Join me as I interview Erin Lynes about building confidence in our canine partners — we talk about clear communication, natural levels of confidence (and how much you should expect to be able to move the needle), the "Mr. Rogers" technique, and more!  

 Transcription

Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today I'll be talking to Erin Lynas about building confidence. Hi, Erin, welcome back to the podcast.

Erin Lynes: Hi, Melissa, thanks so much for having me back. Excited to chat about this stuff.

Melissa Breau: So, to start us off, do you just want to remind everybody kind of a little bit about you?

Erin Lynes: Sure. I am the Labrador lady from Canada, so I share my life with a whole pile of Labradors. We love doing all the dog sports, including dog sledding, agility, dock, diving, nose work, all the stuff. And I run a training facility in the summer here called Aramit Air Academy, and I teach for the fancy dog sports academy year round.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. All right, so let's start with the basics. We're here to talk about confidence. Why is confidence important? What advantages are there to having a confident canine partner?

Erin Lynes: Well, I think the best way to think about it is like this. When confidence is up, stress and fear and all those other ugly emotional type things are down. So when a dog is more confident, they, they have more enjoyment in their life, they feel safer, they're probably easier to take places, they have more opportunities, they have a bigger world in general.

So confidence rarely presents itself as something that is negative. We want more of it and we want lots of it, and it's a good thing. How do you evaluate kind of what a dog's natural confidence level is? Can confidence be like, context specific? Are there categories of confidence we should be considering? Yeah, when I'm looking at a dog and trying to decide, like, how confident is this dog?

Erin Lynes: I really watch their body language and what their actions are in that context. And I'll talk about some different context specific stuff in a minute. But I think that it does help to know that confidence can vary depending on the situation. So what we might look for is how forward a dog is if you put them in a new situation. Are they like, cool, I like to explore this.

I'd like to check it out. Are they standing upright and looking around and, you know, loose and wiggly and looking interested? Or are they sort of shrinking into themselves? Are they reluctant to check things out? Do they look to you or another dog or another person for constant reassurance, or do they seem like they're exuding question marks? They don't know what to do. They don't know how they should feel about it.

Those are ways we can sort of look at what our dog is doing and how they are behaving to see how they are feeling in that situation and confidence broadly. We can look at it in four categories. So all about location. So maybe your dog is super confident as long as they're in the kitchen of your own home. But if you go to the training club, suddenly not so confident them, the situation matters, the physical location.

We might consider confidence from the social perspective. So how confident is your dog around other dogs? Are they, you know, desperate to greet them? Or are they, like, definitely not interested in making friends with new dogs? Or under that social heading, we would also think about how your dog interacts with people. Are you their only friend? Are they very confident around other people? And confidence doesn't necessarily mean, like golden retriever friendliness either, when we're talking about a social setting.

But are they comfortable enough to ignore another person or another dog? Or do they consistently have to keep their eyes on them just in case that, you know, that creature does something potentially scary? We can think about confidence from a sensory perspective. Things like noises, big moving movements, new smells. Does your dog react to those things with curiosity and optimism? Are they like, oh, well, that was interesting, I should check it out.

Or are they giving those sort of yikes vibes when something startling happens? That's a technical term, right? Yikes vibes. Those yike vibes. Yeah, exactly. And I also think about confidence, how it expresses in performance. So is your dog really confident with the skin skills they have, not simply what they've been trained to do, although that definitely falls into that category, but also just how good are they at navigating their own body?

So if you imagine yourself like, walking across a little balance beam, if you know that you've got all your feet under control and the balance beam is wider than your feet, you might feel really confident. But if you're unsure that each time you place your foot down it's actually going to land on that beam, you. You might not be so confident about that. And specifically talking about feet, because when our dogs have four of them, often those rear feet are not, well, well controlled or, you know, well acknowledged in their brain system.

So oftentimes, if we address some physical skills and boost some confidence around their. Their body awareness in general, we see a general boost in confidence. So what kind of games do we look for or what kind of exercises do we do to maybe help improve the dog's content confidence? The good news is there's all kinds of games we can play and they're really fun. So some games that provide choice and control can be very empowering to our dogs.

