Guest Post

Five Communication Lessons from a Search-and-Rescue Dog by Susannah Charleson Author of: Scent of the Missing: Love & Partnership with a Search-and-Rescue Dog She does not speak English, and I do not speak dog. And yet somehow six years into my partnership with Puzzle, a golden retriever and certified search-and-rescue K9, we have forged a common language. We need it in the search field. Our working life together is framed by loss and urgency—a person missing, time passing, a family and community desperate for answers. And so Puzzle and I enter the hard spaces where a lost person might be, and I give my dog a command, and off she goes into the thick of it, independent and ahead of me, ready to communicate back what she knows. It’s my job to translate her and move all of us closer to a rescue. Having run beside many other dogs and handlers before I met the puppy who would become my partner, I knew this kind of collaboration existed, this necessary dialogue. What I didn’t realize is how my work with Puzzle in the search field would improve my communication with other humans, too. Here are some of the lessons offered by a working search dog in the dark. 1. Avoid Hasty Conclusions. Experience is the best teacher, we’re told, but sometimes past experience can be misleading. While it’s easy to judge from the obvious and frame people, places and events by things we’ve seen before, such grab-and-go thinking can cause us to overlook important differences, to miss what we don’t expect, and to stereotype others. Search dogs don’t work with these kinds of preconceptions. Every new situation is taken on its own terms, the obvious and the subtle alike. The dogs operate on what’s real and present to them right…

I reviewed She-Rain:  A Story of Hope by Michael Cogdill a few weeks ago. I absolutely loved it and blathered on and on about it in my review.  I've been given permission to post an article Michael Cogdill wrote. He had me tearing up again when I read this. I swear I'm not a crier, but he keeps finding my buttons! Enjoy. The High Calling of Hard Times: Leadership, Hope, and Radical Love -- Even on the TV News By Michael Cogdill, Author of She-Rain: A Story of Hope The complaints sail almost daily into my professional life. People tell me they find the news so depressing they can't watch anymore. I understand their longing for hope, even as I say the news contains a mother lode of the hope they crave. We journalists and viewers have a way of missing it, even as we look straight at it. My answer grows from having covered terrible news on television for more than twenty-five years. Holding what I deem the sacredness of human grief on my very breath -- as a television reporter and anchor -- has revealed to me the power of the news to inform some of the best of humanity. It forms a lesson in leadership, especially in the worst of times. Aristotle believed "happiness depends upon ourselves." In the coverage of stories such as 9-11, the earthquake in Haiti, or a suffering child in America, we discover the joy of our dependency upon one another. Those stories contain a radical love -- the kind we feel for a stranger in whose eyes we recognize something magnetically familiar. News of human suffering clarifies what Mother Theresa meant when she said charity isn't about pity. It's about love. Too often we who cover and consume the news -- or…