163. Melissa McCue-McGrath, PACT-ATI, ABTC-ATI 

COLLEEN PELAR: Welcome to Unleashed at Work and Home. I'm Colleen Pelar, and this is where pet professionals come for honest conversations about what it really takes to show up for yourself while serving the animals you love. If you've ever felt caught between compassion and exhaustion, you're in the right place. Here we explore what it means to reconnect with your inner wisdom and rediscover the joy that brought you to this work. Make sure to join my email community at colleenpelar.com for gentle, practical insights designed specifically for pet professionals. Now let's dive in.

Welcome back to Unleashed at Work and Home. My guest today is Melissa McCue-McGrath, and I am going to let her tell you what it is that she does, because it is way too hard to summarize into four words. So welcome, Melissa. I hope I get more than four words.

[1:08]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: I get it. So I'm a professional dog trainer out of — currently, now — Maine, but I spent 20 years in Boston working in high rises and urban environments, doing behavior consultations and behavior work predominantly. And then in that interim, I had also written a book called Considerations for the City Dog, and in the last 10 years I've been working on a new book called The Misadventures of the World's Okayest Dog Trainer, which I think lines up very well with the kinds of subjects and topics that you cover on your show — things like, I feel alone, I don't feel like I'm the only one doing this, or I don't know where to turn, or doing something wrong. Or maybe doing something as right as you possibly can in the moment, but then getting more information later, and maybe if you had that information, something would have changed in the initial situation — and just carrying all that with you through a career, and then trying to figure out how to come to terms with that, and how to tell other people coming into this industry: this is what you need to be ready for, because it's not all about learning theory. It's about the people that you work with.

[2:30]

COLLEEN PELAR: Yeah. It's not all about learning theory.

[2:36]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: Oh, it helps. It does help. It absolutely helps.

[2:39]

COLLEEN PELAR: But like, we can get into really interesting discussions of what quadrant does this fall in, or all of that. But in the moment with the client in the living room, that's typically not what's most helpful. I want to go back to the title of the book again. Could you please say that one more time for us?

[2:58]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: Misadventures of the World's Okayest Dog Trainer. Okayest.

[3:04]

COLLEEN PELAR: What? What? Okayest. How can we all reach to be like the okayest version of ourselves? What does that mean to you?

[3:14]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: Okayest. So this stems from two different tracks, which might happen a lot in our conversation — I do tend to derail. So the first was, I am a huge fan of this musical artist named Josh Ritter. He's an Americana folk singer, and he's been around for quite some time. He had this album called The Historical Conquest of Josh Ritter, and he knew he was kind of on this indie circuit — he wasn't famous yet, he eventually got there — but he was just some guy playing his guitar with his friends, and he just thought of getting this really ambitious, grandiose title that seemed the opposite of how he was in real life, and it tickled him to no end. So when I was trying to think of a title for this book, I kind of leaned into that idea.

But I still know enough, after doing this work for over 20 years, that there's still so much I don't know. Almost every chapter is like a shout-out-to-Freud moment — something I didn't know that turned out to be a lesson, in some way, in the profession, or with a client, or with a dog, or in one case a very fractious cat. I couldn't, with all the Dunning-Kruger of it all, say 'best,' because there's so much we don't know. And I felt like 'okayest' was the best word for that. Like, I'm striving to be my okayest self instead of my not-worst self.

And my friends and I will often joke that we are trying to do our not-worst that day when we'd go into a client's house. We're putting on our best selves, but we are trying to do the not-worst for the person in front of us. And what that means to me is: we're taking the information we have in that moment with that person in front of us, and catering that information to the person in front of us, with the dog in front of them, with maybe the other relationships going on in that home or environment or training space. And just trying to do the best with our information that we can.

Sometimes when we walk away — or when we get new information — at least we can say: I don't feel it's fair for people to say I did such a bad job at this, or I did the worst possible thing for this client, because with the information you have, if you can walk away and say I did the best I could with the information I had at the time I had it, you're golden. You can do better on the next one, on the next case, with new information. But you can't wear that on your shoulders, on your back, in your heart for your whole career. There are still ones I wake up from thinking, I wish I knew a little more. But I didn't know that at the time. So 'not worst' is kind of the cover-all for that — and a jokey way that I hope we can relate to.

