E136: 메간 포스터(Megan Foster) - "훈련 중 실수 다루기"

It's a fun group of pups. I know I kind of mentioned that you've been doing this stuff for a long time. So how did you originally kind of get into this dog thing? Yeah. Well, so there were animals around all of the time. And my family, we took the dog to obedience class. And that was kind of when agility was just starting to become a thing in the US. And so then going to obedience classes, we found out about agility. And pretty soon, my parents were really excited about it and really big into it. And one of our horse pastures became an agility field, and we built all the equipment. And just like that, agility was my thing. Starting out in obedience and hopping over to agility, were you always a positive trainer? I sort of think so because, I mean, doesn't a five-year-old or a six-year-old walking around with a pinch collar and using aversives just sound ridiculous? A little bit. Right? And I had my first dog was a Sheltie. So I don't even really remember ever being taught to use aversives specifically. But I have to assume that's because it would never work. Right? So I do remember that pinch collars and corrections were still a thing. But I also remember that using food and using positive reinforcement was also a thing. So in my head, yes, I've always been a positive trainer, just from the sense that I was just out there running around with my dog. To dig into that just a little bit more, how would you kind of describe your approach to training today? I'm assuming it's evolved a little bit since then. Absolutely. Yeah. As much as I can, I try to still be that kid just out there playing with her dogs. But obviously, I have a ton more knowledge and experience today. And so I mostly focus on breaking skills down into the most manageable pieces for both the human learner and the canine learner. And I focus on each individual team and their big picture. So even if I have done it one way with every single dog for the last year, some new dog comes up into one of my classes and they're telling me they need something different, I'm pretty quick to go find something different for them. Kind of making things unique for the dog and the handler. If I have to. Yeah, for sure. So I think a lot of people kind of approach sports and they only look at the skills, right? The healing, the fronts, the sits and downs for obedience or, you know, weave poles, jumps, tunnels, contact equipment when they're talking about agility. What, in your opinion, obviously, do you think that people need to kind of teach their dogs beyond that?

Like beyond just how to use the equipment if they actually want to be successful in agility? Yeah, I always tell my students that agility is the easy part. Teaching dogs obstacles, they love that stuff. That's usually like the most simple part of creating an agility dog. So they need to be comfortable with long periods of downtime. I mean, a competition is 30 seconds to a minute of running and then hours maybe in between runs. And so they need to be okay. They need to be able to rest in a crate. They need to be able to deal with big crowds, loud noises, busy environments. And they also need to be able to move kind of back and forth between obstacle focus and handler focus. And that's specifically on an agility course. But all those other things outside the ring matter too. Mm-hmm. What about, you know, kind of flip that a little bit, the handlers themselves? Are there things that people don't think about that they need to learn if they want to, you know, be successful in the sport? Well, I find that a lot of people, they may not know that their agility dogs need all those other skills. Fair enough. Right? So that's usually step one. But I think the biggest piece of agility training for handlers that's missing is mindset training. And that if you're entering a competition, you not only need to be focusing on your technical skills, but you need to be focusing on your mental skills as well. Can you just talk a little more about that? I'm kind of curious what you mean by that. Yeah. Yeah. By mindset skills, being able to get in the zone and be ready and kind of leave all your work problems and your home problems and all the other stuff that makes you you outside of the agility ring. You need to be able to put it on hold for those few minutes when you're inside of the ring. And not to be soft and fluffy on yourself, but being able to focus on what went well instead of everything that went wrong. And I think that's really hard for us, especially dog trainers. We tend to be perfectionists and we want to get it right. And so we tend to focus a lot on what was going wrong. And if we just flip that skill around to focusing on the positive, I think we'd get better results faster. And also, we want our dogs to be 100% focused when we ask them to compete. I also want the handler to be 100% focused when I ask them to compete. And that's where those mindset skills for the human come in handy a lot. It's kind of interesting because I think a lot of people kind of overlook that piece of it, right?

