E147: 안드레아 해리슨(Andrea Harrison) - "2020년에 더 나은 훈련 목표 설정하기"

And then Dora is our Cairn Terrier cross, and she's quite feral. She's about seven, and I just recently realized I hadn't taught her a down, so my fall project was teaching her to down in a wide variety of settings. So I suspect that'll come up again. But she's a lot of fun. High highs, prey drive, fascinating girl, and really giving me some insights into the terrier brain. Well, as the first podcast of the new year, I figured it was a good chance to think about kind of looking back over where we've come from. So I want to ask you about that. What are some productive ways that we can kind of look back? Yeah, what a great question. One of the things, you know, you're bringing up one of the things that I think is so important to so many of us if we want to keep our motivation up, and that's actually record keeping. And that sounds a little bit like in reverse, right? You want to keep your motivation up and you want to drive forward. You want to look back because if you're doing a good job with your record keeping for you, that can really help you see what you're doing. So if you've got videos from the seasons, from your classes, put together a video compilation, set it to great music, post it on Facebook, because just looking through those videos will give you a chance to be like, oh, look at all the things I did this year. If you've got journals, you know, read through them. Look at the backs of your ribbons and see what you won or what you didn't want or win or what your score was. Check out the certificates that might have been mailed to you. I mean, if you want to really know what you did, you can look at your PayPal or credit card accounts and see what money you've been spending on your dog sports, right? Check out your Facebook timelines. Look, all of these things will give you an overview, a picture of what you've accomplished in whatever the period of time is you want to look at. So some people do that annually. Some people do that every six months or every four months. And you want to look back because you want to try to inform yourself in your here and now, right? It's very hard to look forward if we haven't already looked back. You know, there's this saying, you know, history will repeat itself if we don't study it. And the same thing's true for us, right? If we want to make progress as dog trainers, we need to know where we were so that we can move forward. If we don't understand where we were, we're not going to move forward the way we want, right? You want to be able to inform yourself and, you know, set dreams and knowing what's reasonable

is going to be influenced by what you actually were able to accomplish. You kind of mentioned in there, you know, whether you've accomplished a lot or maybe not as much. I mean, everybody's journey is a little bit different. And I'm sure there are some people who, as I look back, they're kind of amazed by how much they exceeded their goals and other people might be, you know, a little bit less excited or even disappointed by what they managed to achieve. Can you talk about that? Yeah, for sure. Because, you know, ultimately everybody's different, right? Everyone's world human. Everybody who's ever heard me talk hears me say that. Oh, how very human of you. And what you think is, you know, really little accomplishment. Like you teach your dog to down and you're like, hey, that's great. My dog knows how to down. Big whoop. I teach Dora how to down and she can reliably down when a car is pulling in the driveway. And that's a huge accomplishment to me, right? So that's my massive success for the last two months of training. And it might be a really minor thing to a different person or even a different team, me and a different dog, right? If Yen downs when somebody comes in, I barely think to tell her she's a superstar. Dora downs from all kinds of different places, all kinds of different ways. And that's a really big deal. But by recognizing when we do accomplish something, it's important because then that gives us cause to celebrate, right? And finding that good in something can be really difficult. It can be really challenging. So it's important that we figure out what we did that was good, even if we tend to downplay our success. So say you were trialing all last year and you didn't get one cue. And you're like, oh, I didn't get a single cue this, you know, 2019. Just sucked. 2020 is coming. And I don't even want to think about dog training, right? Because people will be doing that today, right? I know people listening to this will be thinking that. And what they need to remember is they got out there, they trialed. They're already way ahead of all those people who were like, oh, I'd like to trial someday and I'm not going out. Or, oh, I'd like to train someday, but I'm not training. I'm not making the time. I'm not making the plan. Like it doesn't have to be around competing. It's about doing the action, right? It's about grabbing that moment to take action. And then if you do that consistently enough, you're going to start to meet success. And so to recognize even the smallest of successes will help you, in fact, recognize the bigger successes. I don't know if that makes sense.