Things like shaping games. And if we consider shaping in really teeny, tiny little layers, we can address all kinds of things that might otherwise be spooky or scary or startling to our dogs by putting our dogs in control of them. For example, um, one of the games I like to play is teaching a dog to knock over something that's going to be rattly or noisy. When they knock it over and they learn that even if the sound of that thing happening, that falling over isn't that awesome for them, they can control it and it leads to good things.

So putting that element of choice and control in there can be really helpful. We can play games that increase their exploration, so building up their ability to search for stuff, bravery games. One of the things I like to play with dogs is setting up a room full of obstacles. Maybe we start very easy if your dog has never played this game before. Soft stuff, things that are not going to make a bunch of noise or slip out from under their feet if they step on them and we scatter a bunch of treats within that room and they get the opportunities to search for them.

So when our dogs are specifically searching for stuff, they're automatically channeling their brain into a state of optimism. Because you don't look for things that you know aren't there. You believe they're there. You're, you know they're going to be good when you find them. So you can build up some confidence playing games like that and then gradually increasing the difficulty of what sort of obstacles and items that you actually put within that room or that location for them to explore around.

Another game that I like to do, another exercise game, is, are movement puzzles. So getting dogs moving in a sort of a moderate state of arousal in a really predictable fashion tends to decrease stress. And it also becomes something that's really portable that we can take in other places. Now I realize maybe not all of the listeners know what movement puzzles are, and if I can take just a second to explain what those are, that might be helpful.

So movement puzzles are a concept that Mari Valga made very popular in recent years. And I love them for all kinds of things. So. So at the very basic level, we teach our dogs to move between two bowls. You put a treat in one bowl, they grab that and eat it. Then you put a treat in the other bowl, they grab that and eat it. And they go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and establish this expectation that when one treat has been eaten from one bowl, they go to the next one and they eat it.

And then we add the next layer of difficulty, which is a cone or something for them to move around so they make like a half circle to go around the cone from bowl to bowl. And now we've got some movement involved. From there we can build to adding all sorts of obstacles which if we're very clever, we can tailor to specifically make them into specific experiences. We could use a cavaletti bar for the dog to step over.

We could make it a platform that they have to climb along. We can make a narrow little channel so the dog gets used to going into a bit of a tight space, all within the context of this bowl to bowl action in the movement puzzle. And because it's just this space steady, repetitious pattern game, our dogs can really build their confidence on that. And then we can translate this to all sorts of new areas.

So say your dog is sort of concerned about tight spaces. If we build this channel system within our movement puzzle and you're practicing this in your kitchen and your dog is like, this is so easy, I love this. I can just go from bowl to bowl and get those cookies, well then you can start to take that very transportable game into different areas, into your backyard, your front yard, the training, the Walmart parking lot.

And you're building your dog's positive experience history within this portable little pattern game that is, is really fun for the dogs to play. And I gotta admit, it's really fun for the humans too because we get to be a little bit creative with how we alter and add these different elements that go into the puzzle as well. So then the last little kind of cluster of games and exercises that I like are really skill building things.

So, so when our dogs get better at particular skills, they don't just get better at doing them, they feel better about doing them too. And that's sort of what I alluded to earlier about your dog learning how to operate all their feet properly. So rear end awareness games and exercises are super, super valuable in a lot of different confidence building contexts. And I really think that those often get overlooked, but they're, they're pretty important.

Melissa Breau: So what role does like clear communication maybe play in all of this? Or playing confidence? How does that kind of factor into like what we're talking about here?

Erin Lynes: When it comes to building confidence, clear communication is pretty darn key. So if you're teaching, take on the teacher role and you're trying to help show your dog they are safe and they are skilled and they can do all these magical, wonderful things in different contexts.

