Rather than measure progress against another athlete or as an arbitrary time chosen by a coach, swimmers often focus on achieving Personal Best times. PB’s measure an athlete against her best and toughest opponent: herself.
Personal Bests represent achievable goals that translate over time into significant drops in time and significant boosts in confidence. Since competence and mastery are often measured in thousandths of a second, an aspiring athlete hones her technique. She works on her fitness and endurance in order to improve incrementally by the tiniest of fractions. Time invested in meaningful practice, proper nutrition and mental toughness translates into swimming faster today than she swam yesterday, which in turn allows her to achieve larger goals.
When working on new behaviors with your shy dog, it can be hard to step back and objectively gauge your progress. For every success, there may be several setbacks or detours to obscure your hard work. If you find yourself wondering if you are moving forward at all, I encourage you to adopt the technique of striving to train to a Personal Best.
Personal Bests don’t hold you hostage to an arbitrary training goal to be met sometime in the nebulous future (or worse yet, right now!) It challenges you to set criteria that is relevant to where your dog is emotionally, physically and mentally, at the very moment you are interacting with her.
Personal Bests do not allow for comparison between your dog and the dog down the street or in training class or even in the same household. Personal Bests measure your dog against the only standard that matters: her own “best” self.
Personal Bests can be measured in the tiniest of increments. Did your dog hesitate less at the doorway today than she did yesterday? That is a Personal Best!
Personal Bests forces you to keep training goals pertinent to your dog. If your dog disengages because of fear, boredom or frustration, then training ends up plateauing or moving backward, not forward.
Personal Bests focus on your dog’s strengths, not weaknesses. Rather than correct for behavior that you don’t want, ask for a known behavior that you do want and build slowly from there.
Personal Bests add up over time to a more confident dog who can offer more positive behaviors.
Personal Bests builds trust. Your dog isn’t being held to unrealistic expectations and can succeed while feeling safe and secure.
Personal Bests allow your dog’s victories to be more frequent, which means that your celebrations can be more frequent, as well!
Question: Share YOUR shy dog’s most recent Personal Best?
You must be logged in to post a comment.