zealand and internationally.
His approach combines established research from psychology, mindset and human performance with practical strategies that competitors can actually use.
Mark works individually with dog agility competitors on areas including confidence, competition nerves, resilience, focus, visualisation, managing expectations and recovering from mistakes.
The coaching isn’t about turning you into somebody you’re not.
It’s about helping you perform more like the competitor you already know you can be.
Individual Coaching — Wherever You Are
Mental skills coaching is available throughout New Zealand and internationally by Zoom.
Sessions are individual and confidential, allowing us to focus entirely on your particular challenges and what you want to achieve.
You don’t need to commit to a long programme before finding out whether mental skills coaching is right for you.
We can start with a conversation about what’s happening, what you’ve already tried and what you would like to be different.
Mental Skills Workshops for Dog Sport Clubs
Individual coaching remains at the heart of our mental skills work, but Mark also delivers workshops for dog sport clubs and groups.
These practical sessions introduce competitors to the mental side of performance and can cover confidence, competition nerves, resilience, visualisation, focus, managing expectations and responding to mistakes.
Workshops can be tailored to the particular needs of the group and have been delivered for competitors in dog agility and scentwork/nosework, including a recent mental skills workshop in Wellington.
If your club or group would like to explore hosting a mental skills workshop, please get in touch.
Your Next Run Starts Before You Enter the Ring
You don’t need to wait until nerves, confidence or pressure become a major problem.
And you don’t need to know exactly what part of your mental game needs work before contacting us.
Tell me what’s happening.
Maybe you’re nervous before competing.
Maybe your confidence has disappeared.
Maybe you’re struggling to recover from mistakes.
Maybe you perform brilliantly in training and can’t understand why competition feels so different.
Or perhaps you’re doing well but believe there’s another level of performance available to you.
We can start there.
You’ve put countless hours into training your dog and developing your technical skills.
Maybe it’s time to spend some time training the other athlete on the course.
Talk to Mark About Your Mental Game
Mental Skills Coaching for Dog Agility Competitors
Australasian Leadership Institute