E187: 멜리사 브로우(Melissa Breau) - "약간의 배경 이야기..."

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championship title. I think, I want to say we were the seventh, but like of all time, but I'm not positive on that number, I could be off by a few. Either way, it's an amazing achievement. But it definitely sounds that dog sports and dogs were in your blood, and you probably didn't have much choice in getting into that from the sounds of it. Pretty much. So sort of linked into that then, because obviously you mentioned before you got Riley that you'd read Denise's blogs. So what got you started on the R plus journey? And at what point did you get introduced to clicker training? Yeah. Growing up, we didn't really, I mean, we definitely had dogs in the house, but I wouldn't say that there was necessarily a training method that the family followed. We always just kind of had easy dogs growing up. My parents, while they did competitive stuff, when they were in high school, once they grew up and got married, dogs kind of took on more of a family dog role and less of a doing things role. Even though my dad had done quite a bit of competitive, obedient stuff with his standard poodle growing up, and I grew up kind of hearing those stories, we didn't really do any of that with any of the dogs we had in my childhood. So I don't really remember anything specific around training with them. But when I adopted Riley, she came to me from her foster with a prong collar. And even though I'd kind of spent a while following Denise at that point, you know, that's kind of where we started out. I was told if I wanted to have nice lucish walking with her by her foster mother that I should just practice figure eights with her for 15 minutes a night with her and her prong collar, and I would never have a problem. That might have worked. Who knows? I wasn't very good about doing it. So as I mentioned, I'd read Denise's blog at that point. I'd found a local training class that I enrolled in. And kind of between those two things, pretty quickly, I was pretty deep in the positive training community. So my local trainer definitely was a positive trainer. And we worked a ton with her. And eventually, I actually started teaching for her. So that got me using other methods pretty quickly. And I, through Denise, found FDSA, and was taking bronze classes and reading kind of everything I could get my hands on. I'm one of those people who likes to research things quite in depth before doing them. So I did quite a bit of reading and learning as much as I could before applying. And, you know, it kind of took time, but eventually positive training just won me over.

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I agree with you about sort of, I like to read all the things and then go and try this. You found FDSA started taking classes. How did you come to be involved with FDSA in sort of the capacity that you are now? That's a fun story. So it started off with camp. I went to camp. And I went as a volunteer, so that I could go without having to pay for camp. Although as a volunteer, I was still footing the bill for my hotel. At least it got me into camp itself. So I volunteered to work it. And after camp, which was an amazing weekend, I reached out to Denise and she pointed me at Terry. And basically, I just approached them and was like, hey, you know, I would love to be more involved in making this happen in the future. Since I reached out when there was a need, when they had something that they were looking for someone to do, they said, hey, would you be interested in doing this? So they started me out running the scholarship fund. So my very first FDSA job was looking at the FDSA scholarships that come in and approving them. Eventually, I kind of decided that I wanted to do a dog training podcast. And I happened to mention it to Denise. I wanted to run it by her mostly because I knew that I'd want to invite a lot of the FDSA instructors on the show. And so once we kind of got talking about it, she was like, well, why don't we just make it an FDSA podcast instead? It seems like it'll benefit the school. So kind of from there, it's history. I started doing the podcast. I was talking to Denise more often. I was talking to Terry more often. I was just, you know, gradually becoming more involved with stuff going on at the school. So after the podcast launched, we ended up coming up with a webinar program. Then once that had been around for a while, we came up with the workshops. And well, now we're working on all sorts of fun projects behind the scenes. I usually spend roughly 10 hours of work a week for FDSA, including hosting webinars. So that's, you know, sort of my part-time job in addition to running my own business. You get a surprising amount of fun in those 10 hours. I get that a lot. And it's funny because it really is only 10 hours. I time it and everything is time blocked. So it really is about 10 hours a week. But what folks may not actually realize, like I mentioned a couple of the projects in there, right? I went to the podcast and the webinar and the workshop, but I don't know that people realize quite how many ideas Denise tends to have, how many things she tends to have kind of floating around in the back of her head at any given time.

