The Power of Trust
As dog owners and trainers, we often find ourselves striving to achieve the perfect balance between nurturing our dogs' abilities and guiding them through challenges. Sometimes, however, our lack of trust in our pups can get in the way. One essential aspect of our training journey is simply learning how to trust our dog to handle the situations they’re put in. Figuring out how to do this, not only empowers our pup but also strengthens the bond between human and canine. In this post, we'll explore the importance of trust and how projecting a calm and confident energy (even if we’re faking it) can help foster a mutual trust that leads to amazing results.
Embracing Challenges: Trusting Your Dog's Potential
Dogs are incredibly intelligent and resilient creatures. Just like humans, they thrive when they're presented with challenges that stimulate their minds and bodies. In many cases, despite our own fumblings and failures with our training. By trusting your dog's potential to overcome challenges, you open up a world of learning and growth for them. Whether it's mastering a complex skill, conquering a fear, or developing impulse control, your belief in their capabilities can work wonders.
The Power of Your Energy: Calmness and Confidence
Dogs are highly attuned to human emotions and energy. When you approach training sessions with calmness and confidence, your dog picks up on these cues and will often reflect your energy. Your composed demeanor reassures your dog that everything is under control, helping them feel more secure and willing to explore new territories. This is critical in helping them to feel safe as stresses increase in the learning process.
Examples of Calm Confidence in Action:
Introducing New Environments: Imagine taking your dog for a walk on a busy street. If you express a sense of calm confidence, your dog is more likely to trust your judgment and adapt to the new surroundings without fear or anxiety. Your reassuring presence can provide them with the courage to follow you instead of filling a leadership void by starting to make the decisions you should be making.
Learning Complex Commands: Teaching your dog intricate commands can be challenging, but your confidence can make a world of difference. I honestly don’t know if your dog will cue into a “belief that they can do it” thus providing extra motivation to solve training puzzles, but I do think that projecting confidence (even if you’re faking it) can help YOU to stay calm and avoid frustration when things don’t feel like they’re going your way. Most of the time, the breakthrough is right around the corner as long as we don’t call it quits when things feel messy.
Overcoming Behavioral Issues: Addressing behavioral issues requires patience and faith in your dog's potential to change. If you approach corrective measures with a calm and confident attitude, your dog is more likely to view your guidance as positive leadership rather than punishment. My clients will often hear me talk about the “Law of Gravity”. Guidance and corrections are like gravity in the sense that they should always be consistent and not subject to our emotions. It doesn’t matter if I’m in a great mood or pissed, if I trip, I’m going down. When guidance or corrections are given we should be able to remove our emotions because a leash correction is just a natural law to an undesirable behavior. It’s so freeing when we learn to leave our negative emotions out of our training sessions. Just don’t forget to bring the positive ones, though. :)
Building Mutual Trust: The Benefits
Enhanced Bond: Trust is a two-way street. By trusting your dog's capacity to tackle challenges, you build a deeper bond of understanding and companionship. Your dog learns that you have their best interests at heart, creating a foundation of mutual respect.
Boosted Confidence: Trusting your dog allows you to have a little extra patience during training. This allows your dog to feel safer and relieves some mental bandwidth for your pup. This boost in self-assurance translates to improved performance in training, a more relaxed demeanor, and a happier overall disposition.
Pawsitive (See what I did there?) Vibes: Let’s be honest, this is as much about you as it is about your dog. Let yourself off the hook a bit. Give your dog some boundaries and expectations. Enforce those, and feel the freedom of knowing that your dog isn’t “BAD” he’s just learning how to be RAD!
