good habits. Better dogs
Each January 1st I feel exactly the same. Sure, there are things I’d like to add to my list of goals or resolutions, but no matter what the date on the calendar it is always me who has to take the action to accomplish them, and therein lay the problem. The goals were too big and too outside of my current life for me to make a meaningful swing at them.
It is the discomfort of change that can keep us from the things we want, even if that change is for the better. Unfortunately, it is often only when a current situation becomes so uncomfortable that we have no choice but to change that we can take action.
Like many, I’ve spent years reading about habits and psychological hacks to help close the gap between this lazy, comfort-seeking brain and the things I want. Imagine my surprise when similar ideas about motivation kept coming up while studying behavior change in dogs. For better or worse, we are animals too (even if we have a driver's license and a RRSP). We look for comfort and good things, and we do whatever we can to avoid discomfort and scary things. Even to our own detriment.
So what do we do? How can we use this information to steer the ship for us and our pets towards a better future?
For this, I leaned heavily into a phrase spoken often by my teacher at The Academy for Dog Trainers, Jean Donaldson. When building a training plan she has told us many times to start with what the dog can do today. We have no choice but to build on the skills an animal already has. They are physically and mentally incapable of knowing things that they don't know yet. So to go fast in a training session we actually need to slow down, pay attention, and build the skills at their pace. Otherwise, they get bored of our stupid games and opt out completely.
Did that last bit sound familiar? It gives me flashbacks to the last Chloe Ting 2 week shred I tried and made it to day 4 before giving up and never trying again.
It is so appealing to go face and eyes into a new goal with the intention to leave everything about the old ways behind us. But, just like our dogs, if we take this approach we are more likely to become too uncomfortable and frustrated leaving us to return to our old comfortable ways. To help with this part, I turn to best-selling author James Clear. In his book Atomic Habits which has become insanely popular since its publication, James hammers home the importance of small habits completed consistently to get us to the life we envision for ourselves (and our dogs of course).
Some of the absolute gems in this book are the ideas of habit stacking or habit swapping. We can totally leverage these concepts to include the goal we have in mind for our pets. For example, if your personal goal is to lose weight and get your dog to be more calm in the house you could choose something you do every day - like park the car in the driveway - and add a new habit of a 20-minute walk before you go inside. If we add some dogs to this situation it could look like a 20-minute walk around the neighborhood for their bathroom break instead of coming home, parking the car, and simply opening the door so they can use the bathroom in the yard. Heck, make it 10 minutes if you have to.
If we say that you leave the house at least once a day and do the 20-minute walk with your dog when you get home that means that in the course of a week, you will have added 140 minutes of walking. That is about 14,000 steps or approximately 5 kilometers that you and your dog never would have walked before that small change. That means that within a year of replacing opening the door for an after-work pee break with a 20-minute walk you could walk an additional 260 km in a year. Think about how much your and your dog’s health could improve with this small change. This isn't even accounting for the extra enrichment of new neighborhood smells for your pups. Since providing different outlets for enrichment is a huge management tool for excess energy in your house you are also contributing to total enrichment time and thus making your dog easier to handle when you get back inside.
Who knows? You might start to look forward to this part of your day and build it up to 30 minutes…or an hour.
The results we hope for are out there and are closer than we think. The catch is that they require consistent, sustained effort over a long period of time. The way we keep chugging along is having the grace to acknowledge where we and our dogs are, and the humility to start small.
Hope this helped,
Anna
