Sometimes when we have these linear shaping programs that emphasize the wrong components,

we feel confident because we think the shaping plan is going really well.

And then you realize that the animal doesn't have the skills,

whereas if you're building the muscle movements that you need from the beginning,

it's like everything just kind of comes together,

which always feels really, really reinforcing.

Hey there, fellow training nerds. You're listening to Drinking from the Toilet. I'm Hannah Branigan,

teacher, trainer, podcaster, inadequate parent slash small business owner, and author of the book,

Awesome Obedience, which you can pick up right now from ClearTraining.com. So I get a lot of requests to do an episode explaining how I

split behaviors, how to do splitting, how to break a behavior down into pieces and train it.

And it's been such a hard thing for me to try to distill into a system. I've taken a couple of

stabs at it. But what I really find is that different behaviors, I break down different ways depending on the

context and the conditions and how I wanted to come out and lots of different stuff.

And I'm not always sure how exactly to articulate the process.

One thing that I have realized is that the old shaping staircase model, which is a great way

to explain the concept of shaping or training through successive approximations

is a little bit limiting and it doesn't quite reflect the way I actually go about designing a shaping

plan in real life. It just doesn't always break down that way. When I saw Mary's presentation on

nonlinear shaping at the Art and Science of Animal Trading Conference, I get super excited because what she's describing is very much the way that I think about shaping,

which was so cool.

And she described it way better than me.

So we're going to talk about that in a minute.

...