마이클 엘리스 - 리어버그로 가는 길

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give you the directions we have a list of hotels you can go to anything you need to know I thought it would be a good idea for you to talk about how you've organized your school what classes like this that you have or you have people come in for a week or two weeks at a time and then talk about the students that are here for months at a time why don't you explain how you've got it organized because it's really cool absolutely so when I opened the school I was trying to decide but my dream was to sort of have doggy University right the idea that you could completely immerse yourself in dog training at its deepest level and people could commit to it and take all these various topics over a extended period of time but of course I had been traveling and doing seminars for the previous 13 years or so and so there were a lot of people that were interested in the training but obviously already had jobs and businesses and things like that so they couldn't get away for a big chunk of time so when I designed the school initially I made classes in little modules so that people could take the modules and that are relatively compressed short week and two week long classes so people could come and spread those classes out over a long period of time and after a couple of years we started in the infancy of what was we call our immersion program and those weekly classes keep going we still offer those weekly classes but we started an immersion program which included all of the classes at the time and so it started out at about three months and over the last seven years or so then we've increased it and now it's five months long and it includes all of the weekly classes that we offer and I'll talk about those in a second but in addition to that there's a whole series of extracurricular activities so they get I don't do any private training anymore but the I immersion students get private lessons with me and my staff we have special topics outside of class where we bring in experts and given fields to expose people to different types of work and things like that they get hand to handle different dogs we arrange loner dogs for them to practice certain skills with so they get their hand on different types of dogs at different stages and so that's for somebody that can commit to a larger chunk of time and can do what I kind of always envisioned and immerse themselves in dog training the weekly classes are on a wide variety of topics and so the order in which they're on our website is typically the order that I recommend people take them in although

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there are some detours you can take so we have a puppy development class which is obviously starting from the ground up but you guys are just here for you recover all the right I'm telling you okay I'm sorry no no problem so it gives you the kind of how we approach puppy rearing from the ground up and theoretically and actually and then we have a class called management and management I think is our most it's good to have this opportunity to talk about it because that's our most misunderstood class when people hear management they think what is that a business class or something like that but technically management is all the things we do to live with dogs while we're getting them trained right and it it's I would argue it's the most important piece of the dog training puzzle right yeah you really need to know how to control your dog's environment to prevent behavior problems from getting started and then if you have a dog with behavior problems management is essential if you have any hope of fixing it so we talked about all the kind of key concepts in management and then we have our core class we're for obedience which is called the obedience intensive which is a two-week class and it covers all the kind of core principles and tools that we use throughout our obedience training with our dogs as we go forward it's kind of the fundamental course it we have a mirrored version of it available through Leerberg's online University as well our principles of dog training class that you guys offer through the online University let me say something yeah the thing that blew my mind is in the beginning you were a little hesitant on doing the online course the beauty of what has evolved here is how many people have taken that course and turned around and come out to the school absolutely I've had a series of them absolutely lots of them yeah several immersion students actually that took that class online first yeah that throughout the program since we've had it so we've had several students take that class and then apply to immersion programs and come for our long-term program after that and and many have taken weekly classes since then so it's great my my trepidation initially with the online classes was making sure that people were getting appropriate feedback right I'm always concerned when it's the same issue I have with videos they're fantastic you can get good information to way more people than you can live it's a huge piece of the puzzle but I'm always concerned about improper practice for extended periods of

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time with people because once people create a bad habit it's hard to correct it again right and so somebody yeah it's absolutely right and so somebody watches a video good they've got good information but if they're not very careful they don't have somebody helping them out they can practice incorrectly they're unaware that they're practicing incorrectly and then going back and fixing it so the online class has been the best compromise that that I could come up with time allowing right where people could get feedback as they went along so they wouldn't have a chance hopefully to rehearse a lot of this stuff incorrectly and so with our obedience intensive mirrors principles of dog training almost exactly and then we have a serious motivation class that follows that and the motivation class is of course how we develop what we call reward events for our dogs all the ways in which we motivate dogs to work for us if you're doing any kind of reward based training and it's obviously essential that your dog be motivated for certain kinds of activities how long is that it's a week long class yep so and we cover principles of motivation in virtually every class it's impossible not to talk about them in all of our class in puppy class we're going to talk about them in obedience class but people don't get enough time in a larger class to go through the mechanics repeatedly so we created its own class where people can get on their feet a lot more and practice the physical aspects of it and then we have our advanced obedience classes right advanced obedience one and two advanced obedience one is a two week long class that you have to have taken our core obedience class the obedience intensive and that class covers the steps to teaching what we would consider some of the very common advanced obedience exercises focused healing formal retrieving send away sent discrimination jumping position changes and that class of behaviors behaviors as well and advanced obedience two is really a week of guided practice so for the students that have taken our core class and advanced obedience one we have an extra week where you get practice under supervision to work on various things and it's just intensive practice the whole time we have two separate detection classes taught by our instructor Erica Duggan

