E200: 카르페 모멘텀의 에밀리와 에바가 말하는 훈련의 전환기

And feeling a bit down about, you know, Expo being canceled and, yeah. Missing out on that awesome conference at the start of the year. And Teresa said, well, you can visit me. You have the time now. And we're like, hmm, good idea. Let's do that. So we made it into a road trip, drove eight hours to Teresa's place and stayed there, supposedly staying for a week. And then we decided, ah, let's rebook some flights and stay for another week. And then Corona hit pretty hard in Europe. And it didn't feel that appealing to go home. And flights were canceled. So, hmm, maybe what about we stay for a while? And that ended up being the rest of the spring. So, yes. So I had, like, the luxury of spending most of my spring at Teresa McKeon's ranch with Shraig and with Teresa's family. That was pretty awesome. So, yeah. Positives and negatives, I'm sure. Yeah. Well, and then I'm Emily. And I just then lost my work wife for, what, three months on a seven-hour time difference that we never really quite figured out and kept botching up a lot. I live down south in Sweden. So it's about a four-hour drive between myself and Eva's house. So we actually do most of our things over the phone or over Zoom or something. And we've always done it that way. So when we wrote the book in 27 to, what, 2010 when it came out, we ran up phone bills because that was still during the time when phone was a thing you, like, paid a lot for. But we've always been hanging out. I actually brought Eva on my honeymoon. And I kid you not, I did. Let's rephrase that. Emily brought her husband on their honeymoon to the Agility World Championships in Portugal. No. Same difference. So, but I live down south in Sweden with my husband, who actually really enjoys Eva's company as well. And our three children in very different ages. Our oldest is 18 and our youngest is seven. And we have two dogs, Scout, who's a Kelpie. She's now 12 and a half. And Tessa, who's a field golden, who's now two and a half. And so I'm in the middle of getting her ready to compete if COVID ever goes away. So I can actually do some stuff with her. But we will be looking at more field training this spring. And we are hoping to get out in both rally obedience and then agility for the fall. That sounds awesome. It sounds like a ton of stuff on your plate there. Yeah. Never boring. And it's probably a good thing your husband likes Eva. I imagine that would be hard otherwise. That may be a requirement. So I mentioned in the intro you guys met in the late 90s. It seems like kind of at that point, you both had already been in dog training and agility for at least a little while.

So what kind of got you into dogs and sports and training to start with? My answer is really, really short. My parents would not buy me a pony. Fair enough. My parents would not buy me a pony. And I got sick and tired of fixing other people's ponies and not getting to keep them. So I saved up my pocket money and I got myself my first dog. It was Nilla in 1990. And from there on, it kind of rolled on. So for me, I had the ponies when I was a kid. So I grew up close to my grandfather's, grandparents' place. And we had our horses in that barn close to where we lived. But I was the one who always wanted a dog in addition to the ponies. So when I grew up and got the opportunity to get my own dog, that's like the first thing I did. Before that, I had been reading so much. So with the horses, I enjoyed riding and enjoyed everything we did with the horses. But if clicker training had been available, I would have been the clicker training kid with the horses for sure. The little bits and pieces of trick training or just out in the woods bareback, I loved that. And I loved just playing with the horses more than I was more into that than I was into the competition part of things. And during that time, I was also reading everything I could find, every book in the library that had to do with dogs and dog training. And an interesting thing about that, now we're talking like the late 80s and beginning of 90s, posture reinforcement training was growing. It was part of the traditional training in Scandinavia. And when people write a book, they are typically pretty explicit about the positive reinforcement bits. And they're not so explicit about the aversives, at least back then. So the writing was often better than the actual training. I wasn't in contact with the actual training. I was in contact with the writing. So I did get access to quite a bit of posture reinforcement advice in the written material. And then also I know when I look back that I was reading sort of selectively. So finding the bits that had to do with posture reinforcement because that appealed to me. So I reasonably got into posture reinforcement training, not in terms of shaping and marker-based training, but in using more lower reward training from the beginning. So my toddler was born in 1992. And we got started with competitive obedience. Because again, that's what you could read about. You can read about tracking. And then it says something like, you will see on your dog's body language when he's got the track right. And I'm like, I don't have a dog. I can't see that.

But obedience, you could read and you can understand what it was supposed to look like. So that was my reason for getting started with competitive obedience first. And then when my toddler was about a year old, I almost wore her out because we were training all the time. So then I got Misty, my dream dog, my pap, who lived to be over 19 and was the obedience star from in the beginning and with whom I got started with agility. Just because my dog club wanted somebody to take an agility instructor's course. And I happened to be one of the younger. I had a cute, fluffy dog. And apparently I liked training. So they thought I was a good candidate. So off you go. Go learn how to do agility. And I hadn't shown any interest in agility before. But it was like, OK, I can do that. And I took a one weekend instructor's course and then I was hooked. So getting started with agility, I had both my dogs who are obedience champions at the time. And I was aiming for the Swedish championship in obedience. And that just, that all just sort of fell to the roadside once you got hooked on agility. And then I spent 10 years hanging out on the agility fields every weekend. And that's where we met. Yes. Yes. Because the thing is, Emily and I, we had young dogs at the same time. In 1998, we had already sort of seen each other on the field maybe the year before or so. But that summer, we had a huge agility competition in Sweden, a full week. And we were both competing with our older dogs, but we also had young dogs. So we had a lot to talk about in training plans and how to teach things to the youngsters. And pretty much nobody else could stand our level of discussion, the level of nerdiness that got started. So we, yeah, we spent that time with each other discussing training and developing training plans. Awesome. You kind of started to get into my next question there a little bit, which was, were you both always positive trainers? And if not, kind of what got you started there? So it sounds like right from the start, at least, Eva, you were kind of reading bits and pieces and kind of pulling that out almost from the beginning. Any more you want to say on that? Or maybe Emily got her experience? Well, so I was not a positive reinforcement trainer from the beginning. I so desperately wanted to be in the vicinity of ponies and getting to ride. So I took all my hints from the people that had the horses and from the training. And that's all pressure and release. And then when I got my first dog, I looked to my neighbor who was a trainer at the local dog club.

