Episode 274: 21 Days to a Better 2021

- You're listening to Bad Dog Agility, bringing you training tips, interviews, and news about the great sport of dog agility. (upbeat music) - I'm Jennifer. - I'm Esteban. - And I'm Sarah, and this is episode 274. - Today's podcast is brought to you by HitItBoard.com and the new Teeter Teach It, an easy-to-use tool that controls the amount of tip on your Teeter so you can introduce motion to

your dog in a gradual way. Go to HitItBoard.com for the new Teeter Teach It and other agility training tools and toys. That's HitItBoard.com. Today, we're going to be talking about 21 days to a better 2021, and that sounds a lot like pop psychology, a little bit of self-help, but every year, people start with new year's resolutions. And so I wanted us to talk about how we could help

you, our audience, achieve some of these goals. Now, we've talked at length about goal setting, especially in the context of agility, planning for big events, improvement, and all different arenas related to dog agility, but here I wanted to take a step back and ask a little bit more of the bigger life questions. So let me start off by asking you, Sarah, and then Jennifer, is there a goal

that you have set yourself, a classic new year's resolution, something that you would like to work on this year? And I will point out that we are three weeks into January. - That's true. Well, I didn't think of this as a new year's resolution, but it is pretty recent, and I'll give you two because I have one that I am succeeding with very, very well and I have

one that I'm failing at currently. - Okay. - So the one that I am succeeding at is upping my water. So I'm drinking more water, right? Like, a lot, a lot more water. - That is such a good one. - And this is something that, you know, everybody always says you should drink a lot of water. Every time I get a headache, someone asks me if I've been

drinking water today. And I just, you know, I thought I was, but I actually went to my doctor because I was having so many headaches and the first thing she said was, are you drinking enough water? Now, I said, you know, I kind of think probably so. - You know, I live with Sarah 24/7 and she barely drinks anything. - Yeah, I wasn't. - It's coffee. The coffee

has lots of caffeine. Caffeine is a diuretic. It sucks the water out of your body. And she rarely drinks water. - Ah, yeah, yeah. I guess we were drinking a lot of sparkling water. Anyway, so she told me to like three-X the amount of water that I was drinking, and so I did. - And you did and look what happened. - And I did, and my headaches went

away. And so, and I'm feeling better. And so now I'm super fanatical about always having my water bottle and drinking it. - And so definitively, I am not the source of her headaches. - I guess not. - Yeah, yeah. Okay, and then your other example you said was something that you're failing. - Yeah, so the other thing that I'm failing at currently, maybe I'll get it back on

track, is I wanted to get like a minimum of seven hours sleep every night. - Mm. - And so, 'cause that also was something that I thought was contributing to my headaches. So I did great during Christmas break. I was good, right? - Well, you didn't have to wake up. - Right, right. I was getting, like, 10, 11 hours a night. But now that I have to get

up in the morning, I'm not there yet. I let it get away from me this week, so I need to get back on track there. - I can't comment or I shouldn't comment 'cause I'm probably partially to blame there. All right, Jennifer, what about you? - I do have one that's going well and one that's not going well. - Ooh. - My one that's not going well didn't

go well last year when it was also a new year's resolution, so I think that's why I set a couple of them. One of my big ones that is going well, we'll start with the positive, is I'm trying to make sure with Ethan, Ethan's six years old and he's in kindergarten now, that we are trying to do more like family dinners. So I'm like, we're eating at the

dinner table. We are gonna turn the TV off. We are going to. - That is bold. - Because it tends to be with our quick-paced schedule, it's like grab food here, he'll grab food and want to eat on the couch and I'll grab a bite to eat on my way to teach. And I'm trying to really kind of set it up so that around 5:00, 5:30, I don't

have any commitments. I can make dinner and Jason's making dinner and we're sitting down and eating and it's going pretty good and it's much better. But my one not going so well is trying to keep up with emails and shorten my reply time. You know, I always get behind. And I, especially during the holidays, you know, you take more time off and, oh, people understand if you're late

getting back to them about scheduling a lesson. And I was like, I'm gonna try to do better. I'm gonna try to make sure that I'm quicker about my replies, even just text messages, and we're gonna get, I'm like Sarah, I'm gonna get back on track for that one. I'm gonna get back on track. But yeah, so three weeks in, we're doing all right on some, not as good

on others. - All right. I guess I should go and mine's, I think it's more classic. I'm just going to give one and admit that it's not going well at all. I think it's a combination. You can look at it as a weight issue, but really, in my mind, it's about an activity level, fitness issue. And with the pandemic, just being at home, we just don't go out

as often as we did before. You know, every time you'd go to the store, instead of having groceries delivered, you have to get out of your car and you gotta walk. You gotta walk up and down the aisles, you're pushing a cart, Hannah's on the cart, so the cart's a little bit heavier. You know, you're getting lots of exercise that you really don't think about. It just happens.

