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If you're doing the same thing today that you were doing three months ago, that's a problem. Okay, that would suggest that, one, we're not tickling our dog's brains quite as much as we could be. But two, well, the dog that you've got in front of you today is probably different from the dog that you had six months ago. Before we dive in, a warning. The content of this podcast may not be appropriate for some, some young listeners. This is real life and that means that sometimes it can be a little bit graphic. So listen on at your own peril. As a veterinarian, dog behaviorist, best selling author and trainer over the past decade, I've had an obsession with transforming the behavior of dogs, understanding their brains, and creating practical strategies that you can implement easily at home. I know all too well when the dream you imagined when you first got your dog is far from your daily reality. In fact, out of the blue, a few months ago, my little dog, Gorse, was bitten by a dog 20 times her size. And suddenly our life of stress free walks, a calm and cuddly household, and being teammates was replaced with reactivity, anxiety, and worrying about what's around the next corner. I'm Dr. Tom. This is the Help My Dog podcast. And this is me documenting that journey of transformation, sharing my knowledge and experience with you, and having a few laughs along the way. Hello and welcome to this episode of the Help My Dog podcast. And today we're taking a listener's question, but I think it's actually one that's very common that probably you've all encountered, and that is when you feel like your training results have plateaued. Yeah. And you were making early progress. And then suddenly it's like, oh, it's sort of maybe starting the same, maybe getting a bit worse. And there are nearly always kind of two reasons why that be okay. The first is that the reason why you got great started to get great results and the winds were coming is because you were doing something different, you were doing something new. And what that does is that tickles your dog's brain in the right areas and gets it activating and waking up. And then what we do as humans is we go, well, that works. I'm just going to do loads of that. And suddenly it starts to be that it's not quite tickling your dog's brain quite as much. And what we might find is that those games or those strategies start to almost descend into becoming party tricks rather than true challenges for your dog. And what we've got to realize about why these games and strategies work is because. And those of you in the Help My Dog Hub will know that there are tons of strategies and games for this very reason. What they do is they set up a scenario in which your dog is. Can flex the muscle that we want to grow, but not the physical muscle, the brain muscle. Right. The brain muscle of disengagement, the brain muscle of calmness, the brain muscle of confidence or optimism. Right. And as they flex that brain muscle, it gets bigger and they use it more and it gets easier to use. The thing is, if you're still getting your dog to lift a 5 kilo weight that looks the same, talks the same, and acts the same, then what it starts to be is just like a little party trick where it's like, yeah, I can do this trick, you know, rather than true actual like, okay, I've got to figure this out and I've got to deploy my skills and test out my skills in the game. And so number one is if you've been. If you're doing the same thing today that you were doing three months ago, that's a problem. Okay. That would suggest that one, we're not tickling our dog's brains quite as much as we could be. But two, well, the dog that you've got in front of you today is probably different from the dog that you had six months ago. Yeah. Because we've grown those skills. So if we're not doing something different, we're not training the dog in front of us. And one thing that we talk about a lot in behavior consultations, which I know some of you will be behave vet clients and you'll have your behaviorist, one of our team that will be telling you what to do every time. Right. Which makes it a whole lot easier. And you, you know, the results come a lot quicker. What, What? You'll what? I can't even remember what I was saying. It's completely gone. It will come back to me in a second. Do, do do do do do do. Variety. And yes. So the dog that you've got today is different from the dog that you had a, a few months ago. And the way to consistent progress is you need to be identifying. And this is what we do in behavior consultations. You need to be identifying. What's the new bottleneck? Yeah, you fixed the previous bottleneck. What's the new bottleneck? Right. And so you should be changing what you are doing and adapting to the dog in front of you. Now, on a very basic level, how can you immediately get out of this plateau, even if you don't know what you need to be focusing on next, which if you don't know and you're in the help my dog hub, then you, you know, head into