Over the years, I’ve coached a lot of well-educated trainers. They’ve been to the seminars, worked through the online courses, read the books, and their toolboxes are full of great methods, exercises, and techniques. That’s a real asset, but it comes with a side effect: once you know fifty ways to change a dog’s behavior, every one of them starts to feel like it deserves a place in the client’s training plan.
Nearly every tool in that toolbox has a useful application. Whether it belongs in the plan for the client sitting in front of you is a different question, and the more you’ve learned, the more often you’ll need to ask it. That’s especially true in pet dog training, where we don’t control the dog’s whole day and we don’t get unlimited time. We work inside a budget set by our clients’ money, their available time, their attention, and their interest. A plan that ignores that budget will fail no matter how many good ideas are in it.
The Produce Aisle
Imagine your doctor is concerned about your cholesterol and tells you to start eating more fruits and vegetables. You walk into the supermarket and find an entire produce section of options, every one of which would provide good nutrition. Do you buy one of each?
Almost certainly not. Your grocery budget is limited, so every item you choose comes at the expense of another. Within that budget, you want to buy things you’ll actually cook and eat, because a bag of spinach that wilts in the back of the fridge did nothing for your cholesterol. And the options aren’t equal to begin with, since some will do far more for your health than others. This means the smart move is to spend the budget on those with the highest impact first.
How the Analogy Maps to Training
Each of those limits has a direct counterpart in a training plan.
The budget has several parts, and proficiency draws from all of them. We have a finite amount of time with the client, the client has a finite amount of time to practice at home, they have a finite amount of attention, and their interest in the work has a ceiling. Getting good at any single skill takes a share of each of those, and every skill we add draws from the same pools, which lowers the odds that the client becomes proficient in any of them. An owner who is handed a heel, a place cue, a check-in game, an emergency u-turn, and a sit-stay at the curb all in the same lesson doesn’t end up with five skills. More often they end up with five partially built skills, if that, and none of it holds up under pressure.
Skills that don’t fit daily life, atrophy. If we teach a client something they have no reason to use in their routine, it will fade from disuse, and the time we spent teaching it is gone. A beautiful down-stay at the front door does nothing for a family that never has a reason to ask for it, and the session time it consumed could have gone toward a skill they’d use on every walk.
Some exercises matter far more than others. For any given dog and owner, a small number of skills will produce most of the result. When a client hires us because their dog lunges and barks at other dogs, an exercise that changes what happens when a dog appears is worth more than a dozen others that only graze the periphery. The budget should go to the high-impact skills first.
Someone will object that a longer plan is a more thorough plan, and that covering more ground is simply better service. I’d argue the opposite. Thoroughness that the client can’t execute isn’t thoroughness at all. A focused plan that the owner carries out well will beat a comprehensive plan that they carry out poorly, and the difference tends to show up in how quickly the client sees results and how likely they are to stick with us.
What the Produce Aisle Can’t Show You
The analogy breaks down in one important place. Vegetables don’t conflict with each other, but strategies can.
One strategy might use play to channel the dog’s energy and behavior while another focuses on lowering arousal, and a trainer who has picked up both along the way may put them in the same plan without noticing the collision. The trouble is that you’re heating something up and cooling it down at the same time. The likely result is a dog sitting at a lukewarm middle, with neither strategy getting to do its job. Confusion compounds it on both ends of the leash, since the owner isn’t sure whether the moment calls for revving the dog up or settling it down, and the dog, getting mixed signals about which state is wanted, ends up guessing. Progress stalls, and we lose the consistency and confidence that clients need to follow through at home. I covered a different version of this in my Leash Reactivity series.
Three Questions That Narrow the Plan
If a big toolbox is the problem, the answer isn’t to stop learning. It’s to get better at deciding what goes into the plan for a given case. I find three questions useful for that. They work best in order, because each one builds on the last.
1. If I had to address the behavior head-on, what exact skills would the handler and the dog each need to execute my instructions? This sets the baseline, and it forces specificity. Until you can name the skills on both ends of the leash, you can’t build an efficient training plan.
2. If the owner has multiple goals, are there skills that serve more than one of them? This is where the budget stretches. One well-built skill that contributes to three of the client’s goals is worth far more than three separate exercises, since it gets practiced more often and becomes reliable faster.
3. Which elements of the plan are ones without which the client and dog could not succeed at all? This is the cut line, and it’s the one trainers tend to cheat on, because a well-educated trainer can build a justification for almost anything. The way to keep yourself honest is to hold onto the difference between helpful and essential. Most of what’s in your toolbox is helpful, but only a small portion of it will be essential for a given client, and everything that doesn’t survive this question is a candidate to get cut.
What Earns a Place in the Plan
The principle underneath all of this is simple. An exercise having value, even real value, doesn’t by itself earn it a place in the training plan. Helpfulness is the entry requirement for the toolbox, but the training plan has a much higher bar, because it has to fit inside the limited time, attention, and interest of the person who will be carrying it out.
None of this is an argument against continuing education. A deep toolbox is exactly what allows you to choose well, and it lets you swap in a better tool when the first one isn’t working. It just asks for a matching discipline, which is the willingness to leave most of what you know out of any single plan.
If you want more confidence in building effective and efficient training plans, set up a Free Discovery Call to learn about my coaching process.
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