Fall to the Level of Your System

“You do not rise to the level of your goals; you fall to the level of your systems.” - James Clear

If you’re currently in a place where dog ownership mostly makes your life hell, it can be hard to know where to start making a change. It’s stressful to figure out if what you’re doing is making a positive difference. It feels like you’re winging it. The results are inconsistent at best, or completely missing at worst.

Hinging your success on day-to-day variables like motivation and ambition can result in the bottom falling out of your goals as soon as challenges arise. Physical energy levels, how much time we have available, how much we have going on, mental and emotional bandwidth - these things are constantly changing for everyone. You’re not alone in these challenges, but what differentiates who moves through them with success or failure?

Why a System?

Consistency is key in determining our success when we want to make a change. Manifesting true change takes a certain amount of discipline, and embracing the nature of repetitive practice - something we come back to every day. Through that practice we create new habits and little by little we take our life in the direction of our goals. But if it were that easy, it wouldn’t be so rare. So what can we do to get ourselves from where we are now, to where we want to go? We create a system.

Systems help remove the ambiguity of knowing “what to do next.” By standardizing our practices we can be assured that “at the bare minimum, I’m not making things any worse.” The systemization of your process also makes it possible to reproduce and plan - if my dog eats a bag of food every three weeks, setting up an autoship means I can plan to budget the correct amount towards dog food each month. If my dog is consistently fed 2 cups of food in his crate at 6 pm, this is an easy set of steps to follow on a stressful day or even to give to a pet sitter. This in turn lowers your stress levels and creates the mental space for other beneficial habits to form. Reliable practices create consistent results.

Getting Practical

When we start this journey, we should do so with a beginner’s mind and a mentally clean slate. Forget what we’ve done in the past - it hasn’t worked and attaching ourselves to past choices just creates clutter that gets in the way of the future. The place to begin is management and repeating events - the little everyday choices we make that form the foundation of our dog’s life.

“Management” is the things we do to set the dog up for success and prevent the rehearsal of undesired behavior. We prevent what we don’t want so we can encourage what we do want. These fundamental practices can transform the experience of dog ownership from overwhelming to manageable. Once we’re a little less overwhelmed, that gives us the room to start actively improving.

A Day In the Life

There are a few recurring responsibilities you signed up for when you got a dog: feeding, training, and exercise. These things need to happen every day whether we’re feeling motivated that day or not.

How you lay out your day will look different for everyone - life circumstances are unique to the individual. A low-key day for my well-managed pack of adult dogs goes something like this:

• 6:30 AM: wake up, let dogs out of crates out into the yard. Mine are okay outside unsupervised for a bit, so they hang out in the yard while I go get ready.

• 7:00 AM-ish: Leash everyone up and out the door for a 30-45 minute walk. I train for neutrality, being easy to walk on the leash, and disengaging quickly when something “interesting” catches their attention (sidewalk snacks, particularly interesting smells, etc).

• 7:45 AM: Get home, let everyone cool off, then into their crates. Feed breakfast.

• 8:00 AM - Noon: everybody chills out on Place or in their crates while I get my morning focus work done.

• Noon: Take a break, get some sunshine. Maybe a quick game of fetch to decompress.

• 1-5 PM: More chill time while I work.

• 5:30 PM: Prep the dogs for training, crate them. Prep their food.

• 5:45 - 6:15 PM: Training sessions for each dog. Each session lasts around 10-15 minutes - it depends on what the dog needs that day! Crate each dog for a bit after training, this improves retention.

• 6:30-10 PM: Everyone comes out of their crates to relax in the evening. If one of the dogs is feeling high-energy, we might play some fetch or some tug. We might go for an “adventure” to a patio, store, or a park if the weather allows. Most nights, we just hang out

• 10 PM: Bedtime! Everyone into their crates until we wake up to do it again tomorrow!

Management Protocols

• If my dogs are not eating directly from my hand during training, they are fed in their crates.

• When I am gone, the dogs are crated. They also sleep in their crates at night.

• Puppies are placed on a schedule of “2 hours in, 1 hour out” to ensure we are getting plenty of bonding time and interaction while teaching them self-settling and preventing “busyness”.

• If I cannot guarantee a dog’s recall, they stay leashed in public.

• Every time we go through a threshold (front door, yard gate, etc) we take a pause, get everyone calm, then proceed together. No charging through doorways or out of their crates.

• The trash cans have lids.

• The cat litter box is kept clean.

• Baby gates are placed in the doorways of “other” rooms to prevent opportunities to create trouble.