It's part of your day. It's getting your steps in. I'm sure, how many of you? I know you used to count your steps all the time. Jen, were you into that? Are you one of those 10,000 steps in a day people? - No, I am not. I am with my dog's GPS collars, but not mine. - Oh, okay. Nice. Nice. You know, there are people like that and

I always laugh when they told me and I asked, you know, what are you doing? And they're just pacing back and forth. They said, you know, I'm at 990 steps. I just need 10 more steps to get my thousand or 10,000 or whatever they need to get. So yeah, my normal weight, like my baseline weight, the weight that I think of this is me, is like 172. And

right now I'm at like 185 and that's a lot. So I need to do something about this. So basically, I'm trying to up my activity level. But I think until I can get back to what I consider my baseline, I am gonna have to cut a little bit of calories, which always sucks. I'm not very good at altering my diet. I tend to eat what I eat and

I don't know that there's too much room to go there because I like my donuts. Okay, so we've all talked about our goals. We had goals and we each have something that's not going great. Well, why isn't it going great? You know, we all have really good reasons for doing or for picking our goals, and everyone does, right? Whether it's, you know, to be more productive at work,

to train their dogs more, to be kinder to their neighbor that they don't like very much, there's lots of good reasons and we can sit down and consciously think about it, but it can be very, very difficult to make these changes. And so here, I just want to put an open call out for those of you who are big psychology buff or you have background in psychology, yeah,

send us your comments, your thoughts. We take emails at, what's our email for the show? - Team, T-E-A-M, @baddogagility.com. - Yeah, send us your thoughts. I'd love to hear it. We read all your emails and we'll reply to them, as well. But people are highly motivated when the year starts but now we're like January 20th, right? By the time this podcast comes out, it'll be the 21st, 22nd,

something like that. And you know, three weeks in, you lose that willpower and motivation and mine, frankly, it disappears on a daily basis, right? I started the day motivated. I have a very good first meal. And then by the time we hit eight, nine o'clock, I'm eating candy and whatever, graham crackers and marshmallows. And I'm like, Hannah, are you gonna eat that? Because, you know, I would like

to eat that. And so, you know, it really falls apart. And so you have a finite and I think this has been born out in many studies of impulse control, right? You have a finite amount of kind of motivation or willpower and you kind of use it up and so you can reach a point where it just breaks in a day, right? But there's also the issue of

for anything that we're looking at, we are trying to create what? Unless it's like a discreet goal, that's like it takes two weeks and then you're done with it, let's say it's a lifetime change, right? You want it to become a habit. But in the beginning, it's like you're dependent on motivation and willpower. But how motivated are you to brush your teeth in the morning, right? I don't

know how motivated I am to brush my teeth, but it's a habit that I do it, right? I get up. Before I eat anything, I'm going to brush my teeth, right? I feel weird if I don't get to brush my teeth, right? I remember one time I went to Vegas and then I woke up the next morning. No, wait. It would have been the night. Yeah. So that

night I go to brush my teeth and then I'm like, I don't have a toothbrush. And so I was like, okay, I'll get it in the morning, but then you go to bed without having brushed your teeth and it feels weird. It doesn't feel right, right? So, you know, there's a strong habit there. Brush your teeth at night and then you brush the teeth in the morning. So

we want to transition from relying on our motivation and willpower and getting to developing these habits. Okay, so, how do we do that? If that's the framework we're looking at, how do we do that? And now, Jennifer, I'm going to turn to you and say, well, let me start with Sarah real quick. What is that called? We talked about lowering or raising barriers. - Oh, like a response

cost. - Response costs. I think that's probably the fancy term. Jennifer, how would you apply something like that to habit development? - I think a lot of times, you got to look at baby steps, you know, the idea that, okay, if I have a goal of we talk about this 21 days, 21 days to, you know, a better you, 21 days to a better '21, it's setting that

goal, transitioning it from your very conscious effort to making it a habit, it's got to start with little steps. So if I want to say, I want to run more, I want to get to a point where I'm getting more exercise, I want to run a 5K, you're not gonna go out and on day one, run a 5K. You're gonna build up. Maybe I make it half a