But that's really like if you can start small and with a little slice, as you build up, you're going to feel more and more successful, whether or not other people see it or not. Mm-hmm. So it's partially about learning how to see the good, even when it doesn't feel like a big thing, and partially about needing to do the small things and appreciate them to kind of build to something bigger, right? Exactly, exactly. So if you're thinking about it like a house built of bricks, because wood doesn't come in the same little cubes, but you're building up a house of bricks, and you're putting one brick, next brick, next brick. Sometimes that wall's going to go up. Sometimes that wall's going to go across, right? It's not going to go up to the roof if the roof is your goal. Sometimes it's just going across. But to get the best wall, you need to go both across and up, right? Like all that foundation counts. We all want to just build a single column of bricks that go straight up to whatever we're aiming for. And that's okay. But don't forget to celebrate the foundation, the pieces that are going sideways, because they're just going to make your wall stronger and therefore lead you to a bigger, more successful thing at the end of it all. Whether that's with the dog you have in front of you today, or whether it's with another dog, right? Whether it's in dog sport training, or whether it's with teaching that you start to do, or a sport that you never thought you'd play, and you start playing it. And all those foundation successes will come back to you. So we always kind of hear this idea that we should live in the present. So you talked a little bit about this already, but why is it so important that we take the time to look back at where we've come from, and then forward to where we want to go? Oh, that's such a good question. You've asked the bestest questions, honestly. So if you're in the present, that involves being truly mindful, right? And informed and grateful about today. And I mean, you know, I'm mindfulness, but mindfulness is not sort of singing kumbaya and being happy. Mindfulness is awareness, right? It's about that concept of being informed and understanding your role in the place. And so if you're present, you also need to have goals and dreams to stretch forward to, right? Like that's how you reach forward. That's how you sort of ground yourself in the present, because you know things are always changing. You've accepted there's this evolution of thought in your training, in your methods, in your skill level, in all of those things. But if you also don't remember and touch back to the past,

you know, you're going to struggle to continue to move forward. Because again, like we were talking about earlier, that history has to inform the choices we make to move forward. So the present's the most sensible place to focus yourself, right? The past lets us remember success, and the future is what excites and inspires us. So, you know, to have both bookends to the present make the sense, right? Like if you don't have those bookends, it's very hard to sort of stay grounded in the present. So how do our, you know, those inner thoughts or those inner beliefs that we have about ourselves or our team, how do those impact this bigger picture, right? They do impact our training and our achievements. So can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, for sure. Because if we've got those thoughts that get in our head, they can be either a positive dialogue, a positive way of looking at things and framing things, or they can be negative, right? And, you know, we tend to have a pretty strong negativity bias just by function of being human. And that's one of the reasons I'm so, so vocal about a gratitude practice and being that all that mindfulness stuff I talk about. And when we plan and train and life in general, in fact, but if we are positive or even accepting, so say you can't be positive yet, you're in a place where you're just not in a good headspace and you just haven't gotten there. You know, if you're in that headspace where you're struggling still, that if you understand that that's having a detrimental impact on your training, just that understanding, just getting that you are not embracing the fullness, the positivity around you to make your training as good as possible, just that one little step is actually going to make a difference to helping you be more positive and understanding that you need to take action in order to affect your thinking, right? So it's this really weird cycle, I guess, because if we know that we're in a good headspace, we can take a positive proactive action and move ourselves forward. If we know we're in a bad headspace, we need to spend some time thinking about that to understand that we maybe want to try to take change, right? We want to grab that and do something about it. If we have those inner beliefs and we don't think that they are helping us, are there things that we can do to change them? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, this is hard because people really grapple with this a lot, right? Because they don't believe me when I say, you know, understanding that you are caught up in some negative thinking is going to help you not think negatively.