Setting yourself up for Success

Change is hard, and sustainable change is even harder. So what can we do to set ourselves up for success, and make sure it sticks? Here are some strategies.

Only change one thing at a time.

While it’s tempting to overhaul your lifestyle because today’s the day it all changes for us, this all-or-nothing approach tends to see the bottom fall out of it. We are better served by making incremental changes, getting comfortable with the “new normal,” then making the next adjustment. This might start with crate training, and becoming accustomed to crating the dog at night and when we leave the house. It might mean moving from free feeding to offering food at “mealtimes” then picking it up. Don’t throw you or your dog in the deep end - take the long view and embrace gradual improvement. Let time and repetition do the work.

Make it easy on yourself

It’s much easier to maintain habits that aren’t wildly inconvenient. I keep my leashes and shoes stored by the front door, and I keep poop bags in my “dog walking” waist pack. I keep my training equipment stored together. I keep a measuring scoop in the dog food bag. I have dog crates in my bedroom for nighttime, and a second set in my vehicle for travel. Each crate has a water bucket. Things should be easy to find and easy to grab - the equipment shouldn’t be getting in the way of accomplishing our goals. Once upon a time, I used to toss my keys on the sideboard table by the door - now there’s a bowl there and the keys are “put away” even though the fundamental behavior of “tossing my keys down the moment I walk in” has not changed. By removing obstacles, we increase the likelihood of our own adherence.

Stay flexible

A good system is there to make your life easier, not harder. It’s there to remove stress and anxiety, not become a source of it. It should flex with the variables of life - bend, don’t break. Be flexible with yourself and find ways to integrate change into the very real parts of life that aren’t picture-perfect. If part of a system is consistently not-happening it is very likely that it’s either not a good fit for your everyday life, or there’s an adjustment we could make that will enable better adherence. A system is there to work for you - not the other way around.

Lower the Temperature of Life

By systemizing our must-do tasks, we ease the stress, anxiety, and mental load that can come with dog ownership. This system makes room for us to create additional positive changes - training for behaviors we want. It lowers the temperature of life, removes conflict between the human and animal, and lets you begin to experience a sense of routine and partnership. It creates structure that we can fall back on. And once we have that, we can start creating the life we dreamed of when we brought home the dog in the first place.

The Mindful Use of Training vs Exercise

In a world where pet obesity is rampant and reactivity is seemingly everywhere, a pet owner’s mantra has bubbled up: “good dogs are tired dogs.” While this holds some measure of truth, it doesn’t paint a complete picture and I want to unpack exercise versus training. After all there are only so many hours in a day available to do “Dog Things” and if our goal is having a well-behaved dog living his best life, then it’s important to spend those hours wisely.

Exercise and training create a feedback loop - one doesn’t work without the other

Not regularly exercising your dog can manifest in anxious behaviors, but not all behavioral issues are solvable via exercise. There’s the idea (especially in working breeds) that they need endless exercise to be content but past a point it’s “man with a hammer syndrome”. It’s totally possible to have a dog that’s physically in great shape, with horrible behavior problems.

Don’t get me wrong, exercise is important. The mind and body are not separate - the mental state flows from the physical. Under-exercised dogs are put in the position where their actions are only so much their fault. But bad habits can stick around and need to be fixed even if we up the activity levels.

We cannot out-exercise a training problem. 

There must be a balance. Exercise creates the conditions for positive change. If a dog is mentally stable, mild-tempered, and reasonably well trained, then exercise solves many problems.  But it’s not a magic bullet.

Mindful Exercise

There’s a lot of ways to get anything done, and exercising a dog is among them. The dog owners I feel most for are the folks who want to do everything right, and are willing to put in the work. But providing adequate exercise can be tough if issues like reactivity, leash pulling, and failure to recall make every outing miserable.

If limited space is an issue, then I like interactive/engagement related play and work to get ourselves moving - any small available space like a hallway, bedroom, or a patch of grass becomes fair game for getting some time in with my dog. Ice storm? You’ll catch me pushing the living room couch back to play some tug.

Longer walks and outings are a great chance to tailor your experience of your time with your dog - and it doesn’t need to be the same every day. Some days can be about decompressing and spending time together. Some are opportunities to train. Some are about getting some hard exercise done. Be mindful, not mindless - take a look at what your dog needs today.

For the vast majority of dogs (big or small), 45 minutes of leash-walking per day is the bare minimum. From there, the sky is the limit - everything from off leash hiking to classes to dog sports exists.

