Amore Magazine

Dear Jamie,

I felt so touched by what you wrote about your dogs and how they make you feel. It played my heartstrings like a symphony. I shared your emotions, felt your love and my meart broke with yours when you lost gidget.
Do you remember asking my thoughts about blogging on your website vs. fitness tips? Well this is the kind of stuff you should write about! This is the stuff that would keep me coming back and have the same effect on the rest of your fans. Although you lead an exciting life that any of us would enjoy being a part of, a short blog about your schedule doesn’t express who you are deep inside. I would never read fitness tips, but a story from your heart about how you feel is where I can feel your passion and experience intimacy which is what I want. Let me feel your emotions in a story, make my heart pound, let me empathize with the love you feel for your dogs and that will keep me coming back for more, again, and again. Why not continue your life story, write a biography, don’t stop there and tell us more. Tell us about how you felt meeting Ginger, tell us how your heart pounds in your chest with the love you feel looking into her eyes. Tell us your happiest memory with her. Tell us your hopes and dreams for her. If you appreciate your fans then let us appreciate you with stories that really let us get to know you on a deeper level.

I am so interested in some of the subjects you mentioned that I have spend years studying them and how to develop them. It’s so interesting that you would mention how a man could aspire to possess the same qualities that I have been studying? You said “Their ever-present loyalty, love, devotion, sacrifice and endless desire to make me happy are qualities only most men can aspire to possess.”
What a coincidence that I also aspire to have those same qualities? I’ve studied empathy, intuition, love in its many forms, relationship skills, communications skills, compassion and many more. I have learned so much through the many, many books I have read about these qualities is that I have learned how to define and measure them as EQ (Emotional Intelligence Quotient). It’s a type of knowledge based IQ or skill that can be measured by an aptitude test. You could recognize a person with a high EQ as the person who is able to read the emotional state of another accurately and react appropriately. It’s the behavior of observing a combination of subtle indicators and using the information gained from them to react appropriately to the person, group, or situation. The skill to read these subtle indicators is similar in man and animal. So if we develop your ability to understand dogs posture, movement, eyes, mouth, tone, and behavior, we become able accurately empathize with them as we simultaneously develop your ability to read other people and empathize with them.
Knowing how to read a person quickly and easily is an essential skill to master in order to be able to effectively motivate and train a person so that’s why I have been honing and developing these skills for so many years. I have been trying to empathize with my clients in a way that would allow me to be highly tuned to what’s going on in their minds and bodies. I have nearly become psychic in my ability to synchronize with the emotional state of another person by reading several hundred books on the subject. I’ve become very sensitive to people and now I want to teach that sensitivity to others. I would like to package what has made me who I am into a concise personal development course. I have accumulated such a vast amount of knowledge that I believe I can write a book and teach a course. I think I could teach people to have more intimate relationships and marriages that will last a lifetime.

I want to write about you about Jamie. I have learned all of this because I was inspired by you with my desire to empathize with you and be able to anticipate your needs and understand what would make you truly happy. That’s why I’m trying to talk to you about it. Don’t freak out because everything that I intend to for you is attuned with your wants and needs.
I’m trying to open a dialogue about something that you appear to be willing to talk about, your relationship with your dogs. I want to talk about the skills that you would develop and use in order to communicate better with your dogs. That’s why I gave you that book about dogs and if you read that book you will learn exactly what I would want to teach you.
Excuse me for interpreting your blog as you saying that your willing to cooperate with me and your willing to discuss your relationship with your dogs. Correct me if I’m wrong.

The reason I gave you that book was to share an experience, to help you to feel what I did, to empathize with me, and empathize with your dogs.
I can tell you haven’t finished the book but maybe talking about it will sharpen your focus so you learn more from it.

Ever looked at the world through your dogs eyes? Empathized with what their thinking? Seeing? Feeling? Or thought about what they aren’t able to think, see, and feel? There are differences between the worlds that you and your dog live in. Understanding those differences will make your dogs much happier and give you a more intimate relationship with them. The great thing about this book is that it will not only teach you how to empathize with your dogs but how to understand yourself and the people around you. If you develop enough understanding to be able to empathize with your dogs you will actually be able to understand everybody around you equivalently. There are thoughts that we can have that our dogs cannot, but there aren’t any thoughts that a dog can have which we cannot have. It’s a one way street and we are on top, but the goal of empathy is to share in their experience.
Being able to “accurately” understand an emotional state, separately from your own is essential to true intimacy and necessary to forming loving bonds that will last a lifetime.
Everyone views the world through their own perspective and the key to enlightenment is understand those perspectives and learning how to “try them on”. It’s like trying on another person’s shoes for a minute. When you’re looking at life through your dogs eyes remember that their puzzle has fewer dimensions, like a cardboard table top puzzle of an Eiffel Tower compared to a rubrics cube with 16 sides. As humans we’re able to consider many more dimensions and viewpoints, so when you understand your dogs, remember they cannot have complicated thoughts. It’s called anthropomorphism and will be explained in the book.

The deeper more basic emotions we do actually have in common like happiness, fear, love, distain which are all emotions, not thoughts.
The English word 'emotion' is derived from the French word émouvoir. This is based on the Latin emovere, where e- (variant of ex-) means 'out' and movere means 'move’. The related term "motivation" is also derived from movere.
So emotion can be translated to ‘move out’ and emotions are constantly moving out of our bodies and being express whether we like it or not. Emotions are expressed in so so so many ways that it’s impossible to hide them or hold them in without being caught. We only need to learn how to recognize them and how their expressed to develop our ability to read people and animals. Interpreting people is an art and a science that has fascinated me for a long time and I’m so excited to share it with you.

For the Love of a Dog is an introduction to transactional analysis, behaviorism, and basic psychoanalysis all in one user friendly package. It’s an easy to understand book that covers a topic that you should be interested in. With the skills you will learn from this book you will be able to have a much more intimate and fulfilling relationship with your pets. You’ll be able to empathize with them, anticipate their needs, and make them much happier as the loving mother you where born to be.

Remember that whatever you learn from this book becomes a part of you that nobody can ever take away from you. You will become a better person for it you will grow into a better example of what you aspire to be.

Empathy defined:
Empathy is the capacity to recognize or being aware of another's state of mind or being sensitive to their emotional state without having it fully communicated in an explicit manner. Empathy does not necessarily imply compassion, or empathic concern because this capacity can be present in context of compassionate or cruel behavior.
D. M. Berger: The capacity to know emotionally what another is experiencing from within the frame of reference of that other person, the capacity to sample the feelings of another or to put oneself in another’s shoes.
Jean Decety: A sense of similarity in feelings experienced by the self and the other, without confusion between the two individuals.
William Ickes: A complex form of psychological inference in which observation, memory, knowledge, and reasoning are combined to yield insights into the thoughts and feelings of others.