[6:41]

COLLEEN PELAR: I think it's a very relatable title. And I think it's so important — that whole point you just went through — it's really easy to judge our past selves for not having resources we didn't have, knowledge we didn't have, understandings we didn't have. We're like, I wish I had known that then, and if I had, I would have done things differently. But to look back and be frustrated and angry at ourselves for that, it derails the learning that can come from it. We can wish that we had known then, but we can't be mad at ourselves that we didn't know, because if you don't know, you don't know. Period. So — you're the world's okayest dog trainer. Is there a trophy with that?

[7:41]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: Well, on the cover of the book, there's a drawing of my dog Captain, drawn by the beautiful and super-talented Lili Chin.

[7:54]

COLLEEN PELAR: Who I also got to talk to — yes!

[7:56]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: She is just brilliant at what she does. She took the likeness of my dog and had him peeing into a coffee cup that says 'World's Best Dog Trainer' on it. And I just thought, that is my trophy. The fact that she was able to make me laugh on that cover is the only trophy I'm ever going to need.

[8:20]

COLLEEN PELAR: Well, a personalized image from Lili Chin is a pretty awesome trophy. I mean, if we put that in an auction — Lili Chin will draw your dog doing something funny — people would compete for that. So that seems like a very worthy trophy for the world's okayest dog trainer. Okay. So I always like to ask my guests: when you were 10, what did you think you were going to be when you grew up?

[8:49]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: I've been thinking about this for so long in the last couple of weeks, and I think there were two tracks I could really pinpoint. The first was: I really wanted to work with dogs or animals in some way. Just coming out of the womb, I'm going to work with animals somehow. I grew up in what I'd call a more poor, working-class district in mid-coast Maine, where we didn't have a gas station in our town.

[9:35]

COLLEEN PELAR: That's pretty rural.

[9:41]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: My mom's town — we would have to go to the next town over to get gas. But my dad had a sled dog team, which I jokingly call an accidental sled dog team. He had this friend who ran the Iditarod, and in order to run the Iditarod, he had to qualify for different races, much like a marathon. So he would take his A team and go do these races, and my dad and I and my younger brother and sister would go help take care of the B team. And then when this gentleman finished the race, he came back to Maine, gave my dad 10 dogs, and pieced out to Florida — and we never saw or heard from him again. That was about 35 years ago, so either he's in witness protection or —

[10:37]

COLLEEN PELAR: He was like, I did the Iditarod and I am never seeing snow again. Florida, here I come.

[10:45]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: Jimmy Buffett forever, like drinking something neon blue out of a big pretty cup with a fun straw. But at that time, even as a kid, I thought: if I want to work with animals, I have really three ways to do this. I can be a veterinarian — which seemed like the most practical route, but it never felt right. I could be a police officer that handled a canine. Or I could be a farmer.

So when I was really thinking about this at 10, I distinctly remember taking one of our Huskies — these were working dogs tied to trees, they had doghouses, they never came in the house. They weren't trained to sit or down. And I put a leash on her and remember running her around our backyard, throwing crackers and yelling, 'Find crack!' because I thought that's how I'm going to train a drug detection dog. My poor dad, ever the realist, would watch this dog — trained to pull for a living — yank his maybe 55-pound kid across the yard, into the woods, toward the lake, down the street. And I'm just yelling at this dog, 'Find crack!' And I'm confident the neighbors heard it and just thought, that's another day at the McCue house. So I finally gave up on that, and did softball like normal kids, and put working with animals on the back burner until I went to college in Ohio for an equestrian teacher-trainer program.

The other avenue I wanted to work in was with horses. Even at 10, I'd walk down the street and muck out stalls so I could maybe get free lessons — my dad would drop me off and I'd clean stalls just to ride a horse. And I loved it. I loved being at one with this horse. And then I went to college, got bucked off, broke my spine. It was the same year Christopher Reeve did the same thing, and one of us can walk, so I was incredibly lucky. And so I was like, okay, maybe I need to recalibrate. Instead of riding horses, I switched majors to psychology — and that's where I got all the learning theory and people skills. But I couldn't figure out how to make psychology work with animals. Animal behavior as a field just wasn't on my radar in the late '90s. Those programs were few and far between and not really marketed to us. And it was hard to get that information anyway — we didn't really have the internet in the same way.

[15:03]

COLLEEN PELAR: It was so hard to get information.

