What do you suppose your dog training coach is going to say when you come up to them

and say, yeah, I tried that, it doesn't work.

Because quite often that comes with a little bit of body language associated with it.

And it's not often kind because here's the thing,

and I've mentioned this on the podcast before. You can shape people and I hope you intentionally

do. You use kindness, you use gratitude to have the kind of relationships you'd love to have

with people. There have been a lot of people that I've observed shaping

their dog training coaches to not coach them. So maybe your coaches got great information for you,

but when they've tried to give you feedback, you tell them things like, I've tried that,

it doesn't work, or yeah, but you don't know my dog, or that won't work with

a breed of mine or, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, I know that I wouldn't be able to do that. Whatever.

I want to give you a better, more effective strategy for you to approach your coach. If you truly

believe that you tried it and it didn't work, because guess what? I'm not saying that's not possible. It is possible. What I'm saying is it might not be the

best tact to take with somebody that you're looking to get feedback from. So, what you want

to do is open a dialogue with your coach. Open a dialogue that looks something like this.

Hey, I've been trying that process

and before I go any further, can I just run a few things by you to make sure I've got it clear?

Who's going to say no to that? Okay, they might say, why don't we talk about it after class or

you know, we'll have a phone consult or something,

but they're not going to say, no. If they do, then you know, you got the wrong coach.

So, you would approach them like, first, let me walk you through all of the steps of the

process as I understand them. And you might go through step one, step two, step three.

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