Hello and welcome to another episode of the Fixing Separation Anxiety podcast. I'm your
host Julie Naismith and this week we're going to be talking about one of the most, if not
the most, important factors when it comes to getting your dog over separation anxiety
so that you can both lead normal lives again and that is consistency. I'll be talking about
how important consistency is to your training and giving you top tips as to how you can
make sure your training does deliver consistency.
Hello and welcome to the Be Right Back Separation Anxiety podcast. Hi, I'm Julie Naismith, dog
trainer, author and full-on separation anxiety geek. I've helped thousands of dogs overcome
separation anxiety with my books, my online programs, my trainer certification and my
Separation Anxiety Training App and this podcast is all about sharing my tips and tricks to
help you teach your dog how to be happy at home alone too.
Alright before I start, quick question for you. What do Roger Federer, Usain Bolt, Beethoven,
Leonardo da Vinci and Einstein have in common? And why are we asking about this on a Separation
Anxiety podcast? I hear you say. Well, I'll tell you what they have in common. Consistency.
So they didn't or they don't just have one or a few moments of brilliance. They were
or they are consistently brilliant. Consistency. Consistency, the most important aspect of
Separation Anxiety Training but that we regularly seem to overlook. It's a huge aspect of any
performance whether that's sport, whether that's science, whether that's music. It's
what separates top performers from the rest. So why does it matter in Separation Anxiety?
Why is she talking about this? Well, here's the thing. If you are working on having a
dog you can leave, then having a dog who is unpredictable in the time that they can
handle, whose durations, the times that it's okay with seem to be all over the place, seem
to be random, that's totally unworkable. If your dog isn't consistently achieving a certain
time it really doesn't help you. Let me just give you an example, a non-Separation Anxiety
Training example. Let's talk about dogs who don't like bikes. Alright, so you have a dog,
you've been working on their reaction to bikes and they are getting much, much better. But
every now and again you take them out and they do lose it. They see a bike and they
lose it. But you can keep going with your walk, you maybe have to change direction,
you maybe have to go to a quiet spot where your dog can recover and go under threshold
and seem okay again. But you can probably, with a bit of caution, continue with the walk.
So that inconsistency, your dog reacting to a bike when maybe the last 10 walks it hasn't,
it hasn't completely scuppered everything, it hasn't ruined your training, it hasn't
ruined that moment, it hasn't ruined the walk. But if you have a dog who when you leave is
unpredictable and you don't know when they are going to lose it when they are alone,
you cannot leave that dog. So a solid, predictable 15 minutes, a dog who can nail 15 minutes
every single time is actually way better or way better for our psyche and our sanity
than a dog who can do 3 hours but is sketchy and unpredictable. Because unlike the walk
with a dog who reacts to the bike, that walk can continue. But if you're somewhere watching
your dog or waiting for bark alerts or doing an exercise with your dog and you're way down
the street because you think your dog can do 30 minutes and it explodes at 2, it's game
over. You have to come back. So if your dog is doing 3 hours, but doing 3 hours randomly
here and there, you can't do anything with those 3 hours. Not really, you can't go to
the cinema, your friends will get really annoyed with you if you're watching your dog on camera
while you're at dinner. And also, when your dog is being really sketchy like that, you
can't really go very far from the door because if they do lose it, if they do freak out and
you're 20 minutes away, that's 20 minutes of freak out time, 20 minutes of time that
your dog should not be left in that state. So you might be set outside for 3 hours because
it is not consistent time. If your dog, however, is nailing 15 minutes, you can do something
with that. If your dog can nail 15 minutes every single time without fail, then you can
go and pick up the mail, you can go and grab a coffee, you might even be able to go and
get a pint of milk because you know every single time your dog can nail it. Now, with
the owners that I work with in my Separation Anxiety Heroes group, we talk about the concept
of the $100 time. $100, Euros, Pounds, call it what you want. The $100 time concept in
Separation Anxiety Training. What we do when we work on training in our group is we are
less focused on those extreme variations in time. So the 3 hours you get here or there,
we are focused on predictability. The $100 time is the time that you would, guess what,
bet $100 on that your dog could do, every single time. Or at least 99 times out of 100
because dogs aren't machines and we can't always predict exactly what we're going to
do. However, as we work on Separation Anxiety Training, there is no doubt that their predictability
at certain times increases. And it's the increase in predictability and consistency
that gives you back your life. The random one-off times are no good to you. You need
to know when you leave the house that you can leave the house for X time. It is no good
you worrying, will this be the day when he doesn't do that time? And will he? So consistency
and predictability are everything. Let's go back to that 3 hours, the outlying time that
maybe your dog got once, or maybe your dog's best ever time is an hour. Personal bests,
I call them. I call these times personal bests. So just like Usain Bolt would set a record
when he did a personal best, they are personal bests. And just like athletes, dogs don't
achieve personal best after personal best. That's not how training goes. That's not how
learning goes. That's not how improvement happens. Personal bests are outliers by their
very definition. So they happen and then almost inevitably after a personal best, we're likely
to see something that's not quite as good. So personal bests happen, they're outlying
occurrences and then the next time that might not be as good and that is normal. The problem
with personal bests in separation anxiety training is that they get our hopes up. They
raise our expectations because we think, whoa, our dog's nailed it, 2 hours, yes. And then
the next time we train, we've got 2 hours in our plan and our dog does 20 minutes. So
whenever I come across that happening, the first thing I say to an owner is, what's your
dog's $100 time? Is it 2 hours? Because if it's 2 hours and your dog just did 20 minutes,
then chances are if he can nail 2 hours time after time after time, it was just an off
day. But more often than not, when we're getting those really long times and people are saying,
oh, I can't make any sense of it, it seems really random, the personal best time is way
lower. And you might look at it all and say, oh, there's no pattern, I don't understand
why he's doing really well sometimes and not others. It's because you're looking at outliers.