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and two weeks long it was a week long it was a week long it was a week long it was a week long when we started it's now two weeks long and then she has a detection to class we have a an electronic collar class which was originally a two-day class and I made it so she was the only short class that we had it was the only two-day class that we had and a lot of our classes have prerequisites for them the more advanced classes require that students have taken certain other skills so that I make sure that they're up to speed on core principles and so on the last class initially I debated whether to put a prerequisite on and I decided not to and I made it two days so that I could talk to as many people that were considering using the electronic collar as possible it's a very popular tool now and it can be misused and so if I made the class long and hard to get into then I wouldn't get to speak to as many people and I wanted to just at least have an influence on getting them to think the right way about the electronic collar I've now extended it to four days this year it was now four days because there was too much stuff that I had to bring them up to speed on in terms of the prerequisites in my mind for using the electronic collar, the foundation training that should go in ahead of time. So now we have a four-day electronic collar class. We have a rally class that is also taught by Erica, an introduction to rally principles as well. It's a week-long class. And now we have three protection classes. So we have my protection theory class. Each of the protection classes is a week-long. My protection theory class, which is a survey of all the various protection disciplines, the sports and practical protection work, and kind of what goes on behind the scenes in the dog's mind, the developmental stages, what we do at each stage of development, what kinds of things you're looking for, and how you read dogs and approach the training aspects of it. The second protection class, protection two, is a class on decoy basics. So people that are learning to work dogs, learn to catch dogs safely with sleeves and suits, and we go from the ground up and give people an opportunity to learn to work dogs safely. And then we have a third one that talks about teaching the exercises to protection sports. So primarily IPO, IGP now, IGP and the ring sports, French ring and Mondial ring sports, the most common of the protection sports available in the United States. And we break down the exercises and talk about the steps that you would take to teach

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the ASA. So people have a little bit of a skeleton of what to work on. And so that's our kind of core classes. We have a dock diving pool here. So we do extracurriculars on teaching people about dock diving or teaching good training principles around the pool and things as well. But that's the bulk of what we've got going right now. So the thing that surprises me that coming out here for this five-day class is people always ask me about the videos that we produce and the DVDs that we produce. And yeah, it's all good stuff. But what reminds me of how difficult all this work is, it doesn't matter whether it's puppy work or whatever it is, you explain it so well. But there's a lot of people here this week that have never been dog trainers before. So you explain it perfectly. They could watch a DVD where you explain it perfectly and they get up and they can't do it. They can't do it. But I will say this to the people that are watching this. I've been going to dog training seminars for over 50 years. And I've never met anybody that gives a seminar that is so polite and so patient to students. It amazes me. So the moral of the story is the DVDs are okay. And what I tell people is when they're trying to make up their mind to come to your school, I say, get the DVDs, watch them 10 or 15 times, then come out here and watch Michael talk about it and get up and let him guide you the right way how to do it. I think there's the foundation. I think for sure. And again, there's certain people that logistically can't get here at various times and getting information to as many people as possible is important. From my perspective, that's how we move dog training along, how we get it to evolve and move forward and get better. And I'm one of those people that wants as much information out there as possible. And so reaching people through the DVDs is great. And there are people that I get students that watch the DVDs and they do fantastic. They did a really, really good job of following that. It connected with them. They had good mechanical skills. My only concern always with the DVDs is what I mentioned before with the online classes is just making sure you're careful about your practice. And so this is, I can't help but talk about this, but tape yourself training. So if you're using the DVDs to guide your training outside, if you're not able to come to classes and you're using the DVDs, then tape yourself training and watch them after every training session. So, and then compare them to the stuff you're seeing because you'll see

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mechanical errors that you're not aware of you're doing. And so getting people not to practice routinely incorrectly is the hardest part about learning from a DVD. And there are people that learned really well that way, but there are a lot of other people that have been practicing for an extended period of time off of that kind of material. And then you get, they get in front of people and you go, Ooh, well, we're doing this a bit wrong. And then they have a habit to change.