Right after getting a pandemic puppy, Tiffany Chen decided to see if she could build some sort of side hustle in order to get her out of the corporate world. She signed up for the Virtual Assistant Internship and learned that it's wise to pick a niche. While she was working on learning about training her own dog (and building his requisite Instagram persona) she started following a lot of positive reinforcement dog trainers. It occurred to her that maybe she could use her virtual assistant powers to help them improve their marketing. She and Annie discuss how fun the R+ dog training movement is on Instagram, talk about ways to help trainers build their followings, and think aloud together about some of the overlap between training dogs and how social media's efforts to train us.

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Also mentioned in this episode:  @misunderstoodmutt @fromdusktilldog @k9fuel_ @doginspired https://virtualassistantinternship.com/

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Partial Transcript:

Annie:

In the decades of my life before I became a professional dog trainer, I think I had an avatar in my brain for who a dog trainer would be, what a dog trainer would be like. And I mean, if I try and remember what that avatar is, it's someone female, older, and kind of uncool, kind of schoolmarm-ish. I guess kind of like Barbara Woodhouse, like a martinet. Not that I thought of myself as particularly cool. I didn't. But I think I thought of myself as uncool in a different kind of way than that.

And when I pictured myself becoming a dog trainer, I didn't really have a picture of what that would be like. I had, even when I graduated from Karen Pryor Academy, I hadn't even seen that many people train dogs, period. And I didn't really, I couldn't quite picture what it would be like as a career.

I mean, I literally didn't know, like how would I dress when I went to clients' houses? Like how, how do I as a dog trainer, like what clothing do I wear? It sounds simple and even silly to say that, but we're all playing roles all the time and I wasn't sure what this role was about or like how I could fit myself into it.

And I think I've talked about this on the podcast before, but in 2010, I went to the Association for Professional Dog Trainers Conference in Atlanta. It was shortly after I had graduated Karen Pryor Academy where I had only met a couple of trainers, because there were only two other people in my class, and my instructor.

And my mind was kind of blown, cause I just sort of had this moment of like seeing there's so many cool and fun and interesting things in the world of dog training. There's so much that you could do with dogs. There's so much to learn about dogs. And I think that this is somehow an overlooked hobby, discipline, area of the world when so many people have dogs in their homes.

Full Transcript at SchoolfortheDogs.com/Podcast

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