Hey guys, welcome or welcome back.

I'm Hannah Branigan, and this is Drinking from the Toilet, a podcast about teaching and training, pretty much anything,

but mostly dogs, with positive reinforcement. So I've gotten several questions lately about

how to set priorities when we're deciding what we should train and what's the most important

thing to train. And I thought it was a pretty good question because prioritizing our training

time is an important part of time

management and since none of us ever have nearly as much time to train as we would like this is an

important skill this is something we need to break down so at first I was thinking well how do I decide

what to train and what's the most important thing to train and how to spend my time

most productively? And then I remembered what a stellar job I've been doing with that lately.

So then I started thinking, well, how should I decide what's the most important thing to train?

And I thought about my students and how I want them to prioritize their training and

what choices they've made that seem to be

getting really good results and getting the outcomes that we're looking for.

So at first I was thinking, well, I should train safety behaviors first, and then we should train

lifestyle behaviors.

So things like stuff that keeps your dog alive, like a safe recall, right?

And then around the house behaviors, night eating stuff off the counter, those are things we use

all the time. And so that feels like it should be a priority. But then I realized, you know,

really, before we can even do that, and probably also those aren't really the answer to people

were looking for, but even before we could do that, we need to consider the structure of training, of the training interaction, and how learning happens and how we want that to play out in our sessions.

And that's really how we should set our priorities.

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