Optimism really allowed Bonnie to have freedom, confidence and success with other dogs that she hadn't previously had all through the training you'd done and continue to do with absolute dogs.

Yes, that is exactly it. That is exactly. That's the real power of games based training is that all of this has been achieved in a way that she has found fun and rewarding.

And so those learning experiences have those massive transformations have been achieved because this has been something she's wanted to do.

Thank you. this has been something she's wanted to do. Welcome to the Absolute Dog Sex and a Squirrel podcast.

I'm Lauren Langman. I'm one of the world's leading dog trainers,

and it's my mission to help owners become their dog's top priority. In each episode, you'll discover how to gain trust and communicate with

your dog like never before, creating unbreakable bonds that make you the most exciting part of

their world. They say optimism is a way of life and I would say for me actually the concept of

optimism has changed my life, not just my dog's life.

I mean, my dog's life for sure, but in turn, my life when I've had hard scenarios at me and they say they come here to serve the purpose and they're here for you.

Some days you can doubt that. Optimism really is a way of life. Now, optimism for you, Alice,

you have a very large, you call her yourself a mastiff mutt. Like she's a massive mutt. Tell us a

bit about Bonnie and tell us why optimism really did change your life. So yes, Bonnie is our sort of furry little renovation project who sort of has benefited from a lot of different training that we've done with Absolute Dogs and is a real world away from where we started with a few years ago. And she's a natural pessimist. So when to kind of, and this sounds like such an abstract concept, I think, with dog training,

how can a dog be an optimist or a pessimist?

Like, how is that a thing?

I think it's a, it's a, it's an attribute that we, we think about in human terms.

But really, it's just do we anticipate a good or a bad outcome from an ambiguous situation?

And when we got Bonnie, she was definitely a dog that when faced with something she wasn't

sure about, would tend to assume that it was a bad thing, would tend to anticipate a negative

outcome. So how this looked for

her was that she was very reactive. We had lots of sort of barking and lunging, whether that

were strangers or other dogs or cyclists or children or, frankly, just about anything when we first

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