The time to book your dog trainer is now. Almost all of the good dog trainers I know (especially those that aren't attached to large kennels) book out months in advance.

I'm currently booking out until August for board and train dogs and that is not unusual for good trainers in the area.

If you have a puppy who is 3 months old, a prime board and train age is 7-8 months so you might as well get them on the calendar with your favorite trainer (me or otherwise) early.

And most importantly:
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If you're dealing with a behavior problem and you're waiting to get to your breaking point - don't! The problem you're experiencing right now WILL get worse if you don't make changes. There's nothing more frustrating than getting to the the ultimate point of frustration, finally picking up the phone and being told you need to wait 2-4 months to get the training you actually want.

When my wife and I got our first house, the first thing I wanted to do was get a dog. Not only that, but despite my wife’s reluctance, I wanted to get a pit bull – which is common these days, but was considered a little more “extreme” or “dangerous” back over a decade ago.

I wasn’t good with dogs. I grew up with them and had them professionally trained, but they didn’t mind me much as an annoying 10-year-old and the only long-term dog we had in the house bit anyone it could every time she got into the trash can – which was a lot. My strategy as a child when I came home to my dog rummaging through the trash was to just walk past it – staying as far away as possible.

But I saw a story one time in Sports Illustrated about Michael Vick’s dogs and their rescue homes. The dogs looked tough, but they were posed in cute ways and seemed like the perfect dogs. For some reason, that story made me want to be a part of the pit bull story.
Some time after that, my wife and I met Tiki. A year-old reverse brindle pit bull with a quirky, independent personality.
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Many of you who used to go on my free public pack walks probably met her. She looked normal enough. She never bit anyone. She didn’t show any aggression. She looked calm and well-behaved. Sometimes she would even help me rehabilitate dogs at appointments. 

​When I was young, I remember waiting in line at the grocery store behind a mother and her young child – probably between 3-5. The kid, bored from a long trip through Kroger, found a glimmer of hope in his day when he saw the brightly colored candied section at the checkout aisle. The aisle, as they tend to be, was filled with Snickers, Sour Patch Kids, gum, Skittles, and any other mainstream candy you could have imagined.

“Mommy, can I have some candy?” the child asked politely as his tiny hand grabbed for some Peanut Butter cups.

“Not today, honey” the mom responded without even thinking.

And then it began.

The child, sensing his mother’s distraction and lack of conviction to her “no” began to escalate.

“PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEASE!!!!” he said.

“I said not today,” she said.

“BUT I WANT CANDY!!!” he said.

The mom then glanced around the store, feeling the impending doom of a full meltdown, and changed her tune.

“Okay honey. Since you were good in the store.”
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This scene is something we’ve all either been a part of – whether as the parent, the kid, or a bystander thinking about we’re happy we don’t have kids or how much better we would handle the situation if we did have kids ( was the latter before I had kids myself and gained a massive amount of empathy for parents put in that situation). 

When I work with a dog, the change in the dog is almost immediate. It's part technique and strategy. But more importantly, I present myself in a way that allows nervous, anxious dogs to immediately feel comfortable and safe. 

When making changes in your dog, you have to start with yourself. I'm not just talking the behavior changes at home, I'm talking having the ability to shift your state and to create confidence. 

This isn't just experience. Being a stable leader, in and of itself, is a skill you need to learn. You might be reading dog training books, when you really need to be reading Tony Robbins books. 

Get more details about what you're missing here in the video:

When shopping for a dog trainer, you will be overwhelmed by the choices and conflicting information for even the most basic questions in dog training. 

Unlike other trades like plumbing, there isn’t a consensus on the right way to do a particular task, instead there is a million dog trainers and each one has “their way.” So much so that dog trainers sum up the training community with one cliche: the only thing two trainers can agree on is that the third trainer has no idea what they are talking about. 

As a trainer, this creates a large amount of stress. Every trainer I meet loves dogs and wants the best for them, but the dialogue has broken down over the best way to move forward with dogs. 