It is super helpful if the language you share with your dog is consistent and reliable. Very predictable use of location specific marker cues, for example, is one way to keep that communication really clear. I like that when I reward my dog, they know exactly where they can go to collect their reinforcement. So that's a big part of what I think communication looks like when we're in a training situation.

But we can also become a really like, trustworthy partners for our dogs when we get good at reading their body language. So our dogs don't communicate back to us with verbal cues and things, sadly, because that would make life so much easier. But we have to get really, really good at reading their individual body language. What is, what does my dog look like when they are happy and confident and feeling, you know, like this is a safe and exciting place to be?

What do they look like when they're a little unsure? And what do they look like when they would really rather not doing this? So there are ways we can investigate our dog's individual body language and develop our eye so that we get good at seeing those things within the context of play. It's really helpful if you're playing with your dog. If you're watching your dog play with other dogs or play with other people, you're going to learn so much about what they enjoy. And yeah, I think that that level of communication where you are the interpreter or the listener is really a big deal too.

Melissa Breau: Is there anything, you know, extra or maybe special that you would do proactively to build confidence and optimism, specifically in puppies, like, you've got a new little one.

Erin Lynes: Yeah, puppies are great because we are getting to start all of these things from day one. Now, puppies are of course born with their own level of confidence or they come out they when, when we adopt a puppy at the age that we get them, they've already had some learning experiences.

They have their own genetic traits and things, so they're already starting with a little bit of a baseline of their own level of confidence. But we definitely always seek to improve whatever they are gifted with. And breaking training skills into wee little layers. For baby puppies playing all these games that I just talked about, even if your puppy feels really naturally confident, you're going to be putting money in the bank for future, future puppy experiences if you can build a lot of positive associations early on.

So with my baby puppies, I want to make sure that I'm breaking things into tiny little pieces. They get success in all manners of their training and just going from there. So trying to actively over face them. Even though, you know, it might seem like your puppy is particularly good at one thing or another. The other thing that I think about with puppies is that, and this is probably the, the Labrador breeder in me is that puppies are not all equal with regards to, like, self preservation and they don't always make good decisions on their own behalf.

So my current puppy, Velveeta, she's five months old now, and ever since she was able to get out of the whelping box, she has been obsessed with climbing on things and exploring with her body. She's very, very nimble and I love that she is so confident. But also I don't want her to die or injure herself. So there's a little bit of being proactive in the sort of challenges I set up and how I manage her so that her confidence doesn't backfire.

I don't want a physical injury, but I also don't want her to take on a task that she believes she could do that is just downright dangerous. So that's another added element for our baby puppies we want to think about.

Melissa Breau: Is it ever too late to improve a dog's confidence? How do you kind of evaluate what changes it might be, you know, reasonable to expect, say, in an adolescent or adult dog?

Erin Lynes: I don't think it's ever too late to make improvements and I certainly don't think there's any harm in trying. Even with an older dog, we probably have to consider reasonable expectations. If a dog is very advanced in age and has had a lot of time to rehearse or experience the world in a way that kind of depletes their confidence. So, you know, if a dog has had, you know, a whole series of bad experiences and they've been dwelling on that for years and years and years, you may not have as much room for improvement as you do with a younger dog who, you know, had one little bad experience and now they're ready to move on and you just need to show them how to do that.

However, you don't want to let the thoughts of impossibility hold you back either because like I said, there's no harm in doing confidence boosting exercises. You're never going to be like, wow, I really wish I didn't help this dog. You always want to try and help them feel safer and more confident, more comfortable in their own skin. And it's actually surprising how much improvement you can make, particularly when a handler has good communication skills, when they learn to listen to what their dog is telling them, when they learn to give them rest and recovery when they need it, when you're developing those skills along the way as well, you can make a lot of, you can make a lot of progress and you can feel a lot better about how to plan and shape your training so that you're not over facing your dog. Sometimes they just need a break from the challenge, a little bit of a reset, and you can, you can see a little bit more progress.

Melissa Breau: Then that kind of gets to what I was going to ask you next, which is, you know, is it possible to overdo working on confidence building? If so, like, how much is too much? How do we decide when a dog is just like, yeah, no, this isn't, this isn't. No longer, we're no longer seeing positive returns?

