My Dog Sport Coaching Philosophy
My Coaching Philosophy
My coaching philosophy is simple: less is more.
So when I’m coaching a handler, a business owner, or a leader my aim is simple. To have you walk away from a session with less on your mind than when you arrived.
Why?
Because nobody performs at their best when they’re preoccupied with a list of things they need to think about.
And when you’re preoccupied you tend to do more…seek more techniques, more strategies, more control, more confidence tips, more overthinking…
But what if the answer isn’t more?
What if the answer is less?
Performance = potential – interference
You and your dog already have the capability to make the most of the opportunities ahead.
My coaching philosophy is based on subtraction. In eliminating the myths and concepts accumulated over the years. In stripping away the theories and conditioning that obscure the feeling of authentically and instinctively working and training with your dog.
As you subtract the compelling but unhelpful thinking (the interference that’s been preoccupying you) – clarity returns, and with it the natural capacity for presence, focus, connection, and confidence you need.
This is the basis for the kind of feelings and performances that give you and your dog the competitive edge.
But mainstream dog sport instruction is offering something different.
There are hundreds of good dog training instructors out there many of whom will try to help you with your mindset. But the solution they offer is based on an assumption.
In order to feel more confident and perform better in the ring you need to master your mindset.
So they offer a technique and a fix. And sometimes mental techniques seem to work…for a while. Unfortunately, there’s a catch.
Obedience is hard. There are a whole heap of variables that neither you nor your instructor are in control of.
The dog training industry turns a blind eye to this fact. If one mental technique, tip, formula, method, strategy, or concept doesn’t work…someone will happily sell you the next one.
And the next one. And the next one.
The focus is primarily on “how to”. The most important questions a struggling handler asks are put off or ignored.
My Story
So if you’re caught in the trap of trying to fix your experience of the sport following the recipe dished out by the mainstream dog training instruction industry, you have my sympathy.
Been there. Done that.
Over the years I’ve worked with many people who came to me after a mindset conversation that left them more confused, more self-doubting, and less confident than before. The dog trainer meant well – but good intentions don’t undo impact.
I’m often the one helping people make sense of what happened, re-ground themselves, and rebuild trust in their own instincts.
My position is simple.
I’ve been a dog sport competitor and trainer for 15 years. I’ve progressed through the classes from pre-beginner to championship level. I’ve judged hundreds of teams, I’ve had hundreds of lessons myself, and have continued my education in the technical elements of training dogs using positive reinforcement. I’m a founder member of a competitive obedience club, and I teach competitive obedience workshops for clubs. I understand the ring, the pressure, the disappointment, the joy and the detail. I live it.
And I am also a highly trained, ethically grounded, qualified coach, who has spent decades studying the human experience, training, mentoring, and supervising other coaches, and working with people in high pressure clinical and business environments. I’ve had many coaching sessions myself, and have learned from some of the world’s best coaches.
These two things are not separate to me.
Despite “mindset” becoming a fashionable thing in dog sports in recent years, it may surprise you to learn that many handlers (and their instructors) are still struggling. When you get trapped by the belief that the only way you can enjoy your sport or get the results you want, is by working harder and trying to memorise what that Ticket Handler said on the podcast were the three key things to do as part of your competition prep routine, your options seem limited.
Searching for the secret to better performance seems to be the only way for you to enjoy the sport.
I was lucky. I found the keys to the cage.
Why mental techniques don’t work.
When I started my coaching journey I studied and consequently taught every technique and model I could find in the pursuit of excellence and high-performance. I shared these ideas on hundreds of courses I designed and delivered in the UK and abroad. I presented at conferences. And many people benefitted hugely. Evenso, I was never entirely comfortable teaching the models, tools, and visualisation techniques. They just didn’t seem to resonate with the truth of my experience.
Unsurprisingly, despite being a very experienced and knowledgeable master practitioner and trainer in these mental techniques and practices, when It came to dog sports they didn’t help me much.
So I set about exploring why this was happening. What I discovered was a simple misunderstanding that seems so obvious to me now, but at the time it was a gamechanger that challenged everything I once believed about how the human experience is created, and how the mind really works.
The quote below is the best description I’ve found to explain why no mental technique (tool, strategy, mantra or practice recommended by someone else) can help you perform better. This understanding has helped me and thousands of others to perform well even when the pressure is on.
Mental techniques seem to work at first. With a new technique in hand we stop seeking. The freedom and passion within then emerge. We then feel and perform great.
But again, this is not the result of the technique. It’s because seeking has stopped.
When the seeking mind ramps up again, the same technique will seem to have lost the power it never actually had.
Usually, this misunderstanding results in the implementation of another, then another, then another technique. Soon the seeking mind has become a runaway train. And great performances become a thing of the past.
Garret Kramer, Founder of Inner Sports
Dog Training Is Hard
Competitive obedience is a hard sport to do well consistently. Dogs are dogs, not machines. One way or another, you have to portray what you want the dog to do…and somehow, the dog has to try and work it out and understand what you’re asking.
It’s emotionally demanding. We’re working with another living being. We care deeply. We invest time, hope, effort, and ourselves. We put ourselves on display, under rules, whilst being watched, judged, and compared.
Despite the difficulties many of us encounter, competitive obedience is quite a simple sport really and I think we can agree that we’re all looking for something similar when we work our dogs.
A rich, enjoyable, fulfilling, satisfying experience.
Think about this logically. You’re probably a more proficient handler now than when you first became keen on dog training.
But somehow your enthusiasm was stronger then than it is now. You couldn’t wait to finish work on a Friday, to pack up the van and drive for hundreds of miles to a dog show.
If true fulfilment was found in more techniques, more mental game strategies, more knowledge, concepts and theories, wouldn’t the opposite be true?
My coaching philosophy is based on simplification.
We learn handling by doing it, not thinking about it. Your body, mind, and dog get conditioned by experience. The more you do something, the better and more efficient the muscle memory becomes.
We should be tapping into this natural way of learning, rather than putting obstacles in the way in the form of complicated dog training theories and concepts, and mental techniques.
This is not about learning dog handling. It’s about learning your handling, with your dog.
I have had dogs that work pretty well in competition, and have qualified Berty to compete at championship level. Dogs have given me a great deal of pleasure over the years. But I do occasionally wonder about what might have been if I had realised the truth about how the mind works ten years earlier than I did.
It has been helpful to my dog sport coaching and obedience training lessons that I can train a dog to decent level.
It’s hard to explain how something works if you can’t do it yourself. I know what working a good round feels like. I can’t give this feeling to someone else directly, but I can point them in the right direction.
This is partly due to a better understanding of what’s important in training a dog to a high level, and partly due to an understanding of how my experience of that training is created.
When you understand the basic foundations of dog training, how your dog moves and learns, and the feelings of working together, you can forget the ‘how to’ and just get on with training, working and enjoying your dog.
To me, getting to this point is what the dog sport coaching and indeed all coaching should be about.
You don’t need a raft of mental techniques.
Just be you.
Just express you.
Just go train the dog.
Actions
So where do we go from here?
In my experience there are a couple of ways to get to the point where you can just step into the ring and work your dog without a headful of concepts and strategies, worries and doubts.
There’s the shorter, direct path. Or the more circuitous route.
Ready to train?
If you have any questions about anything you’ve read, or would like some help with your training, please get in touch.
Thank you for your response. ✨
Just Train The Dog 