The Very First Questions a Dog Trainer Should Ask

• What do you want your life with your dog to look like, and why?
• What things make you and your dog most enjoy your life together?
• What do you do with your dog that you don’t really like that much but feel pressured to do?

These questions all point to the most important thing to consider throughout the entire course of your relationship with your dog: whether or not you, as individuals, are enjoying your life together.

It’s so easy for me to see what other people are doing and unconsciously start feeling like I need to do the same. It’s the classic FOMO or “keeping up with the Joneses” feeling. A powerful,  motivating feeling… but one that almost always feels overwhelmingly negative and cuts at the foundation of self-esteem.

I have to remind myself of what I actually enjoy and want for my life instead of feeling like I have to compare the coolness of the things I do to the things other people enjoy. Me staying at home reading or writing can be just as great as someone’s trip to Italy! (Well, not with most books or most of the things I write, but still… most trips aren’t to Italy, either 😉)

Losing sight of priorities

It seems like casual owners, owners passionate about training, and professional dog trainers alike all fall into this trap. They lose sight of their main goals and forget to think about the answers to the questions I first asked.

The social media comparison game

The most obvious example is when we compare ourselves to other dog-owner teams on social media.

I bet most everyone with a dog has seen some other dog doing something cool, asked themselves how awesome it would be if their dog could do that too, and then a few days of trying to teach it later realize that they don’t actually give a crap if their dog can do summersaults or not.

We also forget that the person whose dog can do summersaults likely gets much less enjoyment out of it than we think. Plus they’re probably already thinking about the next thing, like if their dog can learn to hula-hoop or be calm at a public patio.

It’s exciting and rewarding to always be progressing with your dog and learning new things together. But that mindset also makes it really hard to just sit back and enjoy your life with your dog for what it is.

“Fido, cut that out!”

For the casual dog owner, I see this most when they’re around other people they know and their dog “misbehaves”. You know, the things your dog does when no one else is around and you don’t care one bit, but when you’re around family, friends, or even strangers in public, you suddenly get really embarrassed about it. Out of nowhere, you care about changing the behavior (surely with great and not-at-all confusing results as you tell your dog off, completely flustered 🙄)

To be fair, sometimes we don’t realize that we’ve let something slip or that we actually do want different behaviour from our dog around a stimulus until we get embarrassed about it around other people.

But it seems to me that most of the time, we don’t actually care. 

It’s easier said than done to say that you might as well skip the embarrassment and just own that you aren’t bothered by the behavior, especially around someone you know with a “more well behaved” dog. But it’s also super obvious to the other person that you only care when they’re around, so it’s not like you’re fooling anyone.

Different perspectives on a “good dog”

Some of the worst offenders of losing focus on what they really care about for themselves and their dog are serious dog owner-trainers and trainers themselves.

I’m sure (that is, I really really hope) these are the very first questions a dog trainer asks a new client — but I’m also pretty sure they are the first to leave their minds.

It’s so easy for a trainer to see how much potential your dog has and to start projecting their training goals onto you. The trainer is probably used to having much higher “standards” for their own dog’s behaviour than you might have.

You might be thrilled with your progress — with reaching “good enough” — while they might envision near perfection.

The trainer also probably views the effort-reward tradeoff much differently.

For them, they’re really excited to put in a lot of time and effort with a dog. The process itself is fun and rewarding. There’s a reason it’s their job. They enjoy spending time on it!

But when it comes to you, the dog owner, things might be very different.

Part of the reason you are bringing your dog to a trainer might be precisely because it’s not your favorite way to spend your time, like it is for them. There might be a reason your job title isn’t dog trainer. I think for a lot of us, the fun comes in waves, but rarely for hours a day.

And that’s okay.

It’s your life, so grasp it tightly

No one is objectively right about how well trained a dog ought to be, or precisely what defines a good dog.

A lot of people might act like it, or say things about how you don’t have a well-trained dog unless it can do x, y, or z. But guess what? They’re totally full of it. (And probably full of insecurity about their own dog as well.)

Fundamentally, it is all subjectively up to us — the dog owners — to decide what we want to work on and how much effort we want to put in. Outside of breaking laws or being totally disruptive, there are no requirements or rules.

If you and the trainer can’t see eye to eye on this, you’re not the one who is wrong just because they know more about dogs.

Making decisions with limited information

It’s tricky as the dog owner, especially one newer to the world of training, because you don’t have the experience or whole-picture understanding yet to make the best decisions for you and your dog. We are always learning and re-evaluating on the fly.

Don’t get me wrong: This is often productive and useful. We should re-evaluate as we inevitably learn more and get new perspectives through new types of training!

But it’s also a dangerous game that will never leave you satisfied if you fail to transition out of the mindset at the right time down the road.

Keep evaluating, updating, and asking questions

I need to be able to trust my old decision making ability as well as update with new information.

Often, the more into and attached to something I become, the less objective I can be with my value judgments. In that spirit, the more we learn about dog training — and the more of our identity we put into it — the harder it is for us to have clarity about it.

We have a tendency to prefer activities we are already good at as well as the ones we do frequently. I know plenty of people whose hobbies have run away on them and at some point in their life they have to check themselves and realize that they never meant to sink so much time into shooting pool or playing video games.

But maybe you are putting exactly the amount of time into dogs that you wan’t, and that is fantastic.

As long as you know why you’re doing what you’re doing and like the reason, then I’ll be the first one behind you, encouraging you to go all in.