Hey there. It's Hannah Branigan here with this week's episode of Drinking from the Toilet, a podcast talking about real dogs, real training, and real

life.

A lot of folks have been asking lately for me to do an episode about splitting, which

of course is a topic that I can and do frequently get really obsessive about.

I don't like to split hairs, but I love to split behaviors.

You've probably heard the quote that you should be a splitter,

not a lumper. I think it's from the famous Bob Bailey and it is 100% true. We all want to be

splitters and we all are usually lumpers a lot of the time. We even joke about getting t-shirts

made as members of Lumpers Anonymous. Splitting is hard. Lumping is

easy. Lumping is much more natural for most of us than splitting. Splitting is something we have to

learn to do and have to think really hard and work hard to do it. We can often tell when we've lumped

something after the fact, usually because something is going wrong, often very

wrong. But that doesn't always tell us where we should have split the behavior or especially

where we can or could split the behavior in the future to prevent future train wrecks. So what can

we do to fix that? And why do we even really care?

Because it does seem like an awful lot of work.

Well, splitting is really awesome because it does let us have intense focus on one thing at a time.

That minimizes errors in frustration.

If you're only working on one little thing, you can only ever get one thing wrong.

Whereas if you're trying to hold a lot

of balls in the air, the chances of one of those things falling, well, that is increased. And the more

errors you have, the more frustrated you get, this is sort of what I feel like in my daily life right now.

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