the community and ask and tell us what your struggle is, and we'll help and direct you to the right video lessons. Obviously, if you behave that client, this is all taken care of for you, you'd be bossed around by your behaviorist and told what to do. They're not bossy at all. But anyway, if neither of those things are an option one, why not? Because we'd love to just get you some great results. And you can find out more about the hub by going to helpmydog.com hub or behavevet by getting in touch with BehaveVet. You know the drill. Just for the next week, add in variety into what you do with your dog. Yeah. If you always play the same few games but you know a few more, play the other few. Right? And what you'll see is that'll start to tickle your dog's brain again in the right places. And you'll start to see that the plateau will start to grow again. You'll start to see that we'll start to get an uptick in results. So that's the first thing. Same gets same, right? Different gets different. And if you're feeling like you're on a plateau, that means it's same. And therefore it's probably likely we've been doing same and so we need to do different, number one. Number two, going back to the gym analogy, how do muscles grow? Okay, well, let's pretend I'm on a fitness kick, okay. And let's pretend that, you know, I'm like, oh, okay, I've gone to Sainsbury's or Tesco or other supermarket. Don't even shop at either of those supermarkets. But anyway, and I packed my shopping and I'm like, you know what? I'd like to carry some more weight and grow my muscles. And so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna pick up an extra few carrier bags empty, and I'm gonna carry those. And my muscles are going to grow, right? Are they? Yeah. Or is there just no amount of challenge there? Yeah. Muscles grow in response to challenge. Brains grow in response to challenge. Yeah. People don't grow. Dogs don't grow bang in the centre of the comfort zone. Right. Where they grow is in the stretch zone. Yeah. Where they grow is when they're presented with challenge, where they've got to up Their skill, they've got to upgrade up their strength. Right? And it's the same when it comes to behavior. We need to be making sure that we are systematically when getting our dogs to practice using a particular skill like disengagement or optimism or whatever else is. We need to make sure that they are lifting the weight that is appropriate to them. Yeah. Hey guys, I just want to take a moment to answer a question that has been coming in literally 10 emails today and that is how can we help you with dog's behavior struggle? Whether that be reactivity, separation anxiety, resource guarding. Maybe you've got multi dog household struggle right now. Maybe your dog's just so over aroused on a walk that they just can't listen to you and they're chasing everything in sight. Like can I get Tom's help? And the answer is that actually you can. And you can do that by booking a Behavet behavior consultation. That's where literally my team give you the plan on how to transform your struggle and get, get you to that dream that made you get a dog in the first place. Right? Your world's got smaller and smaller and smaller and actually it doesn't need to be that way. You just need to reach out for help. Now, a couple of things to say on that. First of all, if you're insured, if your dog's insured with Pet Plan, Kennel Club, Agria or many pets, we actually do direct claims with them, which means that that's covered by your insurance. So you don't pay out of your pocket, your insurance covers that. And the second thing to say is that we have loads of options. If you're insured with another provider or if your dog's not insured at all, that's also totally fine. We have loads of options that we've developed to make this so accessible for you because we're aware that you've already invested a load of time and a load of money in getting your dog, looking after your dog, caring for your dog. But the last thing we want is for you to have done all that and still not be living the life that you deserve with your dog. And we know we can get you there. So all you need to do is go to the Behave Vet website and the way to do that is go B E H A that's beh vet and it will take you there or just Google Behavet, right? And you can get scheduled in and we can literally get you booked in for a consultation as soon as possible. We normally can accommodate it within a Week. Right. So that you can be getting to your dream asap. Example, asking your dog to disengage from a crumb of a kibble that you have found dried up in your coat pocket. And it's probably been through the washing machine a few times. Right. That's probably not going to be doing any growing or disengagement. Yeah. On the other extreme of that, saying, okay, now I need you to disengage from a dog, another dog chasing a frisbee in a field. That's probably too much of a wait. And your dog's going to go, no, I can't disengage and I'm going to practice not disengaging. What happens at the gym when we