Hey, listeners.

Welcome back to another episode of drinking from the toilet, the podcast about the reality

of training with positive reinforcement.

I'm your host, Hannah Branigan. This week, well, this week I hope you'll bear with me.

If you thought previous episodes were extraordinarily geeky, this one may set a new standard.

So I hope you liked that before because there's more of it coming now. If you thought previous

episodes were boring, then probably go ahead and turn it off and move on to something more

interesting. So last week, we talked to Dr. Susan Friedman about motivation and the concept

of motivating operations came up, but we never really clearly defined it, at least not good enough for me.

And I feel like motivation and motivating operations are such, there's such big ideas that

it's worth pulling them apart and taking a few episodes to really unpack.

These are concepts that have a big influence on what we do with our training and what we

see and what we observe and how we talk about it. So I hope you also think that this is a good thing to talk

about. And I hope, well, I'm going to do my best to convince you that this isn't all a big waste of time.

This is one of those concepts, one of those ideas where I really think if we can all wrap our heads around it, get used to the language, and use it effectively, we're going to really be able to move the whole field forward.

So what is a motivating operation? When I first heard this term, which I talked about a little bit in front

of Dr. Friedman, but I was maybe a little bit embarrassed to say that initially I dismissed it.

I'm not a fan of unnecessary jargon, right? I don't think that it's helpful to use words that

are just unnecessary big words. I'm all about clear communication.

I want to use the most effective words to communicate precisely what I'm talking about so that

whoever I'm talking to knows what it is. Like we're on the same page, right? And when I first

heard about a motivating operation, I thought, well, whatever, who really cares?

...