Hard Truth: You Don’t Have To Change Who You Are To Have A Well Behaved Dog.

Are you hiring a dog trainer or a lifestyle coach ? Because if someones answer to a difficult dog is any of the following, “you need to be more confident”, “become a stronger leader so your dog respects you” or “you need to work on yourself first” then what exactly are they training?

You don’t need to change your personality to train your dog. You can be anxious, insecure and lack confidence. You can naturally be quiet or reserved, this doesn’t prevent anyone from having a well behaved dog.

What you need is skill and you need to understand how your dog learns. You need to learn how to communicate clearly, how to reinforce the behaviours you want, how to interrupt the behaviours you don’t and how to create reliability through repetition and real world practice.

And no, putting a different leash, collar or piece of equipment on your dog doesn’t magically change their behaviour either, equipment is a tool. Training is what creates and alters behaviour. A different leash doesn’t teach a dog to engage, to have impulse control or change the dynamic between owner and dog.

The same goes for the handler, confidence doesn’t have to come first. Confidence is the by product of success and clear training. You become confident because you understand your dog, you know what to do, you’ve practiced it and you’ve experienced success.

That’s why training the handler is just as important as training the dog. Not because the owner needs to become a completely different person, because they need to become more skilled. Train the dog, train the handler, change the habits, change the interactions, build success and the confidence follows.

If someones primary solution to a behavioural problem is changing the owners personality instead of teaching the owner and dog foundation skills to navigate a problem, they are not a dog trainer, they are a lifestyle coach with a leash.