How our Growly Dogs are thriving in Lockdown!

In this time of social distancing and self-isolation, we need more than ever to keep in touch with our special people - our families and friends, and those with similar interests who understand us.

There are many good things coming out of this crisis (there always are good things. But if you watch the news all the time you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s all gloom and doom! That’s how they operate.)

There are people who are moving forward boldly to cope with the new life that we are experiencing. And there are those who are bemoaning the loss of their “normal life” and sitting on their hands waiting for it to come back. I fear they will be sadly disappointed.

Think of the clothing manufacturers who have switched from fashion or overcoats and are now making hospital protective clothing. Not only are they saving their businesses, but they’re doing something genuinely useful at the same time!

I was impressed to hear of the manager of a company which makes domestic washers and driers. They have immediately switched their production to making mobile washbasin cabinets for hospitals. This is a great example of the manager NOT panicking, but thinking on his feet how best he could serve at this time, while protecting his staff and his business.

The ability to “pivot” when you find yourself in a cul-de-sac is what differentiates those who struggle from those who make the best of things.

The internet was made for a time like this! And companies who can offer online conferencing - the ideal way to keep personal contact as well as distanced working - have seen a 20-fold increase in their business in the last month.

In my own space, many dog trainers who have been forced to shut down the dog training schools they have spent years building up have turned their hand to making themselves available to their clients in other ways.

There are online businesses who are offering free programs to help people now, and sadly there are those that are capitalising on the crisis in order to make a lot of money. Of course people must keep their businesses afloat, but it’s important to honour your integrity and act according to your values. 

What’s this got to do with dog training?

A lot! The only life we know is the one we are living right now. And that’s the life we need to make the best of.

So instead of regretting what we don’t have - let’s look at what we do have!

Here are some thoughts from students in my Growly Program on how they are making the best of this enforced change. I love to see that they are taking a proactive approach, and managing their mindset in this challenging time:

C kicked off with this report.

“We’re progressing nicely here with our mini garden agility course, sniff games, and all the other things you’ve kindly recommended. It’s so much fun!!” 

K told us that having a growly, reactive dog used to make her feel lonely and inadequate.

“Especially during this time of lockdown, isolation and uncertainty, the camaraderie and understanding of the community of other students is invaluable.”

J pointed out that there’s a silver lining for those under Lockdown: the quieter roads and areas reachable on foot are ideal at the moment for training a Growly Dog!  

“In this particular, peculiar and difficult time, for those able to do so, getting started over the next few weeks and months to training a dog whose habits are difficult to live with, would be wise use of this time.”

T was talking about a breakthrough she had in the program in realising that the control we try to exert on everything in our lives - from our surroundings, to other people, and to our dogs - actually works against us! She put it very succinctly when she observed:

“You know when someone else always drives you to a certain destination, then, when it’s time for you to drive yourself you don't know how to get there. That's what Paisley's walks have been like her whole life - me, always driving her where I wanted her to go without allowing her the time she needed to take it all in. How eye-opening for both of us!”

And M, who’s always full of ideas, added that there are so many things we can choose to do safely during this time for ourselves and our dogs: we can choose new activities or rest when needed.

“We have control of what we choose to do, then have a choice to analyze the outcome, and change things if needed.

We don’t need to be stuck in our lizard brain (survival - fight or flight), but stay more in our thinking brain: this is exactly the time to make changes that will have a lasting impact on the rest of your life with your dog.”

In a plumbing emergency, trying to mop up the flood and rescue her home, L noticed her dog dozing peacefully amidst the chaos. She adopted a new thought: Be like Annie!

“I need to maintain perspective with the water, the pandemic, and everything else rather than allowing them to dictate how I think, feel and behave.”

There is no situation so bad that we can’t make it worse by over-reacting to it. Chris Hadfield, astronaut

Inspiration!

Do those comments inspire you? I hope so, as they show a firm grasp of how we need to think - at any time, but especially now - to get the best from this one exciting life of ours!

I’m proud to have helped these students, not only with the Growly Dog problems that they arrived with, but to change their mindset in order to change their experience of the world.

It really isn’t just a question of changing your dog (or other people, or the world). It’s about changing us!

For more thoughts about changing our thoughts to change our lives

Join our Free Masterclass here

Distancing - for dogs and us

We’re beginning to feel like our reactive dogs!

We feel beleaguered, trapped, attacked.

We’re learning to be afraid of other people …

Well, let’s keep things in proportion. We’re not afraid of other people per se, but of coming into close contact with them.

Personal space

Dogs are ahead of us here, because the dog’s personal space is so much larger than ours. Our natural comfortable distance is a metre or so away from the person we’re talking to, if we don’t know them well. There are global variations on this distance, of course - different cultures have different social norms.

And our own natural feelings have to some extent been over-ridden by what we have to put up with on a normal day. Think rush hour public transport!