And I went with her and she really introduced me and she was ever so kind about it. But that wasn't positive reinforcement training either. And I was actually quite a good, looking back on it, I can say I was a good punishment-based trainer. I had good timing, but I did not really realize that it was corrections that we were using. Nilla, my first dog, she was a mixed breed of Lab, Golden and German Shepherd, mostly Lab. And she was what people would deem soft, meaning that I never really felt that I was using corrections. But then my sister bought a Border Terrier, Phlox. And she kind of drifted and became my dog. And with Phlox, it was blatantly obvious that there were corrections. And I wasn't comfortable with that level. And it wasn't fun. I was constantly, not annoyed, but kind of looking for things to tell her what was wrong. And I did not enjoy that at all. And that's where I did the Eva thing of starting to read everything I could find. Everything I could find. Because I was getting into stuff I did not enjoy. I took a complete time out. I read everything. And then I started over. And then with the young dog that Eva was alluding to, that we had young dogs at the same time, I started her off with complete, using just positive reinforcement training, being quite naive in certain aspects. And very, like, gung-ho. I think one of the first things that I actually shaped from scratch was the weave poles. Yes. Weave poles. You shaped weave poles. And not in any traditional fashion either. Because you were shaping weave poles using a target. Which, just try to picture that. Foot target for the weave poles. Yeah. First thing. Here we go. You like to start small, obviously. Let's start small and with nothing that really matters. Yes. And it actually went swimmingly well. So the hubris began there. And then it just kind of went on. And since then, I think that the discussions that Eva and I have been having and all the reading and all the training of other students has just become so obvious. That this is kind of what I do. And I like the science part. I like being able to not just say this is what I do, but that there is science to lean on. I definitely think that we have been reinforcing the breakdown into small pieces, look at things from a science-y perspective in each other. So, like, we both have that foundation before we ever met. And then getting together, that sort of just propelled that forward in an interesting way. But it is interesting, like, thinking back of how you got started with positive reinforcement training and all the influences that were there early on.

Because we're always standing on the shoulders of giants. And those giants in our Scandinavian training, like, when we got started, trying to trace where did that come from is quite interesting. We had quite a few Scandinavian trainers, including Anders Hallgren back in the 70s, who sort of got the language going about positive reinforcement training and introduced the science a bit. And then when clicker training came along in the mid-90s, I remember the first lecture that I went to, that was a Swedish girl named Maril Fogelqvist. She had had some instructor's course and somebody close to where I live had been there, came home, gave a lecture. That was in 97. I already had, like, two obedience champions. I was competing high-level agility. And I had Misty, my little pack, with me. And was shown shaping for the first time. And in the sort of traditional sense of reshaping, sit in a chair with a clicker and your treats and just watch the dog click and treat. And that was the weirdest experience. Like, this super frustrated, barky little dog. And me, with no skills whatsoever, trying to click and give cookies. But that clicked for me in a sense that I think nothing else quite lives up to that experience of, wow, there is something in here that I had no idea about. The possibility to actually communicate in that way and build behavior through reinforcement. Not all through antecedents, but actually using reinforcement to build behavior. So I went home from that and I spent, like, four hours that night. I didn't go to bed until three in the morning with my dog on the kitchen floor, shaping her to put her head under a chair. And I could have that on video. I can watch it in my head. Still, almost 25 years later. So it's like there's both the positive reinforcement trainer, avoiding aversives, using rewards. And then there is the bits and pieces of how consequences drives behavior. Those are two different pieces that come together in a pretty cool way. So for me, that's a bit like a burst into the science-y understanding of how behavior works. I love that. I love those stories. They're fantastic. So I wanted to kind of ask, we've talked a little bit about kind of where you came from and kind of how you got into positive training. But is there a way that you would describe your current training philosophy or kind of your current approach to things? Well, you gave us a little bit of heads up for that question, which I'm thankful for, because that got us talking about, could we even phrase a training philosophy? And Emily?