Erin Lynes: That's a really good question. And I think within an individual session, we have to watch for that. Um, I don't ever want to deter people from working on confidence, but it's, it's a, a marathon, not a sprint in a lot of cases. And what I'd watch for is this. So if your dog is like totally comfortable in a setting and you're doing some training and they progress and they progress and they progress and they seem like they're just like insatiable and they want more, that might be what's standard for your dog.

But if we're working on something that's a little bit more challenging for them, maybe they've got some concerns about the location or the noise or something, some sort of element that is, you know, a little bit bothersome. You might still start to see that initial bout of progress. So they're doing well, they're trying hard, they're doing well, and then it just drops off much earlier than you would expect in a session.

We can see that as a form of courage fatigue. And it can be a sign that what you're training in that moment was actually more challenging than you might have thought. Maybe there is background stuff that is bothering them that you didn't initially recognize. Maybe the exercise itself just takes a lot out of them because their emotional battery can only take so much, you know, output of courage before it runs dry.

So what we want to do in general is keep sessions really short, upbeat and positive. If we can try and get the dog some, some wins while we're in that training mode and then pause or change gears to something else so that they can sort of settle their brains and get that, that winning feeling. Now, it's not the end of the world. If you happen to, you know, go a little too far in your training session and you, you see those early signs of courage fatigue happening, but that's where you want to stop.

Sometimes our instinct is to try and train through it and just, you know, one more, one more rep. If you can just do that scary thing one more time, then, then we'll stop. But I really encourage people not to do that. You can always end a training session on a positive note without the positive note being the specific thing you're working moment. So if I was, you know, maybe like I talked about that game earlier about where my dog is knocking something over that's noisy and rattling.

Maybe they do that three or four times and then all of a sudden they're like, I'm kind of over in the corner sniffing over here. I don't think I'm gonna knock it over again, even though I know when I do that I get really good chicken. I'm going to avoid the temptation to wait for them to come back and try it again or lure them over or, you know, encourage them to do it.

What I might do is say, you know what, looks like you had enough of that. Let's do a couple of hand targets and a little play party and we're best buddies again. And I'll remember that three was the magic number for next time. We won't go for four. Yeah. So part of the reason we're talking about all this is because you've got a new class in the calendar.

Melissa Breau: You've got Bravery. Excuse me, Building Bravery Concepts and Games for Growing Confident, Optimistic Dogs. It's on the schedule for December, so when this comes out, it will still be open for registration. Can you talk a little more about the class and maybe who might want to sign up?

Erin Lynes: Yeah. This is a great class for puppies if you're trying to be proactive about building confidence. And the class is already running right now, so I can tell you we've got some super little gold puppies enrolled in there, learning all kinds of good stuff and building on these teeny, tiny little layers.

So they're going to be little confident superstars. It's also a good class if you've got some dog. Got a dog who's got some mild concerns. Maybe they're a little nervous or around strangers. Maybe they're a little bit not so cool with the harness they put on. There's all different kinds of dogs in this class who have These, you know, just these specific contexts where they are not their most confident and perhaps otherwise are, you know, kind of bubbly, outgoing creatures.

So those sorts of things are definitely things we can work on in this class. I've got all kinds of plans for the games and exercises to boost those, and we're already having lots of fun. Plus, if I can just give a little plug to my TAin the class study group. If you're enrolling at Bronze, you've got a super duper helper there. She's got people. She's helping them with building their own DIY props.

We're getting all the Bronze students posting videos and being active. It's pretty cool. In the study group already.

Melissa Breau: That's awesome. Any final thoughts or key points you want to leave listeners with?

Erin Lynes: Yes, I actually did think of one other thing. You had asked early earlier, Melissa, about communication. And there's a cool concept that we talk about in this class called the Mr. Rogers hack that falls under the communication category that I think that people probably aren't aware of how helpful this can be.