And then they're there and they're nervous and that communicates to their dog and there's all those other pieces. Absolutely. And in all of these feelings that, okay, we work on our dog being able to ignore distractions, ignore people watching them, ignore loud noises. But then when we really get down to it, do we even have those skills? Can we ignore that there's a judge out there judging us, literally judging us, right? People watching, maybe they are talking about us and we don't know what they're saying. And usually it's almost always good stuff, but just those things that the humans aren't taught to ignore those distractions. And I think those are big things to focus on. So I want to talk a little bit about errors in training because I know you have a workshop coming up on that specifically on handling errors in agility. And I think these two pieces kind of tie together, right? But before we dive into that too much, can you just give us kind of a basic definition? What do you consider an error when we're talking about agility? I consider an error to be an unexpected response to a cue the handler thought they gave. Okay. There's a lot of pieces in there to pull apart, huh? Yes, there are. So an unexpected response to a cue the handler thought they gave. Correct. Okay. So what are some of the things that can cause that? Well, so this is the hardest part of agility is that there's handler skills, the handlers guiding the dog around the course. And then there's all these obstacle skills that we've hopefully taught our dogs to complete independently of our handling cues. But then teaching the dog when the handler is relevant and when the handler isn't relevant sometimes muddies up everything. So that's usually where errors kind of occur is because if the handler gives a mistimed cue, so the dog was kind of in the obstacle focus where he thought he wasn't supposed to be paying attention to the handler. But then the handler expected him to be paying attention and error occurs, right? So the dog thought one thing, handler thought another thing, and we end up with this mistake. And sometimes the handler thinks they're giving the correct cue, the cue that the dog needs next, and it's just the wrong cue altogether. I'm guessing you mean more than simply literally saying the wrong word, although I'm sure that happens too. Right, right. Because we don't have just physical cues, we have verbal cues, right? So I think the physical cues are kind of broken into seven pieces. So the first one is movement. The second one is position of the handler. The third is where the handler is looking.

The fourth is where the handler's chest is pointing. Fifth is where the handler's feet are pointing. Then the handler's arms. And then the handler's verbal cues. So you've got all of those things working at the same time. And you have this dog that is incredibly observant of all of those things. And maybe, you know, the handler has four of those things cueing one thing, but then three of those things cueing another. Right? And we don't even know it. Because they're so observant of our tiny little movements. That something unexpected happens. And that's why I keep going back to that definition of an unexpected response. And when you said to the cue we thought you gave, that's also kind of what you're talking about there too, right? That idea of like, there are all these pieces. And if part of it's giving one cue and part of it's giving another cue, well, then it's not what you meant. Right. Exactly. And no dog is answering wrong on purpose, right? So they gave you a response that they thought was 100% correct in that moment based on what information they were able to take in at the moment they were able to take it in. Right? So that's where the timing comes in. Because if the dog is over – if the dog is like still in a tunnel, they can't see you, and your cue is a little bit too early, then they're doing the best with the information that they got. So how do we kind of take that idea and condense it with this idea that, you know, we often hear set the dog up for success. A lot of the times like the person is learning alongside the dog, you're talking about, okay, the person needs to learn all these different handler motions and cues and how to correctly, you know, manage timing. And can you just kind of just get into that a little bit? Just like how do we kind of balance those two things about making sure we're not setting our dogs up to deal with lots of frustration and failure and whatever else and also kind of learn ourselves? Yeah, it's actually my least favorite part of agility is that the human have to learn at the same time. And I wish I had just a house full of school dogs for students to learn on because it would be – I think it would be so much nicer for the dogs in the long run and the students. Right? Because then everyone can just focus on one thing. But since that's not going to happen, I'm not going to have a house full of school dogs. You're not? No, I'm kind of at my maximum capacity and I want to squeeze in one more. But I do try to encourage students to separate skills as best they can. And I go into a lot of how to set up a training structure in the workshop.