lift a weight that's way, way, way too heavy for us? We get an injury. The muscle gets an injury. Right. Same when it comes to our dog skills. So we need to think, okay, where are we between dried up piece of kibble? Been through the washing machine a few times. Dog chasing frisbee in field. Very, very exciting. Maybe it's, can you disengage from a piece of chicken? I don't know. I'm just making this up. I'm giving you a simple game example so that you can understand the concept here. Are you truly working at the stretch level that your dog should be working at? Your dog today is different from the dog six months ago. And therefore, do we need to be stepping out of our comfort zone so that our dog can step out of their comfort zone? Yeah. I think especially as owners of reactive dogs, what we do is we make our world smaller and smaller and smaller and suddenly we find this microscopic world that we feel comfortable and safe in. And then we do all of this training to teach our dog these skills. But our human brain is going, but I'm safe in this microscopic world. Yeah. And so we get initial improvements and then it's like actually the improvements only happen to the level, to the size of the tiny world that we're living in. And now what we need to do is expand that world a little bit and get back into the stretch zone. Does this make sense, guys? Now, different ways that we can get into the stretch zone. One, getting our dogs to lift more weight that might look, look like for example, in the case of working with distractions, well, could we level up the distraction that they're working with? Could we increase proximity to the distraction? A second way that we could build stretch into our training is let's not help our dogs quite so much. We're also Quick to kind of jump in and do the maths homework for our dogs. Right. We're also quick to be like, yes, correct. We're also quick to be like, I'm going to position myself and the food in such a way that the choice is very, very straightforward for you. Very important. When their skills aren't, you know, all that. All that great. Right. But as their skills improve, we need to give them the space to say, hey, I can do this, I know the right answer. And we then go, yes, that is the right answer. Yeah. We then get to be the rewarder rather than the, you know, the guider. Right. It's a little bit like if you ever had the frustrating experience of, of trying to teach a child to like, to write and like, write a letter. Yeah. As in a letter, not a letter. Yeah. So like the letter A or the letter B. And you're like, you've got hold of their little hand and you're like, you're practicing. They're doing it. They're following the stencil of a B. Right. And you're like, okay, it's all good. Yeah. And you could do that forever. And you will be there at their first job interview and you will be writing on the application form with them hand in hand. Right. But have you ever experienced the other extreme of where it's like, okay, now go and, you know, do write the letter B. And suddenly it's like, what is going on here? There's like pencil everywhere. The pen is not even on the page. Yeah. It's like, what happened? And the point is, is that we need to find little in betweens with our dogs in exactly the same way where maybe, you know, they see a distraction. And usually you're like straight in there with the marker word, like, nice, here's a piece of food. Yeah, maybe. What if we count to one? What if we count to two? What if we just take a breath before we jump in? Yeah. Because ultimately that then allows them to step into the ability that they can have. It allows them to grow into the space that you open up for them. And when they grow into, when that skill grows into the space that you've left open, that skill then grows and we stop being in a plateau. Yeah. So for some of you, I want this to be like a wake up call. Like, oh, I might be holding my dog's progress back. For others among you, I think the big takeaway will be if I do the same thing all the time, I'm gonna get the same result at best. Yeah. If I adapt to the dog in front of me and do different, then I'm gonna get different. Right? And of course, guys, if you're in the Help My Dog Hub, we can help you with this in the community. Yeah, this is something that we teach on a lot in the weekly live teaching. There's loads of lessons on it in the video library as well. And ultimately, if in doubt, add in variety. Yeah. And if you're in the Help My Dog Hub, you'll know that there are for every different type of struggle, you know, there's a course for every different type of skill that you want to build. Well, guess what? There are like loads of games, not just two games. And you can just do different games and escape the plateau. Get excited, guys, about how this isn't rocket science and you can get consistent progress and be consistently moving towards your dream and. And that's super exciting. I get so passionate about it. So I'm sorry if I'm shouting. And with that, I will be back to shout at you next week.