mile, you know, and it's progress towards that. But it's little things that make it seem approachable. So in the standpoint of dog agility or dog training, let's just use generically dog training, maybe it's five minutes, five minutes. For the first week, I'm just gonna commit to five minutes and then on week two, I'm gonna go to 10 for a few days, then work our way up to 15

so that by the time I've made it to the end of the 21 days and that and now it's becoming a normal thing. I get home from work, I grab a quick snack, grab my dogs, we're gonna go train before dinner. Like that becomes part of what you just do. You come home, you change clothes, you grab the dog treats, you head out. But it does take the

effort initially and you want to look for baby steps. And then I think a big part of it is you want to reward yourself for your efforts, right? I think that's where, you know, when I diet, I always will kind of say, well, I'll have one little piece of candy if I make it through all healthy meals during the day. If I eat good, I will reward myself

with three M&Ms or, you know, whatever. And finding a way to reward where it's like, oh, if I cheat, if I put this fattening dressing on the salad, that's my cheat for the day. I don't get the dessert at the end. I'm not gonna reward myself because I didn't do as good with whatever dieting. I'm using that example because of new year's resolutions. So I think looking for

small steps, rewarding yourself for the progress on those small steps. - Yeah, I think that's so interesting because there are two really great things in there. And one was about starting with the baby steps, but I'm gonna start with the other one first, which is so huge. Dog trainers are really good at rewarding their dogs. They are terrible at rewarding themselves. I think they're very hard on themselves.

Even instructors out there maybe could do a little bit better with rewarding their students, right? They get on the students very much about not rewarding their dogs appropriately, but maybe they're not reinforcing the students quite as much as they should. And I think, as students, we have maybe tended to internalize that, right? So I think some of the best instructors that I've worked with give you lots of

positive feedback and when they're giving you lots of positive feedback, even when you get feedback that isn't so great, you know, hey, you need to change this or do that, it doesn't feel bad, you know, it feels okay. And so I think that gives us permission to reward ourselves. So I love your snack at the end of the day, and really, agility people do this already. So, everybody

think about this. How many of you out there have a strong association with going out to meals with agility? Like you go out out of town with your agility friends. You show Friday, Friday night, Saturday night, and you guys pick a restaurant. You all go there, you walk in there, and there's 30 other agility people. Everybody's all at the same place 'cause there's only a couple of restaurants

there in that town. And you eat, you drink, you have desserts. And for us, that's like a, like we don't diet at big events, like diet in the sense of-- - You eat healthily. - I'm not there. I'm eating like two, three desserts to get us that positive reinforcement. So we really enjoy all of our trialing, especially when we travel, and especially at big events. You know, it

makes me think of when we all go to Westminster. So in New York, obviously before the pandemic, we'd go, and before Saturday, it was Friday night, right? We always go. - Mm-hmm. - Is it's like a reward for taking the effort, getting out there, going all the way to New York, braving the traffic, the zombies that swarm your minivan as you're trying to drive to the hotel, never

drive again, and eat at the Korean restaurant. So we really enjoy that. And so, you know, that's a physical need that you have and in the same way that you would treat a dog, right? With treats, you're treating yourself with the restaurant but also the social activity, right? The time you spend with your friends. And then the other thing that you mentioned that I really liked was this

idea of starting small because if you walked up and you told someone, hey, you know, you're gonna teach, I don't know, whatever skill and you're gonna need to do like 200 of them every day for a week in order to do it, maybe that's not the best way to do that. You know, maybe start with 10, then 20, then 40. You want to go up very gradually. You

physically might not even be able to do it. You know, like how many pushups can you really do on day one? But start small, go slow, and then by day 30, you're gonna do a lot more than you started with, certainly. You were telling us something about Netflix. So you're a big, I think a lot of people are Netflix watchers. So how do you incorporate that into your

dog training? - Yeah, so for a while, I will be the first to admit I don't love the conditioning aspect of my dog training. I like to go out there and train. I like to go out and run sequences but conditioning is very much a part of what I need to do with them and it's not my favorite. So I basically set it up that I would not

log on to Netflix. I would not watch anything on Netflix unless I was actively doing their conditioning. And I just, one day, I just said, this is what we're doing and I actually was held to it, do really good. Now it's not as much of a problem. This was, I started this, oh, let's see. Would have been back at my old house so, I don't know, three, three