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She never really stops thinking of new ideas like ever. So we've probably got three to four projects in the works behind the scenes at any given time. So she likes to tease stuff, but a lot of the time there's even more going on than folks know about. Yeah, I think definitely you get that impression if you sort of follow Denise's social media and things that are going on. Yeah, I mean, she's got an incredible amount of energy and is just on the go. And yes, lots going through her mind at any one time. So yeah, well done for trying to keep up with her. Yeah, it's definitely an attempt to keep up with her, not necessarily, sometimes more successfully than others. Let's put it that way. And now, yeah, interesting times. So this term, you've got your foundation tribal class, which is something I know nothing about. So talk us through tribal, what is it? And who the class is for? Absolutely. So tribal is a lot of people refer to it as ball herding, right? So it's kind of a combination between something like soccer, and something like billiards. So pool, for those of you that know it better by that name, you start off with, well, the ultimate game is eight balls on the field in the same shape as you would when you're going to play pool. So you've got them in a triangle shape on the field. And the dog brings them to a goal, roughly the size of a soccer goal, one at a time. So depending on what level you're at, that may look slightly different. But that's kind of the basic concept of the game. They're not small, small balls, they're talking big balls here. Exercise type balls. Yes. Yeah, so we use exercise balls. So the same ones that you might use if you were in a gym Pilates class or cardio class, where they have like the balls that you can kind of lay back on and do sit ups on or something like that. Exact same ones. You can get them usually for about five bucks at a discount store somewhere here in the US. So but so the class itself takes you from the absolute beginning through kind of a novice level or pre novice level title in either ATA or NAIT. So it's a little different than most classes because the sport is a little bit newer than a lot of the sports that we teach at FDSA. And it only the class only runs once a year. So what I've done is I release all the lectures the first day of class. And the class is for both people who are brand new to the sport. And for those people who maybe have been introduced to the sport somewhere else, or taken some stuff with me before, and want to kind of jump in and work from where they're

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currently at. So I release all the lectures on day one, they're all currently available if you were to go sign up today. And the gold students start off by sharing a baseline video and we identify where in the lectures they should kind of jump in. For silver students, it's a similar process, you kind of should figure out roughly where you want to start. And if you're a bronze student, you can either choose to work directly from the beginning and go all the way through the lectures from one through to week six. Or you can choose kind of to start with based on what your dog knows. So a lot of dogs have like a basic targeting behavior, right? And that's some week one, that's in our week one lectures. So if your dog has that, you could probably skip that lecture, for example. So it's a little bit different than most of the FDSA classes, but really anybody can take it regardless of your experience with the sport. It's particularly good, I personally think, for dogs who maybe are retired agility dogs, or retired from another sport, especially for physical reasons, it's much lower impact than a lot of your other dog sports out there. There's no jumping, there's no kind of obstacles to worry about. So it can be a little bit easier on the body for those dogs who maybe still are really active and want to do things, but their bodies can't quite handle as much anymore. It can also be a really good sport if you have a dog who is reactive or struggles a little bit being around strange people or strange dogs, both in-person and virtual competition options exist. In-person competitions are kind of rare, you kind of have to find a group in your area in order to do them. But even at in-person competitions, the competition field is usually set up to be reactive dog friendly. So there's no other dogs near the field. It's in the rules that other dogs are not allowed to sit fieldside. And usually the only people who are, there's never anybody inside the ring with you. The judges are always just outside the ring. So so so long as you don't have a dog that is so upset by people that they can't stand somebody standing on the other side of a barrier from them. It's actually a pretty friendly sport for for dogs that have a little bit of reactivity, or fear. Other than that, it's good for dogs who really want to work on stimulus control. It is a sport where that's pretty important. We need some impulse control not to just push any which ball any which way. You kind of need to learn to push the ball when I tell you to push the ball and push which ball I tell you to push. And then it's really great

