Podcasts about yerkes dodson law

Is stress always a bad thing for teams? Not necessarily—but push too hard, and you'll see diminishing returns. Let's unpack the Yerkes-Dodson Law and its impact on leadership. In this episode of the Multifamily Collective, we explore the Yerkes-Dodson Law, a principle from 1908 that remains crucial for leaders today. This law demonstrates how moderate stress can enhance performance—but excessive stress can lead to burnout and reduced productivity. Here's how you can apply this to your leadership style: Understand Stress Thresholds: Healthy stress drives performance, but micromanagement and constant pressure can push teams past their limits. Set Clear Expectations: Instead of overloading your team, establish clear goals and ensure everyone knows what success looks like. Provide Resources: Support your team with the right tools, technology, and people to accomplish their objectives without unnecessary strain. Take the Pulse: Use pulse surveys, weekly check-ins, and open dialogue to gauge your team's stress levels and adjust accordingly. Balanced leadership isn't about how much you push—it's about how effectively you support your team's journey to success. The result? Sustainable performance and a thriving culture. If you're committed to leading with balance, like this video and subscribe to the Multifamily Collective for actionable leadership insights. Keep your teams motivated, not burned out. For more engaging content, explore our offerings at the https://www.multifamilycollective.com and the https://www.multifamilymedianetwork.com. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/mike-brewer/support

Visit us at shapedbydog.com    Harnessing excitement in dog training and understanding arousal lets you create better focus from your dog! Whether your dog gets over the top or seems super laid back, knowing their emotional pathway and what you can do to help them get in the optimal zone will make a world of difference to your training and life with your dog.   In this episode you'll hear:   • How understanding arousal levels can improve your dog's performance in training. • The impact of the Yerkes-Dodson Law on dog behavior and anxiety. • Practical strategies to harness and manage excitement during training sessions. • Insights into recognizing different emotional states in dogs. • Techniques to help calm an over-aroused dog during training. • The importance of building a strong relationship with your dog for effective training. • How to create a balanced training environment for your dog • Tips for identifying the signs of an overly excited dog and how to bring them back to a calm state.   Recallers Opportunity: Write to us at wag@dogsthat.com with the subject line Pathways   Resources:   1. Podcast Episode 86: How to Train Unmotivated or Overexcited Dogs - https://dogsthat.com/podcast/86/ 2. Podcast Episode 88: Barrier Frustration: Help for Fence Fighting, Leash, Reactivity and Window Guarding - https://dogsthat.com/podcast/88/ 3. Podcast Episode 109: Project Calm Dog: Prevent Over Enthusiastic Greetings - https://dogsthat.com/podcast/109/ 4. Podcast Episode 219: Self- Regulation Helping Shy, Hyper, Anxious Or Fearful Dogs To A Better Life - https://dogsthat.com/podcast/219/ 5. Podcast Episode 191: Get Your Dog To Calm Down With This Common Sense Protocol For Relaxation - https://dogsthat.com/podcast/191/ 6. YouTube Playlist: Target Training for Dogs with Susan Garrett - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLphRRSxcMHy3ylCyQ2bJQSCwo_ERiVHj3&si=k36JyMfxaVRmNo8T 7. YouTube Video: Understanding Your Dog's Reinforcement Zone (RZ) with Susan Garrett - https://youtu.be/OaUAScgaFAg 8. ItsYerChoice Summit - https://recallers.com/iycsummit-join/ 9. Crate Games Online - https://get.crategames.com/ 10. Watch this Episode of Shaped by Dog on YouTube - https://youtu.be/J6UhcWPl7CM

If you've ever found yourself caught in that frustrating loop of caring too much or not giving a damn about your fitness goals, you're in the right place. Today, we're cutting through the noise and getting real about what you need to get yourself off the couch and workout. Trust me, I know motivation can be as elusive as a spare treadmill on January first, but guess what? We're flipping the script! We'll start with three easy peasy must haves, and then dive into the Yerkes-Dodson Law to crack the code on balancing stress and workout performance. Here's where it gets juicy—I'm giving you four counterintuitive but totally life-changing skills to up your game.  We'll dig into why you're skipping workouts and what problems they might be solving for you. Plus, I'll dish out some EFT tapping tricks that'll keep you grounded and zen, even on tough days. Oh and PS - no more beating yourself up or shaming yourself into action. So, dumbbell up! We're about to shake off those motivational cobwebs, embrace the power of tiny steps, and get you back on track with a whole lot of kickassery (in a self-love way) Ready to dive in? Let's get this party started! Resources mentioned in the episode: EFT Beginner Guide Connect on Social: ⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠

Most women feel stressed out regularly. In reality, humans are supposed to feel stressed, it actually helps us perform better. Listen to be reminded of the Yerkes Dodson Law that you may have learned in Psych 101, and also to learn how to empathize and when to (and NOT to) help! Subscribe if you love the DPM show! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/drpsychmomshow/subscribe⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and you'll get all my awesome bonus episodes! Most recent subscriber episode: "Love Languages Are Not Based On Research" And When People Say Stuff Like This In Marriage! For my secret Facebook group, the "best money I've ever spent" according to numerous members, go ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! Or click blue subscribe button on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠my Facebook page⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. It's $4.99/mo. For coaching from DPM, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.drpsychmom.com/coaching/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For therapy or life coaching, contact us at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.bestlifebehavioralhealth.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Follow me on TikTok! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@therealdrpsychmom⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqLm4xRaUeroBodFc-h4XDQ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/drpsychmomshow/message

For more than 30 years Professor Tracey Wade has been at the forefront of eating disorder research, clinical practice and public policy. Currently the Director of the Flinders Institute for Mental Health and Wellbeing at Flinders University, Professor Wade has co-written three therapy books, published hundreds of papers and has just been awarded the 2023: Australian Association for Cognitive and Behavioural Therapy - Distinguished Career Award.In this episode of Strong Enough - the podcast from Eating Disorders Families Australia - we focus on her work on the latest genetic links to eating disorders, delve into her research on the importance of media literacy as a way to combat the menace of social media and find out her insights into the perfectionism trait that can trigger disordered eating in many forms including bulimia, restrictive eating and anorexia nervosa.If you would like more information about Professor Wade's work here is the link to her paper on the influence of social media on eating disorders and her paper on perfectionism interventions.Professor Wade also quotes:the Yerkes-Dodson Law of psychologyher colleague Professor Marika Tiggermann's work on eating disorders and body imageand Viktor E Frankl about finding the space between a stimulus and a responseWant more? Become an EDFA Member: https://edfa.org.au/become-a-member/ It costs less than a cup of coffee a month.Website: https://edfa.org.au/Join EDFA's eating disorder support groups and eating disorder support forums: https://edfa.org.au/parents-and-carer-support/eating-disorder-support-groups/Book a free counselling session with EDFA's Fill The Gap program: https://edfa.org.au/counselling-service/Find out more ways to help here: https://edfa.org.au/donation/https://edfa.org.au/get-involved/volunteer/ For more information click on these links to the EDFA website:Anorexia NervosaBulimia NervosaBinge Eating DisorderARFID - Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake DisorderOSFED - Other Specified Feeding & Eating Disorders#eatingdisorderresearch#perfectionism#whatcauseseatingdisorders#anorexia#bulimia#arfid Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

➡️ Where You Can Find Jared TendlerThe Mental Game of Trading [Book]The Mental Game of Trading LIVE [Group Coaching] Exclusive Discount Codes Listed Below ↓20% OFF Essential Membership: EM2010% OFF Premium Membership: PM10

Helen Maroulis won her 9th World Medal this week in Belgrade Serbia. Wrestling Mindset co-founder Gene Zannetti breaks down her interview after winning a bronze medal.Topics include:0:52 - Helen loves being nervous4:50 - Not performing well when too relaxed6:34 - Yerkes-Dodson Law of Arousal and Performance10:18 - Yerkes-Dodson Anxiety Graph16:44 - "You have to love the nerves and pressure"18:36 - Athletes burning out Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What to listen for:In this fascinating episode, our hosts Robin Greubel and Crystal Wing had the pleasure of chatting with Jens Frank from the Scandinavian Working Dog Institute about his experience training dogs for police and military work, as well as his research project to detect soil pollutants. Listen in as Jens shares how the institute works with the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences to interact with the surrounding society, and how the institute is a great extension model that links science and practice.They also had an engaging discussion about the importance of being specific when discussing motivation. Discover the differences between motivation and arousal, and how working dog handlers often look for dogs who have high motivation and low arousal. They also talked about how to objectively measure motivation and how to use deprivation to make it stronger.Hang out until the end as they explored the Yerkes-Dodson Law and how it relates to understanding how to move from lower arousal to higher arousal when teaching new behaviors. Join in as they discuss the importance of striking a balance between control and thrill when training working dogs, and how to reinforce specific behaviors effectively.Key Topics:The Selection of Dogs for Detection Work (10:03)Measuring Motivation for Primary Reinforcers (14:15)The Power of Positive Reinforcement (20:17)How to Evaluate Arousal vs Drive (25:03)Lower vs Higher Arousal (29:42)Yerkes-Dodson Law and Arousal and Drive (33:56)“A Lot of Training Time is Wasted Doing What the Dog Already Knows” (39:39)Reinforcement of Effort (or not doing so) (44:36)Resources:Scandinavian Working Dog Institute (SWDI) https://swdi.se/Here's a link to the App where you get lifetime access to the progression plans. You can also search for "SWDI" in your App Store: https://swdi.se/courses1/the-appWe want to hear from you:Check out the K9 Detection Collaborative FB page and comment on the episode post!K9Sensus Foundation can be found on Facebook and Instagram. We have a Trainer's Group on Facebook!Scentsabilities Nosework is also on Facebook. Here is a Facebook group you should join!Crystal Wing K9 Coach can be found here at CB K9 and here at Evolution Working Dog ClubYou can follow us for notifications of upcoming episodes, find us at k9detectioncollaborative.com to enjoy the freebies, and tell your friends so you can keep the conversations going.Jingle by: www.mavericksings.com Instagram: @mavericktasticAudio editing & other podcast services by: www.thepodcastman.com Instagram: @the_podcast_man

Yerkes-Dodson Law: The Area of optimal stress provides optimal results. I have a weak boss. How to lead on the lower levels. Afraid to share political views in social settings. Instilling confidence in your daughter. Gaining control over an unruly dog. How to be successful when everyone else has "jumped-ship". Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

Dr. Steve Wood describes four psychological concepts that help to explain why some witnesses make mistakes in their testimony performance:  1) Yerkes-Dodson Law suggests there is a relationship between performance and arousal. Increased arousal can help improve performance, but only up to a certain point. At the point when arousal becomes excessive, performance diminishes.  2) The Dunning-Kruger effect is a type of cognitive bias in which people believe they are smarter and more capable than they actually are. Essentially, low-ability people do not possess the skills needed to recognize their own incompetence.  3) Evaluation apprehension is a human tendency to try to look better or the fear of being evaluated. This creates a lot of anxiety because of their concern about how they are perceived by others who are watching them and their performance.  4) "Thin-slicing" refers to the ability of our subconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience or information.  Watch the video of this episode: https://www.courtroomsciences.com/r/EdX

