Nosework

Are your strengths as plain as the nose on your face?

Maizie finds a treat in the snow

My dog Maizie loves walks in the woods. Our house abuts miles of conservation land, which we can explore off leash without having to cross a single street. This proximity is a great privilege and we take advantage of it daily. Together, we tromp along the trails, over stone walls, and through the creek. My favorite part is the wide-skied, grassy field, where we play "Find It," which is Maizie's favorite game.

Here's how we play: I throw a treat somewhere into the grass, and tell her to find it. Maizie dips her nose down towards the earth and starts to search, loping easily back and forth to cover more ground. She drools a lot, anticipating that tasty, tasty treat. Suddenly, a whiff catches her attention. She whips her head around, alert and serious. She glues her nose into the dirt and tightens her gait, inspecting every inch, the world's most precise vacuum. At last the treat reveals itself and is dispatched efficiently into her mouth. "Good girl!" I call out, and she looks up, chewing, then flashes an unmistakable grin. She is proud of herself. Also she is ready for another treat.

"Find It" started when the weather got cold. I wanted to shorten our walks but keep them interesting, and more importantly, exhausting, for this energetic, young golden retriever. Nosework is fun and mentally stimulating, and I had read that 5 minutes of sniffing was as tiring as a 30 minutes of hard exercise. Say less, I thought, and filled my pockets.

Here's what surprised me about nosework: Maizie had to learn to do it.

A dog's sense of smell is their most developed sense, between 10,000 and 100,000 times as strong as a human's sense of smell. The Purina website translates this statistic into one I can more easily comprehend. "[Humans] are visual and so we think and process what we see, rather than being scent-aware. If you made an analogy to sight, what we can see at around a third of a mile a dog could see more than 3,000 miles away." Holy super smeller skills!

And yet when we first started playing Find It, Maizie would use her eyes to find the treats I threw. More than once, I watched her snuffle right past a treat because she thought she had seen it land somewhere else.

If smell is a dog's strongest sense, why did I have to teach Maizie to use hers?

I don't know for sure. The answer could be, she's a certified goober. And while I won't argue with you on that, I do have a different theory. I don't think Maizie was watching - or smelling - where I threw the treat. I think Maizie was watching me, and I was watching the treat. I am her person, and attention that dog pays to me is intense. Most days she sleeps near my desk while I work. If I slightly shift in my desk chair, she'll leap up from a deep sleep, immediately ready for whatever's next. In the field, she was cued onto my eyes and body language, even the way my toes were pointed. Her whole attention was on me, and my attention was on using my own preferred skill, which is sight.

I didn't have to teach her how to use her nose. I had to teach her to use her nose when I wasn't using mine. I had to teach her to trust what she was good at and use it to play the game.

Haven't you ever felt like this? The manager gives you a directive, and you jump in, ready to give it your best. But for some reason, you don't default to using your unique strengths, the skills everyone tells you are a superpower. You start trying to do it the way you think they want it done. You cast about, searching for the secret strategy. This can be exhausting, a wasteful amount of effort for minimal gain. The best outcome you can hope for is to present the leader with a carbon copy of how it would look if they had done it themselves, and hope that you can hide or absorb whatever not doing it your way cost.

What stops us from leading with our strengths? I know for me, I tend to assume that if I'm good at something, everyone must be good at it. When I assume this, sometimes my strengths seem invisible. Strength stealth mode. And on the flip side, I also tend to assume that if I work hard at something, it must not be a strength. Both assumptions are faulty. Strengths include what we are naturally good at, and the skills we hone and practice with intentionality over time.

I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be good at something, lately. I told you in a previous post that I'm challenging myself to stop worrying so much about doing things "right" because when I do I get rigid, defensive, caught up in rules. When I am caught up in the rules, I forget to use curiosity and creativity. I forget to follow my nose.

I am trying to get out of my own way and let myself be good at the things I am good at, instead of focusing all of my energy on the things I'd like to improve. I am trying to learn (or is it remember?) how to play the way I am built to play. At the same time, there are many things I'd really like to get better at. I'm in a learning season, a messy middle filled with new inputs and ideas. Everything feels confusing, and when I second guess myself, I can't smell a treat even when it's under my nose.

I don't know the right answer for myself here, but I know what worked for Maizie. I had to throw the treat behind my own back. "Find it!" I called, and we locked eyes. She cocked her head, confused. She hadn't seen me throw it, and I hadn't seen it land. I couldn't give her any hints. This time it was all her.

"Go on, find it!" I called again. I'm telling you, I saw the moment she decided to use her nose. She might as well have shrugged. Then she took off, nose in the grass. Less than 30 seconds later, she was chewing her reward. I'm going to try to show up that way today, myself. Good at what I'm good at, confident and playful. I think it will help me relax and have fun. I think it will help me learn.

Maizie hard at nosework