Training vs Exercise

While exercise is important, it’s just one part of the picture. If the dog fence fights, has no impulse control, can’t settle down, or blows off their recall, physical exhaustion doesn’t fix it - it just spackles over the problem. You need to TRAIN.

Positive manifestation is very powerful - create a picture in your mind of what I’d love to have in a perfect world. What does your ideal dog look like? What is the gap from where you are to that ideal? This is opposite of the notion of stopping behavior - focus less on what you want to stop and more on what you.

Its not that I want my dog to stop pacing in the house - I want them to learn to self-settle. I want them to experience most thresholds as places where self control is the default. I want their recall to be quick and cheerful.

Socializing towards Neutrality

There are places the idea of “exercise” can go wrong and actually make things worse. Places like dog parks teach the dog that leaving the house should cue arousal, bad leash manners, screaming, and jumping. 

Here in the real world, the easiest way to get through life with a dog is to have one that isn’t overly surprised by much. When we socialize dogs, we’re introducing the dog to the world much as we would a child. We encourage good manners, learning to mind your own business - we expand their universe to include the things they might run into. We want the idea of new things to be all by itself so normal that when something unexpected happens, the dog absorbs it with experienced eyes. Experience breeds reliability.

A dog that is consistently socialized to the real world, with real-world expectations learns to value downtime in deep and profound ways.

They had a busy day with a lot they had to get done, same as the rest of us and they are happy to rest. So the feedback loop of behavior means that how we approach Outside the House impacts what we get Inside the House.

It’s All One Dog

What we do with our dog in one place loops back into all their other behaviors - behavior is not an island. A dog that gets adequate exercise for their needs, spends a lot of time being rewarded for impulse control, and is engaged in their handler is going to be in the right mental state to into those behaviors as default when in doubt. The things we encourage feed into one another and striking the right balance to meet the needs of each dog requires building a relationship and a little intuition.

When it comes time to exercise vs train we must be mindful, not mindless.

Redefining your Relationship with your Dog

There is an underlying theme I run into over and over when people tell me about the issues they experience with their dogs.

They won’t come when called, are unable to calm themselves, or reactive - they’re focused on everything BUT their human. Fundamentally, the majority of these issues stem from misunderstandings and poor communication between dog and human - they’re relationship problems. 

How did we get here?

Some of these relationship issues begin with a reaction to “The old fashioned way” of doing things - dogs used to be “outside” animals, where dominance-based training was the rule of the day and rubbing a dog’s nose in its mess was considered house training.

It’s a good thing to have moved on from those days.

But in doing so, we seem to have gone too far in the other direction, where dogs are not apex predators but instead “furbabies” with no desires beyond cuddles and treats. We infantilize our animals out of love, and it creates a huge host of behavioral issues we then have to train our way out of. What is the solution? We need to radically redefine our relationship to our dogs. 

The History of Dog Ownership

The human-dog bond is currently estimated to be around 32,000 years old - for the record, the dog predates agriculture by about 20,000 years. For most of history, the keeping of “pets” was the exclusive province of the wealthy upper class. For the rest of society, every mouth to feed had to be a contributing member of the household. An animal that does nothing functional is a very new idea. 

The majority of dog breeds we have today descend from the legacy of working animals. The labrador retriever asleep on your couch descends from generations of dogs bred to plunge into freezing water to retrieve downed birds. The pit bull that follows you to your room at night comes from generations of dogs prized for their courage and strength in battle - both with other dogs and in hunting. The Siberian Husky excavating your backyard does so because those traits enabled their survival in one of the harshest climates on earth. And so it goes for each breed - the Great Pyrenees was bred to guard livestock, the Jack Russell terrier was bred to hunt and kill small animals, the Australian Cattle Dog to bully cattle twenty times their size with nothing but their teeth and sheer presence.

The Result

These genetic traits are what make breeds distinct from one another. To build a relationship truly based on mutual respect and understanding, the instincts in your dog’s very bones must be acknowledged and honored without consideration for our own ego. We must adjust our perspective from what we emotionally wish dogs were to what they actually are. From this newfound perspective, we can create beautiful, mutually beneficial relationships based in trust and understanding, where everyone’s needs are met. 

The Solution

When we consider the idea of redefining our relationship to our dogs, what does that actually look like?

It begins with acknowledging the reality that your dog is an animal and relates to the world differently than we as human beings do. Their primary sense is not vision or hearing, it is smell. They are a social animal, but with a specific definition of social - wolves live in packs, but packs do not go and hang out with other packs to blow off steam. Dogs prefer the security of stable social groups and have no inherent behavior-based need to socialize with random dogs or people. 

