I’m a dog trainer, but mostly I’m a coach and teacher. I teach other people how to be their dogs’ partners, and that means learning skills related to dog behavior, how dogs learn, and how to communicate with a non-verbal species.
Learning All the Time
Dogs, humans, and every other species are all learning, all the time. Surviving and thriving depend on being able to get past a variety of obstacles every day. That means solving problems, making choices, and experimenting with different approaches to see what works.
To help my students navigate the infinite choices before them, I teach them to plan the pathway they’ll use to reach their goals. That includes adjusting the environment, even an environment that seems like it’s not adjustable. There are definitive ways to set yourself up for success, no matter what you’re learning or doing.
Control, Choice, and Reduced Stress
Taking control of the situation allows you to solve problems more effectively. If you’re not already using this approach, consider using some of these ideas to make yourself a better learner, a more effective trainer for your dog, and more efficient at any task you take on.
A sense of control and the ability to make choices, even small ones, is known to reduce stress. Minimizing stress allows you to be in a better state to learn new things and to perform known skills more effectively. So, the reasons for learning to learn are clear.
Use Your Brain – Don’t Let it Use You
Your brain will lead the way if you let it, and it might take you directly to the “land of distractions.” LOL You already know how easy it is to drift off-task and follow your thoughts wherever they take you. You also know that this is not productive when you have things you need to do.
Take time to notice the thoughts that enter your brain when you’re committed to a task. One thought after another will threaten to lead you away from your task. What if you’re sweeping the floor? Sweep the broom left, then right. Direct the pile of dirt toward a central location so you can pick it up. You can complete this simple task without many conscious decisions. You’re not using your brain much, it doesn’t have much to do, so it leads you along on its meandering path of thoughts.
Distractions!
“After I finish this, I need to . . .” “Wonder how the recent election turned out . . .” “That’s important! Let me check real quick.” Suddenly, you’re at your computer, looking up who won, while the pile of dirt sits on your kitchen floor. Why? Conditioning.
Training, Learning, and Habits
You do what your brain has been trained to do. Training yourself to behave in certain ways is really helpful when you do it deliberately. It’s how we train dogs and how we teach people to perform intricate procedures. But humans sometimes just do stuff, without thinking much about what the consequences might be. It’s easy and it can be fun to follow your brain around.
In the case described above, you’ll do what you’ve always done unless you take action to change it. Do you have a habit of following your thoughts? Or are you more disciplined about finishing what you’ve started? It seems easy enough to finish your sweeping job and then go to your computer to find out the latest news. But without training, it may be more likely that you’ll lean your broom against the counter and follow your thoughts to whatever distractions are before you.
Techniques for Taking Charge
There are tons of options for starting to take charge of your brain. Stop sweeping for a moment and make a note to check the news afterward. Then finish the job. To do this, you can use an app for notes on your phone or watch.
Grab the pencil you keep by your grocery list and write, “Check news” on a scrap of paper. Write it with a pen on your arm, if that works for you! Even starting to use one of these tactics is a behavior change, and you’ll have to be very deliberate to succeed.
There’s an old saying about “tying a string around your finger” and it works! My mom used to literally tie a piece of string around her finger, thinking of what it was meant to remind her of as she tied it. After completing her task and noticing the string, she immediately remembered what it meant.
Why not sing a little song about checking on the election news as you’re finishing picking up your dust pile and throwing it out? These are just a few training techniques you can try. Create your own, give it a try, and take the first steps toward training your brain to work for you.
Prepare: Change Won’t “Just Happen”
Planning and preparation are required if you want to do things in a different way than you have in the past. Your past behaviors have become routine. You have become very good at them and that has made them easy for you to choose and complete. If you want to do something different, and do that well, you have to make a plan and set yourself up to be successful. You’ll have to make the effort to set aside your old routines in order to create new ones.
Setting Factors: Your Learning Environment
Set up the space you’ll use to learn, create, or train your dog. If possible, keep that space set up permanently. Start allowing your learning space to “cue” you, or “remind” you that there is something specific you mean to do there. For me, it’s a desk with a computer, a lamp, notepad, a chair, and a few other items that help me get to work. In this area, I’m learning, teaching online, creating videos, writing articles, or doing other tasks related to my job.
Think about how people set up their desks in office buildings, or even in their home offices. They may have a family photo on the desk, but they also typically have items that are related to their job.
An engineer may have a small model related to the type of design she works on, or her framed “Professional Engineer” certificate or diploma. Someone who works in a non-profit organization may have photos of the customers they have contributed to or reminders of programs they initiated. Their environment helps them focus their brains on the tasks that help them achieve their job goals.