But in fact, you have to start with identification. If you don't understand that you are catastrophizing, indulging in limiting beliefs, having negative thoughts, override positive thoughts, in all of those things, if you don't get that, you are not going to believe me when I say that you can't change anything but yourself, right? So if you want to change yourself, you have to understand that this thing needs to change. So, you know, in general terms, and, you know, take myself out of grant under advisement, that not everything is always going to work for everybody, but try a bunch of different things to find the right tools for you. You want to tackle your negative thoughts head on. If your beliefs are hindering you or holding you back, you want to think about what those negative beliefs are. So like if you think to yourself, oh, what's the point in training? I'm never successful anyways. Or, oh my gosh, the judge is looking for me to make a mistake. They like that other team better. Or all my friends are better trainers than me, right? Think about the people I hang out with. I think that, you know, that's when I call my cell phone all the time. Wait a minute, I do stuff with my dogs. I'm all right. But if you know you've got these negative thoughts coming to your head, then you can actually look at journaling them. You know, people will write out their negative thought and set fire to it or drown it in water or tear it into a hundred little pieces. And let go of that thought. And that's a kind of new age thing that doesn't always work for me. But I know it's really helped other students. Lists can help people too, like create an accomplishment list. So if you're hung up on catastrophic thinking and all the things that might possibly go wrong when you trial, but you've had successful trials under your belt, you want to focus on those successful trials. What went right, right? Go look at your ribbon. Create an inspiration board. Give yourself some positivity around you to remind you that you are not all of these negative things that your brain keeps grabbing onto. We are often our own worst critic. We have a voice in our head often, you know, the inner critic, that will sit and nick away at us, right? And it can be so hard to overcome that voice. You know, when I talk to some of the people I've worked with, that inner critic voice is way louder than anybody outside of themselves ever has been. You know, it can be a pretty yelly voice. And, you know, you're allowed to tell your inner critic voice. You don't deserve to be treated that way. You need to be quiet. You need to go away.

If I have somebody who's really prone to negative thinking, sometimes I'll say to them, you know, at 6 p.m. for 10 minutes, give that inner critic voice. Talk back to it. Have that conversation. You know, if it's being really negative with you, sit down and say, what are you being so negative about? Are you afraid of going to the trial? Why are you afraid? And it seems weird to have this internal dialogue, right? You're me talking on a podcast about it. But some people find that if they let those negative thoughts express themselves, then they can actually deal with them. One of the hardest things is when we suppress those negative thoughts and we don't acknowledge them, and that inner critic can just get louder and louder and louder, right? I've got a webinar coming up in January on the 16th this month about imposter syndrome. So I've been thinking lots about negative thinking and limiting beliefs and how we can deal with them because it all sort of ties into the same big ball. So I'm really excited to have this conversation, as you can tell, as I yak away. No, it's an important topic, right? Like it's something we have to spend some time thinking about because in order to achieve success in really anything, you have to think about what's holding you back. And so often what's holding you back is actually something that's maybe in your own head. So often. So often. And, you know, somebody will say to me, you know, oh, you know, I'm worried about the trial because the judge might crowd my dog. And I'm like, and we start breaking it down. And I'm like, why would you be worried about the judge crowding your dog? Have you ever seen a judge do that in that particular sport or venue or whatever? And they're like, no. And so when we break it down, we realize often what's getting in the way is fear. And, you know, I talk all the time about people moving from the comfort zone through fear into learning and then into growth. And unfortunately, fear is sort of one phase that you have to face. You have to be like, okay, this sucks, but I got to deal with these fears to get where I want to go. So if we've got goals and aspirations that we want to meet, we kind of have to jump in and do it, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. So for many people, you know, we're at the beginning of the year, and the beginning of the year is really about setting goals and resolutions, right? So we've kind of talked about, you know, looking back over 2019. And I want to talk a little bit about kind of looking ahead to 2020. And while I know that's like kind of super individualized to each person and team,

can you talk a little bit about how people can define success or should be thinking about defining success and what that looks like for their team? Yeah, for sure. And, you know, I think you and I a couple of years ago talked about New Year's resolutions, and I'm just going to remind people because it's been a while. That's not a great way to goal set for a lot of us. Like when you're thinking about success, don't be like, oh, it's January, and I'm going to set 15 goals right now because only about 12% to 20% of New Year's resolutions get met. They're considered successful, right? So instead of thinking about like, oh, you know, I'm going to make this New Year's resolution, and I'm going to achieve it, and I'm going to train seven days a week, you know, think about the long haul. Remember that, you know, you want to be doing this in 90 days. You want to be doing this in 120 days. You want to be doing this in 200 days. So remember to set your goals for success in that sort of realistic time frame. One little trick I use sometimes is to tell people to think about framing it around at least. So instead of saying I'm going to train five days a week, say I'm going to train at least four days a week. You still want to train for five days a week, but if you set it for at least four, then when you accomplish four, you're not going to be like, oh, I didn't train five days. I'm terrible. Well, at least I got my four done. I'm okay. I can try to add that next one the next time, right? So when you're thinking about success, you have to have a pretty clear definition of what success is going to look like for you, right? Think about peaking performance. Do you have an event coming up? Do you have a championship or a national show that you know you want to get to? Do you know how to qualify for it, right? Prioritize. If you've got 52 sports because you do all the things, that's awesome. More power to you. But what's going to be your priority sport for the next six months or year, depending. Because some people do sports in different seasons and that's fine. But where are you going to put your energy for now, right? Like prioritize. And one of the things to bring into account is prioritize like you as well. You are a part of the partnership. So if you've got a dog who's amazing at barn hunt, say, Dora would be a great barn hunt dog, right? But I don't really want to keep rats at home. My husband has said rats freak them out. I fostered a few, but always in the basement. We have rats on the farm anyways. So she's got experience killing them. So I really don't want her knowing there are rats in the house.