[15:04]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: Yeah. It would be like some GeoCities website under construction with a very cheesy GIF of someone with a tractor.

[15:19]

COLLEEN PELAR: And we were grateful for it.

[15:21]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: Oh my gosh. I remember building my first website and being so excited by those little GIFs. And loading your whole page with them. 'I'm so creative — I'll make a black website with lime electric-green writing.' What a time to be alive. We knew nothing back then, but we all tried really hard.

[15:46]

COLLEEN PELAR: Which is the theme, isn't it? We knew nothing, but we tried hard and we learned.

[15:50]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: We did. And those GIFs aren't available anymore.

[15:54]

COLLEEN PELAR: And we're still having lots and lots of questions and trying really hard and learning new things, and looking back going, oh, yesterday I knew nothing. It just keeps going. So — there you were, graduating with a degree that didn't quite line up with animal work. What did you do?

[16:19]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: So I think listeners who work with dogs in a training or behavior capacity might find this funnier than others. I distinctly remember looking at my advisor — the psychology professor at this tiny equestrian college in upstate Ohio — and I looked him dead in the eye. I'm like, when am I ever going to need to know these quadrants? This is so infuriating. I know there's a test coming up, but when am I ever going to need to know this? And I have since emailed him at least half a dozen times in the last 20 years going, 'Hey, still using it every day. Dr. Hushan, sorry.'

So I ended up taking that psychology degree. And what was really interesting: I had tried to get a Bachelor of Arts in psychology, because I'm like, I'm not good at science. I had a teacher tell me in seventh grade — made some flippant joke that landed wrong with little 13-year-old me — and I walked away thinking, I can't do science. I loved science up until that point. And it was just one of those things that I couldn't even tell you what they said today. I just know that they said it, and it hit me in a way where everybody laughed, and it didn't feel like they were laughing with me. I'd tried really hard on that project. And to this day, I cannot imagine this teacher thought anything of it — I think she genuinely thought we were joking together.

So I went from age 13, literally through my entire degree, thinking I can't do science. And yet every elective I took — Intro to Meteorology, Intro to Forensic Science — every elective was a science course. But I would stop after the intro or second level, because I'd think, I'm not going to be able to do the harder version. So I talked myself out of continuing on a science track.

When I went to apply for my graduation diploma, the woman at the registrar's desk said, 'Why are you getting a Bachelor of Arts?' I said, because that's what I signed up for. She said, 'Look at all these science classes. You qualify for a Bachelor of Science degree.' I said, that's impossible. And she sat me down and said, 'It would be a disservice to yourself to say you can't do science, when every single elective you took — you weren't taking dance classes, you were taking science classes.'

You would think you'd know yourself enough, but I didn't. I was 22 and had no idea I was actually interested in science — because of this weighted blanket I'd been carrying for no reason, like, for almost 10 years.

So then I kind of fumbled after college. Did some odd jobs. I ended up getting a Border Collie puppy from a shelter that I was told was a spaniel — after I specifically said I don't want a herding dog and I don't want a puppy. I walked out of that shelter with a four-month-old Border Collie, and that dog was my best friend for 12 years. She needed something to do, so I got her into competitive frisbee, put on a competitive frisbee event, and a local dog trainer came over and said, 'Would you like to be my assistant?' And I was like, okay.

And that's how I got into it. I didn't go looking for this work. I fell — ass-backwards, is the only way to say it — into this work, and it was the only thing that clicked. Like, this is what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm supposed to be teaching, I'm supposed to be working with people, and I still get to work with animals. I didn't find it gracefully — but I found it.

[20:49]

COLLEEN PELAR: That is so awesome. So from college graduation to becoming the assistant of this dog trainer — what were you doing to pay your bills?

[21:01]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: I was working as an office manager at a startup, and I'd also worked for a while as a receptionist for an animal hospital, because I was still thinking, maybe I could do vet tech. I don't have to do math or science, maybe I could do the tech part — but I was always kept at the front desk. I was like, okay, I guess I'm not supposed to go in the back.

But then once I found the training gig and started — which really worked out for that trainer, because this person didn't have the funds yet to pay an assistant, and I was interning in big air quotes, so they got free labor and I got to learn the work while still doing some vet work and office managing. I was doing three gigs at the same time, right out of college, trying to afford living in Boston.

