Did you hear the Tom Brady interview yesterday?
Very interesting and he mentioned a book that helped him a lot with his career. He said that he reads this book every year. Funny how a book can make a difference.
One book that I read and re-read is “Success Through A Positive Mental Attitude” by W. Clement Stone and Napoleon Hill.
One of the most important lessons I learned from this book is discussed in Chapter 3. The topic is accurate thinking. Accurate thinking is much more difficult than you would think.
Emotions and other people’s opinions and beliefs cloud our thoughts making accurate thinking difficult to do.
You may be wondering why accurate thinking is such a big deal and why am I writing about it when this is supposed to be about dog training.
There is a lot of opinion and emotion when it comes to dog training, making it difficult for the person to give you accurate advice.
The overwhelming majority of advice given to dog owners today informs them that they can only use positive reinforcement and that if you use negative or unpleasant consequences you are cruel, mean and inhumane.
This is NOT accurate thinking.
To quote from “Success Through A Positive Mental Attitude,” on page 30 the authors state: “To think accurately you must use reason. The science of reasoning or accurate thinking is called logic.”
Logically, dog owners expose their dogs all the time to unpleasant situations for the good of the dog.
At some point in your dog’s life a strange person will approach your dog with a piece of metal and plunge into your dog’s skin.
Your dog will also probably have a part of his or her body cut open and have certain organs taken out resulting in a painful recovery.
Vaccinations, spaying and neutering are unpleasant but done for the good of the dog.
In training we sometimes need to apply a negative or unpleasant consequence to stop the dog from doing behaviors that could get the dog in hot water.
Logically, training is a series of positive and negative consequences.
Your dog has to learn the word “YES” and the word “NO.”
You’ll get much better results.
If you’d like to see how it’s done check out the Dog Training Inner Circle.
You can get started for just $1.00!
Which is an amazing deal if you logically think about it.
Best,
Eric