Ep.46 Let Your Dog Lead – A Conversation with Michael Overlie
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Michael: Hello and welcome to the love and compassion podcast with Giselle. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives in our world. Don’t forget to like it, subscribe for more amazing content. On today’s podcast, we’ll be talking about learning from our dogs, how to live a more fulfilling life.
Gissele: My guest today is Michael Overlea, who is a canine partnered men’s guide, author of the book, Let Your Dog Lead. He helps male dog owners who suck at relationships, become amazing at relationships. He provides one to one coaching individual in small group retreats.
With the dogs, of course, and he’s developing an app so that men can dip their toes in. Are you ready to become amazing? Please join me in welcoming Michael to the show. Hi, Michael.
Michael: Yay. Oh, I sound pretty good.
Gissele: You do. You sound fantastic. I was wondering if you could start by sharing [00:01:00] with our listeners what led you to do the work that you do today.
Michael: A lifetime of not paying attention followed by the death of my brother in 2017. What happened from that event was just, it was my awakening as a but I was plunged into deep, deep grief over the loss of him. He was, he was the one guy I could count on in my world, right? What happened was he died a few days later.
I had this experience where I was literally leveled and laid out and crying uncontrollably and feeling like I was being ripped apart. And as I came out of that that, that same, that same day. My dog crawled up on my chest and just started pumping me full of love and healing energy. And I was like, what the heck is going on?
So I started looking into this and then I [00:02:00] realized also, well, this is very important. I realized that I didn’t like who I was being in the world, but I wasn’t able to see that I wasn’t able to. Notice how I was showing up and now I could and I didn’t like it. I was like, whoa, we need to change this right away.
So that precipitated all of this and what that dog did for me. I never knew it was possible, so I started looking back at my other dogs and realize what they had done for me. My 1st dog kept me alive when I was 11
. I was suicidal after my dad left. And well, right. Yeah, but I just displaced all that. So all these things, all these dogs, all these lessons, like, oh, my gosh, people need to know about this.
I need to go help some people and so that they can, they can get out of this, this tough guy, macho destructive cycle.
Gissele: Thank you for sharing that. It’s so interesting as a dog owner myself, I have a Doberman Shepherd. It’s so interesting [00:03:00] how dogs offer us so much but very subtly without doing a lot.
You know, in the book you talk about how often in the world we’re doing, we’re doing, we’re doing without being. Dogs just kind of show up in the world as beings, right? And so what were some of the key lessons you learned from your dogs throughout your journey?
Michael: Oh, that I can slow down. I mean, that is so important.
And, you know, before we started recording today, you and I were having this conversation about why on earth do I get up at three 30 in the morning? That’s right. If you want to look at it from a financial perspective, I’m paying myself first, right? So I’m, I’m filling my cup so that I can go out through the rest of my day and give people what, what they might need.
Dogs are fantastic. They can get in this huge scuffle fight. And then minutes later, they’re just like, what? Oh, was there a problem? You know, we, we don’t do that. We create
