What we want is rehearsals of success. Now, if you're listening to this and you're planning

on training your puppy for sports, rehearsals of success is what you ultimately want when you get

into the ring. My puppy is 15 months old now and just today I was thinking,

you know what? Today hasn't been a great day of rehearsals of success. So, what do I mean by

that? It hasn't been a great day for me. I was training my puppy off and on over the last week

to do some weave pulls in a sequence. His weave pulls have been great. But he has learned how much

fun it is to go fast while you're doing weave pulls. His weave pulls just on their own were a

really decent speed and he was having fun and I was thrilled with the performance. But he thought

speed needed to be included in this game like like high, high levels of speed, which

ultimately isn't bad, I guess, but with that incredible speed comes a lot of rehearsals of

incompletion, of I'm going to skip some poles. It's faster if I run alongside and pretend I'm weaving.

Of maybe jumping in in the middle, things he hasn't done for weeks. And so just tonight,

as I was eating dinner and I was reflecting back on some of my notes for my training,

I'm like, you know what? I've got to go back and just have a solid two or three days

of really clear understanding of how to be successful in the weep bowls. Rehearsals of success

are really important when we're raising a puppy because what gets reinforced grows. So,

it doesn't matter how much you're reinforcing your puppy

for being calm at your side. If he's off running amok, jumping over all of your furniture,

shredding your bed sheets, peeing where he wants, these are all rehearsals that if repeated enough, will get reinforced to the

point where your good reinforcement for the odd behavior in your training session once every

couple of days has no hope of impacting both the relationship that puppy has with you and the progress you would like

to see in their behavior moving forward. So, your ultimate goal should be rehearsals of success.

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