In our society we want to let people know when they made a mistake because we think this is necessary for the person to learn. But how do you feel when someone call you out, even if in a gentle way? Shameful, embarrassed, guilty, sometimes even angry and frustrated. Very few times I felt good when someone said I shouldn’t so something. This inhibits learning and have a huge impact on the process of achieving the goal. However, this is something that is ingrained in us and it’s difficult to change in our brains. I work on this on myself everyday and I’m very careful to not shut down the person when trying to repair the damage or control the damage that was done. This could be that I gave a certain instruction to a client and the person have done something completely different or when my partner puts the cups on the mug cupboard. Doesn’t matter, depending on the way you approach this you’ll have different results. The question here is: is it the most effective and best way to get results in your dog training?

And the answer is to divert the attention from the mistake to new instructions! I explain how this works in dog behaviour in this episode.