So if you can just indulge me in a quick little story time here. Okay. So when I take my little farm dog, baby Velveeta, out for her socialization walks, we often go to town. And there's this beautiful riverwalk in our town. It goes along, the river is on one side and there's like the street and other things along the other side of it. It's a great place to practice your leash walking skills and meeting people and other dogs and ignoring them and all that good puppy training type stuff.

Well, we were walking along that route one day, and we were at the part of the trail where on one side there's a train yard. And I wasn't too worried about it because we happen to actually live right next to a busy TR track. So Velveeta is pretty used to hearing all kinds of train noises and stuff. And we were walking along and the trains are kind of moving around, and then all of a sudden there's this Holy.

Oh, my goodness. Boom, bang, boom. That. I don't know if it was a train accident or what, but it was so loud, I jumped out of my skin. Poor little Velveeta. She was like, what was that? And I began my Mr. Rogers hack. So I told her, oh, noisy trains. Those are noisy trains. And she looked at me and there's this moment of. I actually got this on video, so maybe I should post it somewhere later to share it.

But she. She looked at me. And she's like, obviously not understanding my words. Noisy trains means nothing to her. But I think she could tell by my voice that I have become calm. And I'm not concerned about it. I'm not fleeing. I'm looking over where the trains are. And then we just carry on walking. And you can see her body language just go, huh. Okay, no big deal.

So this. This Mr. Rogers hack is all about teaching our. Our dogs, pairing language with things that happen in a way that can let our. That language be useful later on. So me telling Velveeta, noisy trains, noisy trains. Well, maybe it gives her a chance to hear my voice and hear that I'm calm in that moment. But what I'm really hoping for is the next time we walk down that area and I see those trains moving around, and I think, oh, dear God, please don't let them make some big scary noises again.

I can proactively say, hey, Velveeta, noisy trains. You know, noisy trains. And what I would expect from her in that situation is for her to understand that there was that moment last time when there. That big noise happened. Those words sound familiar. Nothing bad happened. It was all good, right? And that's actually what happened the next time I walked her in town. We had the. The. The trains were sort of ruffling around.

They didn't actually end up making any big boom, boom noises. But I told her, hey, Velveeta, noisy trains. She looks over. This is where I think, God, dogs are smart. She looks over to where the trains were, and you can just see that same little thing again, like. And so. And she carried on walking. So pairing our language with things that happen for our dogs can make part of a predictable pattern that brings them some reassurance, helps sort of frame things, and helps predict things for them.

So if those trains had made a big noisy thing that time, she would have already been ready for it. It probably would have been at least a little bit less scary because she. She was already thinking about train stuff instead of, you know, lady daddy. Happy thoughts. Oh, my God, what was that noise? So being prepared for those situations is half the battle. And I think. I think that the students in the class are really gonna love the Mr. Rogers hack when we start putting that into practice for their own dogs. I'd love to share it with some more people as well.

Melissa Breau: I love that. Just the idea of kind of narrating things for your dogs, I'm definitely guilty of not doing it for that reason, but doing it in my household so my dogs know the names of all the rooms in my house. Right. And they pick that stuff up.

And we, I think a lot of us do it just because we're talking to our dogs anyway, like, that's our little buddy. We're telling them stuff. And you think my dogs know exactly when I say, okay, it's one o'clock, we're gonna go for a walk. Right. I'm not. It's not a cue exactly. But they recognize that when it happens day after day. And all of those things we can use more intentionally once we're aware of it.

Yeah, my dogs absolutely know. Okay, we're heading to the office. They'll run ahead of me to the, like, they know what room we're going to, even though, you know, it keeps them up underfoot, if nothing else. So we'll take it anyway.

Melissa Breau: All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on and chatting about all this with me, Erin. I think it's an important topic and I hope people enjoyed the conversation.

Erin Lynes: Thanks so much for having Melissa. Absolutely. My pleasure. And thanks to all our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week. Don't miss it. 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 Fenzi Dog Sports Academy.

Special thanks to Denise Fenzi 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.

 Credits

Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi 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!