Then we started thinking about when we wrote the agility book, agility right from the start. That's often referred to the book that took longer to write than the Bible, which is not true, people. It took a long time. It's a close call. It's a close call. Yeah. But still, so when we teach and when we wrote that book, we tend to think in a structure of what, why, and how, why. And I think that kind of frames up our training philosophy, because a lot of things is derived from that. So the philosophy being principle over method and the philosophy being start with what. And before you decide what your training goals are, you have to ask yourself why, like, who are the goals for? Why do we want to accomplish this? Is this the best goal to have or should we have a different goal? And then depending on what the goal is, then you can design your strategy, how to work with that behavior, how to teach it, or how to modify it. And then again, ask the questions of why choose that strategy? Because there are always many different possible goals. So there is decision making in like, what goal should we go with? And then for every given goal, there are always many possible strategies to get there. And again, we have to choose. So the awareness of those levels, I think, is the philosophy that we work from and that we try to live from in our training. I like that. So it's what, why, and then how, why. Yes. So to kind of bring things, again, kind of back, I guess, we came forward and then we're going back a little bit. I mentioned in your bio that you guys brought Tag Teach, first Tag Teach faculty in Europe. So I wanted to talk about that a little bit because I don't think we've talked about Tag Teach ever on the podcast before. So can you guys give us a lowdown? What is Tag Teach? How does it work? So Tag Teach stands for teaching with acoustical guidance. And Teresa McKeon that stole Eva from me for three months last year, she is one of the developers behind it. And it's often referred to as clicker training for people. Wouldn't you say, Eva? Yes. And that, it's good enough to say it's clicker training for people in the sense that you are looking at breaking down skills, working with one thing at a time, building behavior through positive reinforcement, using behavior science as your background in your teaching. But Tag Teach is developed specifically for working with people. And Tag Teach, that means that we use different tools with people when we are working with people that have a functioning language.

So there are strategies that we use in communicating with people that we can't use when we work with our animals just due to the differences in language and the fact that we have such an elaborate language. And in Tag Teach, we allow for or we make full use of that. So that means that the learner can always be involved in making the training plan or coming with suggestions or asking the teacher to help them with their training using tag points, for example. So it's, this is difficult for me to describe because I was about to say, it's not just about the teacher teaching their students. It's not all about the teacher deciding. But then I didn't want to say that because I tried to live by that. We tried to live by that in our animal training as well, right? That it's not just one directional from teacher to student. We want there to be a communication and working for the benefit of the learner always and for the learner to always have an input. But Eva, I think that the reason you wanted to say that is that if you're working with a human learner with a functioning language, you can have discussion beforehand. If I'm training Tessa, I still want that communication, but that will be derived from the process, the training process. I can't have a discussion with her beforehand saying, so what do you think about this and this? What would you like? I mean, I can ask her things in a slightly different manner. I could check for what reinforces she would like to work for that day, for example. But I can't talk to her about it. We have to show her and let her choose in different fashions. So I think that's why you were drifting towards those words. It's still different. And I mean, also the debriefing afterwards can also be verbal if the human learner is verbal in that way. And I can't do that with Tessa other than looking at the data from the session and kind of having that process with myself afterwards. And I can look at what Tessa looks like next time I go into a session and have that as an information. And I came directly to this podcast recording from an afternoon of online Tag Teach workshop in Swedish. So I'm pretty much like my head is spinning with Tag Teach enthusiasm at the moment. Can I just interject? I just wanted to say before you go into that rabbit hole, the reason that we brought Tag Teach to Sweden in 2005 was that we had been talking about the fact that for our animal learners, we were, as I said, breaking it down, looking at the goals, et cetera, et cetera.

And we were looking for somebody who had standardized or perhaps taken a deeper dive into what does this look like for humans? Because I think most people have been in the perhaps dog training class where the instructor is just firing off information. And you go, my head is about to explode. And I don't know what to do with all this information. And what of these things were I supposed to do and in what order? And we just wanted a way to structure teaching better. Because we were pretty happy about ourselves as dog trainers at the time. And we were less happy with ourselves as people trainers because there was such a discrepancy between the level of uncertainty and frustration in our human learners and in our animal learners. And we're trying to do the best we could with our human learners. But we still felt that there's got to be better ways to do this. And Tag Teach for us really showed to be that. The instructor's dilemma is always that you sit on all this information and you want to give everything. But if you give everything, your student is going to be messed up because it's too much. Too many words, too many examples, too many everything. And you need to kind of know when to talk and know when to not talk. Know what information to divulge when and know when it's kind of student processing time, student doing time and when to hold back. And for me, Tag Teach gave me a first instep into thinking more about that. I was actually taking my education to become a high school teacher in English and Swedish during this time. And I wrote my, I don't know, what do you call that, Eva? It's not a thesis on that level. It's a what? Is it a thesis? Paper? It's a paper. It's a big paper. It's kind of a big exam paper that's kind of for the whole, all the years you study. And I wrote that on Tag Teach, which was interesting because that did not go down that well. Because it's like the process sometimes becomes it's too simple for a human that you're like looking at just behavior and reinforcement. But it was very, very interesting to do those two educations kind of at the same time. It's also fascinating to see how both clicker training for our animals and Tag Teach for our humans fit into the larger umbrella of behavior analysis. So for us, our learning about clicker training came way before our learning about the science of behavior. You had bits and pieces of the science of behavior, but not that much. And the same with Tag Teach. Our knowledge in Tag Teach predated our understanding and knowledge about behavior analysis being available as a scientific field.

