On Patience & Knowing When to Stop
Timing is everything with clicker training and part of that timing is knowing how long to train for and when to stop. This is something I have really been struggling with lately, and something that Koa has been teaching me a lot about.
I am what my instructor refers to as a "recovering perfectionist" and my usual approach to a problem or a project is to pour EVERYTHING into it, to work and work and work until I have the results I want. This can be an effective approach with things like writing projects, but with dog training, it's simply not going to work. In order to keep Koa's attention, I need to keep our sessions around 2 - 5 minutes long, giving her breaks for play and relaxation in between. I need to vary our days so she doesn't get bored, be creative with my reinforcers, and work at different times and in places that are nice and cool for her. Although that sounds simple enough, it's been incredibly difficult for me.
The KPA program is really fast paced and there is a lot of work to get through, so my instinct is to plunge in head first and work really hard every day. I usually have two days off a week, and I really want to use them to train and train and train and train. But that's not going to work for my dog. When we have a really good session, I'm so excited, I want to keep pushing, get more out of it, push it further. But I'm learning that if we make a little break through, I should just do a few more reps to solidify the behavior and then give Koa something to chew on, take her out for a walk, or to the park.
When we have a bad session, I want to work through it, try harder, get to a good place. And while it's a great idea to, if possible, end on a positive note, that's not always possible. If the session isn't going well, I know I should step back, give Koa a break, change my set up and come back to it when I feel calm and grounded, but that's so against my nature. This morning I found myself nearly in tears, fighting a rising sense of panic that I would never get through the classwork, because my dog was so over training she would take one look at my set up and go lie on the couch. Once I calmed down, stepped away from it, it was obvious that I'd been working her too hard. Yesterday was peppered with training sessions and today it was getting hot and she simply wasn't feeling it. Once I packed a few things into a bag, took her for a drive to my work, where I knew the training area would be empty and air conditioned, I was able to start fresh. I broke my sessions down into shorter windows. I pulled out a new tug toy to play with between sessions. She got to say hi to some of her friends at the store and get complimented by curious shoppers. The environment was new and novel. She did awesome.
There are many other dogs that would be easier to go through this program with. Dogs like my "niece" Ruby that are so thrilled to earn a treat, they'll keep working forever if you let them. But Koa is the perfect dog for me, because she is teaching me that no matter how badly I want to get through the material, no matter how hard I want to push her and myself, I have to be patient. I have to time my sessions, take breaks, change the environment. I have to be forgiving of her, and harder yet, be forgiving of myself, if we didn't accomplish what I had hoped for our session. She is teaching me not only to be a better trainer, but to be a better person.