Camille Roney is a certified Academic Life Coach whose work has appeared in the New York Journal, Quizlet, MD Femme, Motivate MD, and more. She empowers students to earn competitive grades while actually ENJOYING the process and overcoming obstacles that may be impacting how they show up in their academics. You can learn more about how Academic Coaching can transform your high school or college student at her site: https://www.nontradaccelerator.com/academic-coaching. Today she's sharing ways you can identify within yourself, via the use of a data, how to identify your, individual, best learning techniques! Enjoy! In this episode Peter and Camille discuss:   0:57 - Intro and welcome Camille Roney! 1:28 - How do you get kids to enjoy it no matter the subject?! (i.e. Math)  4:18 - Ref: Yerkes-Dodson law 5:15 - On being in the zone of focus/flow 5:30 - Q&A for Peter about how he gets into and stays in the zone/flow 6:52 - On teaching students to be bored 8:26 - Tell me about first time college students and their study habits? 10:10 - Success leaves clues. These clues may present as follows… 11:38 - Give us some quick tips. i.e. I have a test tomorrow and I haven't started studying, what can I do? 14:13 - How can people find more about you and what you're doing? Web: https://www.nontradaccelerator.com/academic-coaching Socials: @RoneyCamille on Twitter @thelearningmom on INSTA and @thelearningmomnet on Facebook 14:26 - Thank you Camille! Guys, as always, we are here for you and we love the responses and the notes that we get from you; so please continue to do that! Tell us who you want to hear on the podcast, anything at all; we'd love to know.  Leave us a review on any of the places you get your podcasts, and if you ever need our help I'm www.petershankman.com and you can reach out anytime via peter@shankman.com or @petershankman on all of the socials. You can also find us at @FasterNormal on all of the socials. It really helps when you drop us a review on iTunes and of course, subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already! As you know, the more reviews we get, the more people we can reach. Help us to show the world that ADHD is a gift, not a curse!  15:23 - Faster Than Normal Podcast info & credits TRANSCRIPT:  Hey everyone, how are you doing? My name is Peter Shankman, you are listening to Faster Than Normal the internet's best, number one, most listened to podcast on ADD & ADHD and neurodiversity and it's because of you. I'm glad you're here. Thank you for that. Makes me happy.  We're talking to Camille Roney today. Camille is a certified academic life coach whose works appeared in New York journal Quizlet MD Femme, Motivate MD, and more. Here's the thing she empowers students to be to earn competitive grades while actually enjoying the process and overcoming obstacles that may be impacting how they show up in their academics. I'll repeat that: she teaches kids to enjoy learning. All right. So Camille, you're obviously lying, um, welcome to Faster Than Normal. It's good to have you!  Thank you for having me Peter! So, so you teach kids to enjoy learning the problem with ADHD is that when you enjoy something. You get dopamine from it. If you're interested in it, you get dopamine from it when you explore it, if you don't enjoy it, you don't get domaine from it. So when, you know, if it's English class or something that I loved great, all the dopamine in the world, math or science, not so much. So you're telling me that you figured out a way to get kids to enjoy no matter what the subject let's talk about that. Absolutely. Yeah. I'd love to, I'd love to dive in. Um, so in my experience, There's a few different ways that we can approach it. One is how we're approaching studies in general and the expectations that we have around it. So many students. In fact, I would say the majority of us humans come to school with the expectation that we're about to be bored out of our minds.   And therefore we have, we create the evidence to support that. And a lot of us are just thrown content at regardless of whether it has anything to do with anything that we as individuals care about at all. So what I like to do is invite students to consider what's important to them. What are their personal values, their interests, what are they into? And then there's a few different approaches that we can back; that gives us a bit of a compass with how to approach the studies. Do we need to integrate aspects of those into school? Um, what, you know, relating those values back into the, what the content that they're learning. So if they, um, decide that let's say peace wellbeing, global, um, like global warming global wellbeing. If we're approaching that with say social studies, we can say, okay, how was this really? How did this stuff that happened way back? How could that have impact a global warmingm, or how could that have impacted global wellbeing? How did this impact the wellbeing of others- that kind of invites us to get creative with the content and play with it because some content you really, really have to get creative with- how am I going to make this interesting? And if you, if you assume, let's say a student sits down for physics class, and the first thing that runs through their mind is I suck at physics. It's going to be awful. Rightfully so. But if you can say, if you're thinking throughout the course, um, man, I can't like I'm mesmerizing these formulas so that when I sit at the dinner table tonight with my family, I just get to brag about it and man, I will look so smart and like that we'll feel good. That's their motivation. That's totally fine. That's great. Also, um, you're you, are you familiar with the The Yerkes-Dodson Law of Performance?  No. Tell us. Okay. Beautiful. Beautiful. Imagine that this charge, if you will, on the, this graph on the X axis, you have stimulation. So low to high stimulation; and on the Y axis, you have performance. If this bell curve shape and on the left-hand side, we've got like, so you're under-stimulated therefore your performance is low. You're bored. You're not having fun in the middle the peak stimulation level you've got focus. Engaged energized, genuinely having a good time. And then on the far end, you've got anxious, stressed, restless. I like to consider both internal stimulation and external stimulation and considering how the classroom itself plays into that curve. I also like to invite students to consider. And I'm curious what your answer to this here is Peter; what's an example where it's a case where it's really easy for you to get into flow. Like you just, you don't even realize how much time has gone by, you're just your blinders are on your in the zone and it's just, it's amazing. You're completely in flow.  When I'm on an airplane. Gorgeous. Tell me more.  So when I get on the airplane, I'm flying to Asia. I have 14 hours with nothing but my laptop in front of me and I started working. Next thing we've touched down 14 hours later and I, I mean, I wrote my last two books entirely on airplanes.  Okay, cool. Can you give me another example with a completely different example of when you're in flow? Umm… looking at the dog park and there were other dogs playing. I can, I can go to work for a while and let the dogs just have fun and get lost.  Gorgeous. Okay. So what are, what are some of the common themes between those scenarios? Headphones. Allowing myself to focus on the task at hand. No distractions. Beautiful. How can you apply that to your school? Work life, something that you don't want to do?  I would assume to get into the same zone when I'm doing something I don't want to do. But of course, the problem is, is that the problem is, is that you get bored with it. And then you wind up looking for distractions. Is there something wrong with being distracted?  No, there's nothing wrong being distracted. Unless it leads you down a rabbit hole that then prevents you from doing the work in the first place.  Yeah, exactly. One of the most incredible skills that I wish we were taught in school that took me  just way too long to do, to figure out, is I teach my students how to be bored. We're often taught that boredom is like this awful negative experience. When in reality, it's just one of many human experiences that we have and there's nothing wrong with it, reframing it from negative to a positive. And what I see in so many of my students is that where again, when you approach school with the expectation that it's going to be boring. Yes- we create that. If we come with the expectation that it could be fun; that shifts things like a bit. We can actually create different behaviors so that we are enjoying the experience more. So let's say, um, to sit down to study a student suddenly starts bringing their favorite drink every time, some type of like fizzy soda or something that they genuinely enjoy, or like this pen that just like it glides so smoothly on the page that you think that you're going to die. Like, it's fun. Like enjoy the experience. It doesn't have to be awful for us. Like honestly, if you want to. If coming to school and like a Hawaiian shirt and a wearing a lei and sunglasses, if that helps you like have more fun in school, that's a win, right?  No, that makes sense. I mean, when, you know, when you think about it, does it make sense in terms of how you.. It's essentially what you're saying. It's a different way of looking at things.  Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Tell me about the college student, who's in college for the first time and is on their own for the first time. And you know, whether they're neurodiverse or not, and all of a sudden they don't have a parent watching over them and then no one watching over them and they never, they never really learned that study to learn to do it. Now they're stuck in a thing where it's like, oh, no one can tell you where and when I can go out; no, one's going to stop me and they get kicked out, right? Well, let me first say, there's nothing wrong with going out. I encouraged students to enjoy the college, the university experience, like what a magical time in someone's life. But when else are you going to be surrounded by so much diversity of experiences and people? Fantastic. What I like to suggest is. sorry, let me, let me take a step back. What I often see is people falling into this trap of, oh shoot. The expectation suddenly skyrocketed on my performance levels in academia, but I haven't, we haven't like we haven't had a class called how to read since like the third grade, yet the expectations of our reading skills are completely different since then. So what I, the tracks that I often see students in is they look around I what everybody else is doing and they just do that. So they're copying word for word what's on the lecture slides at the cost of not paying attention to the lecture. They're apt to suddenly sit still in a class for three hours at a time, which is a huge shock for a lot of students transitioning from high school. They've got all these things on their plate. And frankly, it's too much for a lot of people when you just try and do things the way everyone else is doing. What I like to say is success leaves clues. So let's look at the data, look at your information completely objectively, something that is so fantastic about academia is you do some work and you get a result. You get a specific number grade. So what you can do is take track, like keep track of as much data as you, as you feel comfortable with such as, um, how much sleep did I get before a test? Was I hungry while I was studying? What methods did I use? How many, how long did it take me to read this content that I read every word, consider the data and then look at the results of those yields because, but students often, like what I often say to my students, if you've mastered a very specific way of doing things. And you now have, are starting to collect the data of what type of result that yields. whether you like it or not is up to you. But this is a fantastic time to experiment and try new things and see what works and what doesn't. And the key isn't to do everything. The key is to do what you know, works best. Finish all the rest. You don't have to, like, you can get through your entire degree without taking a single note. If that doesn't work for you, stop taking notes. You're wasting your time. Use it in another method for studying and really comprehending information. I think give your brain a break!  Makes sense. It does make a lot of sense. Tell me about, um, give us a couple of quick tips. Um, other than the ones that you've given us are great. A couple of quick tips. I have a test tomorrow, um, I haven't started studying, what can I do? I'm not saying that's what they should do every time, but.  Right. This is such a good question! Okay. What is your favorite- to go from short-term memory to long-term memory for this specific type of content, because you should be studying, you know, how you study for Calculus, for example, should it probably looks very different from how you would study an English class. So that's my first question. How you go from a short-term memory to long-term retention. Just do that. If you get time to do anything else, that's gravy. Fantastic. So, um, I like, I get really into things like techniques, like speed reading or different memorization techniques. The high yield thing is to, sorry. My recommendation for you is strictly focused on the high yield content. Master that. Use your course syllabus or, um, a professor teachers outline on what's going to be covered on the test, how that, how the content is going to be tested matters, like how you study for a multiple choice problem. Uh, exam, it looks different than how you would study for an essay exam. So again, that's a matter of data collection. What works for you for that specific type of content and work with that. Um, my, if I had to give you just one, one quick takeaway from this is: As you're reading your textbook, never go beyond a single paragraph without asking yourself. How would Mr. Jones test me on this content?  That's really good!! And you would think that that takes you longer to get through the content, but because we're strictly focusing on the high yield content, you're not reading every word in the whole, you know, in the assigned reading and because you're really giving yourself that time to get curious and play around with the content. Oh okay. I can see this being a multiple choice question. What would some of the potential answers be? And like really getting curious and creative with the content. Chances are, you don't have to review at all before the test. You've taken the time to really master it the first time, bringing it from short-term memory, to long-term retention, applying it based on how it's going to be questioned, know quizzed or examined on. And then you move on.  Excellent. I love it. Very cool. Um, Camille, thank you so much. How can people find you? [[ Web: https://www.nontradaccelerator.com/academic-coaching Socials: @RoneyCamille on Twitter @thelearningmom on INSTA and @thelearningmomnet on Facebook ]]You can find me on Instagram. I'm at the learning mom or on my website, a non-trad accelerator.com.  Awesome. We will definitely link to all that. We will have you back. There's a lot of fun. Camille Roney, thank you so much for taking the time! I really appreciate it.  Uh, guys, as always Faster Than Normal, we try to bring a new and interesting different ways to learn and think about, ADD and ADHD and all forms of neurodiversity, as well as fun stuff. I know recently we've had some interviews about. We interviewed someone who, um, works with drug addiction, we talked to an accountant to is helping people with ADHD   in their math. If you know anyone who you think might be a good interview for us, let us know. We would love to have them on the podcast. You can find me at, at Peter Shankman. You can find past episodes at FasterThanNormal.com or anywhere that you get your podcasts, including-“Alexa”. I have to say her name very softly, because if I say her name..And if I say it three times Jeff Bezos appears in my apartment and tries to sell me something. So thank you guys for listening. We will see you next week. Camille, thank you for being here. ADHD is a gift, not a curse as is all neurodiversity, stay safe and stay well. — Guys you've been listening to Faster Than Normal. We love when people come to us and say, Hey, I would like to be on the podcast, or when they have a great idea for a great story. And they have a great story themselves. If you're that person who knows someone who has let us know, we're always trying to find new people. We have a plethora!! of new episodes that we've recorded that are in the can that are coming up. The next three months are already filled but if you have someone to let us know, we'll record you and get you on the podcast as well. And you can find me at Peter@shankman.com  The podcast is FasterThanNormal.com on iTunes on Stitcher, Google play anywhere you get your podcasts. Thank you so much for listening and remember that ADHD and all neurodiversity is a gift, not a curse. And we will see you next week with a brand new episode. Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you soon! — Credits: You've been listening to the Faster Than Normal podcast. We're available on iTunes, Stitcher and Google play and of course at www.FasterThanNormal.com I'm your host, Peter Shankman and you can find me at petershankman.com and @petershankman on all of the socials. If you like what you've heard, why not head over to your favorite podcast platform of choice and leave us a review, come more people who leave positive reviews, the more the podcast has shown, and the more people we can help understand that ADHD is a gift, not a curse. Opening and closing themes were composed and produced by Steven Byrom who also produces this podcast, and the opening introduction was recorded by Bernie Wagenblast. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next week!