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for dogs who struggle a little bit with distances. We really build quite a bit of quite a few distance skills into the game. So lots of different things going on there. As we record this just started. So what sort of teams have you got in in at gold at this time? What dogs have you got so that people might like to follow? Let me open up my classroom and then I'll be able to answer that question just a little bit better. I've got a pretty good mix this term, though, between gold students who have some experience and gold students who are brand new. So depending on where you are, there'll be somebody there for you to follow no matter what. We've got one gold student who's been playing the game for about four years, but hasn't really worked on it super recently. So just some rusty skills. And so we're going to work with them. I've got a couple of students who took my tribal workshop a few months ago. I think it was months ago now. I think it was back in August. So they took the tribal workshop. So they've been working independently for the last month or two. And now they're kind of jumping back in. A few of folks are just about ready to test for their NAIT, which is the National Association of Tribal Enthusiasts pre-novice title. So some folks will probably do that during this class, so long as I can encourage them to do that, because I think they're just about ready. And then we've got some folks who, again, who are total newbies who have never seen a ball before and are starting right at lecture one. You know, maybe they have a targeting behavior, but that's kind of it. So full range at Gold this time. And is that a mixture of breeds as well? Or do you tend to see particular breeds that excel at it? That's a funny question. So we do have quite a mix of breeds in class. We have some labs. We have some herding dogs. We have a Bernadoodle at Gold. You do tend to see herding people more interested in tribal. I think that's more because their dogs have herding instincts and they're looking for an output kind of for that energy, right? A source that they, some way that they can use it doesn't involve having to own sheep. But I've definitely seen dogs who are not herding dogs to be super successful at the sport. So the trainer I trained under actually had a Jack Russell Terrier who played the sport, and it was absolutely adorable to watch him play because he preferred to play with the big balls. Small dogs actually can play with smaller balls. But he preferred the big ones and he would actually leap straight up in the air to see over them to

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see her. And that was pretty cute. That said, I will say, and I posted a video about this actually in, we have an FDS instructors group and we were chatting about this the other day. For some reason, Belgian turves seem to just pick up the sport ridiculously quickly. Even compared to other herding dogs or whatever, they just seem to have, be particularly skilled at the sport. So I've had a few of them come through the class now and each time they just, it seems to really appeal to their particular herding instincts, whatever the difference is there, because I am not a super herding doggy person, that their instincts seem to work real well for the game. But everybody can play, you know, it's not limited to herding dogs. And you mentioned in there that it sort of builds up on distance, but sort of at the starting stages, does it need a lot of space for it? Because obviously in half of the world, we're heading into winter, half of the world are heading into summer. So some have got more access to outside and larger spaces than others. So does it need a lot of space? Good question. It doesn't for the early stages. Eventually you do. So a full-size field is, I think it's 40 feet by 55 feet is a normal standard size field for most of the organizations. Don't quote me on that. I'm going from memory and I do not have a great memory for numbers, but it's, you know, it's a larger field for an actual competition field. But for the initial steps, like the first couple of weeks, you could totally do those in your living room. I did almost all the lectures, I think up through week three in my house. So inside, I don't have like a large training room or anything. I just did them in my living room around my couch. So a lot of the foundation skills can be built up in a relatively small space. If you have a small dog, you can use an even smaller space. If you have a big dog, you need enough room at least for your dog to move around a little bit. But you want you, the dog and the ball doll, at least fit in the space. But kind of beyond that, you know, you don't need a ton of extra room until you get a little bit further into the game. Cool. And so registration, once this goes out, will still be open. So people have got until the 15th of October to sign up at the usual FensiDogSportsAcademy.com. So hopefully a few more people will have their interest sparked and something new to try with their dogs. So great. Yeah, I'd love to see them. Um, so moving on a little bit from the tribal, because your other classes relate to building

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website and marketing. Do you just want to tell us a little bit more about those for next time they come around? Yeah, absolutely. The marketing and website class will probably happen in spring of next year. I haven't decided exactly when they're going to run yet, but they don't, they'll happen sometime in early 2021. Um, the website class is kind of what it sounds like. These are the two things I actually spend the majority of my life working on. So I've been in marketing for over 10 years now, uh, going on 15 years, I think, which is a little scary to think about. Um, uh, but yeah, so, uh, that's where I spend most of my life on these days. So I've been in marketing for a long time and, um, I mostly build websites for dog trainers. That is what I do with 90% of my time. So I'm not working on FDSA stuff. That's, that's usually where you'll find me. Uh, and during the website class, we build a website from the ground up. So I take you through literally every step of the process from buying your domain name, uh, setting up your hosting account, uh, actually building the website. And by the end of six weeks, if you keep up with the lectures, you should have a finished website ready to launch. Um, so it's a super fantastic deal. Uh, it's a incredibly high value class for those who need a website. You get something that you can continue to update heading into the future. You get a website that, uh, is super flexible in terms of making it look the way you want it to look. Um, and the lectures are incredibly detailed. I have to redo probably 75% of the lectures each time the class runs because the technology updates and I include screenshots of literally every button you need to click and videos of, um, of me actually walking through each step of the process too, so that there's both video and written instructions for whichever way you prefer to learn. The marketing class by contrast, um, is, uh, a little higher level. So while the website class is super, uh, step-by-step marketing is a little more art and a little bit less science, but there's actually still more science behind it than most people seem to realize. Um, marketing, at least in my, from my perspective is getting people who have never heard of you before to buy the stuff that you sell. So how do you take somebody who doesn't even know that you exist on this planet and get them to the point where they're ready to hand you their money? Uh, as you can imagine that that is kind of a complicated process, but I think a lot of people tend to set up a business or build a website and just kind of expect stuff to happen. And it's a

