Ep285 - The $10,000 bet with Brent Dry

So, and even after all these years, I'm still there.

Maybe I don't emphasize it.

I don't want to be like, I'm here to pretend to be your therapist, but I'm there to pretend to be your therapist in a way, you know, I love it.

Skill acquisition, repetition, feedback, and experience is a few things that came off the top of my head, but just for everyone to know, like, you know, school acquisition is a dog learning the thing that we want them to do, a down stay, a recall, or, you know, we can, we can keep this topics more to like obedience commands, but of course we can branch it out to socialization and habituation.

But how important for skill acquisition, how important is pattern recognition? Because it's easy for trainers, but mind-blowing for new owners.

What do you think about that?

Yeah, look, I think it's important.

One of the things I try to do when I'm teaching people is my analogy I use for everything is I have two main analogies that I use or two main things that I say, right? The first one is everything you do, you're going up a rung of a ladder or you're going up a ladder, right? And you're going up a rung each time.

So teaching, let's just say the drop, the dog could go down into a drop position.

So the first rung of the ladder is the dog, you know, learning how to take food.

The second rung of the ladder is, uh, maybe, uh, getting them to stay on your hand with the food for three or four seconds, you know? And then the next rung of the ladder is now can I lure the dog down to the position? And then the next rung is, you know, so we build these rungs of the ladder up until, you know, the drop ladder is high enough that I tell the dog drop.

In any situation, they're like, yeah, I've got it.

But if we skip rungs on the ladder, then we're kind of just jumping and hoping that we land somewhere safely.

So for me, every single time I'm working with a client, I always try to sit there and go, hey, in regards to the rungs of the ladder, where are you? What are you actually on? And I find that helps people, number one, slow down.

Because they're not like, well, I have to get to the top of the ladder as fast as I can because you don't, right? We have time to be able to, you know, talk about skill acquisition.

Well, we have time.

And that's probably one of the most important things that I think people try to skip through is time.

Like we have time, so let's not rush.

Yeah.

and skip steps, right? And then as a skilled trainer, you can look at what the person is doing.

And if you need to, because I might have a Labrador, I'm like, hey man, follow the food.

And they're like, yeah, I'll do that.

And I'm like, stay committed.

They're like, yeah, I'll do that.

And I'll just follow it down to the ground.