[22:09]

COLLEEN PELAR: Which is so common for pet pros, isn't it? Multiple gigs to pay the bills — the one that fills your heart and the one that fills your refrigerator. Not always the same.

[22:19]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: They are not. And it is a lot of hustle. I ended up giving up one of those gigs and just did dog walking for a while. I'd walk 10 or 12 miles with dogs all day, then come back, shower, change, and go teach or assist or whatever was required.

And then eventually I realized the trainer I was working for was doing some questionable things — before we started the microphones we were talking about 'you don't know what you don't know,' and it was starting to click that some of the things this person was doing wasn't feeling right to me. There was alpha rolling — and this was the early 2000s — and it was articulated to me as, this isn't really alpha rolling, we're just trying to put them on their back to make them stop struggling. I'm like, that's totally different. Sure. And as I was going through it, I was like, this doesn't feel right. And then this person got their credentials taken away, and I was like, okay. That spidey sense that was telling me something isn't quite right is now validated by the certifying body. In that case, I feel like I should start trusting my instincts a little better.

So I started working towards getting a certification — the CPDT, because all the other options before the internet age required giving up your life for 10 weeks and going to something like the Academy for Dog Trainers in California. If you were a single person just out of college with pets, you couldn't take your dog with you and you didn't have the funds. They were valuable resources — but just not accessible.

So I went through the CPDT route, self-taught, read a bunch of books, refreshed the learning theory I'd once said I'd never need — and studied really hard. I earned that certification in 2008, and I felt like, okay. I feel validated. This was, I think, the first thing I actually did for me. Not for a boss, not for a partner. And that was the biggest validation: I actually know this stuff. I shouldn't be second-guessing myself anymore in this way. I'll find whole new ways to second-guess myself.

[25:59]

COLLEEN PELAR: Because you're creative — you can come up with new things. So during this time, were you working for yourself, or were you still working for someone?

[26:15]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: I was still working for this individual in Boston, who's still around — this person is still training, and they do mostly good work. I think in a lot of training, when we get into conversations about camps of training, we can focus so much on a thing they're doing that's maybe not the way you'd want to do it, while 98% of what they're doing is solid and really good and has helped a lot of people. I do still believe that's the case with this person. But the place where they weren't lining up with my values was big enough that I was like, okay, I'm going to go now.

So I ended up connecting with another dog training outfit in the area — all women, which was great. They each brought something really cool to the program. I was watching agility training for the first time, legitimate scent work for the first time, and real behavior work. The person who ran that place ended up becoming executive director for the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants. And I felt valued and validated there. I was still making a lot of mistakes, but I knew I was making them and could get good feedback back — which wasn't really happening the same way at the other place.

And then from there I got roped into the New England Dog Training Club, which is the oldest obedience club in the country. They've changed it to a positive reinforcement training facility, which is great. It's a club — they only meet once a week — and they have a biochemistry professor as president, a woman who ran a shelter as training director, dog walkers who are also accredited trainers teaching classes. It's this really cool environment: absolute mayhem because you have three classes going on in a gym with 14 trainers running around, but it's controlled chaos. Every four to ten people in one ring has three people helping them. It's a beautiful way to train trainers who want to learn and to train people in busy urban environments who really need it.

[30:09]

COLLEEN PELAR: And so you grew up in Maine, then you were in Boston, and now you're back in Maine. What drew you back?

[30:18]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: COVID was a time to be alive. Nobody wants to hear the three words 'aspiring EDM DJ' in the same sentence, and that was our upstairs neighbor who really liked to practice his craft at two in the morning. And we had a second-grader living and quote-unquote going to school in our kitchen. I had my husband working in an office in our apartment. And I was teaching my dog training classes in our apartment — apartment bedrooms are smaller than house bedrooms, turns out, and I had this bed that came out to about here, with the wall about two feet away. So there was this little path, and that's where I was teaching all my dog training classes for about two years. I'd put my computer on the floor so you could see down this tunnel between my bed and the wall. And I'm like, this is not sustainable.

Cost of living was going up so high. My husband said, most of my work is done online anyway — let's go to Maine. And I'd always wanted to come back. It took quite some time to find a place, but once we did, my husband and I said, we're going to die in this house, and that's okay. We are never leaving.