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little more complicated than that. Really, uh, it's not a build it and they will come scenario. Uh, a website will not do any good if nobody comes to the website. So you have to think about how you're going to get people there, how you're going to, um, reach out to find people who don't know that you exist, how you can make those connections and do it at scale, right? Not just on a one-to-one, because eventually you are going to run out of all of the people that your mother knows and your father knows and your immediate close personal friends know that they can recommend to you. And while recommendations are amazing and there can be a fantastic source of business, most businesses can't survive on recommendations alone. So that's really what we look at in the marketing class. We go through, uh, what the pieces are there, what some of the common mistakes folks make are, uh, how to know what's working, what's not working. If you're trying things like Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and really look at those things and be like, okay, am I spending time doing things that aren't even helping me or am I spending time in a way that's actually effective? Uh, and then by the end of class, folks have a pretty solid understanding of how marketing works and a marketing plan to help them actually bring in business. And so, um, people can just keep an eye on the FDSA website to see when that, those, those come back through on the schedule, I assume. Yeah. Yeah. Or they can, uh, if you go to my website, I have an email list and I usually do a semi-decent job of reminding folks somewhere around the time that class starts, uh, that those are hopping back on the schedule if, if you're interested. So if you are worried that you'll miss them when they come up on the FDSA site, you can certainly go to my website and, uh, sign up for my email list and I'll let you know when they're up. And as a reminder, that's www.clickandrepeat.com. Thank you, Sarah. You're welcome. Um, so finally then the way you end every episode with a new guest, what's the dog related accomplishment that you're proudest of? So I'm going to do what most of my guests do and cheat. I'm going to share two. Uh, the first one is definitely earning our championship title and tri-ball me and Rye. Um, you know, you, you, this question has come up before on the alumni list where folks ask, how do you explain to somebody who doesn't do dog sports, why you want to do dog sports? Right. And I posted a comment, uh, when that came up along the lines of, you know, there's not really a way

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to explain to somebody the way that it feels when you and your dog are truly working together as a team and accomplishing this thing, right. That you've trained and worked so hard for. Um, and you're just totally in sync and it's like, you're like talking to each other directly. Um, that's what it felt like to run Riley and tri-ball. And, uh, it was just this incredible feeling. We'd step on the field and we trained all our behaviors to this fluency where, you know, she knew what I was asking her to do. Um, because of the way that we communicated, not necessarily because it was a communication that somebody else would be able to watch and say, Hey, that's what you're doing there. Right. It was part intuition and part, we just worked together to the point where things were just incredibly, incredibly fluent and it felt so good to compete with her. And we were both so excited to step on the field and have fun and play our game. Um, and that championship run was just kind of the, the, the, the perfect coming together of all of that. Um, where, where I could just send her out and direct her where I needed her to be. And at that point, um, so a lot of the time in tri-ball, you'll see handlers teach their dogs to go out to a ball, sit behind it and wait. And with Rye, I could do, it's kind of the equivalent of a running contact and agility, right. Where, um, I could send her out and I could ask her to push based on where she was and she would understand, um, which ball I was referring to just because we had practiced so much that I both knew which ball she would go to based on where she was in motion. And she knew which ball I wanted her to go to based on where she was in motion. So it was just a really cool feeling of teamwork. So that's my first one. Um, my second one's with my current little guy. We are really finally learning how to work as a team. It's taken us a really long time. Uh, he, as I mentioned at the beginning is three and a half now. And partly it's that he's maturing. Finally, uh, he is growing a brain. He is an intact boy and he is very aware that he is an intact boy. The world is a very exciting place for him. Uh, and partly it's that I'm learning how to train him in a way that works for him. Uh, learning how to really train the dog that I've got in front of me instead of necessarily just kind of following the formula or just kind of looking at how other people have trained similar things and figuring out how to communicate with him on his level in a way that he understands. And I'm not perfect yet. We've still got a long way to go. We've got a lot of growing to do,