I ended up doing my master's thesis in behavior analysis starting in 2012. And compared to the other dates that we're juggling here of doing Tag Teach back in 2004 and starting with clicker training in the late 90s. That's an interesting order that I think that we share with a lot of people that we had detailed understanding of how to build behavior before knowing that there even was such a thing as a broader science of behavior. So I don't know how that learning would look if we had done it the other way around. I thought for a while when I started learning about behavior analysis, I thought for a little bit that, oh, here is that big underlying field where all of this is already there. All of this is already known. And somebody just took bits and pieces out and I just learned the bits and pieces. I just learned the clicker training and I just learned Tag Teach. And now I'm learning the full thing. And what I'm seeing, the more I learn about the entire field of behavior analysis is that there is novelty in the clicker training approach that animal trainers are doing. There is novelty in the Tag Teach approach that was developed outside of the scientific field and that adds to the awesome mass of science that is there. So that's pretty neat. I think we've been a little conceptual and I'd love to bring it down with an example if either of you has one kind of to mind that you could share of just like how a Tag Teach example might work. So people can kind of picture what the difference is between that and like I think most people have a pretty good picture in their head of what a typical clicker training session looks like, right? So maybe just kind of how that's different in practice, what it looks like when you're working Tag Teach with a person. So if I work with Tag Teach with a person, Emily, say you were here and we were going to go out. Do you want to work with chicken perhaps? I want to work on my front cross. What's wrong with you? You want to work on your front cross? I was going to teach you some things about how to deal with my chicken because I know you're not always that comfortable around the chicken. That is very true. So in order to let the chickens out and you not having to have them around your feet, there is a gate outside. And in order to close that gate so that it actually stays close, you need to wiggle the gate lock a little bit. So I know that you might be a bit nervous once we get out to the chicken. Do you have something that you can have as a pretend lock? Love it. I do have a pen in my hand right now.

Would it be okay for you if I just have you practice this for a couple of times? Yes. So the exercise you will do is close the latch and wiggle it. The tag point is wiggle. So Eva's making a motion with her pen right now. She holds it. This is lateral. I always say it wrong. Yeah. Lateral. Up and down. Up and down. And then she turns it to lie down. She makes a wiggle motion. So the tag point is the wiggle motion. Yes? Just to be sure that I understood you correctly. So I'm moving my pen. Looking at Emily. Tag. So as I see her doing the wiggle motion that will keep the door locked, I say tag. Or I click. Tag. Tag. Okay. See you now. Good. So with that, I have seen Emily practice three times the motion of closing a pretend latch and wiggling it. And I know that that will keep it closed. And she has now practiced that three times. Emily, I'm guessing that if I let you out now to go close the door behind you before I let the chicken out. I would wiggle the latch. Yeah. And I mean, if we want to bring this into dog sports, this could be you practicing a left about turn in obedience with how are you going to move your feet. And never mind the actual motion now. But say, for example, that your left turn is that you turn your left foot 90 degrees to the left. And then you follow with your right. And then we can talk about that and decide that that is the pattern that the handle wants. And then we make a tag point and I mark that. And we practice that without the dog until fluent. And then we put the dog in there. The dog is going to be a distraction to the behavior of moving the feet correctly. So what we're looking for is all the little details that we know make a big difference, like the latch gate that I need to wiggle for it to stay close so that we don't have chicken everywhere. Or the left foot pattern that we know that we need because it's going to be a cue to the dog and that we need to not botch up. Then we can pick them out, pull them into little pieces if needed, practice them anti-fluency and then use them in the actual situation instead of just hoping for it to be correct. And bring small pieces out and practice them to fluency is the key part here. The phrasing and the marking sort of helps put that learn unit together. So when I tell Emily the tag point is wiggle or she tells me the tag point is left foot on target, then I know that I just have to focus on one thing and I will get feedback as I do it. And that helps the teacher break things down and it helps the learner relax. And you know that, OK, I just have this one thing to focus on and it's something that I will manage to accomplish.

It's also a really neat thing to use in a group setting because you can have a group working together on small things and kind of have everybody involved. And just being the one that marks, for example, will also train your knowledge of the situation. You will learn things from that as well. So I really think it's a very beneficial tool for any instructor or anything that you want to work on. And as I have been saying like 50 times to my poor students this afternoon, I spent four hours with them and I think I repeated this like every five minutes or so. Learning the fundamental structure of tag teaching, actually working with tag points is something that once you have those skills and once you can do it fluently, then it gives you a framework to be creative from. So it's not that often that I do actual tag points, but I use the thinking all the time, constantly. And I think that since the thinking and the breakdown is there, then you kind of set the stage so well that you might not need to break out that actual tag point. Sometimes you do, of course. It's nothing. It doesn't mean that you were a bad teacher if you need to go all the way to a tag point, but it does set the stage for easier learning for everybody around. And I think it's the same thing. For me, it was the same thing. And it is the same thing when I teach with my clicker training that if I set the framework that has to do with set up the environment, look at your learner, click, treat, then a lot of things follow. There are a lot of things that you cannot do. You cannot go in there and push and pull your dog around. You cannot correct if he makes a mistake. That's outside of the regulations of the game. And that means that you become more creative with the bits and pieces that fit into the game, like antecedent arrangements and splitting. And it's the same with the human learners. When I take away the tool of talking nonstop and telling people what they do wrong, then I need to build other tools. I need to develop other tools instead. And those tools, they make me a better teacher. Awesome. Well, thank you for that. I think that was a fantastic summary of what is obviously a huge, complex topic. So I appreciate that. And I appreciate you guys doing your little demo. That was helpful. So obviously, I think it's pretty clear you guys have had the opportunity to do lots of super interesting things in the training world. But I'd love to just kind of give you each a second to talk about whatever you're working on now, what projects you guys currently have on your plate, what's going on in your professional world these days.

