One true dog woman to another…
I get ahead of myself. And I often miss what is really going on for what I want to have going on because I have the perfect fix for it.
But it’s not a fix if I have misunderstood the problem.
Which is why the lightbulb I had this week was so embarrassingly obvious once I could see it. My problem with dog training is not that I don’t know enough or don’t know the right things or I’m lazy or I don’t have time.
It’s because I was trying to solve a surface problem with a surface solution. But what I had was a heart problem.
My heart was hurting for that deep meaningful connection I used to have with my dogs (or with any dog for that matter). I used to have an ease and peace around dogs that I haven’t found again until just recently.
That was the problem I needed to solve for. I needed to go back to what made me fall in love with dogs in the first place.
Just being in the moment with them. Loving them because I knew when they looked at me that I was enough. Feeling at ease with them because I knew they weren’t offput or overwhelmed by my insatiable curiosity.
And when I realized that it suddenly shed light on how I’m best at connecting.
Through curiosity.
Genuine, gentle, and kind curiosity.
The pieces of that epiphany clicked into place when I was watching a Susan Garrett video and she highlighted how she waited, watching, to see how her dog would respond to a certain distraction.
She said, “I was waiting to learn something from him, about him.”
And I realized how training a dog for me is about figuring what the real disconnect is, and I can find that through getting curious and gathering data (by watching my dog and keeping training logs) and then I can use my love of deep thinking to mull it over and puzzle it out.
But I have to start waiting. Waiting to learn something from the dog (or person) I’m hoping to connect with.
I can see how this would make a WORLD of difference with my son. If I’d just let him be, if I’d just watch him and let him make choices without my own ego getting in the way of his learning.
And with my dogs, if I could just find joy in watching them to see who they really are as a dog and how they want to connect with me.
I think the new training game I learned from Susan Garrett’s Recaller’s Archetype series “From Me and Them to Us” will be a great way for me to train this new level of patience and practice this renewed curiosity. Susan Garrett called it Vito’s Thinking Game and explained “the purpose of Vito’s Thinking game… putting a dog in the position to figure out how they can earn reinforcement”.
So I played this game with Puzzle. I practiced the mechanics first to minimize my own fumbling. I realized halfway through playing that I should have written out the steps in big easy to read lines and put them up so I could reference them as I was working through it for the first time (I’ll remember that for next time).
It was great fun and while I haven’t gotten a chance to do it again and grow it to her going around a cone, I am not going to criticize myself for that because I ENJOYED a training session with my dog. And for right now that is solving for two of my problems.
- I want to be connected to my dogs again.
- I want to enjoy training my dogs again.
So, if you’re reading this, go connect with your dog, or go train your dog, or go look up Susan Garrett’s Recaller’s Archetype series and learn some really cool new ways to approach dog training.
Here is the video of Puzzle and I playing Vito’s Thinking Game
Sincerely,
A True DogWoman (Jess)
TruChoice Trainers 