So it's not a sport that's realistic for me and her to have together. So remember to weigh you in this success model that you're looking for. And also remember the flip side of that. Remember your dog, right? Like if I decided I wanted Yen to be doing dock diving, she's a toy American Eskimo. She's probably not going to achieve success the way a Labrador retriever might. If it was important enough to me, it might be fine. But, you know, you always want to remember that too, right? Like prioritize what makes sense. What do you have the financial resources for? What do you have the skills for? What do you have the access to trainers for, right? All of those things. If you don't have sheep and you don't have sheep around you, you might not want to take up hurting, right? So you want to think about those things. And it's really hard to think of success if you aren't yet at a point where you see mistakes as information instead of as a failure, right? So if success to you is hinging on never making a mistake, I really would encourage everybody to remember that mistakes are just information, right? So if you're like, oh my God, I can't do this because I might make a mistake and therefore I'm a failure. Hang on to that thought and rethink it a little. Spend some time with it and see if you can get yourself to, well, if I'm not perfect at this thing, that doesn't mean I can't be successful. It just means I need to spend a little more time with it, right? You know, I've been talking about this a lot lately. Think of the verb, not the noun. You know, if you want to be the dog trainer, get out there and train your dog. So if success to you is being a dog trainer, make sure you give yourself time to do the action, right? And actually train the dog. It's a really important concept. And it's one that I hadn't thought about in terms of dog training until really recently. I was having a conversation with a friend and we were talking about something that had happened at my other workplace. And I was explaining that and they were like, you know, Andrea, that fits for dog training too. And I said, well, of course it does. And then I thought, oh my God, but I've never actually said it in this community before. Right. So, so go ahead and don't be afraid to work with the verb to get to be the noun. And I think that that's really important. You know, the process matters as much as the outcome sometimes. And really remember that for success. You know, I'm actually jotting that down because I think that makes a great like pull out, like that's such an important concept that if you want to be, I just, I like that whole, the

whole thought. Yeah. So you kind of, you kind of touched on this idea of at least, and you know, you touched on a little bit there about setting goals, but you know, what should people be thinking about when they're kind of picking their goals or planning out their dog training year for 2020? Yeah. So it's great to have goals for sure. Right. Like those big dreams. I want to go to the Olympics. We don't have Olympics. I want to go to the nationals. Right. And that's super. But in order to be able to move successfully into achieving those goals means you pretty much have to plan. Sorry, people. Lots of people out there. I'm a weekend warrior. Don't make me plan. I don't want to plan. But, and it's fine. If you love being a weekend warrior and just doing the local show, go for it. But if you want to achieve those long-term dreams, those long-term aspirational goals, then just do me a favor and just experiment with planning a little bit. Okay. You don't have to like, I'm not expecting you to fill out a 362 page book tomorrow, but just experiment with planning. Think about what are you going to do when you train next? What skills are you good at? What skills do you have gaps in? Get yourself a little bit organized. Right. You need to plan and implement those steps to make those big goals possible. So figure out what systems can help you. Do you need a video camera? Do you need to put a decent floor down somewhere to train? Do you need to get a new kind of reinforcement? Do you need to improve your toy play or your engagement? Or like, where are the things that you can work on to build your whole thing? I've done this thing called a success triangle. And so if you put success in the middle of this or the goal in the middle of the triangle, and then around that, you're going to have some mindset stuff, which is sort of your attitude and your dog's attitude. You and your dog's fitness for this thing. And then on the other side of the success or goal triangle, you're going to have the skills. Right. And so you want to remember to try to touch on all of those things in your plan. And it's really easy for most of us to do one or maybe even two of those three things. And it can vary. Right. Like, I might be really good at fitness and skills. Well, I guess I'm good at mindset. So I'll go mindset and skills. But I might not do fitness, which is actually kind of true now that I think about it. But somebody else might be really good at fitness and skills. Right. And so just by remembering all three of those elements have to come together in the plan, that can help us drive forward. Right.