Emily, you started a project like yesterday. I'm super curious of that one. I was actually going to go with the dog training pieces first, but okay. I can do both. Yesterday, I started the... I've had... So I like to run. I'm a long distance runner. And I use that term loosely because speed does not really matter to me. I like to adventure run is what I call it. I'll pack my backpack and I'll grab Tessa and out we go. But I've had so many questions from people saying, I would like to run. I really would like to run. I've always said that I should learn to run, but it never sticks. And after Evan and I gave a Tag Teach webinar a couple of weeks back, I had even more questions about it. And I was like, okay, I'm finally going to do this. I'm going to put together running groups online. And we are focusing on the running, yes. But we're also focusing on how do you build a new skill into your repertoire, what people like to call habits. And it's going... So that's on my mind right now, developing, thinking of the different groups and what that's going to look like, et cetera, et cetera. And it's also very New Year's resolution-y because a lot of those podcasts coming out right now are driving me insane. So I was like, let's boil this down. Let's get to my favorite questions. What does that look like? And kind of really get to nerd on about that. So that's one of my human projects alongside with... My youngest sister has Down syndrome. And during the COVID pandemic, she's been indoors a lot more than before. And she's gained a lot of weight, which is not healthy for her. And she already has respiratory issues. And she is also not very keen on walking and moving. So I'm putting together a chart and a project for her on how to get her to move. Because the people that work where she lives in an assistant living facility, they have all the best intentions, but they take it... The pieces are too big. If you don't want to go out and walk at all, expecting somebody to walk home for a 45-minute walk, it's not going to happen. And I can see that. And I'm just... I'm enjoying setting up a project for her with little reinforcers along the way, mainly me being the reinforcer, my presence being the reinforcer, because we can still meet outside, even if we don't meet indoors during the pandemic. And on the dog side, as I said in the beginning of this chat, is that I'm getting Tessa ready to compete at some point. So this week is my New Year's week, which means I go outside and I take the baseline for every sport that I'm in to see, okay, where are we at? What does it look like right now?

And what do I need to put my attention towards? Because like everybody else, I like to do what's already working. And I need to kind of find the little holes in our performance that we need to put together. I also had an accident last fall and injured my hand severely. So I haven't been able to drive, which means that Tessa has had little training like indoors with other people around. And with the pandemic, it's also difficult, but I'm starting to get to give her some of those opportunities as well. So those are my projects. And I really like the approach of kind of, okay, so this is the obedience class we're going to enter. We've already done our foundation work. Let's go outside and see what does this look like? And then just find the parts that are not working. To me, that's not aversive at all. That's just information so that I can structure my training plan. I love the idea of an annual baseline. I think that's absolutely brilliant. So for me, where do I start? Well, the thing that I am supposedly doing this January is doing more things online, putting stuff, making things available online, building for Emily and myself platforms for all stuff that we have in our computers. Because we have so many lectures, so many weekends. There's so much stuff that we think we've been teaching it, but maybe we haven't taught it for quite some time. Or maybe we taught something once at some working dog club in Sweden with 20 attendees, and then nobody else saw that material. Or maybe we taught it like an angle of it once, and we kind of thought that we explained the full concept, and maybe perhaps that was just in our heads. That happens regularly. Regularly. So taking advantage of the fact that everybody is doing things online and that you can't travel anywhere. I mean, this is travel season. I'm usually not home. January, February, March, I'm barely at home at all. And this year, I can't really go anywhere. So making things available online and working through our material is a big thing. Other than that, I have quite a few projects that have to do with either organizations, like getting positive reinforcement training started in organizations or working with... There's a lot of husbandry training projects. Also in schools or in facilities with smaller pets, facilities with a variety of farm animals kept as pets or small city farms, places like that. And also working with Fear Free and getting more of that going in Scandinavia. I was hosting the first Fear Free lectures in Scandinavia in 2017. And since then, that has been a community that's building, which is really cool.

And we now see, as we see across the globe, huge developing interest. And that's something that... Since I'm ridiculously passionate about teasing out the ins and outs of training procedures, I have a lot of learning opportunities within husbandry training, because there are a lot of procedures that I haven't been working with that much. So that's both a personal venture and teaching and sort of in our society spreading that knowledge. Awesome. So one of the reasons that I reached out to both of you is because you're going to come to a webinar for us at FTSA. So this will come out, we're talking on Wednesday. It'll come out the Friday after we talk. So everybody who's listening to this will be Friday. And you guys are doing your webinar the following Thursday for us. Can you give us a little bit of a peek into what you're going to talk about? I know the topic is navigating transitions in training. Maybe tell us a little bit about what you mean by transitions. So whenever we do a training session, things are ongoing. Like you are moving, your learner is moving, you're looking at behaviors, you might be giving cues, there is reinforcement happening. And we need all the bits and pieces of a training session to sort of come together in a flow where the learner always has somewhere to go, somewhere to go to earn the next reinforcer. We never want to leave our learners in limbo. And what we see if we videotape a training session is that there are a lot of what we call transitions, meaning periods of time that aren't really in the focus for the trainer, but that still need to be navigated somehow. It might be starting the session. It might be ending the session. It might be going from the place where you happen to be to the point in space where the next exercise is going to start. It might be from one reward ending to being able to begin again. It's so easy as a trainer to be focusing on your goal behavior and thinking that's kind of it. But you have to get into the session. You have to get out of the session. You have to manage all those little things that aren't actually the goal behavior. And what we have found is that if you have, they are going to happen whether you like it or not, because the dog is a living organism and it's moving around and you are moving around. So they're going to happen whether you like it or not. So what we've found is that if you have a plan for those transitions, it will help your training immensely. As Eva said about the videotaping, if you can videotape and you can stop and freeze frame at any point,

