00:00:02 Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, welcome to the Foundation's podcast. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and this episode is all about how we can become more confident and handling dogs, which is a huge component of training. Two weeks ago, I dropped an episode of this podcast dedicated to developing confidence in our dogs. That matters so much because it flavors a dog's entire life in a positive direction. Generally, Well, guess what, the same rules apply to us, And often our training efforts fall flat or just don't have the horsepower they need because we don't have confidence in ourselves. That is no bueno and it's what I'm going to talk about right now. A hunting industry friend of mine told me a story years ago about a sheep hunt that he went on. If any of you know anything about sheep hunting, it's not the kind of activity that most outdoorsmen do even once in their lives. So getting to go at all is pretty incredible big horn sheep. And while most of the sheep that are nearly impossible to get a tag for these days aren't known for thriving in states like Iowa, they live where the earth goes up and down a lot, where gravity is a real issue, and things are still pretty wild. To get to a sheep, you tend to have to board some small planes and often climb on the back of a horse for a while. Now, this friend of mine, at the end of his sheep hunt, ended up getting into one of those small planes that still utilizes a propeller and can land on nothing more than a cleared strip of timber that is pretty far from what most of us think is a runway. Well, on that flight, his plane didn't make it and they made a crash landing. Now, while the pilot, his guide, and he all survived, it didn't look great for them. I forget now whether they were in Alaska or Canada, but I remember him talking about how brutally cold it was and how much snow they dealt with. Now, when they finally got picked up by a rescue hell, they thought they were good to go, as most of us would, except that the helicopter suffered the same fate as the plane, which, if you're keeping track, comes to a total of two crash landings on one trip, which we can all agree is about too many. They survived that one too, and when I asked him what the worst part about it all? 00:02:20 Speaker 2: Was. 00:02:21 Speaker 1: He said it was when they were huddled under a tarp with a single candle for warmth, and he looked at his guide, who was a survival expert and someone you generally find comfort in when things get really dicey, and he was bawling his eyes out. That my buddy said was the hardest to deal with because he saw someone who was supposed to be in charge, supposed to be conditioned to deal with real life and death adversity, and it felt like he had given up. My buddy said that was an absolute gut punch. He also said climbing into the second rescue helicopter wasn't as joyful as you'd expect because he had developed a pretty healthy and understandable fear of flying machines in the undefeated gravity that they attempt to defy. His guide had lost his confidence, and it changed their outlook. It changed their whole situation for the worse. My friend said, it was terrible. Now, confidence is just wildly important to life, even if you're not in a life or death situation. Now, if you don't believe that, look up self help books that are supposed to take the average low confidence person and prime them up. To fight lions or whatever. The amount of those books that are available is mind boggling. 00:03:37 Speaker 2: It truly is. 00:03:38 Speaker 1: In fact, just to see I search for self help books on Amazon and the results totaled over one hundred thousand. Not all of those deal with confidence and self esteem, but a lot of them do. It's a big deal, and it matters in many facets of our lives. Setting boundaries with your lunatic family members, being assertive enough to ask for as you think you deserve, or at least telling your boss to go kick rocks in the street when he asked you to color way outside the lines of your job description. Whatever it is, confidence matters, and as you probably can guess, it matters with how you handle your dog. The energy we project is important, but that walks in lockstep with us just being confident in what we are asking the dog to do, and then what to do when the dog doesn't deliver. You might remember that a couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I've been training a King Charles Spaniel to give this woman a hand, since her life is pretty full and she didn't ask for that dog. 00:04:36 Speaker 2: In her life. 00:04:37 Speaker 1: His name is Nico, and he actually is a really good boy. He just has very little connections to human after being rehome three times in the first year, mind you, and he's pretty comfortable entertaining. 00:04:49 Speaker 2: Himself while ignoring most people. 00:04:52 Speaker 1: But we did some placeboard work, and we did some basic obedience stuff and he showed plenty of signs of life. Then we worked again on the same stuff and he had regressed some, mostly I think because he had been cooped up inside for a few days and is not really the kind of dog who wants to live the life of the average housecat. So just this morning I met up with Nico and his owner again and we went to work, but this time about halfway through, she took the lead and I watched her interact with the pup. It was clear that she had been working hard with that little dog and that he is way more bonded to her than me. It was actually pretty awesome to see, and I told her that, and she admitted that she was working with him every day and that when she knows what to do, she's all about putting the work in. But originally she didn't know what to do. She had zero confidence in herself as a trainer or her dog's potential, and so she didn't do anything. Now, what is really cool about that is she will be the one to have the most influence on that dog and the one who will get the most out of having that dog for his whole life. Just her change in