In this episode we discuss the Yerkes-Dodson Law bell curve, which shows how stress can either boost or reduce your performance at work. We share personal examples of times in our career when we fell in different areas on the bell curve and we also share advice on how to manage your stress so you can leverage it to boost your performance.Call To ActionAnswer the following questions:Where do you feel you are on the bell curve?Why do you feel you are at that point in the bell curve?What can you do to move closer to the optimal performance area (if not already in that area)?Content MentionedThe Bell Curve For Optimal PerformancePrevious podcast episode - Imposter Syndrome

Your heart is beating fast. Your chest seizes slightly. You burst into a cold sweat. Your deadline is fast approaching and you feel physically ill from the pressure. You close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and continue your project in stride. Anxiety can come in many forms and be triggered by all sorts of situations. Perhaps meeting new people or traveling or pressure from work. Whatever the reason may be, anxiety is usually perceived as a negative attribute. After all, people seek medical intervention in order to decrease anxiety. But what if anxiety had its purpose? What if there were ways to harness its power? According to the Yerkes-Dodson Law, there may be an optimal level of stress or anxiety one can experience in order to have the best possible performative outcome. It would be appear then that anxiety may be beneficial in the right amounts. If one suffers from anxiety, how can one be able to rewrite their narrative for the good? How can one reframe anxiety into a superpower?

In this episode, Brian and Josh discuss how tennis players can find their optimal level of intensity on the practice court and in matches. The co-hosts outline some of the research concepts relating to Individual Zones of Optimal Functioning (IZOF) and the Inverted-U Theory which shows the relationship between pressure and performance (also known as the Yerkes-Dodson Law). They discuss how tennis players can use mental preparation to control their intensity levels, and review specific ways that tennis players can increase or decrease their levels of intensity on the court during matches. Aaron Donald pre-game speech (self-talk) - https://youtu.be/y4P7D5fEXJI To learn more about Josh and Brian's backgrounds and sport psychology businesses, go to TiebreakerPsych.com and PerformanceXtra.com. If you have feedback about the show or questions on the mental game in tennis, email us at TennisIQPodcast@gmail.com or use the hashtag #tennisIQ on Twitter. Don't forget to subscribe on YouTube or your podcast platform of choice (Spotify, Apple, Google, etc.) to stay up to date on future episodes.

Mr. Erik Uliasz has been teaching AP psychology for 20+ years and is a track and field coach for his high school. He discusses the Yerkes Dodson Law, neuroplasticity, and the different brain parts and their functions including the cerebellum and the frontal lobes. He also speaks about the famous NAVY SEALS four brain-based strategies (see this video if you want to see the full segment on that). Stay until the end to hear his tips on how to keep your brain in the best condition, tips that athletes like Tom Brady use. Connect with Mind-Design Sports: ► Website: https://www.mind-designsports.org ► Instagram @mind_design_sports ► Twitter @MindDesignSport Listen to our podcast on other platforms and make sure to subscribe/follow! Apple Podcasts Spotify Podcasts Google Podcasts Youtube --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/mind-design-sports/message

Empowered By Design:  Episode 6 - Riding the Rainbow - Strategies for Managing Stress   Dr. Lyz: Licensed Psychologist, Wellness Entrepreneur, Relationship Specialist Empowered By Design Podcast: Psychology, Mental Health and Wellness, Relationships, Mindset, Self-care, Stress Management, Optimal Performance, Preventative Health Care, Cultivate Resilience Let’s talk about Stress!  We all experience it.  We don’t love it.  Stress is uncomfortable and can be dangerous when levels become too high, when life becomes overwhelming.  Dr. Lyz explains the relationship between stress and performance with attention to the reciprocal effects of distress and aspects of the body, mind, heart, soul, and spirit.  Dr. Lyz reviews the benefits of maintaining stress at a low to moderate range and shares six strategies for avoiding unnecessary stress, managing unavoidable stress, and designing a healthy, proactive approach to living well.     Riding the Rainbow to manage stress illustrates the relationship between stress and performance outlined in the Yerkes-Dodson Law.  Optimal performance occurs when stress levels are maintained at a moderate level.  Low levels of stress are correlated with low performance - think of when you are not invested in a particular outcome or when you are disconnected from authentic stress awareness.  High levels of stress are correlated with low performance - for example when you feel overwhelmed, anxious and life feels out of control.  When you can manage stress, prevent it from becoming too high, and maintain stress at a low to moderate level, performance is optimized.   Six Strategies for Managing Stress:   Avoid stress when you can. Recognize stress when it’s unavoidable. Take a curious approach to stress and increase your awareness of the impacts of stress - body, mind, heart, soul, and spirit. Be proactive. Cultivate resilience. Prioritize health and wellness.   Subscribe to my email list to stay connected: www.DrLyz.com www.VisionistasByDesign.com   Follow Dr. Lyz on Social Media:   Instagram   Facebook   YouTube     Pinterest     Clubhouse: follow @DrLyz   Welcome to the podcast, Empowered By Design with Dr. Lyz!  This podcast is designed to bring you psychological concepts in real life terms that will empower a proactive approach to mental health and overall wellness while inviting balance, harmony, connection, and joy.  Lyz DeBoer Kreider, PhD, a licensed psychologist in Pennsylvania and New York, shares her passion for helping you pursue your dreams and goals for life and love with intentional vision.  This podcast is about finding and owning your power right now and using it for good, by nurturing the connection of body, mind, heart, soul, and spirit. Empowered By Design Podcast delivers psychological concepts and practical strategies with a real life approach, designed to empower: Health and wellness, Optimal performance, Authentic connection with yourself and others, and purposeful, joyful living.   Dr. Lyz’s Signature Formula: Dream, Design, Deliver Dream - Reflect, Attend Design - Create, Plan Deliver - Align, Evaluate, Celebrate   Download a free guide for using the Dream, Design, Deliver Signature Formula to pursue your dreams with Intentional Vision. And check out Episode 4 for more information on Dr. Lyz’s Dream, Design, Deliver Signature Formula.  

This episode discusses the Yerkes-Dodson Law, the Psychology of Fear and swimming with sharks.

The Yerkes–Dodson law is an empirical relationship between pressure and performance, originally developed by psychologists Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson in 1908. The law dictates that performance increases with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a point. When levels of arousal become too high, performance decreases. The process is often illustrated graphically as a bell-shaped curve which increases and then decreases with higher levels of arousal. The original paper (a study of Japanese dancing mice) was only referenced ten times over the next half century, yet in four of the citing articles, these findings were described as a psychological "law". Researchers have found that different tasks require different levels of arousal for optimal performance. For example, difficult or intellectually demanding tasks may require a lower level of arousal (to facilitate concentration), whereas tasks demanding stamina or persistence may be performed better with higher levels of arousal (to increase motivation). Because of task differences, the shape of the curve can be highly variable. For simple or well-learned tasks, the relationship is monotonic, and performance improves as arousal increases. For complex, unfamiliar, or difficult tasks, the relationship between arousal and performance reverses after a point, and performance thereafter declines as arousal increases. The effect of task difficulty led to the hypothesis that the Yerkes–Dodson Law can be decomposed into two distinct factors as in a bathtub curve. The upward part of the inverted U can be thought of as the energizing effect of arousal. The downward part is caused by negative effects of arousal (or stress) on cognitive processes like attention (e.g., "tunnel vision"), memory, and problem-solving.

There are those who shine under the limelight and those who crumble under the pressure. That made us question, “do you actually thrive under pressure?” What makes the two kinds of people different? How can you perform at a high level for a prolonged period of time?  On this episode of the Not as Advertised Podcast, we explore those questions, the topics of work pressure, the Yerkes-Dodson Law and share some tips on self-care.