Your Starting Action
Every time you enter your learning space, perform a simple starting action, like turning on a lamp or setting a timer. I tear off yesterday’s calendar page and turn on my desk lamp.
A “start-up” routine will help you take charge of the process. When you enter the space, your start-up routine will not only remind you of what you plan to focus on, but it will replace many of the thoughts that compete for your attention. The starting action will help you train yourself to do what you designed the space for, to direct your focus to where you want it.
To begin learning at your desk, you might simply lay down a notebook and pick up a pen or turn your computer on and go to the appropriate website. Be careful to design your setting factors so that you don’t begin searching or scrolling. You’re already aware that access to a computer can be a challenge to your focus!
Think about what you can do to minimize this risk. Keep the page open and ready? Write an inspirational note that you’ll see when you sit down? You’ll have to experiment a little to find what is required to train your brain to work for you.
A Behavioral Approach Works
B.F. Skinner was a famous behaviorist who was inventive with ideas for working efficiently. The ideas I’m presenting here are not my own! I learned many of them from him. Dr. Skinner used a behavioral approach to focus on his own work.
When Skinner went to his desk to write, he would turn on a lamp. Being an inventive guy, he had set up a clock that started recording the time he spent at his desk as soon as the lamp came on. His setting factors cued him to start writing, but they also helped him collect data that tracked how long he was writing at his desk.
It’s interesting to note that Dr. Skinner began noticing himself interrupting his writing to check the clock. Does that sound familiar? He began keeping a piece of cardboard next to the clock and added to his routine the action of placing the cardboard against the face of the clock so he would be more mindful of when he checked the clock.
Pomodoros
Some have taken this idea of focusing and minimizing checking the clock a little further. The “Pomodoro Technique” is one way to effectively manage your time. It’s easier to commit to a finite period of time than to some unknown amount of time that ends when you get tired! 25 minutes is what Francesco Cirillo came up with when he developed the “Pomodoro” technique. The name came from the tomato-shaped kitchen timer he used to time his work periods. You can see how planning, preparation, and setting up helpful aids can really help you learn to focus.
Setting Factors Specific to Dog Training
For my students who are learning to train their dogs, I often recommend doing your training sessions in a quiet and low-distraction room in your home, like the kitchen or bathroom. Setting factors should include having your treats ready, already cut up if needed, in a plastic bag or storage container that’s easy to get to and easy to open. Entering that room will begin to become a signal to your brain that it’s training time.
You may start to see your dog start to behave differently when you enter the training area. He might perk up, look directly at you, or otherwise show you he is ready to do the things that typically happen in that room. Your dog’s engagement can help you engage with him in return, becoming an additional signal to your brain that it’s time to practice learning together.
Pomodoros for Dog Training
A timer is helpful to keep you from letting your brain go on “repeat” and keep doing the same behavior over and over with your dog, until you lose focus and start to fail. Humans can easily get into a “groove” of training, having so much fun that you go for too long, or too many repetitions. This behavior tends to drive you directly toward failure. Keeping a session short and stopping on a “good one” tends to keep you excited to train at the next session. For dog training sessions, 25 minutes is typically way too long. Just 1 or 2 minutes at a time is a perfect duration before a break. You can do several 1-2 minute sessions with breaks in between.
Soon, you and your learner will be able to quickly get into the state you need to be in for learning, even when you switch to environments other than your typical training area. It takes consistent practice of just how you want behaviors to work for you to reach this goal.
Prompts that Help Train Your Brain
Writing a mission statement can help you teach yourself what to do in your learning environment. Write your overall mission statement (long-term), your daily goal and perhaps even your goal for this session. Put these statements where you can easily see them. When a new idea pops into your head and threatens to distract you from your task, glance over at your mission statement – does the idea further your mission? If not, let it go and re-focus on what you want to focus on.
Learning vs. Relaxation
What you do to relax and de-stress after a long day is NOT what you should do when you’re setting yourself up to learn, write, or train your dog. I tend to slouch on the couch and watch TV to de-stress after a long day. The living room, couch, and television are part of the environment in which I turn my brain off, to shut it down. That environment is not conducive to the writing, planning, and research I do for work. My desk is that environment and sitting in my chair cues me to get started. There, I sit up straight and either have music playing or silence to help me focus, not Gray’s Anatomy! LOL
Physical Environment is Key: Use it
This is purely behavior science. When you get in the driver’s seat of your car, you drive. When you stand at your kitchen sink and turn on the hot water, you wash dishes. Having a learning, writing, or training environment is likely new to you. It will require some thought and planning to set it up to work for you. If you’re training your dog, you’re also learning to train your dog so your environment must support both you and your dog. Remove physical and psychological obstacles. Have your treats, target, leash, items for your dog to retrieve, and everything you need handy.