[31:57]

COLLEEN PELAR: It's wonderful that you found a place that really suits you.

[32:00]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: Yeah. And now we've got bougie chickens. They're ridiculous, they're so funny. And our dog is happier because he's got some space. Our kid is so much happier too. We didn't realize — all the behavior work I do with animals, you can equally apply it to humans. You have to be a lot more careful when attributing characteristics to humans, but my daughter was having panic attacks, and being in a busier environment really wasn't suiting her. And I wasn't thinking of it quite like that, because that was the environment we were in, and I wasn't thinking of her as a learner — I was thinking of her as my daughter, which felt different.

When we moved to Maine, those panic attacks showed up in a very different way. She had about seven months where she missed middle school because she couldn't get in the door due to panic attacks that were so severe. And I was like, wait — she's a learner. I know what to do here, because my job is in behavior.

Going into those meetings with school staff — and hearing, 'Well, you're just a dog trainer' — it felt so flippant and hurtful. But I was able to say, no, this is actually what I do, and articulate how to work very challenging behavior cases, and then use that same language for my kid.

When we were able to get her some medicinal support — in the same way that we would in a big behavior case, if your body doesn't make enough serotonin, store-bought is fine — luckily her pediatrician felt the same way. And her pediatrician has since become the Chief Medical Officer at Boston Children's. So for her to look at me and say, 'You're right,' going back to this theme of validation — it's like, I do know my stuff. I do know how this works, even if people who don't understand my job will just say, you're just a dog trainer. It's not how the 'just' works.

[34:16]

COLLEEN PELAR: And it goes with so many pet professional careers — my pet sitting clients and my dog walking clients hear that all the time. 'Oh, it's just the dog walker.' What's in that little word that's so dismissive — of the humanity and the intelligence and the experience of the person who's there, not even counting the education, because maybe we do or do not have a formal degree in a particular field. But the 'just' — it feels very flippant.

[35:01]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: It feels like a backhand. Yeah. And then to try to defend against it — that's a hard thing to defend against.

[35:06]

COLLEEN PELAR: Yeah. So hierarchical.

[35:09]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: Yeah. That one didn't feel very good. But being able to eventually use what I know — I ended up creating a behavior plan the same way that I would with dogs. It had a flow chart and everything, and they put it into what's called a 504, which is a supportive plan to help kids who are in mainstream classes but need a little support. Like, if a kid has ADHD, they might get fidget toys. Or if a kid has anxiety, they can just get up and walk out of the room without getting permission. Things written into a 504 to help these kids have their needs met.

And one of my daughter's things was this flow chart: Can she communicate to you, yes or no? Can we give her medication at this point, yes or no? Can she walk, yes or no? I had the flow chart, and I was waiting for them to say, oh, well, this isn't going to work. And they looked it over, passed it by their psychologists and psychiatrists at school, and they said, 'Actually, this is brilliant.' And I'm like... I know.

[36:25]

COLLEEN PELAR: And now they're like, let's create one of these for these other eight children.

[36:33]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: Yeah. I was like, this is what I do, guys.

[36:35]

COLLEEN PELAR: The belief that we have as humans that we're these intelligent, rational creatures — we are not. We are emotion-based creatures who live in and respond to our environments. We are reactive. And there's so much we can do to support ourselves. The science of supporting animals is really very applicable to supporting humans, because first we're animals, and then we also have this part that can envision and craft and create other kinds of thinking — that we don't yet know whether other animals share. We'd like to believe we're unique in that. But the evidence keeps showing us that almost all the things we thought made us so special are shared by many of our animal friends.

[37:34]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: And going back to how, when people are listening, they might think they're alone — or think they're doing something wrong. Even on that level, like we're talking about how we humans think we're the only ones, and now the evidence is showing that we're not. Whenever somebody thinks 'I'm alone in this' — you're not. There are more people like that. And it's important to articulate that, because it can be so lonely.

I don't know if you find this with your reactive dog clients, but they just feel so alone. And I'm like, you're not alone — it's just you can't have a reactive dog party and bring all your reactive dogs together and socialize and talk, because that's not what that dog needs. But they aren't alone. They are lonely — but they're not alone. And just knowing that you're not the only one is validating and supportive, right there in that knowledge. And once you know you're not alone, then maybe somebody else wrote about it, or talked about it, or went through it — and then you can start to seek out that information. But if you don't even know that anybody else is going through it, you don't know where to look or how to look.