Our community is fractured along partisan lines, much the way our nation’s politics are divided. Two sides yelling at each other about what is right and that leads you, the consumer, to be confused and forced to pick a side as well. 

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In my other job as a life coach, the most common advice in the entire field, to the point where it’s basically a cliché, is to set clear goals. This advice manifests itself in a thousand different ways in the coaching world, but still people, even myself, have a hard time of taking it really seriously to the point where we make our goals clear.
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But if you don’t set a goal and plan for it, then you’re really setting yourself up for a much higher potential of failure than would be the case if you had a clearly defined vision for what your success looks like. In other words, have a plan and a goal, or you’re going to be following someone else’s plan – your spouse’s, your parents’, your boss’s, and, yes, even your dog’s!

Many of us in the dog world find ourselves here because we struggle connecting with other humans. Some have had our trust broken by the humans that matter most to us, some of us have just felt like we have never fit in with people, and some of us are just shy.

Love and connection, being one of the most important human needs, is easy to get from dogs. They love us easily, they love us completely, and even when we let them down they are still there for us. It makes sense that those of us who struggle in the human world find our refuge in the natural world with dogs.
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From my position, I get to see something else that’s even more interesting – what happens when dogs shouldn’t be so easy to love. I get to see people who take abuse from their dogs and yet always forgive them. Dogs can bite their owners, bite their children, keep them from sleeping at night, ruin their expensive furniture or family heirlooms, and yet the owners continue to love them. Even more interestingly, owners will excuse every behavior or take the blame themselves.

I remember back before I knew what I was doing with dogs, I was out walking my dog through my busy neighborhood - I’m being generous by saying “walking,” because it was mostly being pulled, getting frustrated and getting blown off by my dog.

Towards the end of the walk, I was doing so terribly that someone took a minute out of their meal and stepped out of a restaurant just to heckle me. I remember very clearly a man opening the door across the street and yelling:
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“It’s called dog training. You need it.”
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If you’re rehabilitating your dog, there is a good chance that fear is wrapped up somewhere in your dog’s behavioral cocktail.

Teaching something like a basic “place” command (requiring a dog to step up onto a short platform) teaches you a lot about your dog’s personality. Some dogs will bound over any and everything to get to a treat. Others will greet anything new has a potential life-threatening danger.

Sophie, and many of the dogs I work with, fall into the second camp. Sometimes it’s not so obvious in their day to day life, but when you put the smallest new thing in front of them, they show you who they are.

If you ever want to successfully help rehabilitate a dog, or even train a dog, you’re going to have to feel comfortable dealing with fear. In this video, I discuss the two major approaches to dealing with fear: the slow gradual, dog-friendly approach and the “ripping off the Band-Aid” approach. I thought that Sophie was going to be resistant, but she ended up giving us an awesome display of why it’s sometimes good to go easy, have fun, and let the dog make choices rather than asserting yourself and making the choices for her.

If you have a fearful dog in your life, then it’s important that you learn how to navigate these moments confidently in a way that helps move the dog forward. Too often when a dog shows some trepidation with something, owners just manage it out of their lives. Sometimes, that is the right decision, but overcoming these little fears is going to manifest itself in your dogs as pure, new confidence.
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Also, overcoming little things like this is a GREAT way to build trust with a dog so you can overcome the bigger fears in life later.  
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A long time ago I realized I wasn’t very handy – you know with tools and fixing things. Most of my life I have internalized this belief about myself to the point where I was almost paralyzed when some time of minor problem popped up in my house.

A few months ago my wife pointed out that I have been able to teach myself practically anything with a dogged stubbornness and determination so it didn’t make much sense that I would run into something I’m not naturally inclined to do well and just throw up my hands and say “that’s not for me.”

While I’m used to being right basically all the time, I was wrong this time and she was right (I’m sure she will be happy to have that in writing).
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Since that conversation I haven’t gotten worlds better at fixing things, but I’ve changed my mindset. I’ve taken responsibility. That little change has changed everything.
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