Again, we're going to remember to prioritize when we plan. You are not going to be able to do everything at once. So if I want to do agility with Dora, which I do in the spring, I think she's ready to start at the age of seven. Finally, I talk to Tom and we're going to move the agility equipment up to a little side yard I have. So it's closer to the house because she's not at the stage where Sally was, where Sally was doing full courses. So I took over 100 by 150 foot field at the front of the property, moved all my agility equipment down there. Didn't need to do it as often. Right. Because she had much better. She had great skills. And then as she's retired over the last couple of years, we're going to start using a side yard that's closer to the house so I can do it more often. So prioritize. Right. Do I need to run full courses with Dora? No, she doesn't even know how to weave yet. So I can build that skill sort of piece by piece. Right. And then by doing that, by thinking about that planning at the front end of it, you can also start to really slice down what you need to do. How can you break down your goal? So I want to do an agility course with Dora and film it and put it up on my Facebook page because she is not really all that great in public. So I'm not likely to take her to a trial. How can I get that refined? Right. Right. She's great on a wobble board already. She knows two on, two off contact because I can't not train. Right. Our dog's in my house. I'm going to be training at something. So I've got to figure out how to add, you know, a tunnel lane to jump, an actual contact. Right. What supports do I need to be able to make that happen? So slice, slice, slice it down. So finally that I can really see what to do. Right. And if you're an experienced trainer, I often suggest that people work from their gaps and holes in their knowledge and fill those in because they have the insight to be able to know where their holes and gaps are. But if you're fairly new to training, do the opposite thing. Play to your strengths. If you are worried that you aren't a good enough trainer, by all means, plan around your strengths, not around your holes. Because if you start to try to plan around your holes, you're just going to put yourself right back into that stuff we were talking about earlier and become negative and hurt on yourself and get hung up on that inner critic is going to get quite loud. So it's quite OK when you're new to planning and new to training to play to your strengths, not to the holes that you have. And in fact, I would say all trainers need to spend some time working from their strengths

as well. Right. Yeah. And you mentioned that idea of kind of slicing it down so you can see what to do. And that also ties back into what you're saying earlier, right, about being able to see achievements and see that you're achieving some version of success. Right. If you've sliced it down into tiny enough pieces that you can be successful, it's also easier to see that you're being successful. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. So important. You know, if everybody who is listening to this could just think right now of one thing they're grateful for and one thing they're doing OK at, that would be huge. Like the universal upswing in that mood would be amazing. You know, like that's so important to remember. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so I want to talk, uh, I wanted to have you talk rather about kind of the difference between process goals and outcome goals. Cause I know I've heard you talk about them before and I think they kind of tie in really well to what we've been kind of discussing. So can you explain the difference and then just, you know, what people should, should focus on? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So when I talk about process goals, I'm talking about largely internally driven goals that keep you, um, remembering to use little slices and dices of the thing. Right. And when I talk about outcome goals, I'm talking about externally seen visible goals that measure achievement in an often more standard way. So until I learned about process goals, I didn't even really realize that they were goals. I was like, well, those are just the steps to get to the outcome. Uh, when I was a horse rider as a kid, my outcome goal was getting the ring and win a ribbon. I was riding other people's horses to qualify them for national shows. And my job was to get those ponies qualified. So I needed to come out of the ring with ribbons in my classes. That was the only goal. Nobody cared if I put down a nice round or not. The goal was get a ribbon. So, so as a kid, my focus on outcome goals really set me up to really appreciate the process goal. I don't remember the ribbon I had, but I can remember the 12 perfect fences. I presume I got a ribbon, right? If they were as perfect in my head. But, but remembering that sort of really reminds me that the thing that you carry away with you is often the sense of pride in the accomplishment, as opposed to the actual trophy podium ribbon. I mean, those things are big and huge and worthy of celebration. Don't get me wrong. But the process goal that you meet by laying down a perfect run is something that just can't be beat, right?