[38:55]

COLLEEN PELAR: Yeah. And we tend to then believe the flaws are in ourselves.

[39:01]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: Exactly.

[39:03]

COLLEEN PELAR: And it's so not. Many of these ideas are in your book, and I — I have not completed it. I read half of it, very interesting, but that's as far as I got before recording time hit. So people might enjoy reading some of this, because these ideas are important about learning and reaching out for community and support, and that it is available — but it requires us to reach, and sometimes reach a few times, because not every reach is the right one, not every connection is the right one.

I'm looking at the clock and wanting to be respectful of your time, but I could go a lot longer. So — if you had a magic wand and could grant a wish for pet professionals, what would you give us?

[40:07]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: This is something I wrote about, and something that I think is worth saying here as well: forgive yourself. I have a lot of favorite F words, many of them I can't say on podcasts, but 'forgive yourself' is something that I think we —

[40:31]

COLLEEN PELAR: Forget to do.

[40:33]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: Something we forget to do. I find a lot of trainers, behaviorists, veterinarians, vet techs, even pet sitters — when something goes a little south, if we were talking to somebody else, a friend, in the exact same situation, we'd be like, 'it worked out, it's okay, let it go, you're good, whatever.' But when it's ourselves, we just think, oh no, those rules don't apply to me. Why would I be nice to myself?

Forgiving yourself is super important. I'll actually tell a very funny story about forgiving myself, because it kind of goes to language — and just doing the best you can with the information you have can backfire.

I was working with a very sweet family — husband, wife, two older daughters. One was in her first year of college doing veterinary work. The other was a high school junior or senior. It was a weekend, and they had said the younger daughter was off playing sports. So I took that to mean she was gone. And neither daughter was in the room when I started the meeting.

I'm working with them and this Great Dane, and the conversation went to medical issues with Great Danes. And I'm like, well, I'm not a vet, I can't speak to it — and then I saw one of the daughters was in the refrigerator, getting some breakfast. And I said, 'But she can tell you all about bloat.'

One — this was the wrong daughter. Not in vet school. And two — she's a grown woman she doesn't know telling a 16-year-old, 'Oh yeah, just look at her, she can tell you all about bloat,' without realizing that bloat is a medical condition in Great Danes. I thought I was talking shop and being cool. And once I realized — the look of horror on that poor girl's face — I was like, oh my God. 'You're the high-schooler, aren't you? Let me get out of this.' The information I had was that they had a vet student, and I was so excited to support this vet student and give her the floor. The information that came immediately after was that was not the case.

So I would tell people: forgive yourself. And also maybe wait to be more sure you have the right daughter.

[43:48]

COLLEEN PELAR: Make sure you have the right daughter! And honestly, the ripple effects if people could just forgive themselves for these moments — we're human, we will make mistakes, things will happen, and it's not the end of the world. It's okay.

[44:07]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: I'm still here. She graduated. I'm sure she's never bloated a day in her life and she looks fantastic. And I'm sure her sister is a brilliant veterinarian right now, who laughs every time she sees a Great Dane about the time the dog trainer came and basically called her younger sister fat.

[44:33]

COLLEEN PELAR: That's awesome. Thank you for sharing that. So if people wanted to learn more about you and your work, Melissa, how could they do that?

[44:49]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: Let's start with my name, because that's a doozy — Melissa McCue-McGrath. At melissamcuemcgrath.com I have information about where I'm working, some information about an invasive species detection project where I trained pet dogs to find invasive species here in Maine, and the book is there as well. So that might just be the easiest.

[45:14]

COLLEEN PELAR: Awesome! Thank you — I will link up to all of that, and it's been so fun talking with you today. I really appreciate you coming on.

[45:23]

MELISSA McCUE-McGRATH: Thank you. It was so much fun, and I'm so glad we got to connect.

[45:26]

COLLEEN PELAR: That's our conversation for today. If something we talked about resonated, I invite you to sit with it. Notice what feels true and what you want to explore further. You don't have to have it all figured out to start moving toward what matters. Whatever showed up for you today — clarity, questions, even resistance — trust that it's pointing you towards something important. For more support, join my weekly notes at colleenpelar.com. And until next time, remember: you are enough, always, just as you are.