and what you see in that frame is taking your training forward or at least not making it worse, then it's happy days. But a lot of times you will see that what's going on in those little transition periods is not beneficial for the training or for the trainer. We can also look at it from the perspective of the trainer and the trainer skills that you want to have developed in yourself. There is something about things happening in real time that is different from the scripts or the narratives that we have in our heads when it comes to training. You might be thinking that, oh, I'm going to reinforce this behavior. All right, how did you get to the starting point? And how did you move? And how did you get if you are going to toss a treat? Where was the treat to begin with? How did you get the treat to your hand where it needed to be to be tossed? And if we look at the transition times, they are both moments where we need to make sure that our learner has somewhere to go so that he's not lost, or we start developing behaviors that don't fit into our training sessions. But transition times are also opportunities for you as a trainer. If you control your transition times or have a pre-planned strategy for your transition time, you can use that to do the things that you need to do before the next repetition starts, like refilling your treats or moving the dumbbell from one hand to the other. If we can get those things done in a structured way so that we get to control a little bit what happens, there is not so much haphazard behavior and learning happening. And we can be better teachers because we have a setup that's easier for our learner to follow. So based on that, I would think the major benefit is that training would move forward more successfully, right? The dog is more successful and things are clearer and training maybe happens faster. Is that those kind of the benefits of having those pieces in place? Yeah. Most certainly. Training going smoother, reaching your training goals faster, but also a huge component is your learner being occupied with something that leads to reinforcement throughout the session. Because there are so many times in training sessions where extinction conditions might happen, even though you hadn't planned to work with any extinction in your training. But there were chunks of time when reinforcement was not available and when your learner didn't have a clear path for what to do to get to the next reinforcer. And if we look specifically at dog sports and you look at yourself as a trainer, everything you do is going to be in a handling system.

We talk of handling systems only in agility, but there's a handling system for obedience and in rally obedience and whatever other sports that you're doing. And if you make sure to think about your transitions so that your movements and the way that you handle things in those aren't contradictory to what you're supposed to be doing as soon as you're actually working, then your own learning will be more smooth sailing towards success. You're not doing the opposite to what you're supposed to be doing. So we're kind of being mindful about our time and mindful about not doing repetitions of stuff that we don't want, both for the dog and the handler. Would you say, Emily, that this just came to mind? It makes you feel less clumsy. It definitely makes you feel less clumsy because you know the feeling. Sometimes when you train your dog, people will say, it feels like I have two heads and eight arms and I don't know what the feet are doing. So by kind of developing and taking care of the transitions, you are going to feel more put together, more like the trainer you want to be kind of thing going. Because you have something to do all the time as well. Your movements come together. It's not, oh, now I should be somewhere with my hands and my feet. And how do I get there? You are on some kind of path all the time. So it really, really helps the trainer stay on track as well. And looking at it from like a system kind of standpoint, I think that creating this so that the dog knows the structure and knows all these different things that you do, it helps you go from venue to venue, from situation to situation. Because it's like, okay, so in this situation, these reinforcers are available for these behaviors. It becomes very, very clear. And for a young dog, for example, for like Tessa, when I bring her into stuff that where she's never been before, she's like, all right, in this situation, this is what she's going to do. And this is what I'm going to do. And it's all very, very, it's just clear. Is there anything else you guys want to share to kind of give people a sneak peek into what you'll be talking about during the webinar? Anything else that you want to mention? Well, during the webinar, we will be pretty practical in our focus and look at strategies that we use a lot for transitions in structured training sessions. So we will take a look at what we call, where we call them transports. They might be long lasting rewards, or they might be other trained strategies that really, really, like, almost physically move your dog from one point to the next.

And how both what that might look like, and how that can be beneficial in different training scenarios. I love that. I'm excited to see it. I'm super excited that you guys are presenting for us. And then you're coming back. You're doing Lemonade Conference stuff for us, too. So I know we have you on the schedule for two presentations during TLC, talking about dealing with mistakes. Do you have it prepped? Can you share a sneak peek about what you think you'll cover there? We just love you, because when you asked us to be in the conference, we were like, we'd like to talk about mistakes. And you were like, sure. We were like, we want two slots. And you were like, okay. So the dealing of mistakes, it kind of ties in well with the whole transitions. And Emily, it ties all the way back to training philosophy. It does. Why? How? Why? Like, if the goals of our training, if we know the goals of our training, and we know why we have those goals, then dealing with mistakes has to be part of every single training plan. And our choice of how to deal with the mistake when it happens needs to be linked to the goals that we have. Yeah. So at the conference, we're going to be talking, as I said, in two sessions. And in the first one, we're going to take our approach of, so mistakes are going to happen. What does it look like in your training structure? What does it look like? What are the different, how can you deal with them, like on a conceptual level? And then in the next session, we're going to get really hands-on practical on looking at the difference between what you do in the situation where the mistake occurs and what you do for later. Because that's one of our main things when it comes to mistakes is that you have to divide them up into what you do in the actual second that that thing happened. And what you do for later. Normally, when we talk about mistakes, this is where we start singing, you know, the cheer tune, if I could turn back time, because that's what trainers want to do every time something happens. But it just happened. We need to have a good way to deal with it. And this is, we have a ton of passion topics. This is like the passion topic of passion topics, however, because we have a structure that we've been developing. For our agility training, that is pretty much what we will share here. It's when, because the training that we do in our sports, we do the training for us. Our goals are predominantly the fun aspect and the enrichment aspect and doing things together with our animals. Like working with mistakes in a dog sports context is so much fun.

