Welcome to The Paddock

A walk round in circles at the Paddock with me and Berty, and an invitation to check out my Big 5 Realisations from doing what I do with dogs. If you love dogs and being outdoors, and have had some kind of amazing outdoor experience that stopped you in your tracks, and you’ve been trying to figure it out ever since, then Mellow Dog Mumma is all about that.

As a child, I was taught that success comes from working really hard. Yet my experience of training dogs for competition was that when me and my dog were working well together, I was usually not trying very hard at all, and working the round felt easy. Unrushed. Effortless.

A bit about me

After a 17 year career as Nurse, I started a business as an executive coach and trainer. Around the same time I got my first dog, a Golden Retriever called Lucy. And that changed everything.

Dogs are a way of life, and they are my way of life. The lessons I’ve learned from training high performance sports dogs has influenced my work as a coach specifically in terms of presence, connection, resilience, and showing up fully.

When working our best rounds, I had a sense that something was different. I experienced a more neutral state of mind and a sense of experiencing each moment as it unfolded before me – one step at a time. Your state of mind matters when it comes to performance. And I made it my quest to find out what it takes for us all to unleash our potential (starting with me).

I realised that many organisations and people with quirky passions, who care for the world, and have ambitions in life, have been treating performance as a skills based problem. But it isn’t. And this misunderstanding has been keeping many of us stuck for years.

My approach blows mainstream approaches to performance out of the water. Forget your 6 Step formulas, your state management techniques, your ‘think positive’ mantras, and superstitious rituals – which don’t really work for most of us anyway…and can keep us struggling, striving, and searching for years.

This is about understanding how the human experience actually works. This comes from an unorthodox means of creating transformational change in all aspects of life and work -health, wealth, relationships, hobbies, teamwork, leadership – because all boats rise with the tide.

I have since been teaching classes online and working with clients, and sometimes travelling around the UK, often accompanied by the dogs, in our canine camper – teaching workshops – taking the best of what I’ve learned doing what I do with dogs – using real life examples from my unconventional passion – to highlight the teamwork, resilience, wellbeing, and greatness in each of us – to folks who always KNEW they had the potential in them. But just couldn’t figure out how to unleash it.

Due to growing up in the black country and then living most of my adult life down south, I’ve got:

• a weird accent (I still say bath, not baarth)

• an irreverent sense of humour

• a love for Golden Retrievers (and all creatures, but especially the golden ones)

• a light touch (or so I’m told)

• a calming nature – most of the time, but I’ve got a feisty edge, especially when I see injustice.

• and when I can…I tend to be really good at creating experiences that help mavericks figure out how to live, love, lead, play, parent and work – like a dog I.E from a place of peak performance and personal joy, doing what they’re born to do with purpose and total jolly abandon. Life is so much easier than most of us make it. Simply all we need to do is love life and not overthink it! Because life doesn’t have to feel like hard work.

• and when I can…I tend to be really good at creating experiences that help mavericks figure out how to live, love, lead, play, parent and work – like a dog I.E from a place of peak performance and personal joy, doing what they’re born to do with purpose and total jolly abandon. Life is so much easier than most of us make it. Simply all we need to do is love life and not overthink it! Because life doesn’t have to feel like hard work.