Between Seasons: What Potty Training a Puppy Taught Me About Renewing My Mind
Between Seasons: Entry 3
Between Seasons is my journal while the podcast rests. Season 2 of The Redeemed Perfectionist podcast returns in January, and until then, I'm taking you along as I build what's next.
Potty training a puppy taught me more about renewing my mind than I expected. You don’t shame the puppy. You just keep gently carrying it back to where it belongs, and that’s how we take every thought captive too.
“Tell the puppy where to pee.”
I thought we were going to discuss perfectionism, not dog training?
LOL. Believe it or not, they’re very connected, at least metaphorically. Stick with me. I promise it all comes together.
I’ve been telling you something big was coming. Well, friend, it’s here! But before I tell you the thing, I need to give you a little backstory.
I Didn’t Want What I Want Now
Over the past couple of years, the Lord has been working on my heart to line up my desires with His.
“Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.” – Psalm 37:4
It’s easy to read that verse as a transaction: if I want the thing, I’d better do this thing called delighting in the Lord. As if God were a vending machine, and if I put in enough coins, out comes what I asked for.
Except our God isn’t a vending machine, is He?
I think the truer meaning is this. As I delight in Him (joyfully spending time with Him, hearing His heart, seeking His will, trusting Him), my desires and my vision start to grow into what He wants for me. We become one, and I start wanting what He wants. Some of those desires might be things I already wanted. Others are things I never would have imagined.
That has been my story. As I’ve delighted in Him, I’ve found things that fill me up that I never saw coming, like writing and podcasting. Neither one was in my plans until the Lord put them in my heart.
And here’s the important part: the desire didn’t come first. It grew as I walked in obedience. Feeding the thing made me want the thing.
What we feed, grows. (Hang on to that one. It matters later.)
The Thing I Wrestled With
One thing I’ve always wanted is to mentor groups of women. If you ever want to see me lit up, watch me lead a group conversation that builds Kingdom community and a deeper walk with Jesus. It’s like someone hooked me up to an IV of happy hormones, and it carries me for hours.
What I didn’t think applied to me was 1:1 coaching.
For months I wrestled with the Lord about it. But the confirmations kept coming, and He made it very clear that 1:1 coaching was part of His plan for me.
As I kept delighting in Him, my vision for it grew, and then my appetite for it did too. But one thing kept bothering me:
I didn’t have a defined program or method I could call my own.
How would I help women overcome?
How would I guide them so they walked away with practical tools and changes they could actually see in their lives?
I wrestled hard with this. I’d been on the receiving end of other people’s programs and found incredible freedom. I had my own testimony and the practices I’d learned in my own walk with Him. Still, I felt like something was missing.
And that one thing kept me from launching.
But I kept delighting myself in Him. Then one day, out of nowhere, the answer came, and my heart leapt.
Have You Ever Done This?
You know when something triggers you and suddenly you’re in a full-blown anxiety spiral? Or something trips your anger button and you go from zero to felony in a hot second?
Here’s what researchers have found: our bodies remember. A painful experience from childhood can stay stored in your nervous system and fire off years later when something today feels like what happened back then.
Experiences aren’t stored only as memories. They’re stored as feelings, reactions, and sensations too.
That’s why triggers are almost always historical.
In the heat of the moment, you’re not thinking, “Wow, this feels exactly like what so-and-so did to me when I was ten.” Your body is reacting to old data, and your mind quickly comes up with a present-day reason for it.
So what if your system could get an upgrade?
What if the old data could be updated so that the thing that used to set you off doesn’t have the same hold on you?
What if that didn’t require a long, painful trip down memory lane or a year’s worth of paychecks?
What if being transformed by the renewing of your mind (Romans 12:2) was more than a verse you know, and became something you actually live?
What if you could take a thought captive in the moment and make it obedient to Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5)?
Here’s My News
For the past several months, I’ve been deep in training, and I am now a certified neurocoach!
This was the missing piece. It’s the answer the Lord dropped in my lap while I was busy delighting in Him and not trying to force it.
Ok, Leneé, but you STILL haven’t told us what any of this has to do with telling a puppy where to pee.
Fair enough. Here it is.
Tell the Puppy Where to Pee
In neurocoaching, there’s something we call directionalizing. It just means telling your mind where to go on purpose.
Think about potty training a puppy. When it has an accident on the rug, you don’t spend the afternoon yelling at it, and you don’t decide it’s a bad dog. You pick it up and calmly carry it to the spot where it’s supposed to go. Then you do it again. And again. Eventually, it goes there on its own.
Our minds work much the same way. For many of us, our minds were trained years ago, by fear and by a picture of God as someone keeping score. So of course they keep running back to the same rug: You messed up. He’s disappointed. Try harder.
Shaming that puppy has never worked. (Believe me, I tried for years.) What works is lovingly and consistently picking it up and taking it where it belongs: to what’s true. To what’s lovely. To what God actually says about you (Philippians 4:8).
That’s what taking every thought captive looks like. It’s intentional, it’s gentle, and it’s done over and over again.
And remember: what we feed, grows.
What This Means for You
I help driven women keep their ambition and lose the exhaustion by getting to the place where the striving comes from.
Together, we find where fear-based striving lives in your body, gently loosen its grip without reliving the past, and give your body new information rooted in God’s love. That way you can keep achieving, but from rest instead of exhaustion.
Imagine going from “I know God loves me, so why does my body still react like I’m about to get fired?” to “That demanding inner critic is so much quieter, and God’s voice is so much clearer.”
This is woven into everything I’ve been building behind the scenes, and there’s more I’m not quite ready to tell you yet. 😉 Here’s what I can tell you: in December, I’ll be opening a limited number of Clarity Sessions. It’s a starting point. It’s one focused session where we get clear on where you are, what you really want, and which direction we’re headed.
The people on my early list will hear about it first, before I share it anywhere else.
If your heart just did a little jump reading this, [get on the early list]
Love you all,
Leneé
P.S. Want something to sit with while you wait? Episode 37 of The Redeemed Perfectionist podcast, Why Following All the Rules Traps You in Perfectionism, is where I first mentioned the puppy, and it pairs perfectly with this post. [Listen here] And if you’re new around here, you can catch up on the rest of my Between Seasons entries [here].
Just so you know: neurocoaching is coaching, not counseling or therapy. It’s not a replacement for care from your doctor or a licensed counselor, but it can be a beautiful companion to it.