Because we can always set up the environment. It's not going to be life and death scenarios. They are excellent. Sports training is just perfect for developing strategies for how to deal with mistake and working in a positive reinforcement paradigm also with our mistakes. So we're really, really, really happy to get to just zoom in on that type of training session that we might do for our agility or for our rally or for our competitive obedience. Awesome. All right. So I've got three questions here that I usually ask at the end of every episode when we have a first time guest on. So we're going to kind of go through them as we can. So the first one here is what's the dog related accomplishment that you are proudest of? I don't know who wants to go first. I think that's a tough one. So I normally just tend to think about my students and the moments they have when they go kind of aha and they break something down further. When they take the time to ask those two questions that I really love, which are what does it look like and who does what when? And when I see them get that process going without my part in it. And if I look at like from a competitive standpoint, my biggest accomplishment, I think, was a youth Swedish championship that I was in when I was like 16, maybe, with my first dog, Nilla, who had she was. She could be worried in certain situations. And I had terrible ring nerves at that point. And how I developed a system for myself to keep her experience. As Eva said before, that the goal is for us to have fun together and terrible ring nerves and fun. They don't kind of jam at all. And how I developed a system for that specific competition. And we took a silver at that competition. And my system was and I put tag points to that years later. But my system was that I hummed to myself because as long as I was humming, I was breathing. And as long as you breathe, you get oxygen to your brain and you can make your good training decisions. And she came second and we had a fabulous time. And when I watched the photos and the VHS tapes back, because that's how old I am, from that competition, her tail was up the entire time. And it was just fabulous. So, the time around this New Year's Eve got me thinking, when I got this question from you, of the many times that I have noticed fireworks and looked for my dog. And that relates to really, I wasn't aware how proud I was about that training. But with TISLA, we worked with growing noise sensitivities, both around New Year's and around other times of the year with noises of various kinds.

And managing to turn that around, which I didn't think that I would be able to do that since this became a growing issue. And it came together with her spondylosis starting to develop. And just, I did not, I expected that I would be able to slow it down, but I didn't expect to be able to reverse it. And this year, not having her with me and actually missing the opportunity to get to play with her with the fireworks that happen outside. That sort of made me realize how far we came, that we actually had fun playing with the gunshots or the firework. So, that was apparently a really, really big thing and a big accomplishment. I have to answer for you. I have to answer for you before you keep going. Because Eva's best moment when I was just like, that is my best friend. Just look at her goal. Was when she won the Swedish championships that were held up in Umeå, which is in the way north of Sweden. Which year was this Eva? Ninety? Eight. Ninety-eight? Ninety-eight. Yeah. Ninety-eight. It's August. It's August. It's summer. It's like two or three degrees outside. It's like cold like you would not, it's Celsius. It's cold. And it's mud up to your thighs. And everybody's like miserable and in raincoats. And the dogs are having a hard time. And Eva, she struts into the arena with this little pap thing that's barking and bouncing in her arms. And she's in shorts and a tank top and she's in bare feet. There's mud everywhere. And she races through this course and there's nothing, there's nothing in that run that could have been better. I mean, my skin prickles as I talk about it. And she just flew through the course and Misty was just spot on. And they won with I don't know how much, but it was just like, it was amazing to watch. Because that is my picture of somebody being in the zone. Nothing could have, nothing. I mean, literally nothing could have stopped you from just doing that. Thank you for bringing that back, Emily. It's like I still have the feels from running with Misty. And this is me being like not that interested in competing. Like the competitive sides of things I thought or I think aren't really what is so appealing. But that the zone, getting to enter that zone with my dog is like the most amazing thing. And I guess that is also what I got with Tisla when working with the fireworks. Once we got the proper training structure going, it is that like that the connection of being on the same path and me having to be on my best in order to navigate the challenge that's in front of us. And that's what competitions give. It's a challenge that requires of me to be at my best.