There are many upsides in this crisis, and not having to squash into a bus or tube train at rush hour has got to be up there near the top!

So keeping two metres away from people entails making an effort and keeping it in your mind the whole time.

Help from your Growly Dog!

And here’s where your Growly Dog can help you: she is all too keen to keep her distance from other dogs and people - and maybe bikes, toddlers, and cars as well.

So work together on this, and keep your distance too!

Having a small understanding of how she views the world - as a dangerous, threat-filled, place - could make all the difference to how you protect her.

This is why I’ve made a free Masterclass for you: so that you can learn so much to help your dog!

Time off

Many of us are in enforced isolation right now. And this is just heaven for your Growly fella! One of the first things I ask new Growly Dog students to do is to give their dog a “cortisol holiday” - a complete break from all the things that terrify him on a daily basis, to allow the hormone levels to stabilise.

Usually five days of home confinement makes a considerable difference to the anxious, reactive, dog. A noticeable difference.

Now is an ideal opportunity to give your anxious dog that break. And while you find new ways to exercise and amuse him in the home, you can detach yourself from all these worries and anxieties too.

While you’re at home you don’t have to remember to avoid people. You don’t have to view others with fear. You can switch off the things that worry you (yes, I mean the constant news updates, social media, alarmists in general) and enjoy some peace with your now-calmer dog.

Teach him some tricks!

Teach him to fetch!

Have some fun!

I know that many of you with Growly Dogs suffer from feelings of isolation. But right now you’re exactly where you need to be!

I am sure that another upside from this crisis is that people have a space in which to reflect and look at their own life critically.

Instead of being bundled along in the daily grind, holding everything together - working hard not to drop a ball - many people are stepping off their treadmill for the first time in years!

So this is a wonderful opportunity to reassess exactly where you are in life:

• Is it exactly where you want to be?

•  Are there changes you’d love to make?

• What’s stopping you making those changes over the next few months?

Here’s a little exercise for you:

1. Write down the top three values you want to live your life by

   (e.g. adventure, integrity, connection, spirituality, nature, joy . . .)

2. Beside each of your three, write down how far you are now living your life by them. You can use a scale of 1-10 if that helps, with 1 being not at all, and 10 being totally.

3. Now look at what you’ve written!

Is this how you want it to be?

• Yes: fantastic!

• No: what are you going to do to change things?

Comment below or email me and tell me how this went for you!

Want to know how to start the change with your dog?

Join our free masterclass

See how calm your dog is?

Look at your dog.

Is he worrying about rampant viruses? Or is he just contentedly being a dog? Is he getting anxious about what just may happen in the future, or is he happy with where he is right now?

We can learn from our pets. For a start we can enjoy their world-view and consequent feelings of normality and continuity.

And we can observe that worrying about things changes nothing!

For more harmony with your dog, get our free email course!

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Security and safety

We all need a sense of security (as Maslow defined in his Hierarchy of Needs), and the panic and fears being whipped up by some parts of the media and social media are counter-productive!

Continually being in an anxious state lowers your immunity and maintains damaging stress.

Choose one or maybe two news sources that you trust, and check them just once a day. You do not need minute-by-minute reports and all the speculation and catastrophising that goes with them.

When you are talking, ask yourself “Am I making the situation better or worse?” 

We all need a sense of belonging, and isolation measures can make us feel alone and vulnerable.

Self-sufficiency

I’m no epidemiologist, but I have seen isolation work. When the UK slaughtered millions of farm animals in the last Foot and Mouth outbreak, Ireland was barely touched. Because it is largely a rural economy, there was a united effort from the whole country - instantly - to comply with the sweeping measures brought in to prevent the spread of the disease. The result was that only a couple of flocks in one area were affected. Ireland escaped Foot and Mouth virtually unscathed.

Once we have our safety and belonging needs sorted - by reframing them as virtues not calamities - we can look to being the best version of ourselves.

We manifest into our lives the things we most desire and the things we most fear. (This is physics, not woo-woo - ask Einstein …) Where is your focus?

These things will pass! Do what is recommended by your authorities, look at the upside of isolation (there’s always an upside to everything!)

.. and enjoy some quality time with your soothing, carefree, dog.

Your dog is not so soothing and carefree?
Get our free course here to help you change everything!

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Can keeping away from other dogs make my dog worse?

One of the joys of my work is that I see more and more people starting out on their dog-owning journey using only force-free methods. HOORAY!!

They have dismissed all those noisy “balanced” or shock trainers. They’ve seen through them for what they are: bullies.

They have no wish to treat their dog any differently from the other members of their family.

They’ve got rid of the aversive equipment they were persuaded to spend money on in order to keep their poor dog under ever tighter physical control. They’re ready to rock and roll!