But basically, if something is new to either the handler or the dog, I don't combine two things together. So I don't work on a new handling skill and a new obstacle skill in the same session. Or even not new but not really well known. And I try to break things down into as small of pieces as I can so that we're either focusing on the dog's behavior or the handler's behavior. And not combining those things until much later. So I know you mentioned that perfectionist thing earlier. So I'm curious because I'm sure people are going to wonder this. So when you say a session, do you mean like, okay, we're working on this particular exercise right now. And then maybe we take a short break and 10 minutes later, we're working on something else. Or are you talking about like period for one day like you focus on obstacle skills and a different day you kind of focus on handling stuff? Maybe. Maybe. I mean, for me, a session is, you know, whatever 10 minute or 10 cookie period I'm doing. So I might work on like a handling skill for me and an obstacle skill for my dog in the same day. Just not at the same time. Usually. Or if I want to work on, say, my dog walk at speed, I'm going to try to set up the sequence that the dog walk has in it. I want to make that sequence easy for me. So not taxing on my handling skills. Because I see this happen all the time that the student really wants to work on one skill. But then the course that they're using is just way too difficult for focusing on the dog walk. And then some other mistake happens before you ever get to the dog walk. So then what do you do? Do you swap gears and focus on the mistake that just happened a few obstacles before? Do you ignore it and just keep going and working on your dog walk? And I think that's where the waters get muddy in this how to deal with the mistakes. This is, I think, how the workshop kind of came up. Yeah. I'm going to guess, you know, how you actually handle a mistake in the moment probably is different depending on whether you're just training or whether you're actually competing, right? Absolutely. So can you maybe just talk us through an example of how you'd handle it, you know, during training if something goes wrong? Like, what does that look like for you? Um, usually if something goes wrong the first time, hopefully no one's heads explode, but I usually just reward it anyways. Fair enough. I mean, I usually just don't deal with it the first time. Um, just because going back to that of whose mistake was it. And in that moment, I can't be sure. Like, was it, was it my mistake? Was it the dog's mistake? Did something go in?

So at least the first time I'm just going to reward it and maybe think about it on the way back. Because I really feel like on the second attempt, if the dog knows the answer, he'll get it right that second time. And so usually that first mistake, I draw it up to one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Catherine McAleese. And she says, you are a human and your dog is not a machine. So one mistake for me is nothing. To kind of flip that, like when we're talking about competition, obviously if something goes wrong on course, it's a little bit different than handling it during training. And we were talking earlier about mindset and kind of that piece, you know, I think it's really easy for people to feel super self-critical, especially when we're talking about competition mistakes. Do you have any tips for kind of talking yourself off the ledge or, you know, ways that people can kind of accept what you're just talking about, the fact that we're kind of only human? Yeah. So back to those mindset skills, this is absolutely part of it. And that as far as handling mistakes and competition, the mindset skill to that is that your job is to keep the flow going for the dog. Because that's how dogs tend to get ring-wise is when our lack of mindset skills and our emotions kind of creep in and they can sort of, they can make a negative impact on how our dog feels about competition. So at least in that very moment, you try to keep going. And that's a lot about what the workshop is about is giving the handler the technical skill to be able to keep going. Because that's usually the thing that's missing between training and competition. Because in training, most of the time, if we make a mistake, we can stop, we can reward the dog, we can talk to our instructor, or we can, you know, pause the video and go back and rewatch something or reread our lecture notes. But in a competition, none of that exists. And so usually what gets replaced with all that help that we're able to get in training is this void of information, right? The handler's kind of melting down because they don't know what to do. And then the dog's melting down because no one's telling them what to do. And it becomes a little bit of a mess. So the technical skills, we try to teach to replace all those yucky feelings to handle errors in competition. Technical skills. Can you break that down for us just a little bit? But can I explain a little more what you're covering the workshop? Yeah. So let's say my dog runs by an obstacle. In that moment, I've got options. I can just keep going as if it never happened.

I can call the dog back and ask them to do it again. I can ask the dog to do some other behavior, like a sit, just to kind of regain control over the situation in case they're going wild. Or I can just, depending on maybe this isn't the first mistake, I can just call it quits and call the dog to me and leave. But each of those individual things needs to be trained. And not be a surprise for the dog. What I find is that the dogs don't see these things from the human until they get to a competition. So in the workshop, we're going to cover training each of those options. So that you actually have options when something goes wrong in a competition. And to practice those options so that the first time your dog sees some behavior from you should not be at a competition. Right. Because you were talking earlier about dogs becoming ring-wise and stuff. And I'm assuming that's how that happens is because they get new stuff thrown at them. Absolutely. There are a handful of dogs. And I mean, I feel like my dog Smack is one of these. That he just learned as he went and he was pretty okay with it. It wasn't that we didn't have problems. But he was pretty resilient to kind of going with the flow and learning with me. And then now, 10 years later, I have Shrek, who is none of those things. So this is where I'm at now. If I do something he has never seen before, he looks like I have seven heads. And that I have just broken some contract and I must be punished or something. Right. Right. Like, and I don't really mean it that way. But yeah, he looks at me like I have seven heads if I do something that he's not seen before. So I feel like everyone's kind of dealing with one of these types of dogs. A dog that is like, yeah, all right. Well, I've never seen that before, but she's pretty okay. And I really like agility, so I'll deal with it. And then the other side of that, the other extreme is I'm actually here because there's reinforcement available. So don't show me things that I don't understand. Right. And really, it's not fair for either dog to kind of have things that they don't understand thrown at them in that environment. But some dogs just handle it better. Exactly. Some dogs just handle it better. But now I'm to the point where I know better, so I'm going to do better and prepare all of the dogs regardless of their personality. But even on the flip side of that is that I've given the handlers these tools so that I can replace their negative reactions to mistakes.