And with Misty, I needed the competition, everybody around me to get that high in a sense, because there's a lot of energy that goes in there. And she needed me. She required, I would say, not needed. She didn't need much. She required of me. To stay out of her way. Get my adrenaline up and stay out of her way. Yes. So, yeah. Side story to this, when Eva talked about the energy. So, when you know the agility competitions, everybody goes and they bring the tents and everything. And Eva would have half the tent and I would have the other half of the tent. In my part of the tent, it was all zen. And it's like, ding, everybody take it easy. Do not push Emily's energy. In the other part of the tent is Eva playing ABBA at like full volume and dancing around. And I'm like, I'm hating her. All right. And now, take this. Fast forward to when we got to go to Clicker Expo. So, we wrote the agility book. That's a proud moment that isn't exactly training, but getting an email from Karen Pryor saying, hey, I read an article by you. I have been looking everywhere for somebody to write an agility book. Click a training for me. Would you be interested in doing that? That's a proud moment. And then we got invited to speak at Clicker Expo. And by that time, Misty had been retired for a couple of years. I was sort of out of the competition world or on my way out of the competition world. And we are going to Clicker Expo. It's a big thing. We are going to teach. I spent the night before our first presentation. I woke up like five times. And I was in the middle of the same dream every single time. I was standing barefoot on the start line, Misty in my arms, barking her head up. And we were just ready to go. So that is like the feel of presenting. This is the level of energy that I have to navigate every time we stand on stage. Bad news for Emily, for us sharing a room, is that, again, she wants to prepare for her presentations. With some, I don't know, seriousness or calmness. You know, the whole zen thing. And I'm like, bring out the wine and turn on the volume, please. Yep. This is a problem. I'm going to miss conference seasons so much. I'm going to be an alcoholic by the end of this because it's just the wine and not the party. Aw. Well, you clearly managed to navigate it between the two of you. I know that I have advice about missing the party piece. Emily is coming up here in a couple of weeks. So we have to figure that one out. Oh, my goodness. So my next ending question here is, what's the best piece of training advice that you've ever heard? It's all behavior. That's one. That's an early one. Just, it's all behavior.

Everything that you're looking at is behavior. But then I have another one that's really awesome. No idea where this came from, but it happened just the other week. Don't let your expectations get in the way of your observations. You know who said that? It would be Emily. I was on the podcast with Hannah. Yeah, I was on a podcast with Hannah Brannigan, and we were talking about our young dogs. And you know with the young dog, you have all the plans and the dreams and the schemes in your head. And you think that you put all this in. And then, so you kind of, your expectations are like everything. But you have to keep them out of the way of your observations. Otherwise, you're going to mess up your training. And that goes for everything, really. I actually, I've been thinking about it, and I can't find a situation where it's not true. So that's actually my quotes of 2020 for myself. I usually try to figure out something good that I said during the year. That's it. And this is probably, Emily, the first of your quotes that I have been using daily. You do a lot of good quotes, but this one is for every situation. Just keep your eyes open. Keep observing. And I think that my favorite quote would be, Susan Schneider said, reinforcement is the course that works backwards. And for me, that helps me keep my eye on the ball. It's just not what's, I'm talking about observations. It is what's happening in the moment, but it's also what's going to happen in the next repetition. It's going to be my information about, am I on the correct route? It's not all about my plan. It's about what is going on, what I put in, what's going to happen in the next repetition. And I think that we all need to keep an eye on that. And I think those two quotes kind of go together in a sense. You need to observe. I love it. Last one. Who is somebody that you each look up to? I look up to Ava. No, but in all honesty, I do look up to Ava. And she's always with me, in a sense. I can hear her voice in my head when I, and I'm like, she goes, what does that look like? And I'm like, but I look up to Ryan Cartlidge. I really, I was thinking about this just the other day, how he's building the community around Animal Training Academy and how he gets people engaged online, sharing all sorts from the most like heartfelt stuff about themselves to very specific training schedules, et cetera. And I really think that's, and how the tone is maintained in the groups. I think that is a really good thing. Ava and I have been talking a lot about how do we teach people how to talk about training?

And I think a lot of the things that's going on in those groups are nice approximations, if nothing else. And sometimes the whole way through. But still, we all know that online communication can be difficult and can get tricky. But I really think that he manages, with the help of a lot of other people, I know that. But still, I think that's great. All right, guys. I have a name on my list. And just notice that Emily and I have not been talking about this question before. We got the question from Melissa, so I know that we were going to get it. We deliberately, we didn't even talk about that we had gotten the question. Right, Emily? And we definitely didn't mention any names whatsoever. What do you think? How much for a shared brain is this? What do you think is on my piece of paper here? Ryan Cartlidge. Are you kidding me? I'm not. That's funny. So, Ryan, we love you for the same reason that Emily just said. And the shared brain in action. That is funny. That's freaky. It's not. It makes sense. Because for, I mean, exactly what Emily was saying, this navigating the communication and the community is a huge thing. And it's something, the same reason that we got going with TAG Teach in the, like, 15 years ago, had to do with how can we take what we love about the animal training and the positive reinforcement aspects and bring it into teaching. What we're navigating now. What we're navigating now. And I think, like, we all, everybody on a large scale is building communities in a way that's both positive reinforcement. It's science-based. It's good information. It's solid information. But it's kind and compassionate at the same time. And Ryan with Animal Training Academy is just amazing at accomplishing that. I actually had another name on my list, to be fair. I had added two names on my list. And Shrag Patel would be my other name for those very same reasons. It was on my list, too. Of course. So the combination of good, solid science and striving to really, or accomplishing to really spread good information in a coherent way, focusing on behavior, focusing on the descriptive aspects, and still managing to spread kindness and compassion and just get people involved. And navigating those two aren't, isn't always so easy. And both of them are really good role models for that. Oh, that was fun, Emily. I was like, seriously, did you just say Ryan? Love it. You stole each other's name, sort of. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, both of you, for coming on the podcast, for doing the webinar, for joining us for TLC. We're excited to have you. So thank you. Thank you so much for having us and letting us chat.

We haven't spoken together over the whole day, so it was great. Awesome. Awesome catching up. Thank you so much, Melissa. Good talking to you. Thank you. You, too. And thank you to our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week. Don't miss it. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzie Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzie for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by bensound.com. The track featured here is called Buddy. Audio editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in, and happy training. Music by Ben Doolittle. Music by Ben Doolittle.