Kudos to these dog-owners for wanting to treat their dog humanely! and not falling for the clever marketing of the tv personality “trainers”

Trouble is, some of the old methods die hard. While the spirit is willing, the new neural pathways have yet to be cut!

❓ “If I treat him when he barks, isn’t he going to think I’m rewarding him for barking?”

❓ “If I let him choose where he wants to sleep, won’t he take over the house and steal my bed?”

❓ “If I let my puppy sleep in my bedroom, will I never be able to get him out?”

❓ “Do I have to carry treats for the rest of my life? When can I get rid of them?” (I dunno - when does your boss stop paying you?) 

And here’s a good one:

❓ “I’ve done what you told me and we’ve kept our reactive dog away from other dogs. But won’t that make him more afraid of them?” 

It’s great that I frequently get queries from folk who are just starting out on their new force-free journey with their reactive, anxious, aggressive - Growly - dog.

This query comes up surprisingly often.

And it shows that - while they’re doing their best to follow a kinder way - they haven’t yet grasped the reason behind it.

Tell me: Let’s say you were afraid of spiders. I mean terrified. And I made sure to keep you away from them (or them away from you!) as much as possible, so that you didn’t continually get frights and panic attacks, always on full alert, ready to “fight or flee”. How would you feel if, after a few spider-free months, you saw one?

Would you feel exactly the same level of anxiety as you did when you came across spiders all day, every day?

OR

Would you feel less alarmed, having spent months not jumping out of your skin every few hours?

Might you, in fact, be able to look at this spider with curiosity rather than blind panic?

So it is for your dog!

Giving your dog distance from the thing he fears allows all his systems to return to normal levels. Hormones stabilise. Heart rate plummets. Stress levels are down. He is no longer scanning the horizon waiting for a dog to appear. You can actually enjoy a walk together! 

This image of Otto calmly watching another dog is from one of the many videos in my premium program From Growly Dog to Confident Dog

Once you’ve got to this point, you’ve got something you can work with, as opposed to the spinning, lurching, tense ball of fear and noise that you previously got on sight of another dog.

You’ve desensitised your dog from other dogs (at a great distance). Now you can start Phase II of the operation! You can start counterconditioning him to other dogs at a slightly closer distance.

This part requires some skill and a lot more understanding. I go into it in great detail in From Growly Dog to Confident Dog  I’m keen that you should learn this thoroughly so that you get it right from the start!

For now, suffice it to say that you need to associate those distant dogs with the appearance of something really good - turkey, sausage, cheese, liver cake are all winners here - changing the emotional response of your dog to the things he previously feared.

Your dog kicking off at other dogs is the result of how she feels about the sight of a dog approaching. This is how the sequence goes:

Dog appears

Your dog thinks OH NO!

Your dog feels afraid

Your dog barks and lunges and screams to get the other dog to go away

(And I could add - you feel embarrassed, wretched, and helpless.)

So this is where we honour the dog, honour her feelings, and change the actions which are a result of those feelings. 

✅ Yes. Your dog will gradually become more tolerant of dogs in her environment, simply because she no longer has that knee-jerk fear reaction when she sees one.

✅ And YES. Keeping your dog at a safe distance for as long as it takes will help this process.

❎ Nope. She’s not going to feel worse about strange dogs the less she sees them, any more than you’ll feel worse about spiders the less you see of them.

Learn exactly what your Growly Dog is thinking and why he does what he does, with our free email course

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My dog gets to enjoy the coffee shop too!

My dog gets to enjoy the coffee shop too!

I am sitting in the window of our local busy coffee shop, in a comfortable armchair, my coffee on the table beside me. Just inside the full-length window, by my feet, lies Lacy on her mat.

We can both relax after our morning outing - me in my armchair, she on her mat watching the world go by without barking at it.

She’s polished off the liver sausage foodtoy I prepared for her. She’s done a couple of tricks for a fingertip of cream from my coffee. She’s watched comings and goings and is now dozing on the mat, her chin resting on my foot.

She’s popular with the staff who are always pleased to see her. It’s a pleasant way for both of us to unwind after our morning’s work.

You may think this is all fairly unremarkable, but you should know that Lacy started out as a very reactive dog - she would get stressed and barky and appear ferocious at any approach, of dogs or people.

Already got a Growly Dog? A reactive, shy, aggressive dog? Watch our free Masterclass and learn new strategies to change your lives for the better!

So getting her to genuinely relax in a public place is an achievement of which I am proud and which we can both enjoy. A lot of what I teach here at Brilliant Family Dog is geared to growing your puppy’s or dog’s confidence and ability to relax. You can train all the sits in the world, but it’s no good if your dog is panting and gasping and pinging off the walls!

Horses for courses

Many dogs are sufficiently “wired” that they need help to learn this skill - especially with the growing popularity of placing working dogs in pet homes. This is a kind of square-peg/round-hole combo which needs careful management to succeed and not drive everyone - owner and dog - barmy.