Like the outcome of getting the ribbon is lovely, but the process is the feeling of, oh my God, that went as well as it could. I'm sure I'm not the only person who's had the experience of having a not that great run, right? With my dogs and agility. I've had some runs that were kind of ugly, right? A little bit stuck sturdy, a little bit, and Sally would be barky at me off the start line, right? It was a little bit like pushy, pushy pulley. And the thing is, is that those runs maybe won me, well, did often win me the class in the queue because she's very, very quick and very accurate, but they didn't feel good, right? And so process goal is sort of leaves you with that feeling of it felt good when you meet it. You're like, yeah, that felt right. An outcome goal is just, I got the ribbon. I got the placement. I got the queue. I qualified for nationals. I got the number of points required. And so a goal can be a bit of both in some ways, in that you can feel good about an outcome goal and you can feel, oh shoot, that wasn't great about a process goal, but you don't actually meet the process goal until you feel okay about it. So a process goal with Dora, with this down, was first of all to teach her just to down in our training space. And now my goal with her is to generalize it so she can down in a variety of places. And so that's the process goal. Like I haven't set an outcome goal for it. And I guess now that we're talking about it, I probably will, that she can down in 10 places under varying degrees of pressure, which I'll define. But for her, the process goal of the down in, you know, wherever I ask her to down. So today we did a down in the barn. We did a down in the bathroom. We did a down in a puddle on the way to the barn. She was not happy about that. We need to work that one some more. Right. And we did the, we did five different downs in five different places. And, you know, that's a process goal. That's what I'm working on. And that's working really well because this helix of a process goal to outcome goal takes you from the process goal through learning opportunities where you're going to try things and see if it works. So like the puddle was a big challenge. I knew it was going into it, but I was like, if she doesn't do it, I just back up a bit and do it in a snowbank tomorrow. Right. And then, and then, you know, next we do performance opportunities. So we put that on the road. We try it when the car pulls in the driveway or when the phone rings or when, when there's some pressure on it and then we can get to the outcome goal. Right.

So it's, it's sort of like this helix that swings around that takes us back to process goals. Because when you meet that outcome goal, it's not like training suddenly ends. You don't go, oh my gosh, okay. I just won a first place ribbon. I don't ever need to train again. That's not the reality for it. So we kind of have to cycle back around this helix of opportunity. Right. You know, the steps to get to your outcome goals vary quite a lot. You and I might have different process goals to get to the same outcome, but the outcome goals are generally the same. Like we want to win the ribbon. We want to get the cue. We want to get the point. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So regardless of the type, how do we kind of make sure the goals we're setting are realistic and yet, you know, kind of not for lack of a, for lack of a better way of saying it like kind of not stupid easy, right? Where they're just like so easy. Of course, we're going to accomplish them. Yeah, of course. And you know, the thing is, we're not always going to get it right. Right. We're just not. We're not always going to make sure that it's not always going to work quite the way we think. We're going to be like, oh my God, that was such a dumb goal. I can't believe I bothered setting it. Or, oh my God, I'm never going to get to this goal. Right. Like again, trial and error is really ultimately going to be our answer. And that's one of those things where if we have experience, we can be, we're more likely to set a realistic goal off the get go. If you don't, if you haven't trained, you know, however many dogs, a hundred dogs to down before, you might not even think that checking if your dog understands to down on a variety of surfaces isn't important. I know that because I had a Chihuahua and Chihuahuas are fussy about where they like to lie down. Right. So, I mean, a hard floor versus a pillow versus outside. They were very, very different things to our Chihuahuas. Very. So for Dora, it was an easy thing for me to know that that was a realistic way to add a little bit of challenge, a little bit to the goal setting. Somebody else might be like, hey, my dog knows how to down. And the first time they asked them to down is on, you know, a yucky surface. The dog's like, I don't know what the hell you're talking about. And that's, that's okay. If that happens, you just have to realize that, you know, you're going to have to be flexible and adaptable. And, you know, if you record keep, that's going to help you figure out that the goals you're setting are reasonable as well. Dora heard her name. She's rolling around.

