Tips, Articles, & Thoughts From Dog Agility Coach And Competitor Daisy Peel
To build soft skills you should behave less like a careful carpenter and more like a skateboarder in a skateboard park: aggressive, curious, and experimental, always seeking new ways to challenge yourself. Dig in to this concept more with Daisy Peel in this week’s Agility Challenge Tip!
To develop reliable hard skills, you have to connect the right wires in your brain. You want to be careful, slow, and highly aware of errors. You want to work like a careful carpenter. Dig more in to this concept in this week’s Agility Challenge Tip with Daisy!
The first step toward building a skill is to figure out exactly what type of skill you’re building. Every skill falls into one of two categories: hard skills and soft skills. Again, this tip comes from Daniel Coyle’s The Little Book Of Talent, and is adapted for use by us agility handlers! Read on to discover the difference between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ skills in dog agility!
It’s tempting to think that if we don’t have the latest and greatest this or that, we’ll never be successful. If we don’t have the latest and greatest dog toy, how will our dog ever be as motivated as that super motivated border collie over there? If we don’t have the latest and greatest equipment – the best jumps, the prettiest tunnels, a heated arena with an amazing turf surface – how can we possibly be the best we can possibly be? But, do we really NEED all that fancy stuff to be our best and make progress with our dog agility handling and training?
Top performers are willing to fail, and they’re willing to do so repeatedly in the name of improvement. So, how do you ensure that you’re always comfortable looking silly, or foolish, or stupid? How can you avoid the trap of avoiding expanding your skillset in the name of “looking good”? When it comes to physical exercise, we all expect to feel discomfort – after all, the saying goes, ‘no pain, no gain,’ right? Learn more in this Agility Challenge Tip!
The idea that talented handlers get their skill by following their “natural instincts” is baloney. This is good news for all of us – there is no “natural instinct” for dog agility. ALL improvement is about absorbing and applying new information, and the best source of information is top performers. So steal it. What do I mean by that? Read this Agility Challenge tip to find out!