Hey there. Welcome back to drinking from the toilet. The podcast about real dogs, real training, and real life. I'm your host, Hannah Branigan, also real.

And I have a confession.

In the last two weeks, I've trained my dogs exactly one time.

Total.

Yep.

I had the best of intentions, as usual.

I even have some goals, which I am making zero progress on. But

a variety of unexpected and exhausting life stuff just kind of happened as it does. And I fell

off the wagon. Again, not the first time. And as usual, this led to a really attractive

guilt spiral. Lots of negative thoughts, like, you know,

if you were a real dog trainer, or how do you expect people to actually pay you to help

them train their dogs if you can't even be bothered to train your own? And of course,

guilt is so productive, right? In fact, once I start feeling guilty about not training,

I am even less likely to train at all. I turn my mind

to think about other things. I'll look for other sources of reinforcement, other hobbies that are

maybe less punishing or guilt-inducing. I periodically consider knitting. It happens. And I know

what happens to a lot of people. This is a super common problem.

I know a lot of people experience this because, in fact, in my zero to CD mentorship

program where we have these on regular weekly check-ins where we talk about our training plans.

And so we're talking about our upcoming training plan and what obstacles we'll be facing

in the coming week so that we could work on

solutions to prevent those obstacles from derailing our plan and blocking us from making progress.

...