Eye On The Prize: Setting Good Expectations - a podcast by Ty Brown

In today’s post, I’d like to tackle a topic that comes up a lot among my clients: developing realistic expectations for our dogs.

On one end of the spectrum of expectations is the dog owner that doesn't realize the great accomplishments and successes they’ve had. For instance, say someone is dealing with an aggressive dog. When they come back to us after a few sessions, they’re down in the dumps. But as we dig deeper, we find out that before they couldn't even go on a walk because the dog was lunging.

The dog used to be a nightmare, but a few months into the training he’s doing way better. Unfortunately, the owner’s complaint then becomes: “We’re doing fine on walks, except when another dog charges at us! Then we’ve got a problem.” That’s totally valid, and we have to fix it. But it’s not uncommon to see someone make huge strides and solve 80% of their dogs’ problems, yet still focus on the problems.

From a mindset perspective, that’s an issue. It’s hard to get the ideal dog if you’re constantly nitpicking. If you tend to dwell on problems despite progress, then your misplaced focus on will affect your dog training. There’s nothing wrong with saying: “We’ve made some awesome progress, even though we still need to fix this issue.” With the correct consistency and technique, that mindset can get you a lot of results.

The other side of the spectrum is made up of folks who are in denial about their dogs’ enormous problems. They say things like: “Oh, he’s so good—he’ll wait as long as it takes for his dinner!” or “He attacks everything he sees, but he knows how to sit!” This type of owner only sees the good.

Obviously, they know that the dog has major issues, which is why they’re seeking out training in the first place. But they have a very difficult time training their dog because their standards are so low and they excuse all the problems that they see. That’s why, when a client tells me that their dog bit the mailman but knows how to shake and speak on command, I’ll say: “Amazing...aside from all the murdering, right?”

Having these unrealistic perspectives about our dogs—either seeing only the tiny good things if the dog has huge problems, or only seeing the bad things even though the dog is making big strides—is not conducive to results. To solve this problem, I always encourage people to look at their dog training from an “addition and subtraction” perspective.

Here’s what that looks like. First, we remove all our care and emotion toward the dog and look at actual behaviors that influence our quality of life and the dog’s quality of life. Forget about how much we love our dog and how much he loves us. What do you need to add to your dog’s behavior to get the quality of life that we both want? What do you need to subtract? Addition might be adding behaviors like good recall on hikes; subtraction might be getting rid of a habit like jumping up on the counter.

Once you have your columns of addition and subtraction, you can look at them as simply behavior issues. If you started out with a dog that had a bunch of troubles, you can look back to those columns and realize that those few remaining issues are small in comparison to what you’ve done. You can see that you’ve done a good job. If you’re a little bit in denial, you might look at those columns and realize that you need to subtract all the murder and add every good behavior under the sun. Maybe you’ll realize that you need to buckle down and train.

In the end, a more correct perspective on who your dog is, what your relationship with him is, and what your dog needs will get you results so much faster.

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