affected her dog's behavior more than my presence had. And that's what you really want to see, because it changes all of the little interactions, the little signals. And what I mean by that is that when I first watched her with that dog, she would praise him and love him up, just randomly for no reason, and often when he didn't do what she asked him. This is super common because we naturally want to be really positive around our dogs. 00:06:24 Speaker 2: We can't help it. 00:06:26 Speaker 1: But if you spend time with a professional trainer, you'll see an awful lot of like neutral interactions with dogs. The emotion just doesn't come in until a behavior is delivered. Then it's party time. Pros understand that there is value to praise and rewards, but those things need to be earned, and they are confident they can get that message through to dogs. Now, us amateurs have a harder time believing that, so we tend to default to the fur baby side of things, which is kind of like eating a whole sleeve of oreos when you're feeling a little snacky. Sure they taste amazing, especially with a giant glass of cold milk, but it would be hard to argue that, aside from the instant pleasure of gnombing on some cookies, that's generally not a great decision. So how do you develop confidence as a dog trainer? Your first impulse might be to watch some YouTube videos or maybe buy into one of the master classes that a lot of trainers offer. Now, I wouldn't discourage anyone from doing either, because I think that filling your head with knowledge is a good thing. And maybe you pick up a book at least if you're one of those people like me who was born way back in the nineteen hundreds, It doesn't really matter. There are a lot of ways to learn about this stuff, and consuming content is a pretty good way to get there. It's not as good as training with someone who is better than you, but that's often a hell of a lot more difficult to facilitate. Fill that big, beautiful brain of yours up. But then remember that learning about a subject and then actually engaging in that subject are just different things. And also remember that the people who create a lot of the content probably just way better at training than you, or they might have a style that just doesn't jive with your personality or your dog's personality. And even if it does perfectly match what you have going on, there is the reality of someone explaining how to do something in a five minute video or a twenty minute podcast and then actually going out and confidently putting that into practice for weeks until lessons start to stick. This is where it gets tricky, and there are a million examples of other things in life that kind of create or at least contextualize this concept. So here's one that stuck with me and changed my life. When I was in college, I fished a lot of bass tournaments. I was eaten up with it, even though the travel and stress and expense nearly killed me. But I did enjoy it for many reasons, but one was that I just got to fish with people who were really good at it. Now, if you know anything about bass, you know they love cover and they love structure, small mouth and large mouth alike. Rocks true use weed lines, and of course docks. Docks provide overhead cover from avian predators. They're full of hard structure to use to their advantage when trying not to get eaten and also while trying to eat something, And they often create really harsh shade lines, which are perfect if one of your primary strategies for eating is to ambush smaller fish, you just hide in the shadows. A lot of people fish docks by casting to each side with a spinner bait or some other chunk and wine lure. But when you learn how to skip underneath docks, everything changes. And I thought I was pretty good at skipping senkos and tube jigs and swimming jigs and whatever else under docks until I drew a pro and a championship tournament on Lake Minnetonka here in the Cities one time. Then I got a lesson in skipping docks, and it changed everything for me. He was so much better at it than I was. It wasn't even funny. It made me realize how much better I could be, and I started working on it to the point now where I'm very confident in that strategy. But I can also tell you I wouldn't have gotten there by just reading an article or listening to a podcast or watching a video. I had to see it in action, but most importantly, had to put it into practice in different conditions for a long time. Dog training is like that. You can read about treat training your dog to do something, which is great, but until you spend days or weeks treat training a dog to do something, it's just a different thing. And I know this is simple, but I'm going to go somewhere with this. Let's say you have a one year old Labrador Retriever that you've done a pretty good job with as far as obedience is concerned. He doesn't pull too hard on the leash when you walk him, he sits on command, he doesn't beg and he heals just like you want him to. If you make him sit and you toss a bumper, he'll go get it, and if you've done a really good job, he'll deliver it to hand. Honestly, that's better than a hell of a lot of dogs already. So that's great. But what about double retrieves, what about long distance retres what about water work or some other environment that he's unfamiliar with. Well, I can tell you this. Make believe pup can do all of those things if you make them happen. And if you did all of that earlier stuff. You probably have the confidence to try to make that happen. But what if you didn't. What if you didn't work the basics first, so that when you ask your dog to sit, he sometimes does and he sometimes just ignores you. Or what if you just couldn't get him to not pull on the leash NonStop while you walked him. Will you have the confidence to try the upper level stuff? Probably not. This is a process that feeds itself, and the momentum can swing one way or the other depending on what you put in and how patient you are. We preach the message of training a puppy from the moment you