Ternyata tidak selamanya stress atau tekanan yang kita rasakan itu buruk. Kira-kira seperti itulah menurut Yerkes-Dodson Law. Berdasarkan hukum tersebut, selama trigger dari stress tersebut dalam batas toleransi kita, maka Kinerja kita akan lebih efesien dan lebih produktif

Flute 360 | Episode 92: “Mind-Body Integration Techniques to Help Relieve Performance Anxiety, Part 1” (40:56) In today’s episode, Heidi talks with Chris Neal about mind-body integration approaches to lessen the symptoms of performance anxiety. Many techniques fall under the mind and body integration category, according to The National Center of Complementary and Integrative Health Association. Listen to today’s episode to hear all the details. Please note, next week’s episode (E93) is a continuation of today’s episode (E92). Listen to it on December 14, 2019, to hear the discussion continued! Episode 92 – Main Points: 0:28 – Gold Sponsor: The Resilient Self Podcast with Chris Neal, MA & LPC 1:19 – Welcome & Introduction! 2:06 – Reference to Chris’ Podcast titled: The Resilient Self Podcast 3:17 – Podcast Information 4:45 – Heidi: Please share with the listeners your professional background! 4:55 – Chris’ Answer 9:39 – Heidi: Please talk about your musical background! 10:02 – Chris’ Answer 12:39 – Question: Can you please define what performance anxiety is? 12:56 – Chris’ Answer 20:40 – Heidi Comments 28:18 – Question: Are there any statistics to show whom performance anxiety affects more? For example: Men or women? A certain age group? 28:40 – Chris’ Answer 30:40 – Vladimir Horowitz, pianist 31:10 – Topic: Trait Anxiety vs. State Anxiety 33:19 – Reference to the Yerkes-Dodson Law. 34:50 – Choosing flute repertoire that is appropriate for the student’s level. 35:38 – Chris Responds 39:13 – Conclusion 39:43 – Bronze Sponsor: J&K Productions Episode 92 – Resources Mentioned: Vladimir Horowitz, pianist Yerkes-Dodson Law The Resilient Self Podcast Episode 92 – Sponsors: Gold Level: The Resilient Self Podcast with Chris Neal, MA & LPC Bronze Level: J&K Productions

Kids often need to move to think and yet, in school and sometimes at home, we ask them to sit still to learn or problem solve. Scott Ertl invented BouncyBands to help kids move while seated! We talk about why movement is so important and how to help work some extra movement into your kiddos' days!For more information about BouncyBands: http://bouncybands.com/For more information about the Yerkes-Dodson Law: https://youtu.be/klaUNrgG9NsBe sure to follow Chronicles of Nannya on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chroniclesofnannya/And Twitter: https://twitter.com/nannyapodcastAnd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chroniclesofnannya/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Summary: Stacy Barnett is an active competitor in Nosework, Tracking, Obedience, Rally, Agility and Barn Hunt, but Scent Sports are her primary focus and her first love. She is an AKC Judge and contractor, as well as an instructor at FDSA. She hosts the Scentsabilities podcast and blogs regularly on nosework topics at www.scentsabilitiesnw.com. Next Episode:  To be released 10/12/2018, an interview with Nancy Gagliardi Little on agility startlines and obedience. TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we’ll be talking to Stacy Barnett. Stacy is an active competitor in Nosework, Tracking, Obedience, Rally, Agility and Barn Hunt, but Scent Sports are her primary focus and her first love. She is an AKC Judge and contractor, as well as an instructor at FDSA. She hosts the Scentsabilities podcast and blogs regularly on nosework topics at www.scentsabilitiesnw.com — nw is for nosework. I’ll be sure to include a link in the show notes for anybody who is interested. Hi Stacy, welcome back to the podcast. Stacy Barnett: Hi Melissa. How are you? Melissa Breau: Good. I’m excited to chat. It’s morning for us now, so good morning. Stacy Barnett: Oh, I don’t even know what time it is. I flew in from Reno last night, and I was in Sweden right before that, so my body’s very confused. So if you tell me it’s morning, I’ll just believe you. I’ve got a little bit of jetlag going on. Melissa Breau: All different sorts of time zones. Stacy Barnett: Yes. Melissa Breau: To get us started, do you want to just remind listeners a little bit about who the dogs are that you share your life with? Stacy Barnett: Sure, sure. I’ve got four hooligans that live in my house and that I love and that I work with. Joey is my senior poodle. He is turning 11, I think this week. He’s at the NW 3 level, which is the third level. Then I have a 7-year-old miniature American Shepherd, or mini Aussie. He’s at the NW 2 level. Then I have two Labradors. They’re my primary nosework competition dogs. I have Judd. Judd is my 9-year-old. He is a Summit title holder, which puts him at the top of his sport. It’s really, really exciting. That happened recently. And an 18-month-old Labrador female named Brava. She’s full of vinegar. Really, really a fun dog, high, high drive, and she’s really teaching me a lot about arousal. Melissa Breau: I want to do a deep dive on nosework today — starting with some of the science-y stuff. What is it about a dog, biologically, that really allows them to excel when it comes to identifying a scent and then tracking it to the source? Stacy Barnett: I love the science behind this. This is probably one of the reasons why I love nosework so much is I’m a little bit of a geek and I have a scientific background. But what I love about this is that there’s a lot of history here. Dogs evolved from wolves. Wolves, if you think about it, have to travel long distances in order to find their prey. They go over miles and miles and miles and miles to find that large prey, and to do that, they have to use their noses, and they have to be able to track, and they have to be able to hunt. Dogs have inherited that ability, and if you look at them from a biological perspective, they all have that ability. Twelve-and-a-half percent of their brain is dedicated to olfaction, so the olfactory lobe is 12-and-a-half percent, it’s one-eighth of their brain. The other part of it is that the nose itself. They have the ability to scent directionally. You and I have the ability to hear directionally, so if I’m standing in front of you, you know I’m standing in front of you, because we have space between our ears, and this space is what allows us to hear in stereo. Dogs can smell in stereo because they have space between their nostrils. It has to do with what they call aerodynamic reach. The difference between the space in the nostrils and aerodynamic reach, it’s kind of technical, but it’s one of the reasons why they can scent directionally. Every breed can do this. Every breed, from a Chihuahua up to a Great Dane, it doesn’t matter how big or small their nose is, they still have that space between their nostrils. So there’s that, and they also have the ability, when they sniff in and they blow out, they have these slits on the side of their nose, so the air blows out of the side of their nose, and it doesn’t disturb the scent that’s being pulled in in the next sniff. It’s fascinating. Melissa Breau: It is pretty neat, especially thinking about the directional piece of it. I imagine it plays such a big role when you’re doing something like scentwork. Stacy Barnett: Oh, totally. Totally. Melissa Breau: Obviously, our noses can’t even come close … so when we’re teaching a dog nosework, once a team is past the basics, what factors influence the difficulty of that search? Stacy Barnett: There’s so many factors. Airflow is a big part of it. From an airflow perspective, airflow is caused by air pressure differentials, which means that there’s differences in air pressure. Air will move from a high-pressure area to a low-pressure area, so that causes air to flow. Air also moves because of temperature differentials. We all know hot air rises and cool air falls, so if you get an area that’s more in the sun, the air is going to rise and it’s going to fall in a shady area. So there’s that. You also have the aspect of how long the hides have been in the area. We call that aging. That is basically, because of the process of diffusion, the longer the hide is aged, the larger the scent cone is going to be. What you’re going to find is that it also depends on how many hides you have and what proximity those hides are to each other, and if you have high hides, if you have low hides, and how the hides interact, because it becomes exponentially more difficult when you have more than one hide out. The other thing is if you have a change in slope, so if you’re scenting and you’re on a slope, that can make a big difference. Standing water, moisture, rain, really the possibilities are endless, and it’s one of the coolest things about this sport, because every time you go to do a search, it’s different. You can never duplicate the same search. It’s always different, it’s always cool, it’s always fresh. It’s always fun. Melissa Breau: I want to talk about some of that terminology for a minute — can you just talk us through that? I know you mentioned airflow and aging and scent cones. Can you define what some of those things are, if people are new to this? Stacy Barnett: Think about a scent cone. We call it a scent cone. People often think in their head, they think of an ice cream cone, but it’s really not that accurate. The scent cone is the plume of odor that we can’t see, but it’s out there because the odor has diffused, or the molecules have left the source, and it becomes like a plume in the air that the dog is following. A scent cone looks like, if you look at a smokestack, and with a smokestack you can kind of see the plume and it goes in the direction that the air is flowing. So if the wind is going from north to south, your plume is going to go from north to south. That’s going to be more what a scent cone actually looks like. If you think about it, when you have less airflow, it’s not quite as windy, your scent cone is going to be a little bit wider, and when you get a windy condition, you get a narrow scent cone, which is more like if you had a water hose and you were to put it on high pressure. So that scent cone is going to go farther and it’s going to be narrower, so where the dog intersects is going to be different. Aging has to do with … we call it aging, and it’s essentially how long the hide has been out and sitting out, because it changes how the dog has to work the hide. Then we have things like pooling odor. Pooling odor is, if you think about a pool of water, that’s exactly what happens. That odor pools in an area and it collects in an area. That’s a lot of fun too. Melissa Breau: Since we can’t “see” scent, and obviously we don’t smell it, how do we really know all this about the way that scents travel? How do we know what we know? Stacy Barnett: We call it scent theory, and we call it scent theory for a reason: because it’s theory. My own background is I have a chemical engineering degree. I pull from my understanding of fluid flow dynamics in order to really understand odor. Air is just another fluid. It’s a gas, but gas is just a fluid in a different state. It all follows fluid flow mechanics. But I think the easiest way to think about it is to think about water. If you think about how water flows, like water in a stream, you can understand turbulence, there’s eddies, all these things happen with air. You get turbulence, you get eddies, because when water hits a rock in a stream, you get the turbulence before and after the rock. The same thing happens with air. So if we can understand how air flows, we know how the odor is carried on that air. Again, it’s theory, but I think we have a pretty good grasp of it. I like to think about that, or think about a smokestack or something like that, to give a visual, because if we can understand a visual, we can start to figure out what it’s actually doing. We can’t smell it the way that the dogs can smell it, but if we can have a visual, I think it helps us. Melissa Breau: Thinking through that for a minute, if there are multiple hides in a room, and you get multiple scent cones, and some of those maybe even overlap … how do you begin to teach the dog this idea that there are multiple hides, and OK, they found one, they need to go find another one. I feel like that’s a complex concept, and maybe they even have to return to where they started in order to trace it to source. Stacy Barnett: That is all about converging odor. That’s what we call it, where you have different scent cones and the scent cones overlap. It’s very complicated for the dog to find it, but they’re absolutely capable of doing this. What I usually do is I start with the hides fairly far apart, and then I start to set a situation up where the scent cones start to overlap. But what’s hard is that the dog has to … oh, and when they go from one hide and to help them move to another, you can actually help move with your body. And I cue them with a word. I say, “Find another.” “Find another” means “That hide is done, it’s finished, let’s go find another hide.” And the body motion helps to move the dog into a new