Training Tuesday: Who Should Know Better?

Aligning your values in training and competition

Used with permission from Megan Foster's Fostering Excellence in Agility.

Today I want to talk about the phrase, "...but they know better."

I hear this a lot in training and in competition where a handler will assume that a mistake is 100 percent the dog's fault: "They know this and they should know better, and they should perform to criteria no matter what."

We need to spend some time unpacking this idea just to make sure that we are staying in check with ourselves and our training values and our competition values.

So first we have to break down who should know? Is it the dog's responsibility to perform to criteria no matter what, or is it the handler's responsibility to uphold criteria no matter what? I don't think you can have one without the other, and that's really what we need to take a really hard look at and be honest with ourselves.

Learn more in Megan's podcast and transcript here: https://bit.ly/WhoShouldKnowBetter.