The Dog in everyday life: trust, agreements and worry

The Dog is the sign people ring when something has gone wrong and someone has to say honestly how it looks. The qualities tradition assigns to it are quickly looked up and told in three words. What is more interesting is how that feels – at work, among friends, at three in the morning. That is the subject here.

Trust is a decision for him

Dog people take longer than others to make up their minds about someone new. It comes across as reserved, and it is, but it has little to do with shyness. What is happening there is observation: does what a person says match what they do? Small promises count for more here than large ones. Anyone who has been on time three times has more credit with this sign than someone who once promised something big.

Once the decision has been made, it holds – and that works in both directions. A Dog stays at the side of people whom others would have left long ago. But he also strikes people off the list and barely looks at them again afterwards. If you are built that way yourself, one small habit is worth having: once a year, take another quiet look at a person you have written off. Sometimes the occasion was smaller than it felt.

Agreements, rules and the irritation they cause

In professional life the Dog is the one who says: that is not what was agreed. Every team needs a person like that, and usually he is appreciated only once he is missing. It becomes wearing where a great deal is talked about and little is written down – this sign then spends its strength keeping spoken commitments in its head, and is annoyed by every one that lapses.

Against that a practical move helps more than an attitude: not guarding compliance, but writing the arrangement down. Two lines after the meeting, to everyone involved, friendly in tone. That takes the moral edge off the matter and makes it checkable. And a second, less comfortable point belongs with it: not every irregularity is an injustice. Anyone who takes up every one of them is no longer listened to in the cases where it really counts. It helps to decide in advance which two things one really cares about in the current year.

Worry and what helps against it

Attentiveness is hard to switch off. Anyone who spends the whole day checking whether something is amiss goes on checking in the evening – only without an object. What is typical, then, is not the large fear but the small one, which attaches itself to everything left undone: the email that has not been answered, the conversation still to come, the test result still on its way.

Reassurance, by contrast, works astonishingly badly. “It will be fine” falls flat with this sign. What helps is a concrete next step: a date, a figure, a telephone call that takes place at nine tomorrow morning. Worry that is given a task grows quieter. Worry that is merely consoled looks for the next subject. Which is why the note on the bedside table is not a tidiness habit for Dog people but a sleeping aid.

When you are dealing with a Dog

Say it straight out. Gentle circumlocutions do not reach this sign as consideration but as concealment, and a Dog that scents concealment starts to search. He takes an unpleasant piece of news, plainly said, better than a friendly hint.

And look at how much he is carrying just now. Dog people take on more than they are given, because they cannot bear to see responsibility left lying about, and they are reluctant to admit that it has become too much. The question “What have you got on your plate at the moment?” does more here than any praise. How the animal sign is arrived at in the first place, and what the calendar behind it rests on, is explained under Chinese astrology.