area, because they’re going to follow your body motion. So that really helps. You also have to start realizing dogs are hardwired for “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” So they’re going to be hardwired to ignore another hide for the hide that they’re already at, so you have to start to figure out your reward schedules and whether or not you’re going to re-feed at that hide if they come back to it. What’s easy in the beginning is to work the dog on leash, so that you can use the leash to help them stay, to not return to the original hide. From a re-feeding perspective, I do always re-feed the hide if the dog has confidence or motivation issues or if the dog is very green. Once I know the dog is confident and motivated and the dog is not as green, I start not re-feeding the hide because I want them to know that that hide is finished and they have to find the next one. Melissa Breau: I think it’s an interesting process where you don’t want to erode your confidence, so sometimes you do want to reward them for finding it, but it definitely depends on the dog and the experience level. That makes sense. Stacy Barnett: And sometimes the dog actually has to go back to that hide in order to find the next hide because of the way that the scent cones overlap. They can get information at that hide, and we call it anchoring. So they can go back to that hide and they can say, “Oh wow, there’s another scent cone,” and they can go from that hide to the next hide by getting the information for the second hide at the first hide. Melissa Breau: When there is something pooling odor, or the scent cones intersect, how are you building those things gradually? I know you mentioned usually you start with two hides far apart and you move them closer together. What are some of the other things you do to build those skills gradually and set the dog up for success? Stacy Barnett: It’s all about hide placement, because if you have two hides, and you have two difficult hides, that’s going to be a lot harder than if you have two easy hides. So I like to do things systematically, especially when I teach converging odor. And pooling odor, if you add pooling odor with converging odor, that’s really challenging. So I try to avoid the pooling odor aspect when I’m introducing converging odor, and when I’m doing converging odor I try to be very systematic so that the dog understands how to solve these problems. I want to keep it simple in the beginning and not make it terribly complex, so I make sure that the dog understands and learns how to source different permutations of accessible hides, inaccessible hides, elevated hides, low hides, two hides, three hides. I try to get very systematic about it. Melissa Breau: I know confidence is a really big piece of what you do and what you train for, so I’d love to talk about that in trialing a little bit. When trialing and you have a dog who isn’t super confident, how can you tell when it’s just that they’re working something that’s more complex versus when they are struggling because of stress or because of a lack of confidence? Stacy Barnett: You really need to pay attention to your dog. You have to look for the dog’s enthusiasm level, and you have to really look for the stress signals that they’re giving you. If you look at the enthusiasm level, if the enthusiasm stays up, then they’re not stressed out and they can continue to work. But if you start seeing waning enthusiasm, or the dog is starting to check out, or the dog starts getting distracted, or the dog starts sniffing the ground, or the dog scratches or shakes off, these can be different indications that maybe the dog is a little frustrated or a little confused, and both frustration and confusion can help to lower confidence, which is not what we want. We want to try to work the dog in a state where they’re not confused and they’re not frustrated, so that they can build up their own self-confidence and their own skill set, and ultimately they’ll be more successful and you’ll be able to keep their focus a little bit more. Melissa Breau: If you have a dog that isn’t super confident and you’re in that competition environment, what can you do to make sure you’re supporting them or helping them, and set them up for success even at a trial or in that kind of a situation? Stacy Barnett: I think you also need to know your dog. Nosework really is a confidence-building skill. However, it’s a confidence-building activity. It doesn’t mean that trialing is confidence-building. So in preparation for that trial, you need to get the dog into a situation that you know they’re prepared going into it. It’s just like any other sport. We certainly wouldn’t want to take a dog who has just learned how to heel, and all of a sudden take them into an obedience trial, or take a dog that has never run a course before and take them into an agility trial. Training is really necessary in this sport, and I think sometimes we forget that because the dog has an innate ability to sniff. So generalization is really the key. But if you’re in the moment and your dog is starting to stress a little bit, you have to figure out is it salvageable? Is it a little bit of light stress or is it heavy stress? If it’s just a little bit of light stress and the dog’s got a little distracted, maybe, I give the dog a cookie. I call it a confidence cookie. What that does is it lowers the arousal of the dog, and then that way the dog’s lowered arousal state allows him to relax a little bit, and then they can usually be successful. And you can feed really at any time during your search. The other thing, though, if the stress gets to be too high, call it quits. There’s no point in going for the cue. I’ve been in this situation before with Why, my mini Aussie. He’s a very, very stress-y dog. I had a trial just a couple of months ago where I thought he was too stressed and I said to the judge, “I’m really sorry, but I’m going to excuse myself,” and she completely agreed with my thoughts on that. You want to look at the long-term game. It’s not just a short-term cue. That’s the biggest advice I can give on that. Melissa Breau: You mentioned innate skills in there, and I’m curious: When it comes to something like covering an entire search area and doing it efficiently and quickly, how much of that is innate, how much of that is training, how much is handling? Can you talk us through that piece? Stacy Barnett: It’s probably balanced in-between innate skills, training, and handling. I think all three are really important. If you’re talking a really large search area, there is a degree of talent that comes into play, and that has to do with a dog’s natural hunt drive. If you have a dog with a certain degree of hunt drive, they’re going to want to go out there and find that odor. If you have a dog that doesn’t have that strong of a hunt drive, you have to try to build that a little bit. You can build that through different activities and different motivation games and that sort of thing. So there is definitely an aspect of training. The other thing is training actually helps the dog to become efficient. It really helps them to connect the dots, although I always try to say our dogs do come to us with a Harvard education in olfaction, but with training they become rocket scientists. They learn how to connect those dots. The other thing, I also think about it in terms of you know when you learned how to read and you had to sound out your words? You had to sound them out and it was challenging. Your brain is hardwired to be able to read language, but you still had to learn how to do it. And now when you read, you don’t even actually look at the whole word. The brain doesn’t look at the whole word. The brain may look at the beginning and the end and connects the dots and you know exactly what you’re reading. So it’s kind of the same thing with sniffing. So all these different things really come into play. Handling is a big piece of it because you can help or hinder. You can also help your dog get through a search area. This really becomes super important, especially when your search areas get really big, like at the Elite or Summit level. Handling is huge there. So training, talent, handling — it’s all part of the puzzle. Melissa Breau: The other piece that I wanted to talk about a little bit was startline routines. I know that that’s something that you talk about a lot, but what are some of the different types of routines or some of the options that people have? How can a handler begin to parse those things and decide which routine they need for their dog? Stacy Barnett: The key to this is arousal. Arousal is like the secret sauce of nosework. If you can have a good startline, it’s going to predict how good your search is, and if you have the right arousal state, that will predict how good your startline is. So you need to have the right arousal state coming in, and some dogs tend to be on the low arousal side of it and some dogs tend to be on the high arousal. With Judd, who was slightly to the left of the curve — and we’re talking the Yerkes-Dodson Law — he’s not always in drive. He comes in at a slightly low arousal, or at least he used to, and I conditioned it. But with a slightly low arousal I might use a little opposition reflex on the harness and rev him up a little bit, like “ready, ready, ready, ready.” I might do something like that to help him get into a higher state of arousal. If you have a dog that is a little on the anxious side, or just your high arousal dog, like Brava, she comes into the search area on her hind legs. She really does. It’s kind of funny, she sashays, it’s cute, and she’s still effective, which is amazing. So if you have a high arousal dog, you need to lower that arousal. Things like food actually lower arousal. With dogs like that, if you feed on the startline, if they’re not handler-focused, it can get them right where they need to be. There’s different tips and techniques that you can do, but it all comes down to arousal states, so whatever you can do to modify that arousal state to get the dog in drive, that is going to be the key to the success of your search. Melissa Breau: So I know a lot of this is covered in a lot more detail by some of the nosework classes that are on the schedule at FDSA this term. Do you want to share what you have on the October calendar and what’s covered in which class? Stacy Barnett: Sure, sure. I’m teaching three classes. I have NW 120, which is Introduction to Nosework Elements. That is a class … it’s a follow on from our Introduction to Odor. We teach the dogs how to search interiors, exteriors, vehicles, containers, although we start containers and interiors in NW 101. We also introduce buried, which is an AKC element. So we introduce that. Then I’m teaching NW 241, which is Nosework Challenges Series 2. That is actually a whole class, soup to nuts, on converging odor. We take converging odor and we start with the preliminary skills and we systematically help the dog learn how to work through converging odor puzzles so that they get from the very, very beginning of converging odor to the elements that are necessary to them to be able to be really effective at solving converging odor. The last class, which is NW 250, which is NW 3 prep, I’ve actually folded the Path to Elite class, which I was going to teach that in December, I took all that information and I pulled that into NW 250. So NW 250 covers both NW 3 and Elite, and it’s all about how do you prepare for these levels and how to be successful at them. So it’s covering a whole lot this term. I’m really, really excited about it. Melissa Breau: Lots of different levels. Lots of different students. Stacy Barnett: Yeah. Yeah. Melissa Breau: Alright, so my last question — what’s a lesson you’ve learned or been reminded of recently when it comes to dog training? Stacy Barnett: Trust. I wrote a blog on this recently, and I think one of the instructor quotes that came out, my instructor quote was, “Yes, but does your dog trust you?” We always talk about “Trust your dog” in nosework, and I like the term, but in a lot of ways I don’t because it’s so one-sided. It’s so important for the dog to trust the handler. Trust is mutual, and the dog has to be able to trust the handler in order to be able to be self-confident in what they’re doing and in order to have teamwork. Teamwork happens when you have trust between the dog, when it’s not just you trusting the dog, but it’s the dog trusting you. Melissa Breau: I think that’s a great note to round things out on. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast Stacy! Stacy Barnett: Oh, I’m thrilled to be here. This was a lot of fun. This was a lot of fun, and I’m going to try to still figure out what time it is... This was a blast. Thank you so much Melissa. I really enjoyed it. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in! We’ll be back next week, this time with Nancy Gagliardi Little to talk about the other two big topics in the dog sports world: agility and obedience. If you haven’t already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. CREDITS: Today’s show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