Internal Environment
The external environment is key to focus, but so is your internal state. When you’re learning, it’s best to provide an environment in which it is easy for your brain to focus on taking in the new information required. You want to be comfortable and relaxed to the point where you can eliminate intrusive, stressful thoughts. However, you don’t want to be relaxed to the point where you shut down your brain and stop thinking, like I am on the couch after a long day!
Providing yourself with a conducive environment will teach you to quickly and easily reach a state in which you function effectively and efficiently. Pay attention; be aware of how you’re feeling and how to settle yourself. Experiment with setting factors like location and available items that help you adjust and get into the state you need to be in.
Mindfulness and Meditation
When training a dog, you must teach him the small bits of behavior necessary to build the larger behaviors you need. If a dog loses his mind when the doorbell rings, you don’t begin training when a visitor arrives! You start in a low-distraction area, away from the door and everything it signifies for him. Training your brain requires a similar approach. Mindful meditation is a way to practice the skills you desire to increase your ability to focus.
Practice mindfulness outside your learning time. Concentrating on your breathing teaches your brain to settle, to focus on one thing at a time. These skills will generalize to other areas of your life. Meditation is simply a way to train your brain to allow you to use it well instead of following it along as it meanders without focus.
People often say, “I can’t meditate because my thoughts just go everywhere!” Of course they do! Meditation is not a performance you carry out. It’s a technique for learning to operate your brain in a way that helps you do what you want to do.
Guided Meditation
In the beginning, your thoughts will go everywhere. Just as learning anything new, like how to train your dog or how to work a Calculus problem, or in what characteristics birds and mammals are different, learning to choose what you’ll focus on is a skill set.
Most guided meditations lead you to focus on your breathing as you notice the hundreds of thoughts that will come into your mind, let them go, and go back to focusing on your breathing. As you progress, you’ll be able to choose your focus much more easily in all areas of your life.
Meditation is not mysterious; it’s just a protocol for managing the thoughts that enter your brain. You’ll need to practice it regularly. Just a few minutes every morning can bust through barriers to learning efficiently. You can find a variety of short, guided meditations on YouTube. I particularly like the ones offered for free by “The Mindful Movement.”
Don’t Settle for “Good Enough”
“Good enough” (a.k.a., “GE” – Thanks, Dr. Robert E. Bailey!) is your enemy because it helps your brain to begin leading you back into your previously learned behaviors, the ones that did not result in you being a focused learner who learns effectively and efficiently. You’ve been learning continuously for a long time, and many of the things you have learned to do are not helping you; however, you’ll keep doing them because they are deeply ingrained.
Behavior never stays the same. It’s always changing, moving in one direction or another. If you’re not always pushing toward excellence, you’ll settle for “GE” and start falling into the solidly learned behaviors that have repeatedly failed to achieve your goal.
“Perfect Practice Makes Perfect” – Vince Lombardi
Perfect performance is NOT the goal, but perfect practice helps you learn. You do not need to “be” perfect, but perfect practice in terms of doing things consistently helps you create habits, skill sets that become easier for you over time.
Push toward excellence, learn from errors that cause you to fail, don’t make those errors again, change your setting factors, build on what worked in the past, refer to your mission statement and short-term goals, and keep pushing. Add to your repertoire those behaviors that help you get closer to your goal. Repeat only the behaviors that help you move toward excellence.
If you shoot for the moon, you may land among the stars. But if you succumb to “GE,” you won’t reach either. You’ll keep repeating behaviors that are not helpful.
Writing, Dog Training, and Tennis
There’s another benefit of pushing toward excellence and not settling for “GE.” My son played tennis under a wise coach, Harry Taylor. Harry’s commonly stated mantra, “Pros miss in,” eloquently describes how the outcome of pushing toward excellence is that your errors are smaller and much easier to recover from.
Pro tennis players certainly miss shots. If they didn’t, tennis matches would go on forever! But their errors most often result in the ball hitting in bounds, just not exactly where they wanted it to. This means they are still in the game and can recover, using the skills they’ve gained to make their next play so the ball lands in the right place.
Amateurs can’t do this. They haven’t focused their learning to the point where their performance is controlled enough to limit the breadth of their errors, so their errors are bigger and often unrecoverable.
Learning to focus on your learning, writing, or dog training will help you decrease the impact of your errors so that they don’t throw your entire process off-course.
Learning is a Skill Set
You have more control over your own behavior than you may realize! The choices you make in preparing your environment to help you learn better ways to use your brain will benefit you immediately and in the long-term. Like any new skill set, the one you use for learning something new, writing a book, or training your dog can be structured to help you reach your goal efficiently and effectively.
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