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but we're getting there. And, uh, it's really cool still when, when we have those moments where we have tiny glimmers of excellence and brilliance. Uh, and, uh, and so, so that feels really good. And so I'm, I'm pretty proud that I've stuck with it and we've stuck with it and that we're starting to come together as a team. I can totally relate to the caucus plan you're taking a while to mature. And, um, yeah, yeah. Apparently they've been up when you're about 14. Um, right. It's a good thing they live a long time. Yeah. Um, so the next two with, with the number of people that you've, you've interviewed and workshops you've watched and webinars that you've been part of, you've, you've obviously had a lot of exposure to lots of these. Um, so what's the best piece of training advice that you've heard? Wow. Now you've really built that up for me. Uh, um, so I actually had to go back and look through some old transcripts to find the one that I podcast transcripts, uh, to find the one that I really wanted to reference, um, which was something that Sue Alsby said, uh, the very first time I interviewed her, we were talking about training and about the way that training works. And she said, if you don't have focus, uh, you need to stop working on something else and go back and get focus. It's this idea that, um, she, she had this, this awesome analogy about you don't leave the house without putting on your clothes. You can't train a dog until your dog is focused. Uh, and you know, it's an idea that we see a lot and a lot of the materials at FDSA. Deb really talks about it. Deb Jones has talked about it in her focus classes, uh, this idea that if you don't have the dog, you can't really train anything. Um, Denise kind of talks about it a little bit in terms of engagement, right? That's kind of the core idea there. You need the dog opted in before you can really get anywhere. Uh, but just something in the way that Sue phrased it and Sue's analogy kind of struck home for me. So this idea that, you know, focus is really like getting dressed in the morning. You really, truly can't do anything until your dog is tuned in. And it's been a serious lesson I've had to learn with Levi. We spent, you know, the last year or more learning how to focus, how to get that piece of the puzzle. Uh, now that while we're not there in all environments, we've got it in some environments and in the places where we train, you know, the rest is now coming so much more easily. Yeah. I like that analogy of you, you can't leave the house without putting your clothes

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on where you can, but you probably shouldn't. Um, yeah. Right. And then, um, finally, who's someone else in the dog world that you look up to? So this question's almost not fair for the same reason that you kind of, uh, were alluding to at the last one, right? I, I, I have so much exposure to so many awesome, amazing folks at FDSA. Uh, of course there are the obvious folks, Denise and shade and Deb and, you know, so many of the trainers are doing truly leading edge training and learning new things. And I'm blessed to be in a position where I can talk to a lot of them one-on-one and ask them questions sometimes and, you know, be involved in some of those conversations that they have with each other. So, uh, I had to think kind of hard about who I wanted to talk about here. And while, uh, you know, they're all amazing and I, I adore all of them. Um, I thought I would share somebody who maybe, uh, I don't think other people have quite realized, uh, is quite as brilliant as I happen to think she is. So that's Sarah Bruschi. Uh, I've read literally every single time I watch her train. Um, I find myself thinking, I want to train like that someday. Like that's just, uh, she, she's a clean trainer and she's an excellent trainer and her training is just phenomenal to watch. So she's super generous. She tends to share lots of her videos on her Facebook page. If folks want to go stalk her, uh, she's going to be, um, hopefully not hate me that I just sent a bunch of people to her Facebook page, but, uh, I, she's my pick. So she's, she's somebody that, that when I watch, I go, yeah, I would like to train like that. I absolutely agree about the super clean. She's one of the cleanest trainers and, and as you say, shares so much on her Facebook page and, um, yeah, a lot to be got from watching the stuff that she puts out there. It's a good pick. Thank you. Um, well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Melissa. And thanks to our listeners for tuning in. Thank you, Sarah. You're welcome. Melissa will be back next week, uh, hosting again. And if you haven't already subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice, have the next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Today's show is brought to you by the Fensie Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fensie 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.