and a half years ago. And I just committed. I had Netflix on my iPad and I said, if I want to go turn on the iPad, we're gonna go into the fitness room and I'll watch something while I'm working the dogs. And now I really don't have that same view of conditioning like I used to. It used to be, oh, this is not the fun part. It's not

the sexy part of dog agility, you know, getting them down there and doing their sit to stand. And it absolutely changed the habit and my attitude about it. I didn't dread it. I didn't dislike it. I was like, oh, okay, I really want to watch the next episode. I guess I better get one of the dogs and start working out. - Right. - And I kind of set

myself up for a reward system and kind of, you know, a lot of people will do buddy systems when they're working out to make themselves kind of accountable, to give themselves something to tie in directly to it. And in this case, my reward was something that was tied directly to the activity itself. So it really worked and now I have no problem going out and my fitness area

doesn't actually even have a TV in it anymore. - That makes me think of dogs that love to do the tunnel and they don't really love weaving, but then you work intensely with them on weaving, they get lots of reinforcement for the weaving, and then they have a very different attitude about weaving, right? And so I think in this way, we can apply the training principles as dog

trainers to ourselves and really see a lot of success. Then we don't have to rely on this willpower because Jennifer is using Netflix to her advantage and it works, right? Rather than just everyday, she has to say, oh, I have to do this. I have to do this. I have to do this. Right? And maybe she doesn't have any willpower to do it when she hits, you know,

eight o'clock at night and she's been teaching all day and you gotta deal with the kid and you gotta deal with your husband who's basically a second kid or so I hear, you know, husbands in general are second kids. So, Sarah, one resolution that I know a lot of people out there listening have is start lines or contacts. Their dog breaks them. They don't stop when they need

to and it seems to be a longstanding problem. They want to fix it, but they don't fix it. In the context of everything we've been talking about, what do you think's going on and what could a possible solution be? - Well, I think that those can be areas where you're not quite sure what to do when they make the mistake or it's difficult for you to make the

choice to like put your dog away when they make that kind of a mistake. And these are things where a lot of times, that is going to be one of the better answers, right? Especially when you're in practice, like when your dog misses a contact, you don't want to go on and let them continue to rehearse that. You want to make sure that you're getting your criteria and

that and so I think paying attention to your criteria and whenever you let it go, you know, you can kind of give yourself a little slap on the wrist kind of like the old idea of the swear jar, right? When anybody in a group anytime anybody says a curse word, you put a dollar in the swear jar or something like that. You can put like a dollar for

every contact that you miss set aside and then it kind of also brings your awareness to it, because a lot of times, these are things that you didn't even really notice it happened. You didn't really notice your dog kind of keep that one paw up in their sit when it's supposed to be four on the floor, you know? - Right. - And so by highlighting it as something

that you want to change, you bring your focus to it and so you notice it more. - Yeah, you're talking about breaking the system 'cause right now, the system for contacts and start lines is this. You can still qualify and get a ribbon and get a cue, get a placement if you break a star line, if you break a contact, as long as you hit it, or maybe

the judge doesn't see and you're going to be positively reinforced. You're gonna get the ribbon. You're gonna get your cue. You're gonna get your qualification, right? And everybody's gonna tell you what a great run you had. And then let's say that your dog breaks the start line. It takes a couple of obstacles while you're watching them take it and then you leave the ring. You're not gonna get

any positive reinforcement from your friends. No one's going to walk up to you and say, hey, what a great job, what a great run. Can you teach me how to do that? Right? So that's not the kind of positive reinforcement that we like to get in agility, right? And so I think there are very powerful forces working there and here you're breaking that, right? We're saying, no, no,

no. If you're gonna miss the contact, then you know, now in the AKC, you have Fix and Go, you can redo it, right? And it can become a very good thing. In fact, you hear very good instructors and knowledgeable experience competitors be proud of themselves for, well, they might say something like, I didn't let him or her get away with it. I didn't let my dog get away

with it. But that they held their criteria and they realize that this is an important thing in the long-term, but they are giving themselves a pat on the back. And when they come off, people who know that they are struggling with start lines, right? Their friends, their instructors will positively reinforce that. Hey, you did the right thing by not going on to the next part of the course

or starting the course. It's better to leave the course now, for example. And so you can change the reinforcement that you are giving yourself and then you can go to dinner that night with your friends and think, yes, I am getting the dessert. Why? Because I did not let my dog get away with the broken start lines. And then at the next trial, your dog has beautiful, perfect

