Motivational Monday- Do we pay enough attention to building motivation?

“The starting point of all achievement is desire.” Napoleon Hill

Everything starts here, with giving a dog a reason to cooperate with us. Motivation is the base and the foundation of any training with any training method.

Yes - any training, any learning with any method used.

‘What about compulsion/aversive based training?’- you may ask? Truth be told, motivation to avoid punishment or to turn off some discomfort is still a motivation. But this is not the kind motivation that I’m looking for and in Bravery Boost Training we focus on creating intensity for rewards only.

In fact if you are rewarded based or positive trainer you should pay much more attention to building motivation, creating intensity for rewards than you think. Especially if you want your training to be successful. If whatever you have to offer to your dog is not as attractive as ..... (put any sort of distraction here) you may have a really hard time getting your dog attention.

I tend to say 'If I had a pound for every time a hear 'my dog likes food or play only if there are no distractions around' or 'I was not allowed to join dog training classes as my dog wouldn't take food next to the other dogs' or even better 'trainer told me my dog is not trainable as wouldn't take food from him'- I would be quite wealthy by this day.

Many dog trainers instead of focusing on learning new DMC, CBT or FAT system that can sell to their clients (yes, I just made up all those names) should spend more time on learning how to boost dogs motivation and add value to whatever they want to use as a reinforcer. That will make 'the reward part' of 'reward based training' much more rewarding and effective in the same time.

I'm training a couple dozen dogs on residential training per year. And unless I have some crazy driven dog with great work ethic I will always spend first week purely on making friends and bonding and building motivation to cooperate with me. If I'm successful with that the rest it just easy.

Motivation training is such a large subject. Today I will focus on 2 rules I follow when working on it especially with my youngsters.

Just yesterday we had very long discussion with Lila on different aspects on motivation. Worth to mention Lila is one of my favourite dog trainers. Nobody disagrees with me more than she is and we can spend hours discussing different aspects of dog training and behaviour.

But let's go back to the subject. I mentioned that I spend huge amount of time especially with puppies only on play and building intensity for rewards. As we are talking about puppies I also truly believe we tend to spend too much time and put too much focus on technical aspects of training in early stages in dog's life.

I spend majority of time on play.

Of course not ALL the time. Majority of it. I do want to condition markers or teach foundation games early on. However, I cannot really go all in into technical part if I cannot deliver something that my dog really values, can I?

Our conclusion was: We should not train 2 things at a time. If you are working on new skills eg. for agility, do not use a reinforcer that is still in the progress of shaping/improving eg. tug play. Following this example we need to create play as complete reward event eg. build intensity and desire to retrieve and release, before we attempt to use it as a reward in training.

Another rule I follow at the very beginning of building motivation journey is:

‘Invest in your dogs actual strengths rather than keep trying to make struggle to strength change.’

We are not to decide what is rewarding for our dog. Only our dog can decide or find something motivating or valuable. Of course we can and we should work on intensity to all motivators we want to use in training. Also with well planned 'motivation training' we can create new motivators or add value to one motivator with another one and also work on balance and ability to switch back and forth between them. I will write about that little bit more on another occasion, however, we can do it only through existing desires and this is the foundation work on motivation.

Let me explain.

I very often see owners begging or pushing their dog into tug. Every day, 3 times a day! With some dogs it gets to the point that it produces stress and frantic behaviour of gripping a toy just to calm the situation down and/or the handler. From outside it might look that after a few minutes of trying and pushing toy into dog's mouth or slamming it on the floor, the handler finally was successful. But was that really producing the right emotion or real motivation? Can we use hectic behaviour as a true reinforcer? Other dogs when almost forced to tug they disengage and look like they want to say ‘oh dear god not again!’ whenever handler is reaching for tug toys. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying don’t try to develop that passion for tug or any other reward. With many, even older dogs we can wake up the fighting spirit that they were never showing before. That reminds me my malinois Mango that I rescued years ago. Till he was 3,5 years old he has never even seen a tug toy. He lived in apartment and only activity he had till I got him was lead walking around the block. After some training and 'waking up' process that was my best biting dog in Schutzhund to this day! If it is in the dog 'has it' you can and you should wake it up!.

However if your dog deep down is not a tugger going all in into this way of reinforcement may not be such a good strategy.

Know your dogs, read their emotions, recognise what are their desires Invest your time in building even more intensity in what she/he likes and work on creative way of using it in training. We cannot force how our dogs want to be paid for their job.

Boost Motivation

Boost Confidence

Boost Relationship

Boost Performance

Many thanks for reading,

Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Alex