Summary: Stacy Barnett is an active competitor in Nosework, Tracking, Obedience, Rally, Agility and Barn Hunt, but Scent Sports are her primary focus and her first love. She is an AKC Judge and contractor, as well as an instructor at FDSA. She hosts the Scentsabilities podcast and blogs regularly on nosework topics at www.scentsabilitiesnw.com. Links mentioned: FDSA Podcast Group Scentsabilities (Stacy's Site) Next Episode:  To be released 7/20/2018, featuring Deb Jones, talking about teaching people to teach dogs.  TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we’ll be talking to Stacy Barnett. Stacy is an active competitor in Nosework, Tracking, Obedience, Rally, Agility and Barn Hunt, but Scent Sports are her primary focus and her first love. She is an AKC Judge and contractor, as well as an instructor at FDSA. She hosts the Scentsabilities podcast and blogs regularly on nosework topics at www.scentsabilitiesnw.com — I’ll be sure to include a link in the show notes for anyone who is interested. Hi Stacy, welcome to the podcast. Stacy Barnett: Hi Melissa. Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here. Melissa Breau: I’m excited to chat. To start us out, can you just remind listeners who the dogs are that you share your life with? Stacy Barnett: I have four crazy hooligans who live in my hut. They are; they’re nuts. I’ll start out with my older dogs. I have an almost 11-year-old Standard Poodle named Joey. He’s a brown Standard Poodle. He’s absolutely wonderful. I absolutely love him. I have a 7-year-old miniature American Shepherd, which is, you know, a mini-Aussie, named Why, and Why is actually his name. He came with it. I always have people ask me, “Why is his name Why?” And I always say, “Why not?” So I have Why, and then I have my two Labradors, who I refer to as my Dream Team. My Labradors, I have Judd, who’s almost 9 years old. He is my heart and soul. He’s actually the one that really got me going in nosework and is the reason why I ended up quitting corporate and pursuing a whole job in nosework. He’s my baby, he’s my Labrador, my 9-year-old Labrador. And then I have my youngest, who is a major hooligan. She is about 15 months old and she is a Labrador, a little shrimpy Lab. Her name is Brava, and I absolutely adore her. She’s the only girl in the house, so she’s like my soul sister. Melissa Breau: I’m sure she gets a little spoiled being the only girl in the house. Stacy Barnett: She does, and the boys love her. They absolutely love her. They fawn over her. We all do. We think she’s wonderful. Melissa Breau: Alright, so I know you’ve been on the podcast a few times now to talk about different aspects of nosework, but today I want to focus our conversation on how handlers can tailor nosework training to their specific dog. Is there a particular type of dog or particular skills or maybe a personality type that really lends itself to helping a dog become a strong nosework competitor? Stacy Barnett: There are, but at the same time I also want to emphasize the fact that every dog can do this sport. Maybe not every dog can compete in this sport, it really depends on the dog, but every dog can do this sport. There are certain aspects of the dog’s personality or what is intrinsic to the dog that will help the dog to become a really strong competitor in terms of being very competitive, or a dog that will really gravitate toward the sport and really, really love the sport. In my experience, all dogs do love the sport, but there are some that just seem to live and breathe for it. And the ones that seem to live and breathe for it, there are a couple of different things that contribute to that. Number one, the dog is a little bit more independent. If the dog is more handler-focused, I say if the dog is really into you and really cares what you think, those dogs tend to not be as gung-ho for the sport. The dogs that are a little bit more independent but have a nice balance between environmental and handler focus seem to do a little bit better. Above all, they have to have a natural love of scenting. Now, most dogs do have this natural love, but there are some dogs that just really, really love it. Those are the dogs I would say make the strongest nosework competitors. Melissa Breau: What other factors may influence how well a dog does when it comes to nosework? Stacy Barnett: One of them has to do with how motivated they are for food and toys. We tend to use food and toys as primary reinforcers for nosework. It’s very easy to reinforce with food, for instance, because it’s very fast. This is a timed sport. You have a certain amount of time to do the search, and typically, at least in the U.S., the fastest dog wins. If you can reward very quickly with food, you’re going to be at an advantage. Toys work really well too. Dogs like toys, they tend to work really hard for toys, you can use toys for a reward, but having a motivation for either food or toys is a real advantage. Another thing is the dog’s ability to think on their own and to problem solve. This goes hand-in-hand with dogs being independent, so if you have a more independent dog that can do some problem solving, you can do really well. I look at Brava, for instance. Brava, and I actually put a video of this on my Facebook page, knows how to open doors. She is a problem solver. The latch doors, the lever doors, she knows how to push down on the door and pull on it and open the door, which is really kind of amusing in some respects but kind of scary in other respects. But having that problem-solving ability can really help in nosework. The third thing that is not a requirement but is definitely helpful is physical fitness. Physical fitness is not a requirement. You know, this is a really great sport for older dogs, for infirm dogs, that sort of thing, but having that physical fitness can give you an edge in competition. There’s different sorts of physical fitness. There’s also fitness related to stamina. Stamina is important from both a physical perspective and a mental perspective. If you can have that mental stamina or that physical stamina, and I’m also thinking nasal stamina, dogs that can sniff for a long period of time, can help in competition. Melissa Breau: To dig a little more into it, you were saying about nosework being good for many different types of dogs. Can you talk to that a little bit more? What are some of the benefits of doing nosework? Stacy Barnett: Oh, there are so many benefits of doing nosework, and in fact I think we could do a whole podcast on this. I think we really could. I’m thinking of three different groups of dogs that really benefit from nosework from a therapeutic perspective. One of them is reactive dogs. For a reactive dog, what it can do is you can develop a positive conditioned emotional response to odor, and then if you have very mild triggers while the dog is experiencing — and I’m talking extremely mild, where the dog is under threshold — and the dog has a positive conditioned emotional response to odor, your dog’s reactivity level can actually go down. With my dog Why, for instance, he used to be extremely dog-reactive, and he was dog-reactive out of fear. So I started to train him in nosework, and he started to really enjoy nosework. At the same time, in doing nosework and having fun in doing nosework, he was also exposed to the smell of other dogs, not necessarily dogs in his surroundings, but the smell of other dogs. The end result was actually lowering of his reactivity level, which was really fantastic. So now he can be within about 8 feet of another dog, which is unbelievable. Older dogs. Older dogs are really super. It can keep their mind active. If they can’t physically do all of the things that they used to be able to do, they still have an active mind. They still want to do things. They may not be able to do agility or heavy-duty obedience or IPO or whatever, dock diving, I don’t know, whatever you’re doing. Even barn hunt. Barn hunt requires a certain amount of physical ability because they have to jump up and down hay bales. These are all dogs that when they get older they still want to work, they still want to do stuff. So if you do nosework, it exercises the mind and it keeps them busy because olfaction, the olfactory lobe, is one-eighth of the dog’s brain, so you’re really, really using the dog’s brain and they can stay engaged. I’ve seen it do incredible things for dogs with cognitive dysfunction who have gotten older. We have seen some amazing, amazing things with the older dogs. Then you have the young dogs. Young dogs, their joints are young, you don’t want to stress out their joints, you don’t want to over-exercise them, but yet you still have these energetic young animals who need an outlet. And it tires them out, which is super, because it does use so much of their brain. In AKC, for instance, you can even trial your dog as young as 6 months old. For a lot of dogs that may be too early, based upon their emotional maturity, but you can do this when they’re young and it’s not going to tax their bodies. So you can protect their bodies but you can still get them tired, which is a really, really great thing, trust me. Melissa Breau: Especially when you’ve got a drivey young dog. Stacy Barnett: I do, I do. She’s about 15 months old right now, and I have to tell you, nosework has been amazing for my sanity and for her sanity. Melissa Breau: I think most people probably start out teaching nosework by following a class or they’re using somebody else’s training plan. But at some point, all these different kinds of dogs, handlers need to tailor that training. How can a beginner handler tailor their training based on their dog’s stage of learning and their temperament? Stacy Barnett: You have to be in tune with your dog’s emotions. So whether or not you’re a beginner or not, you can still read your dog. You can still tell if your dog is confident, if they’re feeling motivation for an activity. You have to be able to read that confidence and that motivation because that’s really the core. Those are sacred. Confidence and motivation are sacred in my book. Once those are in place, you can start to build on skills. But you have to always think about having like a little meter on the back of your dog, like a little meter that says how confident they are, how motivated they are. But based upon that confidence and that motivation, you can tailor what you do with your dog. Maybe you want to build the confidence, or your dog is having some confidence issues — and I don’t just mean confidence in the environment, by the way. There are three different kinds of confidence that I talk about. There’s confidence in skills, which is basically does the dog believe in themselves. There’s confidence in the environment. That’s is the dog comfortable in the environment. Is the dog comfortable in new places. And then there’s confidence in the handler, and this is something that I think a lot of people don’t think about. That’s basically does your dog trust you. Does your dog trust that they’re always going to get their reward for the work that they do. Basically you need to evaluate all of these things and always check for that confidence and that motivation. If you have that, then you can work on the skills, because the skills should be secondary to the confidence and motivation. Melissa Breau: I know you’re a fan of Denise’s book, Train the Dog in Front of You. Can you share a little bit about how that concept applies to nosework? Stacey Barnett: Yes, I love that book. I love, love, love, love, love that book, and I’m not just saying that because she’s my boss. No, I really do, and I tell everybody it’s not a nosework book, but that doesn’t matter. It is such a good dog-training book, and especially chapters 2 and 3 — notice I even know the chapters — chapters 2 and 3 are especially applicable to nosework. Those are the chapters that relate to whether or not the dog is cautious or secure, and whether or not the dog is environmental versus handler focused. Because those are two really core things that affect the dog’s ability to do nosework. If the dog is cautious, for instance, you might want to work in a known environment. If the dog is more secure, maybe you want to work in more novel environments. The same thing goes with environmental versus handler focus. You’ve got to think of these things as spectrums. It’s not an either/or, it’s not whether the dog is handler or environmental focused. It’s on the spectrum. So if the dog is more environmentally focused, you might have a slightly different way of handling the dog, where you might be thinking more about distractions and how you’re going to work with distractions, or if the dog is more handler focused, you might want to be thinking about how to build independence. Actually there’s three different kinds of focus, although this is not in the book, this is more my interpretation. There’s environmental, there’s handler, and there’s search focus. So if you can understand where your dog falls on these spectrums that Denise talks about in terms of environmental and handler focus, you can figure out how do you then reorient your dog onto the search focus. Melissa Breau: Denise opens the book by asking handlers if they are handling their dog in a manner that builds on his strengths while also improving his weaknesses. I was hoping we’d get into that a little bit. Can you share some examples of how a dog’s personality or strengths might influence their nosework training? For example, if a dog is super-confident or less confident, how would that impact training? Stacy Barnett: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I always talk about my pyramid. I have a pyramid of training, and that pyramid of training, there’s confidence on the bottom, then there’s motivation is the next layer, then skills, and then stamina. Basically, if you have a confident and a motivated dog, you can work on harder skills, because confidence and motivation, again, it’s sacred. You can also work on their personality strengths. If your dog is confident and motivated more naturally, maybe you can work on harder skills, or maybe you can work in new environments. The other thing is that it’s also important to really evaluate the dog’s resilience. From a resilience perspective, that will help you to identify whether or not your search is too challenging or not challenging enough. So you need to think about the dog’s natural drive levels, the dog’s resilience, and that can help you to understand how challenging of a search that you can make for your dog in order to keep the dog from … because you don’t want anxiety and you don’t want boredom. You can actually find a sweet spot based upon the dog’s resilience and the dog’s drive levels. But again, the basis, of course, is confidence and motivation. Melissa Breau: Funny enough, I was debating whether or not to announce it here, so I guess I will. We started a new Facebook group specifically for the podcast, and we’re going to encourage people to listen and then ask some questions, so maybe if anybody has a question, I’ll have to tag you.   Stacy Barnett: That sounds great. Melissa Breau: Come dish out a little more. I know you enjoy talking about this stuff. Stacy Barnett: I love this stuff. I love this stuff. I eat, sleep, and breathe this. Melissa Breau: What about natural arousal states? How might a handler tailor training based on those? Stacy Barnett: Arousal is one of those things that … don’t fear arousal. If your dog is high arousal, don’t fear it. Embrace it. Arousal is actually the key to really successful nosework trialing. What’s interesting is that dogs have a natural arousal state, so dogs either have what I call an arousal excess or an arousal gap. If you think about what your dog does when they’re at rest, where that arousal state is compared to their arousal state when they’re in drive, that will tell you whether or not you have an arousal excess or you have an arousal gap. The size of that gap is going to indicate how much work you have to do, because some dogs are a little bit closer to the ideal than other dogs. But what you want to do is when you train them and you’re actually working them, you always want to make sure that your dog is in drive — in drive approaching the start line and in drive while they’re actually searching. You can condition this arousal, because arousal is a habit, and if you can always work your dog in the right arousal state, you’re going to find that your dog is going to come more naturally to the start line and in the right arousal state, and the right arousal state is when the dog is in drive. That’s at the peak arousal. If we think about the Yerkes-Dodson Law, like the curve, it looks like a bell-shaped curve, for dogs who have an arousal gap, we want to increase the arousal to the point that they’re in drive. For dogs who have an arousal excess, we want to decrease the arousal to get the dog into drive, because just because you’re peeling the dog off the ceiling doesn’t mean that they’re in drive. And that’s not what we want. We don’t want the dog that we have to peel off the ceiling. For those dogs, we have to lower the arousal so that they can focus and they can really think. And working in drive really becomes a habit, so you always want to work the dog in drive and always want to work the dog in the right arousal state. Melissa Breau: Of course, if handlers are doing this well, as training progresses their dog will improve; but I think it’s common for trainers in all sports to find they are training the dog they used to have instead of the one that’s in front of them right now. How can handlers evaluate their dogs as they go along and avoid that misstep? Stacy Barnett: That’s really interesting, and I refer to something called typecasting. If you’re familiar with typecasting and you think about the movies, there are a couple movie stars that I can think of off the top of my head that definitely get typecasted. Typecasting is something where you have an actor who might be casted in a very similar role, regardless of the movie that they’re in. Two of the major type-casted actors that I can think of are Christopher Walken and Jim Carrey. Christopher Walken, he’s always kind of that creepy, funny dude. He’s always kind of creepy, he’s always kind of funny, he’s always in those creepy roles, he’s always in just this weird role, and then Jim Carrey is always in the role he’s very kind of a slapstick, silly, funny, not very serious role. And for type-casted actors, it’s very difficult for those actors to break out into another type of role. So it’s very possible that you have type-casted your own dog. If you think about Judd, he used to have a nickname. I used to call him Fragile Little Flower. He was my fragile little flower, and he had a hard time in obedience and rally and agility. He’d be the dog stuck at the top of the A-frame and that kind of thing, just very nervous, very shut down. He is no longer that dog, so I had to divorce that typecast of his. Now he is “I am Judd, hear me roar.” He’s this really great search dog. So I had to break that typecast, because if you have a preconceived notion about your dog, you can train to that preconceived notion and you can actually impose restrictions on your dog. So think about whether or not you can break that typecast. The other thing is have a framework. I suggest my pyramid, and I mentioned my pyramid before, earlier, where you have confidence, motivation, skills, and stamina. So always reevaluate your dog in every search session. Every time you do a search, is your dog confident, is your dog motivated, that sort of thing, especially confidence and motivation, what is the dog’s right arousal state. And sometimes recognize that your dog is going to have an off day. So reevaluate your dog with every search, but also, if you have an off day and all of a sudden your dog doesn’t seem very motivated, there could be something else that’s going on. Maybe say, “All right, today is not our day, and tomorrow’s a different day.” Those are the things I would do to make sure that from a handling perspective you’re always reevaluating your dog and you’re always training the dog in front of you. Melissa Breau: I’m not sure who said it, but somebody at one point mentioned if the dog doesn’t do something you’re pretty sure they’ve been trained to do, let it go. Happened once, don’t worry about it. If it happens two or three times, then it’s time to start thinking about how you can change your training. Stacy Barnett: Absolutely. Absolutely. Whoever said that is a genius. Melissa Breau: Are there any dead giveaways — or even something maybe a little more subtle — that indicate it’s time to go through that process in your own head and reevaluate the dog that you have and maybe your training plan a little bit? Stacy Barnett: Absolutely, absolutely. Things like if your dog is bored, or if your dog is anxious, these are the things where perhaps you’re not evaluating your dog’s resilience level or your dog’s drive level well enough. Because depending upon the dog’s drive level and the dog’s resilience level, you could easily put your dog into an anxious situation. Or if the dog is bored, then you need to reevaluate and say maybe you’re making your searches a little bit too hard, or maybe you’re making them a little bit too easy. Maybe the challenge level isn’t right compared to the dog’s skill level. The other thing is look for changes in the dog’s attitude, and whether or not they’re positive or negative, and then modify your approach based upon that, because you always want the dog to come thinking, This is the most fun part of my day, and if your dog isn’t having fun, you need to reevaluate what you’re doing, and maybe you need to reevaluate what your dog needs, so maybe your dog needs something different from you. Melissa Breau: To round things out, I want to give you a little bit of time to talk about some of the exciting things on the calendar. I know you’ve got a webinar next week on Setting Meaningful Scent Puzzles for Your Dog. Can you share a little bit about it, what the premise is? Stacy Barnett: Oh, absolutely. I can’t wait for that one. The keyword is meaningful. Because it’s not just about setting scent puzzles. We can all set scent puzzles. Scent puzzles are basically our way of creating problems for our dogs to solve so they can learn and build skills, and it’s all about skill building. However, it’s really, really important that we think about the word meaningful, and meaningful really refers to the resilience and the drive of the dog. For instance, I’m not a big fan of … sometimes we see this in seminars and it actually bothers me, where a clinician may set out a really, really hard hide and have green dogs work the hard hide. What you end up with is a dog that might lose their confidence or lose their motivation. So it’s really important that you set the right challenge and right challenge level for your dog, based upon the dog’s resilience and natural drive levels. That’s really what I want to talk about is based upon the dog’s natural drive levels and resilience, how do you know you’re setting a meaningful scent puzzle that’s going to build the skills at the same time as caring for the dog’s confidence and motivation. So it’s not just about building the skills, but rather it’s about how you build the skills so that you can preserve that. Melissa Breau: What about for August, what classes do you have coming up? Anything you want to mention? Stacy Barnett: Oh, I have three classes coming up. I’m teaching 101, so if you want to get into nosework and you haven’t started nosework, join me in NW101, that’s Introduction to Nosework. I’m also teaching NW230, which is polishing skills for NW2 and NW3. And the one that I want to mention today and talk a little bit about is Nosework Challenges. That’s NW240. That’s a series that I haven’t taught in a while, and I’m going to bring that series back. NW240 is Nosework Challenges. It’s a lot of fun. It’s going to be focused on skills, but at the same time what I’m going to do is I’m going to add in elements of this discussion around resilience and drive, so that we can make sure that we’re doing the puzzles in the right way. Melissa Breau: One last question for you. It’s my new ending question for people when they come on. What’s a lesson you’ve learned or been reminded of recently when it comes to dog training? Stacy Barnett: You have to actually train, which sounds kind of funny, but nosework can seem so natural, so it can be like, well, the dog is just scenting, they know how to find the hide, they have value for the odor, so they go out and they find the target odor. Well, that sounds great and all, but you really have to train, because it’s very possible now, with nosework being a lot more popular than it used to be, now with the addition of AKC out there and some other venues, there’s a lot of trialing opportunities and it’s very possible to get into a situation where you’re trialing more than you’re training. If that’s the case, that’s going to have a negative impact on your trialing. You’re going to find that having that competitive mindset instead of the evaluative context is going to be a detriment to your training. So it’s really important to work your dog while you’re evaluative versus competitive, if that makes sense. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. That’s great. I like that a lot. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast Stacy! I really appreciate it. Stacy Barnett: I’ve had so much fun with this. This is a really great topic, a really, really great topic, and I really enjoyed this. Thank you so much for having me on. Melissa Breau: Absolutely, and I hope some folks come and join you for the webinars. Thank you to our listeners for tuning in! We’ll be back next week, this time we’ll be back with Deb Jones to talk about becoming a better teacher for the human half of the dog-handler team. If you haven’t already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. CREDITS: Today’s show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

