I’m a fan of adding as much creativity as possible to training – for all sports. The official reason is that creative training automatically strengthens your dog’s skills; dogs who can fetch twenty different objects of different sizes and shapes have a much easier time when you hand them a dumbbell – they become “fluent” on the underlying concept – “retrieve” whatever, on cue.
But that’s not really why I do it. The real reason I do it is because my attention span is short for training if I’m working on known behaviors. I get bored with repetition, especially if I expect that the dog is going to do the exercise and do it very well. Again. Ho Hum. So…what’s the answer?
Go ahead. Have some fun with your training. Break out of the mold! Then you too can keep yourself awake at night, itching to go out and see what happens with your latest crazy idea! I mean…what WILL your dog do if you ask her to fetch a wine bottle instead of the dumbbell? Put the articles on your kid’s trampoline and send her to find the right one? Hang your gloves from the trees and go ahead with your directed retrieve?
I’m teaching a webinar tonight called “Gaming the System: Develop Your Creative Training Potential!” The goal of that webinar is to get you excited – massively motivated! To get out and work with your dog. The sport you love doesn’t matter; what matters is that I’m going to do a bunch of the work for you! I’ll lay out a way for you to think about both your training and mixing it up so that your creative training is structured.
How’s that for an oxymoron? Structured creativity!
Yes, structured. So if you break into a cold sweat contemplating trying to think outside the box, I’m going to help you with that. And if I do a fantastic job, you will go beyond what I give you and will come up with your own creative approaches.
But what if I just break even? What if you never go beyond the structure that I give to you? Frankly, that’s fine too. You’ll still be a good deal better off than if you hadn’t learned about it at all.
I look forward to seeing many of you tomorrow night, Thursday the 9th, at 6pm PT! You can read the description and register here. The cost is $19.95, and while you need to register before the webinar runs, you can watch it at any time afterwards at your leisure – for at least a year.
Here’s a video from the presentation – simply for entertainment purposes! But yeah – it’s making the dog stronger at the same time.
