Dog trainers say you should look at their dog if you want to get to know someone. We say that because our dogs are our distorted reflections. The same can be said about society. If this is true, our dogs tell us that we live in an age of anxiety, reactivity, poor manners, poor focus, low patience, and instant gratification. We live in an era where boundaries are not made or reinforced, and expectations for behavior are low. If our dogs are “spoiled,” what does that say about us?
It is extremely common for a new client to say, “I know I need to be trained, too.” This is a factual statement. We all need training. Even the most experienced of us must continue to learn through practice, but what do dog trainers teach humans to do?
Most people who contact me for training have problems with and goals for their dog’s behavior. My job is to assist these clients and make their path to success easier and quicker. Through our actions, we stop problems and achieve goals. Any dog handler must study their actions and learn how they affect the dog’s actions.
Together, we study and develop our physical awareness. We work on understanding the state of our bodies, body language, fine motor skills, speech, and hand-eye coordination. This training includes body awareness, movement, and balance. We walk, bend, stretch, and use controlled breathing when we train our dogs. We learn physical discipline, moderation of actions, how to be still and quiet, and how to use our words and our movements to cause the correct action in our dog’s behavior when necessary. Dogs rely on body language, so if we want to communicate with them effectively, we must have as much control over our entire body as we do over our speech mechanisms when we talk to each other. Our training builds coordination and consistency through awareness for free and accurate communication with dogs and humans.
Dog training is a practical and meaningful way to develop skills that our multibillion-dollar self-help and therapy industry focuses on. Skills like mental awareness or state of mind awareness, the ability to pay attention, focus, long-term and short-term goal setting, development of strategies and plans for success in achieving goals, self-motivation to execute plans, time management, scheduling, grit, self-reliance, resilience, patience, inner-strength, self-care, emotional control, and emotional intelligence. We also study how to manage and reduce our stress levels and practice rehearsing skills effectively. These skills and abilities transcend our relationships with our dogs and help us improve all our relationships.
We study and develop our awareness of others. We practice reading body language and using that information to predict intentions and likely behaviors. We practice noting others’ energy levels and using that to understand what they are doing. We learn to look for signs of stress. We assess your dogs’ knowledge and practice assigning them tasks they can do. We become more aware of our expectations for their behavior, clarify what they can expect from us, and practice setting temporary and permanent boundaries. When we practice these skills with a dog and master them, we can not help but use them when interacting with people, quickly setting boundaries, and increasing our empathy and understanding of others.
We train to improve our environmental awareness and become skilled at accessing the environments we enter with our dogs. We learn which environments we can control, which our dogs perform well in, and which they don’t. We learn how to prepare our dogs to be successful in more challenging environments. We exercise our sometimes limited control of various environments, making dealing with unleashed and strange dogs, groups of people, unusual people and events, children, distractions, and other environmental triggers easier.
Our training will transcend our dog training practice because training dogs daily for many years made me a better, more aware person. My well-being improves daily as I learn to appreciate the present moment more. Over the years, I learned to understand and teach these practical skills for self-development while training dogs. I teach clients and their dogs through example. How can I expect a dog to control themselves if I can not control myself? How can I teach a person to be reliable to a dog if I can not be relied upon?
When a client comments, “I need to be trained too,” I am always ready to respond.“ I train dogs to follow good leaders and teach people to naturally project good leadership to their human/canine groups.”
If you want to learn more about training with me, click this link and fill out our contact form. Thank you for reading, and Enjoy Your Dog!!!