In this episode I chat with Hamza Khan about the systems and strategies we use to achieve peak performance, and how that begins with managing our health, energy and attention.   Hamza is an award-winning author, marketer, entrepreneur and keynote speaker on a mission to help people & organizations transform ideas into action.   Episode Highlights: [04:05] What is burn out & why it matters [09:00] 12 stages of burn-out [19:20] Strategies to manage burn-out [28:05] Managing time & energy [36:15] Non-negotiables [41:25] Focus & decision fatigue   Guest - Hamza Khan: http://www.hamzakhan.ca Medium: https://medium.com/@hamzak Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HamzaKhan.ca Twitter: @HamzaK (https://twitter.com/hamzak) Instagram: @hamzak (https://www.instagram.com/hamzak/) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/khanhamza/ Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/hamzak   Concepts: • 12 Stages of Burnout - https://bit.ly/2kg622O  • Parkinson's Law - https://bit.ly/1Massqh  • Yerkes Dodson Law - https://bit.ly/2K7cupB • Robin Sharma's 90/90/1 rule - https://bit.ly/2tpeQpm  • Eisenhower's Urgent / Important framework - https://bit.ly/2duSBni   Books & Media: • Hamza Khan: The Burnout Gamble - https://amzn.to/2Kl1jWt  • Hamza Khan: The Burnout Gamble (Ted Talk) - https://bit.ly/2tpdmve  • Kelly McGonigal, PhD: The Upside of Stress - https://amzn.to/2K4yC3D  • Kelly McGonigal, PhD: How to make stress your friend (Ted Talk) - https://bit.ly/1ctvXdp  • Sun Tzu: The Art of War - https://amzn.to/2K7Wljs   People: Herbert Freudenberger - https://bit.ly/2K94xA3   Additional Articles by Hamza: • Introverts: Manage Your Energy By Colour Coding Your Calendar - https://bit.ly/2tArnpd  • Why you should wear the same thing to work everyday - https://bit.ly/2tr8B4s  • Better distractions - https://bit.ly/2tptAEG  • 4-step guide to eliminating distractions - https://bit.ly/2Ims1fu  • How to disconnect - https://bit.ly/2MlUUe2  Fighting information overload - https://bit.ly/2KhFDO8  

