Train FOR the Moment, not IN the Moment

I'm sure that the title of this blog post is a quote from someone at some point and I heard it somewhere specific, but I have no idea when or where or from whom I might have heard it. But it did specifically pop in my head when I was working with a client at their home a little while back and I haven't been able to get it out of my head since!

With that specific client, they'd been trying for a couple of months to get their dog comfortable riding in the car again - he used to love it and even used to ride with them to take their kiddos to school each morning until one day, for some reason, he didn't like it anymore and wouldn't get in the car. There's a whole variety of potential reasons why that may have happened and I could take an entire blog post just exploring those reasons, but the fact is that he wasn't even interested in going near the car when they were getting the kiddos packed up and ready to leave.

In one session (more specifically, in less than an hour), he was hopping into and out of both their car and their SUV for me and for his pawrents as if he'd been doing it all along without any problems! This isn't a humble-brag blog post - I'm completely honest when I say I don't think I did anything super special to get him into the car. However, I was prepared to spend the whole hour-long session rewarding little things and trying small strategies...which might have been the clincher for him!

Of course, when he first started hopping in the car again, his humans were like, "What the heck? We've been working on this for months and he's acting like a complete angel with you," which I totally understand and I know that can be pretty frustrating! But, then I remembered the quote, "Train FOR the moment, not IN the moment." I wondered out loud to my clients if taking it slow during our session, offering him close to all the time in the world, and practicing a lot of patience at his pace helped him out. His mom confirmed that, most of the time, when she was trying to work on getting in the car, it was in the morning right before leaving for school. At a time when she was already trying to wrangle a couple of kiddos and they're possibly running late and when it could get frustrating really fast to deal with a wishy-washy, "will he or won't he hop in the car?" doggo, the doggo in question was struggling to see the car as a good thing and actually want to go with them for a ride.

Taking the time during our session, when things were calm and we could truly go at his pace without pressure, led to some really great results and we were able to rebuild his skill of jumping in the car again. Training in the morning was not only stressful (for the humans and the dog), it was also not effective. A much more viable strategy for them, as well as many busy families, was practicing for a few minutes or for just a handful of treats in the evening or on Saturday before some errands. When he started hopping in easily and consistently, then they could resume asking him if he'd like to come with to take the kiddos to school again!

All of that is to say, if you need or want a particular behavior in a certain context and at a certain time, train FOR that moment ahead of time, so that you aren't forced to manage the stress for all parties involved of trying to train IN the moment!