She's on the couch beside me and she's rolling around now. People hear her story. She's like, oh, oh, oh. Yeah. So kind of talking about goals and talking about all these pieces, people are usually pretty good about going, okay, so this is a thing I want to achieve, right? Thinking of a goal. But then it comes to actually doing the work to achieve them. And follow through is often the bane of some of our existence. Um, so can you just talk a little bit about like keeping ourselves accountable and actually, you know, following through on some of these goals? Yeah, for sure. For sure. And that's such an important part of it, right? Because if we lose motivation, we lose our impetus to carry on. And that's one of the reasons I really want people to remember to celebrate the stuff that they're doing that they like. That is actually a very good strategy for keeping moving forward. Reward yourself. And I don't mean go out and buy a, you know, gorgeous new leather collar, although that would be nice. It doesn't have to be a big deal. It can be something small, like going for a walk in a favorite park or, um, you know, any of those kinds of things. It doesn't have to be a big expensive thing, but, but the motivation is going to come either from achieving goals. So that's one reason people show, right? Is because if we're out and we're trialing, that's giving us a end goal to keep us training in between. A lot of people you showed or classes at the gold level, right? And FENZ, that, that you want to be able to do it well. So you're going to be able to keep going. Um, some people use classes, uh, generally meet meetups at the park, uh, fun matches. I don't think we do enough fun matches and show and goes in those kinds of things. Most of us, um, those can keep you all motivated. Give yourself a way to check in, whether it's with an instructor or a friend who's doing a similar training program in the community or another community. It doesn't matter. Um, create habits around these things that you want to do. So if your goal is to train at least four times a week, how can you create a habit to let you train four times a week? Where can you eke out the time? What can you attach your habit of training to? That's going to let you, um, remember to train because sometimes honestly, what happens with these goals is we just forget about them. Life gets busy, life gets in the way. And we've forgotten that we have this goal. And then we're like, oh my gosh, I haven't trained in two weeks. You throw your hands up in the air and you think, what's the point, right? And the point is you've got to show and go in two weeks.

So you get back to it. You don't want to be a weekend warrior. You get back to it. Your friend, um, two States over, uh, is busy training and remembers to check in with you. And you're like, oh, I didn't train in two weeks, but I'll train tonight. Right? Like those are all the kinds of things that we want to be able to do to keep ourselves accountable. Um, some people are really good at internally, uh, being motivated for accountability. Most of us are, do much better with a little bit of external drive. So one last question. Um, and it's the question I'm asking all my guests lately. So of course I have to ask you too. Um, so what's something that you've learned or that you've been reminded of recently when it comes to dog training or in your case, I'll even extend it. It could be something else that we talked about tonight. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I think the, the thing that I've learned specifically about dog training with this reminder of Dora is really the importance of being able to generalize. And, you know, when you asked me, you give me the, the, I would have been able to talk about anything we've talked about. It's still going to be generalized, right? Like, like, um, you know, if you can operationalize these goals that you have, how can you actually concretely do them? And then you generalize them in some way. Um, so that the goal is be a better dog trainer, right? Like that's pretty airy fairy. So you take this sort of kind of airy fairy goal and, and, and drill down into it. Like, what does that actually mean? What does that look like? And how can you put it into effect? Right? Like, should Andrea get a puppy in the new year? Well, like she's thinking about it for the first time in a very long time, right? Like maybe I'm adding a puppy this year. We'll see. Right. But really because of that, right. I want to be the best trainer I'm capable of being. And to do that, I want to get lots of training and Dora's great. And my other dogs are super, but you know, they're, they're mature dogs. And so to operationalize being the best trainer I can be, I better have some dogs around who wanted to play with me and do some stuff. Right. So I think those, that sort of concept of operationalizing what it is and then generalizing to make it happen in as many different ways as possible. Those would be the two things that are currently most on my mind, right? That, that are right central in my brain. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Andrea. Oh, it was absolutely a pleasure. Happy, happy new years.

I hope we all have great years of lots of success in all of our goals, outcome and process. Yeah, totally. Me too. Thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Petra Ford to talk about her excellent obedience series. She's doing a workshop series offered through FDSA. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzie Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzie for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty free by bensound.com. The track featured here is called Buddy. Audio editing provided by Chris Line. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training.