Sometimes the things that are common sense aren’t common thoughts, and don’t become logical thought processes sadly, until after things go wrong. And after you have to fix the errors.
Training your pet dog in obedience training is a good example of this sort of process.
I started doing some research on the web about dog trainings, and the various types and ways of dog training, and the various results achieved by those different ways.
The thing about dog training, or obedience training is this:
EVERYBODY WANTS THE SAME RESULT!!
Everybody wants a dog that sits when you tell it to, comes when you tell it to, and never barks and never fights.
Lofty goals. Difficult to achieve without putting in the hard yards.
The same can be said about training people.
Training people for sports. Training people for music. Training people for singing and acting. Training people for employment and vocation….
If you want to train your dog there are many things you can try:
- Try doing it yourself.
After all, how hard can it be? Dogs only have small brains…it can’t be that difficult to educate them?
- Take your dog to obedience classes.
In these situations, groups of dog owners attend with their dogs [of different breeds] and of different levels of training. Depending on the number of attendees, you might be lucky to get five minutes of one-on-one time with the trainer.
- Internet lessons and videos
Translating from the internet via you to the dog may be a disjointed process. And how do you the dog owner know that you are doing things correctly and getting the right message across to your dog?
- Send your dog away to be trained
Do they beat your dog when you send your dog away? What happens there? You certainly end up with a very obedient dog…
- Have private one-on-one lessons with just you and your dog and a dog trainer.
Kind of like having a personal trainer at the gym. There is education and accountability. And at each lesson the trainer knows EXACTLY at what level of training your dog is at, and what your dog has been doing between lessons.
There is no hiding in this type of training. And there is no fudging. It’s like those dreaded weekly piano lessons. If you haven’t been doing your scales and your practice, you WILL NOT And you will be found out….
I read an article on the web from The K9 Company about what dog trainers do not do, with a sub-heading simply put:
Why do professionals do things differently than non-professionals?
I’ll share the writer, Cat Saunders’s comments here:
“In almost all of my work with dogs, be it group dog obedience classes or an in-home personal training consultation, I am often explaining, as well intended their actions are, owners are inadvertently creating and or compounding many of the stresses and behavioural concerns they have with their dogs. As a society we learn a lot from our environment. If we see something that “looks” like fun, we often wish to try it ourselves. The tricky part is when we are dealing with a different species, often our well-intended actions are anthropomorphic [ascribing human attributes to a being i.e. a dog ], and can be quite detrimental to having a sound, confident and well behaved dog. This is simply because we see something we believe to be a positive and good thing for our dogs, without knowing the consequences of what you don’t know…. There are so many sources of information and the web is full of opinions, agendas and half science related articles and advice when it come dog training. It’s a bit like self-diagnosis, you can find “facts” to confirm any prognosis. When reading and researching on the web, it is important to remain objective and open minded.”
These are interesting observations…
As well intended as humans are, the results and effects of our use of Dr Google to be the solution to everything can often be harmful and irreparably scarring with respect of the original intention that we started off to achieve.
If we want to have an obedient dog that behaves perfectly, on all occasions, then the best results will be achieved by calling in the professionals rather than scouring the internet and composing a Heinz recipe on dog training…. And then trying to magically develop a super-power and become an overnight “world’s greatest” dog trainer.
And yet in dentistry:
And yet in the career of dentistry, seemingly well educated people [dentists] with high IQs suddenly decide that they will miraculously become HR trainers and train their team members in roles that they [the dentists] have never performed themselves, but have somehow researched about on the internet, and become an overnight authority.
And yet these dentists did not get their dental degree on the internet.
They learnt dentistry and the principles of dentistry over a number of years from people more knowledgeable and more skilled who were celebrated educators.
Seriously, it makes no sense to take a day off from doing dentistry to stay home and clean your house, and wash your car and do your lawns. You can pay someone to do these things while you can produce a lot more money doing a day’s worth of dentistry. In reality, the hired help will have the house and the car and the lawns and the gardens looking a lot better than the dentist could, in a fraction of the time.
So why would a dentist take “drilling time” off from his patients to do something like teaching his practice staff phone skills, when in the time it would take to be only “half good” at teaching something that the dentist does not do and has never done and never learnt, the dentist could have produced enough dental treatment to pay for ten to twenty lots of phone trainers and educators, who would do the job of training way, way better.
The business of dentistry is a crazy model.
I’ve written before about a friend of mine who went through a serious 16 week onboarding process to work for a national stationery supplier. And twelve of those weeks went by before she was allowed to interact with live customers.
Just to sell pens!!
Yet in dentistry, dentists often hire someone with “experience” to come and work for their practice, and then rely on that person bringing supposed skills that a previous employer had given them, when those supposed skills may not actually be suitable and appropriate for their new practice and their new role.
Or dentists allow new team members to “practice” their processes on live patients of the practice.
If McDonald’s and Officeworks can invest so much time and effort into onboarding and educating their teams and getting things right from the get-go, then why do dentists on the whole do everything in an upside down and back to front and illogical manner when it comes to onboarding and training team members?
Like I said….
Like I originally said, sometimes the things that are common sense aren’t common thoughts, and don’t become logical thought processes sadly, until WAY WAY WAY AFTER things go wrong…
If you were setting off on a holiday, it would make sense to set the Google Sat Nav before you began driving rather than one to two hours after you’d started, just in case you inadvertently took a wrong turn early and you didn’t know that you had…
Because you might find yourself way off course, or way off track, because of your blind ignorance…
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