Training groups for the win!

Like most, I had goals coming into this year - one was to start putting thoughts into the FFD blog (!!!!) and another was to spend more time training my dogs.

You’d think AT LEAST the second thing would come easy… I live with three dogs, I am, literally, a dog trainer by profession, and I spend A LOT of my time consuming dog training/behavior-related content. BUT, as I’m sure many in my position will relate, it’s actually not always easy to make it a point to train your own dogs!

My friends and fellow trainers, Hannah from Longsnouts and Jacqueline from Training by Jacqueline, came together this month to host a free online training group throughout January - to celebrate National Train Your Dog Month and, selfishly, to hold us all accountable to actually train. our. dogs. - and… it’s been working!

Our Facebook group has turned into a safe and happy space for people of all skill levels (we have full-time practicing dog trainers, guardians of dogs with ALL kinds of backgrounds, people that have specific goals and people just here for a good time, certified/deployable SAR teams, etc.) to share their training wins, post videos and ask for feedback, and start making the habit of carving out a few minutes every day to train their dogs.

Hannah shared (spot on and incredibly relatable) thoughts in the group earlier this month about how sometimes, showing up and trying is the hardest part. I know that this is what holds me back a lot of times - the fear that every single piece of a training loop won’t be perfect, that I might try and fail, that ‘people’ (who, exactly?) will think I’m dumb and incompetent if everything doesn’t go exactly as it should (like, what?).

It’s like a breath of fresh air when I see footage of a person working through a challenge with their dog, or not having impeccable timing in each rep, or tossing a reset treat and having it go under the couch and having to spend a minute crawling over and fishing it out before the dog can get back to work. That’s real life! That’s how it goes when we’re working with another creature that has its own thoughts and feelings.

Takeaway #1: showing up and trying is hard, but it opens the door for more instances of showing up and trying (and seeing improvement -hello R+!)

Takeaway #2: dog training feels less daunting when you have a group of people for support. Find your people, post your videos, and let’s have a great year of training dogs!

Those are my thoughts - how are you supposed to end a blog post?

A submission to the training group of Doogie teaching himself how to step onto this feed bowl!