That feels like a big deal because you're talking earlier about just, you know, you're talking about, okay, what do you do when an error happens? And if you don't even know what options are on the table, like how are you going to actually make a choice in the moment when your dog's moving fast? Yeah. It's the same thing. I don't want the handler to be out there prepared with a situation they've never seen either. Are you going to get into in the workshop a little bit like when you choose each option? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Because a lot of that depends on, you know, my experience level with the dog or even the rules of the game. Because in different levels, you can sometimes still be okay with a certain amount of faults. So it might be that, yeah, if my dog just runs around one jump and novice and I know how to fix it without having the wheels fall off later, I could potentially save that run and still qualify. And I know that's like a big part of everyone's goals for the weekend potentially. But also from an even bigger competitive stance in USDAA, you have these team events. So it's not just my score standing alone. Two other people are kind of in this with me. So if I don't have a plan for fixing things and getting a score for my team, that can kind of feel bad and potentially cause drama. But hopefully not because you're not teaming with those people. Right. At least hopefully not. Yeah. Right. But I just think that you should be able to finish a run without the dog leaving or sniffing or barking or biting just because someone miscued something. Right. Or someone didn't understand something. And so practicing those things and teaching your dog those things and learning them yourself kind of helps set you up for not wasting quite so much money. Totally. At the trial. Absolutely. And like I said, replacing the handler's negative reactions. So the handlers that kind of sigh and drop their shoulders when something unexpected happens or they turn their backs to the dog or something. So those little problems that are causing big feelings from both ends of the leash, I find that these skills that we're covering in the workshop have replaced all of those feelings completely. That's awesome. That's awesome. All right. So we're getting close to the end here. And I want to kind of go through some of the questions that I usually ask folks the first time they're on, every time they're on. So the first one here is what dog-related accomplishment are you proudest of? Oh, gosh. This was hard for me to think of. But I still feel that my relationship with my second dog, Ty, he was a Sheltie.

And I got him when he was three years old. And he already had some agility training. And he was not what you would call a happy agility dog. He did not have a very good response when things went wrong. And I was nine or 10 at the time. But within two years, he was competing at the USDA nationals and placing in the national finals. So I still hang on to that memory pretty dearly and why I constantly remind myself to just be that little girl playing with her dog. To bring the fun back into it. Exactly. It's like it'll be fine. Everything will be fine. So the next one, what's the best piece of training advice that you've ever heard? Yeah. This one was fairly recent, but I love it. And it's don't quit when you get it right. Quit when you can't get it wrong. Oh, I like that. Yeah. And it's not to mean go out there and like drill yourself to death or drill your dog to death. But it kind of talks about fluency and fluency isn't getting it right one time. Fluency is getting it right over and over and over and over and over again under all sorts of circumstances. Which I think a lot of people kind of overlook the importance of that piece, right? Totally. So I want to kind of push my boundaries all the time. Well, can I do it in this situation? Can I do it in this situation and kind of push the boundaries of my fluency and my dog's fluency on any type of skill? Last one here. Who is somebody else in the dog world that you look up to? I couldn't answer this one. It was so hard. But honestly, I am so lucky to be in the area of the country that I'm in. I have so many amazing people near me that I can train with on a pretty regular basis. And my students are amazing. And I have all of these influencers throughout the world that I just live in this bubble of inspiration that I couldn't choose anyone. But I am very lucky and very thankful for all of the people around me in this sport of agility and dog training. And you're in the Pacific Northwest, right? That's right. So I know I've got... There's a good bubble up there. Yeah, it's so nice up here. And even if they're not local, I know that the people that I need on my side are just a phone call away. And that is so amazing. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Megan. Thanks for having me, Melissa. This was great. Absolutely. And thank you to our listeners for tuning in. We will be back next week with Kat Warren, author of What the Dog Knows, to talk about her upcoming Young Readers edition.

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 Line. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training. Today's show is brought to you by pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense pense