bring it home with. The idea is that the dog needs to learn and you're the one who will teach him. And without a doubt, that's absolutely true. You want to train your dog from the jump. But it's not just to have a better dog. It's also a way for you to see the results of a training plan, positive results, because that matters a lot. And while it's pretty dang easy to treat train most puppies to do a few basic things, and that's great, it's also not just for them. It's a starting point for you. Think about it this way. If you can take an eight week old puppy and get him sitting pretty consistently on command after a few days, why can't you do the harder stuff later. Because usually there's a breakdown in confidence somewhere in between there, and that's when things get tough. This is where the pros earn their money and why they deserve their money. When your dog is struggling with some task, it's easy to think all kinds of things, he's not smart enough. 00:12:56 Speaker 2: He's too stubborn, whatever. 00:12:58 Speaker 1: But most of that is projection on our part, because we've already seen that we can ask them to do things and they'll deliver, but at some point, for some reason, they won't, and that can get really frustrating fast. This is where the timeline often shifts and it's easier to decide that training has gone far enough. But mostly it's because we aren't confident enough to help them through whatever we are asking. This happens for plenty of reasons, but it's so important to remember that you have to get those early wins and sometimes revert to the easy wins to keep your training momentum going in the right direction and your confidence growing. This is also why when you watch pros work, they might dedicate a little time to some type of training with a dog and then switch gears ten or twenty minutes later to work on a different task. It's not that they couldn't push through the original one, but if the wheels start to fall off, or they see the dog has just moved enough in a certain direction maybe with their attention, they consider it time to do something else. Plus, they are generally pretty confident that they can offer up situations where the dog will eventually have success, and that matters in a major, major way. They're not going to let the dogs fail, and in that process, they won't fail at training even if something they wanted to check off the list just didn't get there on a specific day. They also know that all of this stuff helps them be confident and is recognizable by the dog. If you think that's not true, you need to work with dogs more, because they can read us very very well. A calm, assertive, and confident trainer is one who can ask a lot of dogs because dogs generally respond very well to that energy. A person who isn't confident, who is an assertive will watch a dog make its own decisions because it knows it can. This is kind of like in grade school when you're usual teacher who took absolutely no shit is out and a sub is in, and the sub was working in the mortgage industry until weeks ago, and they have no business teaching kids because they don't know what the hell they are doing. Do you think the classroom behavior will be the same then with that sub it won't, because kids are just like dogs, and that they can sense things about authority figures and that flavors their interactions in a palpable way. If they get a whiff of uneasiness, then they'll test your boundaries. It's nature, honestly, and dogs understand that game very well. So not only is it just generally a good idea to work on something like training until you're more confident, but it's also necessary to get the results you really want out of the task. Now, of course, I should probably say this, confidence can be a double edged sword. If you're over confident, you can ruin a dog pretty quickly, and likely will, because that's the kind of situation that can lead the best of us to absolutely lose our shit when things go wrong. Confidence should ideally manifest itself in a bend. There done that attitude, not a know it all attitude, if that makes sense. So I'll say this just to reiterate it one last time. If you aren't overly confident in your training, consume whatever content you need, get around the right people, but also just go for it. Train your dog on the simple stuff, get those easy wins. Then train that simple stuff over and over while you slowly add in more challenging things. Your confidence level should move in lockstep with your dog or be so damn close you can't tell who is in the lead. Now if you hit a roadblock, make sure you're incorporating other training tasks to give the dog a win no matter what, every time you train, and then figure out how to navigate those troubled waters. Believe in yourself. Dog training in many ways isn't that hard, and I say that followed by a gigantic, super huge, But it certainly can be really difficult, and it only gets more difficult the less confident we are, which often leads to a good enough attitude, and the dogs that are trained to that level often are barely trained at all. Work on yourself in this category and the dog and you will be way better off for it. Do that and come back in two weeks because I'm going to talk about genetics, like really really dive into the topic and explain why it's so important to the dog world, way beyond the usual ways in which we think about canine genetics. That's it for this episode of Houndations. I'm your host, Tony Peterson. Thank you so much for listening and for all your support. You guys showed up big time a couple weeks ago when we had the Dog Days of May at meat Eater here. 00:17:51 Speaker 2: We really really appreciate it. 00:17:54 Speaker 1: If you're interested in more than dogs, and we know you are, head on over to the medeater dot com. Give Brent Reeves this country life podcast to listen, just good storytelling. We have new podcasts on there, all kinds of crazy stuff, dropping new content every single day over there. Go check it out at the meat eater dot com and thank you once again,