This about me page is about me as a well trained and educated coach who is using coaching principles to train my puppy. I spent over 20 years in the game of softball and my coaching philosophy stayed the same throughout. It was definitely challenged many times by my colleagues and by parents but I stuck with it. The ones who never challenged it was the players who were the most important in my opinion. I coached all ages from recreation level softball to rep softball or what some would refer to as travel ball in different leagues. As a real athlete centered coach, the most common critique from many of my colleagues and others involved in the game was that I was too nice. This was apparently not a productive trait to have in a sport that has grown to be very competitive with very high expectations. I believe however that I may have found a way to transfer those skills from coaching to training my dog. I have been thinking about it quite a lot recently as our puppy Rylee is now 11 months old. It has definitely been an adventure.
About Me
The whole concept of training our puppy has been an interesting one. One that I found myself pulling on some of my coaching skills to manage. Skills such as mental training, planning and some of the coaching teaching principles. For example, if you consider a yearly training plan for a team or an athlete, it is over a season, and will change each season as the player moves through their sport career depending on their ultimate goals. For our puppy, or a dog, the training plan would have the skills we want her to learn and a pathway to the end game.
For athletes, they draw on past experiences, the current stress level and amount of confidence they have in the skill that they are executing. In the batters box for example, there are many factors that are going to effect their performance. When a puppy is going to do something, they do things the best way they know how. And if they have been successfully taught how to do things the way we want them to, they will. If they sometimes react the way we want them to, and sometimes they don’t, they will go for the one that they know best which is sometimes the one we don’t want. Their body and mind go to the easiest outcome. If that makes sense.
Here, I am sharing how I am adapting my coaching skills to my puppy training skills in the hopes that some might find it useful in raising their puppy or training their new dog that has joined the family. I am not saying that I am a trainer and am in no way qualified to be a trainer. I am talking about how I have my experience, the information we have learned from the amazing trainers we have worked with and the resources that I have found online.
My expertise is coaching. Coaching athletes. And I am transferring those skills to being a puppy owner and my path to our quest for success with her.