start lines because now they understand that Mom really means it and they're not gonna get to do any agility unless they meet their criteria at the start line. So I like how you are talking about shifting the way that you think and you can think of in terms of like, almost like punishers, reinforcements, reinforcers for yourself. - Right, 'cause basically, you know, if your dog misses the contact,

okay, let me clarify. If your dog doesn't perform the contact as you have trained them, right? But they hit the yellow, there is no immediate downside to that for you, right? Like, you know intellectually that this is gonna degrade your performance over time, but there's no downside at that moment. So we're kind of almost talking about adding an artificial downside to your dog not holding criteria, right? And

then adding an artificial upside to you making sure that your dog does hold criteria by telling your training partners, this is something I'm working on and when I make the hard decision to throw away a cue and fix the contact with Fix and Go, even though my dog hit the yellow and we wouldn't, you know, we could have cued, like you are going to help me, training partner,

by telling me great call on using your FEO to fix that contact, right? So I think that's one way to do it. I think with these habits, I think another thing that is, and it kind of is a little bit like Jennifer's Netflix thing that I find is really helpful with habits is building them into the timeline of your day. You know? So I find that a lot

of times, the more consistent the timing is, the easier it is for me to build that into a habit. And it doesn't work with everything, but with a lot of things, it can work out really well. I mean, when we work our dogs, we don't want to work them after they've eaten, right, 'cause they have full bellies, right? And so that becomes like an artificial line in the

sand in terms of the day, right, is that if you haven't yet worked the dog that day or worked them in the afternoon and it's getting close to dinnertime, you've got to get it done, and it's kind of the same. We kind of do the same things ourselves with our own workouts. We don't like to work out on a full stomach. And so, you know, if it's getting

to be dinnertime and we haven't worked out, we like, we're extra forced to get that workout in right there. Right? And so I think like these time, these like little points in time in your day can be really helpful for building habits because then you don't even think about it, right? When it comes to that part, it's kind of like your dogs, you know, they know what time

dinner is, right? When it starts to get to be that time of day, you start to say, oh, you know, I need to do this. I need to do that. Like, this is the time of day where I work out. This is the time of day where I go and work the dogs. - Right. Right. All right. Well, there's one more thing that I wanted to talk about

related to all of this and Jennifer already mentioned it in passing, and I want to elaborate on it a little bit. The idea of having a training partner, sometimes they're called accountability partners, someone like-minded, you set a goal with, Jennifer, can you tell us a little bit about that? Do you have a training partner? - I think we've talked a little bit about this. We had another podcast

where we talked a lot about finding motivation. I think it was one of our motivation podcasts. And I think having a training partner whether it's live, somebody that you can get with, although COVID's making that difficult, so possibly somebody that you check in with on Zoom or you have a phone call, somebody else is there to help keep you accountable. You know, I think that's why in terms

of going to the fitness example real quickly, a lot of people have fitness equipment in their house. You know, they have a treadmill or they have weights or whatever, yet you'll still find them going to the gym. And then you think, well, why do they need to go to the gym? Why do they need to schedule an appointment with the personal trainer when all the stuff's right there?

And it's the accountability. If you have a 9:00 AM appointment, you have somebody else relying on you and you're going to get up and you're gonna go and you're gonna put more effort than if you just say, oh, I gotta get down to the basement sometime today. You can always find something else to do and put it off. I think with training, it can be very much the

same thing, whether it be a rental or a set time. Right now, I'm doing training with my mom, so we have a set time every week and it forces me to train and it's not even negotiable in my head. You know, if I say to myself, well, I think I'll train my dogs and somebody says, well, can I do a private lesson? I'll often say to myself, well,

no, okay. I'll train my dogs later. Sure, I'll put you in that spot. But by having somebody else at that time that we are doing this together, we are training together, I'm far, far more accountable, and that's just what I do. I don't move that time to put something else in. I don't go to the grocery store at that time. That's when me and my mom train. I

get the dogs, we go out there, and it's that guaranteed time. So I think, you know, maybe if it's not somebody that you're getting with live, maybe even just a phone call at the end of, we're gonna train Tuesdays. That's when you're gonna train on Tuesday, I'm gonna train on Tuesday. I will call you Tuesday night and I want to know what you did and I'm gonna call

you and you're gonna have to tell me that you did something, not I put it off or you make a pact, you know? Okay, every day I call you and you don't train, you gotta buy me dinner. - Right, right. - I'm gonna eat your candy allotment for the day. I will not give you the code to your lockbox unless you can tell me what you trained that

