Quick question, and you don’t have to answer it out loud.
Is there a part of your training you never film?
Not because you forgot. Because you’d rather not watch it. The thing you don’t bring to your coach, don’t post about, don’t bring up in a lesson. Most of us have one. I’ve had a few.
Here’s why I’m asking.
I’ve got a podcast episode out this week about something I got wrong for about ten years, and the part that surprised me wasn’t the mistake itself. It was the mechanism underneath it.
For a very long time I believed that if you ever needed to tell your dog no, it meant you’d failed somewhere upstream. You didn’t train long enough, you didn’t make it valuable enough, you weren’t patient enough. A good enough trainer wouldn’t have needed to.
Nobody ever sat me down and said that to me in those words. It was just in the water.
And here’s the part that took me years to see.
That belief didn’t stop me from correcting my dog. It stopped me from correcting my dog WELL.
Think about what happens when you believe you should never need to do something. You don’t plan for it. You don’t practice it. You don’t build a skill around it. You never teach your dog what it means, because teaching it would mean admitting you expect to use it.
So the only time it ever came out was when I was already frustrated.
That was my whole system. Not a decision, a reaction. My timing was fine — timing is a skill I have. But there was no plan behind it, no preparation, and no fairness at all to the dog, who had no idea what was coming or what it meant, because I’d never taught her.
And afterwards, every single time, I felt terrible.
For years I read that bad feeling as my conscience. I felt bad, therefore I’d done something wrong, therefore the belief must be right and I should try harder.
I don’t read it that way anymore. I think the feeling was accurate and I had it pointed at the wrong thing.
It wasn’t wrong that it happened. It was wrong that it happened at the worst possible moment, out of frustration, with zero preparation, to a dog who couldn’t have seen it coming.
The rule didn’t protect my dog. It protected my self-image. And my dog paid the difference.
Which brings me back to the question at the top.
When you believe you shouldn’t need to do something, but you find yourself doing it anyway, you don’t stop doing it. You stop LOOKING at it.
You don’t film it. You don’t analyze it. You don’t ask anybody about it. And a trainer who can’t look at part of their own training can’t improve that part. It becomes the one thing that never gets better, because it’s the one thing you’ve decided not to see.
What I lost wasn’t a technique. It was trust in my own eyes.
So — what are you not looking at?
Leave me a comment and tell me. One line is plenty, and I’m not going to judge a single one of them. I’ve got my own list 🙂
The whole system lives inside The Agility Challenge. If you want the training that goes with this, the door is here.