The Day Nobody Ran: What 11 Off-Leash Dogs Taught Me About Trust

People always ask me how I keep count. Simple: I count the legs and divide by four. If I get a decimal, we have a problem.

But the question I get most is this: how did you never lose a dog? For nine years, more than 2,000 walks, no fences, no leashes. The honest answer is that I never controlled them. Nobody can control 35 dogs in a forest. I learned that for certain on the day I lost control completely.

Meet Piper

Piper is a Parson Jack Russell. Thirteen pounds of dog and two hundred pounds of opinion. She is famous for one thing: disappearing. She treats "come" as a suggestion. I once found her a foot and a half underground and had to call for backup with a shovel. We dug her out, and she immediately tried to go back in. Her owners, who in my opinion are saints, have come out on rescue missions more times than I can count.

The day nobody ran

One winter, I was sick. But I had 11 dogs waiting, and walking is sacred to me, so we went. Once we were in the forest, I started coughing hard and decided to sit down. That is the last decision I remember making.

Then I woke up with a jolt. I checked my phone. I had been out cold in the snow for five or six minutes.

My first thought was not, am I okay? My first thought was: Piper. Six minutes! In Jack Russell time, that's a different postal code.

I got up, with no idea where to look. Then I turned around to check on Jazz, my smallest dog, eleven pounds. And there was Jazz. And right beside her was Piper, looking at me like I was the one who had wandered off.

For those minutes I had no voice. No commands. No treats. Nothing to hold her with. And the dog who always ran chose to stay.

That was the day I understood. I was never controlling the pack. I was part of it. Piper didn't stay because of anything I did that day. She stayed because of every day before it.

The same is true with people

Long before the dogs, I worked at sea in the merchant navy. One night our container ship sailed into a storm: thirteen hours, rolling over forty degrees, losing containers into the sea. Two giant steel rings broke loose in the engine room. The second engineer, the fitter and I spent over an hour chasing them with chain hooks. The fitter and I were not friends. But when I jumped, I had to trust he would be ready to hook. We secured them, and the ship made it.

When control is impossible, trust is the only thing that holds.

What this means for leaders

Trust isn't tested on the good days. It's tested when things go wrong. On those days, everyone watches one thing: you. When I panic, the pack panics. When I stay steady, they find their way back to me. Your calm becomes their calm.

This is the heart of my PACK Framework: Presence, Assurance, Consistency and Keep steady. Four simple habits that build the kind of trust that holds when you can't hold anything at all.

So think of your next bad day. The one that's coming, because it's always coming. Decide now how you want your people to see you handle it.

People don't stay because they're tied to you. They stay because you're worth coming back to.