Believing in our Dogs

Whew! Had a wonderful week of vacation! Spent time with family who were in the States visiting from Norway- lovely, lovely people. I am feeling refreshed and ready to get back to work and back to my neglected blog.

The Manners 101 students and their dogs simply rocked last evening. We practiced lots of loose leash walking and were rewarding lavishly for focused attention. All the dogs and handler teams did very well with this. Then we played lots of recall games with added distractions such as people passing by and even other dogs moving past. Every once in a while a dog would take a brief notice of the distraction- but 100% of the time they quickly chose to get back to their person!

Here is the interesting thing: at the start of class, some dogs were not succeeding as often when their people were thinking that their dog would not do well. When I encouraged everyone to believe that their dog could succeed at a certain task, voila!, the dogs did great. I am not even going to attempt to explain the power of this type of thinking. But, I do know that when we believe in our dog’s capabilities and are asking them to do a behavior appropriate for their level of training, the dogs, more often than not, are successful at their task. What I take from this is that, once again, the relationship we have with our dogs is a foundational key to their ability to succeed at any given task we set before them. My dog and I are a team and when I embrace the team attitude and spirit and bring this to our work together, we can accomplish most anything we strive for. Author and trainer extraordinaire, Pam Dennison, also speaks of the importance of this type of positive thinking and even encourages people to visualize their dog doing the behavior being asked of them.

So, try some positive thinking next time you are training with your dog and see what happens. Do you notice a shift in yourself? Do you notice a shift in your dog- maybe better attention? Did your training session go more smoothly? Were you able to accomplish more than you thought possible? I would love to hear what your experiences are!