day. You know? So having somebody else and knowing that there's somebody else out there doing it with you, you know, again, live is always great, especially, I think early mornings, late nights, you know, having somebody who's also going to the club at 8:00 AM or also going down to the club at 9:00 PM is helpful, but that's making things hard with COVID right now. So, you know, just

a phone call or a Zoom call, review what you did, know that somebody has somebody with a dog in your similar training level, right? So they have a puppy, you have a puppy, we're working on stuff together. I just think that's a great option to help keep the accountability, and at some point, it's not a phone call that you have to make to check in. It's a phone

call you want to make, right? You want to talk to each other and see what happens. And that's that whole transition of taking something that seems forced and doing it enough that it transitions into that habit. - Yeah, no, that's awesome. That's awesome, and I think we've had a really great discussion. You know, we started this podcast talking about 21 days, 21 days to make a new habit.

You see it all over the internet, articles, books, people selling their motivational stuff for the new year, and it's probably gonna take you longer than 21 days. - But I think 21 days would be a solid start. - But, yeah, I think that's a great start, and I think keeping this big picture that Jennifer was talking about of using reinforcement for yourself, I think that that's a key

point, understanding that you're starting with motivation and willpower, but eventually you want to turn this into a habit that doesn't require motivation or willpower. - I think that is huge because I think people think it's always gonna be as hard to find that motivation as it is in that kind of beginning period of time. And so I think understanding that you're moving it from motivation, willpower to just

part of your routine - Right. - I think routine would be another great word for habit. - Sure. - It's part of your routine. It's part of what you do. - Sure, sure. And understanding that motivation slash willpower is like a finite resource. It's not infinite. At some point, you know, it's like energy, you need to sleep. There's only so much energy you can have. So, keep that

in mind. Train with a partner or have some kind of accountability partner and rethink some of your issues in agility, especially as they pertain to things like start lines, contacts, and think about how you can reinforce yourself for doing the right thing in terms of handling or training and I think you'll start to get some really good returns on your investment in yourself for the new year, your

goals. And so hopefully when we meet again next week, we'll all have made progress on the things that we weren't making progress on. - I'll be full of water and well-rested. - There you go. - I hope, I hope. Well, before we finish this podcast. we'll just end on I guess a bit of a funny story. Why don't you tell everybody about your Christmas present this year? 'Cause

this is, it goes directly into the idea of building habits and the idea that you can make things that you want to do easier and you can make things that you don't want to do harder. That's like, you know, one of a good strategy for goals as well, so. - Right, right. I want to know whose idea was to get me this. - It was Isaac's idea. -

Okay, so Isaac, my 16-year-old son, they got me a box and it's a box, it's like a cookie jar. It's a clear plastic, like you can see what's in it, but it's got this lock mechanism, an electronic lock mechanism. So you can type in or you scroll around. - A dial, yeah. - Yeah, yeah. You can lock it up for like a minute, 10 minutes, 24 hours, five

days, right? And you put your candy or cigarettes or game controller in there or whatever and then you just set it on a timer. Yeah, and you can't get to it. Like there's no way to open the box short of smashing it, like with a hammer. And it's the most horrible thing because I had some candy and then Hannah was just fiddling, our 10-year-old was fiddling with the

dial and she had set it to the max, which I think was like 10 days or something. - Yeah, nine days, 23 hours. - I didn't know that it was like primed, and so the container was open. And so I just wanted to put the lid on, I don't know, to keep it candy fresh or something. I'm so dumb. I just put the lid on and then suddenly

I could hear the locking mechanism close. And so then this was like Christmas day and so I didn't have access to it for like nine or 10 days. I couldn't get to any of that candy. So like, since then, if I walk into the living room and I see Esteban with like three or four candy wrappers in front of him and the box there, right, unlocked in the

box, I'll just put the lid on and I'll just twist the dial to like two hours, right? And hit it, just to like break, you know, interrupt the behavior, essentially, right? Just give him that little bit of a break that he needs to not just keep chowing down on the taffies in the box. - Yeah, yeah. You guys can Google that, look it up. I'm sure there are

several different ones or maybe Sarah can put a link in the show notes page. Some of you want to get it for yourself or for your spouse or, you know. - Right, but for your own habits, just think of ways that you can make doing the right thing easy. You know, have your treats, have your treats and your toys by the back door so it's always easy to

grab what you need to train your dog, that kind of thing, you know? Make the right behavior easy, make the wrong behavior hard. - Yup. - And that's it for this week's podcast. We'd like to thank our sponsor, HitItBoard.com. Happy training. (upbeat music)