Hélène Lawler, Faculty (Foundations, Herding)

Hélène (she/her) is a professional dog sport performance coach who specializes on helping trainers and competitors master their mental game, as well as dial in their skills and performance, to acheive their goals and dreams in dog sports.

Her areas of specialty are: Mindset coaching and resolving over-arousal problems (at both ends of the leash!) in dog sports.

Hélène has been training dogs since 1989, when she got her first dog, a border collie named Jake. Over the years, she has explored obedience, search and rescue, protection sports, rally, tricks, and freestyle, among others. She discovered agility in 2004, and herding in 2005. Herding quickly became her passion; she was so excited about it that she took lessons for a whole year without a dog!

In 2006, Hélène bought her first herding dog — a border collie named Hannah. Hannah was an amazing partner and teacher, and together had a very successful career in both agility and herding. They won the Ontario novice herding championship in their first year of competition. They proceeded to go all the way to Open in USBCHA herding while simultaneously competing at the Masters level in agility.

Hélène has also been very active in rescue over the years, giving her the opportunity to work with a wide variety of dogs and challenges. It was through working with rescue dogs that she discovered and became committed to using positive reinforcement-based training methods.

Her passion today is finding practical, hands on ways of applying the science of learning to training working and sport dogs. Additionally, she is exploring new understandings of arousal and finding innovative ways of putting that learning into practice.

Hélène is also deeply committed to natural rearing as a critical component of dog training, believing that a clear, sound mind and a strong, healthy body are integral to a calm, confident, eager-to-learn animal partner.

Today, Hélène lives on a mixed livestock farm in rural eastern Ontario with her team of Border Collies, Maremma guardian dogs, an Australian Working Kelpie, and a rat terrier named Bea.

You can follow Hélène on Facebook here, on IG and TikTok at @helene.lawler.

For more information, go to www.helenelawler.com, or reach out to her directly at hello@helenelawler.com.

Pronouns: Hélène goes by she/her.