Episode
730 — Hypnosis for Dog Handlers: Calm Your Mind, Free Your Dog
- Podcast
- Pure Dog Talk
- Published
- Mar 16, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2338
- Processing state
not_requested
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Summary
Hypnosis for Dog Handlers: Calm Your Mind, Free Your Dog In this fascinating episode, host Laura Reeves welcomes Radek Blažo, a dog show enthusiast and certified hypnotherapist from Slovakia, whose two passions — purebred dogs and cognitive behavioral hypnotherapy — have collided in a surprisingly powerful way. Radek's dog journey began at age 15 in Slovakia, when his father took him to visit breeders and he fell in love with Lhasa Apsos. He eventually traveled to Italy to learn the craft of handling and later came to the United States, where mentors like Melissa Pepke and professional handler Barbara Beisel shaped his understanding of the sport. He now works with Tibetan Terriers alongside close friends while maintaining deep roots in the Lhasa community. After a career pivot into journalism and then into cognitive behavioral hypnotherapy — which he studied through a college in the UK — Radek had a lightbulb moment at a dog show. Watching a clearly skilled handler fall apart in the breed ring, with her anxiety visibly transferring to her dog, he realized he could bridge his two worlds. The science backs him up. Research from the University of Bristol confirms that dogs can detect human emotions through scent and actually change their behavior in response to stress, fear or sadness. As Radek puts it, you can fake a smile but you can't fake your hormones — dogs smell adrenaline, sweat, and the full cocktail of anxiety whether you want them to or not. The result is a feedback loop Laura aptly calls a "death spiral": the handler gets nervous, the dog reacts, the handler gets more nervous and so on. Radek's online course addresses this from multiple angles. He begins by teaching the psychology behind show-day triggers — being judged, time pressure, negative self-talk — and…