Business leader's book explores how dogs make us better humans
Bea Bohm-Meyer has combined her success as a business mentor and coach with her "crazy love of dogs" to write a book called How Dogs Make Us Better Humans.
The self-published book, which achieved best-seller status on Amazon, was born when Bohm-Meyer's consulting work dropped off at the beginning of the pandemic, and like many others, she suddenly had more downtime.
"I was sitting and watching my dogs play outside. They came in and I was a little bit sad, and one of them just came to hug me. I was thinking how happy they made me and all of the things that they taught me throughout my life," she told Taproot.
"So I started writing what I felt about them and some of the stories around loss and learning and I thought ... these dogs really have taught me so much about life and how to show up in the world."
As Bohm-Meyer began reflecting about her own dogs and gathering stories about others, she quickly found that there was no shortage of tales to tell. On a survey she put out to owners through her partner's business, The Leash Team, the overwhelming answer to "What do you think a dog's purpose is?" was "unconditional love."
That's a feeling she has experienced with all of her dogs, including an eight-year-old rescue named Buckley and a Great Pyrenees-Maremma named Eddie, who helped her recover from the loss of her border collie Charlie.
One of the stories Bohm-Meyer shares in her book is about sports psychologist John Dunn, who talks about never punishing your dog for the sake of learning.
"(Dunn) had a service dog that he took with him everywhere. He was late for meeting and he went out and called his dog, and his dog wouldn't come. And it was because (Dunn) was upset," she explained. "He realized that, so he calmed himself down and went out and his energy was great, and his dog came right away."
Bohm-Meyer's work focuses on building corporate cultures through compassionate leadership, which she quickly realized is closely linked to what she's learned from her dogs. While she didn't want to tell people exactly how to show up in the leadership world, Bohm-Meyer includes a summary at the end of each chapter that has a subtle lesson about how to be a better human being.
"So it dances between our love of dogs and how they make us better. And if we're really present, they help us become not only better human beings but better leaders."