The Breed Difference

We need to also acknowledge the genetic drives and needs of each breed and provide healthy outlets for those instincts so they’re channeled in productive ways. If you have a Belgian Malinois, that dog will need to bite and work in order to be a good dog everywhere else. If these bone-deep needs are not accommodated, they will find outlets that are more than likely to be destructive. While the form those outlets take will vary from breed to breed and dog to dog, there are some consistent behaviors we see in most dogs - acquiring food, chasing prey, orienting to the world through their nose, instinctively defending resources and territory, the urge to run and explore, and the need to interact with their social group.

With training, these motivators become currency to the dog. As their human, you hold the keys to their world - what you get out of the dog depends on what you put in.

Where to Start?

Step one is creating a household based on clear, consistent, fair rules that set the dog up for success. Allowing one version of a behavior because it’s funny or cute will set that dog up to display the versions we don’t want. For example, allowing a dog to jump on a strong able bodied person might end poorly for a child or an elderly person. Sneaking bits of food off your plate turns into theft. We must apply clear, consistent rules so that the dog understands how to succeed. 

The Good News

The good news is that training is the vehicle by which we create a system of communication between two vastly different species. Something magical happens when you begin training from the perspective of creating clarity using the things the dog wants - suddenly the dog understands that they can control their world through their choices. Once this revelation occurs, we have a dog interested in making better choices to control their outcome. They become engaged in their relationship with their person, the first step to a well-trained dog. From here, creating the final picture becomes a matter of owner education, long-term consistency, and the genetic potential of the dog

Common Pitfalls

There are a few common pitfalls I have identified as key creators of the majority of problems I notice people experience - improper socialization, management issues, and “Everything in life is free.”

Improper Socialization

When most people think of socialization, they imagine it as taking their dog or puppy around to say hi to new people, and to the dog park to play. Maybe the pet store or the vet clinic. While their heart is in the right place, often as not, dogs raised under this paradigm of socialization end up reactive and need remedial training because this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the goals of good socialization and how to approach it.

As contradictory as it might seem, a well socialized dog is one that DOESN’T necessarily want to interact - at its core reactivity derives from the anticipation of interaction. 

Neutrality is the Gold Standard

Good socialization teaches the dog to process new things at their own pace (flooring, busy environments, rides in the car, other dogs, other animals, and everything else the world might throw at them), focus through distractions, and feel secure that their person has their back. Good socialization should NEVER overload them to the point they process the experience as unpleasant or traumatic. 

Management issues

Management is best defined as setting up the dog’s environment so that they are successful.

This might mean crating the dog when you’re unable to supervise them, keeping them on a leash if they have an unreliable recall, or storing the trash can somewhere the dog cannot access it.

It might mean recognizing that two dogs within the same household do not get along and that their incompatibilities are best approached through crating and rotating, or muzzle conditioning.

Good management builds up a bank of successful experiences that shape behavior in the direction we want, while preventing the rehearsal of undesirable behaviors. Behavior is like a track worn through the grass - the more times you walk a path, the more entrenched it becomes. Management lets you prevent what you DON’T want so you can train what you DO want.

Nothing in Life is Free

One of the keys to motivating a dog is their perception that you are the gateway to good things.

Everything good flows from their human - food, toys, freedom, affection, and security.

A dog that is continually given these things without any contingent behavior becomes oversaturated and thus more difficult to motivate.

Why train with treats when you could just train with the food they already eat in a day? Why have 50 toys laying out when they only play with one or two?

Making access to resources contingent on training and good behavior makes them more valuable to the dog, and the behaviors in question more persistent.

Furthermore, restricting access to resources actually improves your relationship with your dog - and this goes double for working breeds. It’s not just food time, it’s hangout time with Mom or Dad PLUS food! Best part of the day! It’s not just a ball laying in the yard, it’s an opportunity to bond. 

Conclusion

The human-dog bond is one of the most remarkable things in all the world - two vastly different species that have come to be inseparable from each other.

This relationship blossoms into something beautiful when we acknowledge and honor our dogs for who they really are and give them what they need to be successful. If you’re here, I assume that is because you are someone who wants to do their best by their best friend, which puts you on the path towards meeting those needs.  

Expecting your dog to Do Stuff to earn their pay is not cruelty.

It grants them the gift of purpose.

It gives them a place to channel their intelligence and strengths.

It redefines your relationship.