How To Use Everyday Reinforcement To Grow Lasting Skills

I’m sharing my step by step plan on how to use everyday reinforcement to grow lasting skills, helping you open the door to brilliant behaviors, stronger focus, and a deeper connection with your dog.

Transcript Summary:
Let's talk about how we can evolve the current relationship with your dog and reinforcement and evolve it into a strategic use of that reinforcement. So, the first step is the dog loving food. Some of you don't have a dog that loves food. You need to create that love.

But when you find one food the dog loves, then you're going to use a second food. Maybe give it to them first and give them the higher value food second. So, we start with step number one as we evolve your reinforcement strategy. That is the dog's got to love food. Because if they don't love food, you can't grow brilliant behaviors.

Brilliant behaviors are grown from brilliant reinforcement. So, number one, dog loves food. That's where a lot of you are. That the dog won't do anything unless they see the food. And so, we've got to go from step one all the way down to step five.

So, step two is we've got to add some contingencies to them getting their food. And that's where for me, one of the first games I play with my dogs is the ItsYerChoice game. I've talked about it a lot on the podcast. I'm gonna leave a link in the show notes.

Contingencies on that reinforcement means you might have some cookies in your pocket. Now if you play ItsYerChoice, your dog will eventually ignore those cookies in the pocket because they know coming up and bopping you in the hip is not going to get cookies.

Or you might be like me, I have like food bowls around the house on the counters. And they're there if I see something amazing happening, then I will mark it. I might say, “Good dog.” I might give what we call a spotlight, a location specific reinforcement marker “cook”, and I'll walk over, and I'll give the dog a cookie.

So, what would that look like? Let's say I don't like my dogs in the kitchen when I'm eating, or I don't like my dogs in the kitchen when I'm cooking. If I see a dog in a dog bed on the peripheral of the kitchen, I'll give them a cookie, especially when they're puppies. I will intentionally make them want to be in those beds.

So that could be a contingency. The dog gets the surprise deposit into the relationship bank. ‘I love when you're in that bed.’ ‘I love when you aren't barking when someone comes through the door.’ Whatever you love, you're going to reinforce.

So, they don't see the food coming, they are in the midst of something, and then you go, “That's mighty good.” And you reinforce them. There's a contingency on that. It could be you are training the dog with a training game, with a series of training games, with a training plan like our Recallers program.

Where we give you strategically layered games that help you evolve the reinforcement strategies with your dog. And the other thing that you need to do while you're growing contingencies on your reinforcement is, ignore the demand-ica dog. The dog that comes up and flips your hand and says, “I think you need to feed me. I think there's cookies back here.” The dog that sits and barks at the cookie jar, the dog that wines when it's near dinner o’clock.

You need to ignore the demand-ica dog, and you need to help grow their understanding that food, toys, activities are all reinforcement that are delivered, not demanded. Okay, so we've got ‘Gotta love food.’ ‘Gotta, have some contingencies on that food.’ Now we've got to transfer the value of that food.

Playing games where the dog does something and then they're reinforced, that's a way to transfer value. So, the value goes from the food into a game like Crate Games. The transfer of value happens. So, any of you who've ever played Crate Games, I know that your dogs will love to fly into the crate because they've got such a history of reinforcement there. The value has been transferred.

It could be transferred into a game of tug. Now you've got another valuable reinforcer. You're not always using food. You're sometimes using tug. It will be transferred into acts with you like the Hand Target or other games that now you can use.