Lacy has also gone through all the training I do in my premium programs - naturally, it’s one of the perks of being the boss’s dog! And the results have been as spectacular for her as for so many of my students. “I can’t believe how much our life has changed,” is a common cry after even the first Growly Dog lesson.

An awful lot of this has to do with how we act ourselves, and with our expectations: What you expect, you get! Gaining insight into why your dog does what she does is the way to make changes to accommodate her needs with minimum disruption to your daily life. And that’s the focus of the choice-based training I teach.

It’s a question of growing your confidence so you know what to do in any situation. Being able to settle your dog in a public place and flip her off-switch is a valuable skill.

Here’s a great way to get started with this skill

Calm Down! Step-by-Step to a Calm, Relaxed, and Brilliant Family Dog - in ebook, paperback, or audiobook - will help you to locate this hidden switch!

Don’t go without our free e-course to change life with your Growly Dog!

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Procrastination is the thief of your dog’s time

“Procrastination is the thief of time”

One of my mother’s favourite sayings! Whenever we wanted to put off doing anything at all - from carrying our plate back to the sink to hanging up our coats or finishing our homework - that steady calm voice would tell us we were wasting our precious time, that it was lost and gone for ever.

Of course at that age we had no idea of how fast time whizzes by.

But now we’re all grown up and we know! All too well!

And it’s not only our time that we’re losing, but our lovely dog’s time.

Our dogs haven’t got as long as we have. They haven’t got time to lose. They’re here and time-consuming (as a puppy), they’re still here and much loved and adored (as an older dog).

But how much of their time do we waste by NOT working with them? 

.. by NOT teaching them what we’d like?

.. by NOT finding the time to do the training we’ve spent ages trawling through the internet to find?

If we’re always being too busy to utilise the knowledge we’ve found, then that knowledge is useless - and acquiring it was a perfect waste of time! 

NOW NOW NOW!

We all want rapid results - of course we do. I don’t know about you, but I get a lot of tech challenges in my line of business. I know how to do things . . . but what do I do when it all goes wrong? 😱

Over time I’ve cracked most of the daily tech problems I get. But if my business didn’t rely on solving those problems, I’d probably . . . procrastinate!

It’s much easier not to confront problems, rather let them drift in the forlorn hope that they’ll just disappear. But as we know, in truth, they bubble along below the surface till one day they jump up to bite us!

And then, don’t you just wish you’d dealt with the problem head on, at the time it first emerged? Because now you have loads of issues to unravel - just to get back to where you started!

So to forestall tech problems, I’m careful only to use software which has a solid reputation for speedy support and backup. 

Don’t you need just that with your dog?

You can find anything you want on the internet and in books. You can filter your results carefully for methods which accord with your own values - to make sure you only use force-free training.

You can even allocate the time and get started working with your dog!

So . . . it says: 

Step 1: Do this

Step 2: Dog will do that

Step 3: You’ve got it!

But hang on! What happens when Step 2 falls asunder?

What happens when you “do this” (or you think you’re “doing this” - maybe you’re actually doing something wrong or different? How can you know?) and then your dog does NOT “do that”?

Now what?

You’re stuck. Stuck fast. Can’t move forward. No idea what the problem is. Is the dog dumb? Are you dumb? You’re doing your best and it’s just not working.

This is where you need that speedy support and backup. There is absolutely no reason why you should be able to make this work straight away. You’re not an expert, which is why you’ve looked for help in the first place!  

So what can you do?

Just like me choosing softwares which have a solid reputation for speedy support and backup, you need to choose dog training with a solid reputation for speedy support and backup!

I’m not a tech expert, and I can’t manage those techy problems without guidance and help. And if you’re not a professional dog trainer,  you need that same guidance and help for your dog training.

Every time you meet a problem you can’t solve, you’re likely to put off dealing with it.

• Ok, so the dog jumps up on visitors - I can’t fix it so they’ll have to put up with it.

• The dog barks at other dogs - been trying to change this on my own for years without success.

• My dog is so embarrassing I can’t walk him by daylight … I’ve tried everything . . .

You need HELP!

You need someone who you can trust not only to give you the methods and techniques, but to help you build a plan to teach them to your particular dog - in your own individual circumstances - and then be there for you to be accountable to, so that you get it done!

Someone who will hold your hand, help you modify your plan where necessary, see what may be going wrong, and give you a High Five when you’ve achieved your goal.

Someone you can be honest with, unburden yourself to, who you know will understand what you’re struggling with with your dog.

You’re in luck!

You can sign up here for our free e-course below to get you started in the direction you want to go - and find out all about our programs to keep your nose to the grindstone, getting the results you want!

Want to change life with your Growly Dog without force or intimidation? Get our free e-course here and get started!

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