His $100 time is actually consistent. Once dogs get training, they do get to a stage
where there is a consistent time. You just can't always see it. It could be 5 seconds.
But more often than not, when I ask people the question, what's your dog's $100 time,
they can tell me. They can say, you know what, he did do a personal best at 17 minutes last
week, but really his $100 time is 30 seconds. That's the time that he nails every single
time without fail. So if you're looking at your dog's pattern of absences and you're
thinking it doesn't make sense, it doesn't add up, it's completely random, what's going
on is you're looking at the personal best, you're looking at the outliers, you're not
looking at the consistent times. So personal bests aren't always helpful. It's human nature
that that's what we're looking for. But what you need to be doing with separation anxiety
training is you need to be pushing up the predictable, the consistent time. The great
thing about the personal best though is that they do at least show you that your dog can
do those times, but you need to work on consistency to get your dog nailing them every single
time. And that's what separation anxiety training does. We actually don't train for personal
bests at all. We do not, on a consistent, on a regular basis, leave dogs to set their
personal best. So this is what we don't do in training. We don't go out and watch our
dogs and see how long they can last. That's not separation anxiety training. The way separation
anxiety training works is we gradually increase the time that a dog can do. So we go at the
dog's pace, we nudge the time up in tiny, tiny increments. We're not doing this, oh
I wonder what he can do today, keep the stopwatch running, because that just stresses the dog
You might get lucky, you might get back at 2 hours 56 and your dog's fine, but if your
dog is freaking out for three minutes between 2.56 and 2.59, you are not teaching your dog
that being alone is okay, because those last few minutes he was panicking. So if your training
method is go out and watch how long your dog can cope with, that's not desensitization,
that's not gradual exposure to scary alone time, which is the method that I teach. The
method that I teach and that gets results is we go up in tiny increments, we train with
a plan. No going out and hoping, we train with a plan. So before you do the exercise,
you know what the target duration is. You are not going out and just looking at your
stopwatch. You are training with a specific target in mind every single time. And guess
what that does, that gradual exposure, going at the dog's pace, tiny increments, it pushes
up the $100 time, it increases the consistent time. And that's how we get a dog to start
nailing that 3 hours consistently, by gradually going at the dog's pace, not going out hoping
that your dog might get the 3 hours today, or 2 hours, or 20 minutes, whatever it is,
we go gradually. And if you can't understand what's going on with your dog in terms of
the pattern of times, it's because you're not training with a plan. If you train with
a plan, actually, you haven't got as much variation in the time that they can do because
you are not just going out, watching them and recording the time that they are achieving,
you are training to a specific duration. So it might be that your plan says go out for
12 minutes, but that day your dog might have been able to do 20. You do not do the 20,
you stick to 12 minutes. Because if you do the hope and pray, go out and just let your
dog do what it can and stay out for as long as you think your dog's okay, you're not training
with a plan. I just want to talk as well about where regressions fit into this whole picture
of consistency. If your dog suddenly does really badly, so say you are being really
diligent and you're training and you're sticking with the plan, you're only increasing those
durations by a tiny amount each time, the target durations. But for whatever reason,
all of a sudden your dog can't come anywhere close to the times in the plan, even though
you've just been incrementally increasing. So that can feel like your dog has regressed.
And certainly it can be the case that dogs can get to $100 time, let's say our dog has
got a 15 minute $100 time because you've inched your way up to that 15 minutes, but then all
of a sudden it spends two, four weeks and it can't do more than two minutes. Then that
definitely feels like a regression. So sometimes it actually is just that your dog hasn't got
the consistency that you thought. It seemed like they were consistent at 15 minutes. You
seem like that was your $100 time, but in the dog's head, no, no, it's just not there
yet. So I always encourage people to think, well, I did get the 15 minutes, so I'll take
comfort from that, but I'm just going to go back to two minutes because that's how I'm
going to build up the consistency at 15 minutes. So really a regression is just a case of teaching
the dog more repetitions at the lower durations so we can push that consistency up again.
And hopefully when you think about it like that, it's less panic inducing because I know
that what happens is when you hit a certain time and then you spend a month where you
can't even get close to it, everybody's brain just goes into panic mode. You feel like you're
in free fall. You think it's never going to work. Instead, think that that time just isn't
consistent yet and your dog has gone back to a time that it can more consistently do.
That's consistency. If you work with me, you'll hear me talk about it over and over again
because I do think it's really overlooked when it comes to training, but it is the single
most important factor in my experience in getting dogs to a stage where you feel like
you've got your freedom back and you can do stuff again. If your dog can nail two hours
consistently, you can go to the movies. If your dog can nail an hour consistently, you
can go to lunch. But if it can only do an hour, one in every four times, then you can't
do those things. So consistency, consistency, consistency. It is so important. All right.
I'll get off my soapbox about consistency, but I hope that's been helpful in getting
you to rethink that focusing on duration isn't enough. Consistency is really what matters.
Okay, that's it from me this week. I hope you found this helpful. If you do like these
podcasts, I'd love it if you'd head over to Apple Podcasts and subscribe. Also, if
you are in the mood to, why not leave me a review and let me know what you think of these
podcasts. That would be ever so helpful. Okay, happy training. Bye for now.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Be Right Back Separation Anxiety
Podcast. If you want to find out more about how I can help you further, head over to
julienaysmith.com. Meanwhile, if you enjoyed listening today, I would love it if you would
head over to wherever you listen to your podcast and consider rating my show. Thanks so
much. Good luck with that training and bye for now.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai