This term self-reinforcing tends to come up most often when the trainer doesn't know what is reinforcing the behavior, doesn't know what the function of the behavior is, and maybe it's because they just haven't looked hard enough often.

The function, a lot of the times, is there in front of us if we know to look for it.

Hey there, fellow training nerds. I'm Hannah Branigan, teacher, trainer, podcaster, inadequate parent and small business owner and author of the book Awesome Obedience, which you can pick up right now from Clickertraining.com. And in fact, Awesome Obedience, the field guide is now available for pre-order. This is a new version.

It's a portable, durable, spiral-bound version of the original book.

It features all of the key exercises, but it's stripped down from some of the extra

stuff in a format that you can easily throw in your training bag so you can reference the

exercises and the diagrams on the go when you're actually doing the training training bag so you can reference the exercises and the diagrams

on the go when you're actually doing the training. So if you already had a copy of

the awesome obedience, the full-size book, this companion field guide is now available to you at a

discount. And I think there's flat rate shipping on it as well. So if you're interested in that,

you can go to clickertraining.com for more information. I'll make sure to include a link to that in the show notes.

So what do you do when faced with a self-reinforcing behavior? This is a question that I have seen

come up frequently today, in fact, with other trainers on the internet and in person

and in conversations. There's been stuff written about it. And I see it especially with trainers

who are working to find reinforcement-based solutions and getting stumped. So I think it's

something important to talk about. It's one of those places where you run into,

go to self-reinforcing behavior. And sometimes it can feel like there's nothing that you can do except maybe bring in punishment or bring in an aversive. But I think we can explore it a little

bit more. But before we do that, I need to send a shout out to these awesome folks for

supporting the podcast on Patreon. So I'm going to do again the first name, last initials for hopefully a nice compromise

between gratitude and privacy.

So special thank you to Ginny A, S-I-W, Lindsay W, Amber T,

Janine C, Sherry Y, Jte L, Rebecca Y, Neil M, and Nancy L.

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