SUMMARY: Dr. Deborah Jones -- better known around FDSA as Deb Jones -- she is a psychologist who specializes in learning theory and social behavior. An early innovator in the use of clicker training, she has owned and worked with a variety of breeds and has earned top level titles in agility, rally, and obedience over the last 25 years. In 2004 Deb worked with agility trainer and World Team member Judy Keller to develop the FOCUS training system. FOCUS stands for Fun, Obedience & Consistency lead to Unbelievable Success. Deb has also worked with Denise Fenzi, co-authoring the “Dog Sports Skills” book series and authored several other books, with more in the works! At FDSA, Deb offers a wide range of popular classes, including a number of excellent foundations classes. Her focus is on developing training methods that are enjoyable and effective for both the dog and the trainer. Links K9 in Focus (Deb's Site) Next Episode:  To be released 2/9/2018, and I'll be talking to Denise Fenzi about Play, so stay tuned! TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we'll be talking to Dr. Deborah Jones -- better known around FDSA as Deb Jones.   Deb is a psychologist who specializes in learning theory and social behavior. An early innovator in the use of clicker training, she has owned and worked with a variety of breeds and has earned top-level titles in agility, rally, and obedience over the last 25 years. In 2004, Deb worked with agility trainer and World Team member Judy Keller to develop the FOCUS training system. FOCUS stands for Fun, Obedience & Consistency Lead to Unbelievable Success. Deb has also worked with Denise Fenzi, co-authoring the “Dog Sports Skills” book series, and authored several other books, with more in the works! At FDSA, Deb offers a wide range of popular classes, including a number of excellent foundations classes. Her focus is on developing training methods that are enjoyable and effective for both the dog and the trainer. Hi Deb! Welcome back to the podcast. Deb Jones: Thanks, Melissa. I'm really happy to be here. Melissa Breau: To start us out, do you want to just reacquaint listeners with the furry friends you share your household with? Deb Jones: At the moment, we have four dogs and one cat. We have a wide variety. Smudge is the oldest dog. He's a Blue Merle Sheltie. He's 14 now, and sadly, he's sort of in the hospice stage of life. He's having more and more issues, so that's always a tough thing to deal with. But we're taking it day to day and seeing how he is. Then I have Zen, my red Border Collie, who's 10 years old. Zen still is his wild and crazy self. I don't think that's ever going to change. Star is my black-and-white Border Collie, and she's going to be 7 this year, which is just stunning to me because it seems like she's still just 2 years old. I can't believe they keep getting older. I tell them to stop, and I tell them 7's a perfect age, just stay 7 forever and I'd be thrilled because it's just the right time. Then we have little Tigger, who is the tiny little Sheltie. He is just going to be turning 2 next week, and he only weighs 7 and a half pounds, so he's very, very small for a Sheltie, but he's full of himself. He's got enough attitude for everybody. And finally we have Tricky the cat. I think Trick's about 8 or so now. He's been around for a while. He was the star of the Cat Class that we put on last year. So that's the group for the moment. Melissa Breau: Last time you were on the podcast, I know we talked quite a bit about focus, since that's a big part of what you teach. For anyone who's listening who wants to go back and listen to that, which I recommend, it's Episode 14. But I did have a question or two that we didn't get to last time, so I wanted to dive into that just a little bit. On your syllabus for the Get Focused class, you have a line that says, “What is focus? How is it different from attention?” So I wanted to ask, what is your definition of focus, and how is it different from attention? Deb Jones: OK, I'm glad to talk about that. That's a common question that we get all the time. The way that I think about focus is that it's the ability to concentrate on a task despite distractions. So whatever it is that we're doing, you can keep doing that without being pulled away or pulled in other directions by things going on around you. In the dog training world, attention is often considered to be either the dog's looking at you or making eye contact with you. Focus is a lot more than that. That's a part of it, but it's actually a small part. With focus, my dog might be working on a task totally independently of me, and I don't want them looking at me or making eye contact. You can imagine, for example, pretty much most of agility, nosework, working in obedience at the upper levels in particular, something like go outs — there are lots of times when the dog needs to focus on what they're doing, and then appropriately switch back to trainer focus when it's necessary. So there's a lot more going on there than just “Look at me,” because if you just look at me all the time, we're not going to get very far in our training. We start out with that, we start out with “Pay attention to the trainer,” because that is really the first step. But it's also, I think, a lot more about persistence at the task, sticking on task once you start doing something, no matter what is going on around you. That's sort of my expanded answer of the difference there. Melissa Breau: A lot of people tend to ask about focus. They're those students that have worked really hard, and they finally managed to achieve good focus from their dogs, and then they're really scared to ruin it. They're working at their desk, or they're watching TV, or who knows, but they're doing something of their own that does not involve the dog, and the dog comes over and offers focus, offers to engage, and wants to work, and they feel like, OK, my choices are ruin my dog's focus and all this work that I put in, or ignore my dog, and they struggle with that a little bit. How do you handle that? What do you recommend in that kind of situation? Deb Jones: That's something that does start to happen, especially if you've done very much focus work. All of a sudden now, too much focus is a problem. But it's really not a problem. We're all happy when we have more focus. We can't say that's a problem. Melissa Breau: It's a good problem. Deb Jones: Yes, it's a very good problem. So if your dog wants to interact with you, I always think that is fabulous. Take it. I always acknowledge it. That doesn't mean I'm going to get up and train you right now, but I am going to respond to you in some way, even if I'm just petting you and saying we're going to do something later. That's still responding to you. I don't jump up every time that you focus on me. In our work, in the system that we have set up and the way we teach focus, we set up expectations for when we want focus and when we don't need it anymore, and we're clear about when those times are. We want focus work for training sessions. When I'm training my dog, I want focus a hundred percent of the time. But when we're lounging around the house, we don't need focus anymore. So we set up the dogs to understand, These are the times, these are the signals I'll give you that focus will be reinforced, and these are the signals that I give you that we are done for now and you can pretty much do whatever you want … well, within reason. You can't get into trouble, but you can pretty much do whatever you want. So we have those on and off cues that we use with them. If I had a dog, though, who was very sensitive, or really hardly ever engaged with me and was very new to this, I would probably leap up from my desk and have a party if they showed me that they wanted to be engaged. So it really very much depends on the dog, as well as the level of training you're at. If I did that now, though, with Zen, I would never do anything else. It would be like a constant 24/7, so with him it's the opposite. It's “We're done for now. We don't need any more focus at the moment.” We do actually in focus training, the second exercise we do, we capture focus when it happens, and we acknowledge it with something that's non-food. So we want to get into the fact that my paying attention to you, my interacting with you, playing, praise, petting, all of those things, we will do. And what surprises people is how often then the dog starts focusing on them around the house. So it shows us that they're willing to do it, as long as we're willing to acknowledge it. The other thing I want to mention here, because this is something that also comes up a lot, is people will talk about doing focus work while they're walking their dog, or hiking, and I tell them, “Don't do that.” To me, that is totally separate from my focus work. When we're out hiking, or out walking, that's my dog's chance to relax, and to sniff, and to do again whatever they want to do within reason. I'll stop when they stop, I'll move when they move, I don't make a big deal about it. It's for them to relax as much as for me, and that's not a time when I want focus. I may have to give you a cue at some point, I may have to call them back to me, or ask them to lie down or something, as necessary, but we don't ever combine focus work with those informal activities. We keep those totally separate, again so it's clear to the dog: I'm expecting focus from you now; I'm not going to be expecting it from you in these other situations. Melissa Breau: Hearing you say this, it almost sounds like you're essentially putting it on stimulus control. Deb Jones: Exactly. I could have said that and not gone through all these explanations. Yes, that is exactly what we're doing is putting it on stimulus control. Maybe I need to stop being so wordy. Melissa Breau: No, no, I think that was good, because I've taken the class and I hadn't thought of it that way until you described it this time around. That's an interesting way of thinking about it. Now, I know in addition to Get Focused this session, you're teaching a new class, and the topic is kind of fascinating. You called it Achieving a Balance Between Motivation and Control, which I think everybody wants that, right? So can you share a little bit about what the class covers? Deb Jones: Well, I can probably share a lot about what the class covers, because it's on my mind. Whenever we develop a new class, we think about it 24/7. It's on my mind a lot, and I've been thinking about this class for a long time and trying to figure out how to put it into the format that I wanted in order to teach it. When I was thinking back, I realized I was writing lectures for this when we went to camp last year, on the plane to camp, so it's been a while. I've been working on pulling this together, and the thought's been in the back of my mind even longer. This is another what we would call a concept class, meaning the class is not about any particular behavior or skill. It's more like it's built around a theme, and everything we do then kind of supports that theme or helps us explore it or find ways to make changes based on that. Concept classes in general are harder because they require more from the trainer. They require more thought and effort. And they're harder for the instructor for the same reason. They just are a little bit different. A skills class is just, “We're going to work on this thing, like a retrieve, and that's all we're going to work on for six weeks,” which is a lot more straightforward. But concept classes tend to be a bit different. I first really started thinking about this idea of balance in dogs back when I was doing a lot of agility. You would see what would happen over time pretty regularly. Somebody would start out, say, with their first agility dog, and often the dog was never gotten with performance in mind. They just stumbled into it. And as they started to do agility, typically what happened was they would say, “Oh, this dog isn't fast enough,” “This dog isn't interested,” or “This dog isn't very driven” — and I'll talk about drive in a second here — and then they would go, “I need a dog that's going to be better suited for this,” which I'm good with that. I think that's a very smart thing to think about: Is the dog I have suited for what I want to do? But then they would get a faster model, oftentimes a model with no brakes, so typically a herding breed. And then they have this little baby puppy herding-breed dog, and they spend about a year building drive in the dog because they're so worried. Since their last dog didn't have a lot of enthusiasm and energy, they're going to get it with this next dog. Of course what happens is this dog already had plenty of motivation, and what you're doing is not building drive in any way at all. What you're doing is building over-arousal. So now you have dogs that are high as kites, and what happens? No control, because the person was afraid to work on control because that was a bad idea with their last dog. We're pretty much always training our last dog, and it's usually very different from what the dog in front of us needs right now. So we end up with these dogs that are highly over-aroused, often around agility, and that's just the first place I saw it. People do it in other sports as well. Let me get back to the term drive, though, because this is one that I very carefully left out of the description of the class. I purposely thought about it and left it out and changed it to motivation. The term motivation, I think, is a better one for what we're talking about. When you're motivated, you want to do something. You have a reason to do it, you have the energy to do it, you have the desire to do it. That's what we think of in dogs when we talk about drive. But scientific terms we never use the term drive. That's just something that's seen as not even a real thing. It doesn't exist. It's a word that can be described better in many other ways, or a quality that can be described better in many other ways. On the other hand, dog trainers use it all the time, so it's not like I can say I will never use that word, because people do understand what you're saying when you talk about drive. Actually, in my first lecture in the class, I talk about … say a little bit about this and why I don't use that term, but I understand that a lot of people do. To me, it's more of a motivation issue than it is a drive issue. That's why I don't use that term a lot. I may lapse into it now and again, if I forget myself. But typically, so let's go back to my example of the totally over-aroused dog. So now what we've got is no control. What that really means is there's no balance. You've got all arousal, no control, or all motivation, no control. That's not a good place to be for the dog or the trainer — trust me, I've been there. You wish greatly for your more careful, thoughtful dog when you have a dog that just “go, go, go” a thousand miles an hour, and you cannot get them to slow down for a second. That's a problem. That's a big problem. I think in general it's hard for us to know who our dogs are, to really, clearly see them, and to see what they actually need. Again, we have this illusion that either we're training the dog we had before, or we have this mythical, idealized version of who the dog is. So we're not actually thinking and really analyzing who's this dog and what do they need to get them more into this balanced place where they can do whatever we want, yet they can still make good choices and decisions and think about what they're doing. This is where we get into nature and nurture a little bit in my thinking about it. Genetics matters. There's no question about that. You can't say they don't, and I sort of believe they matter more than 50 percent. Of course in psychology, for years we've talked about the nature-nurture controversy and what determines how you turn out as an adult. Was it all determined by your genetics, or does your environment and experience have a lot more to do with it? Of course it's not one or the other. It's an interaction of the two. But lately the thinking has been going back to the nature part of it, and that there are some things that were hardwired into us, and it's really hard to change them. You can't override nature. You can modify it a little bit. So we're going to be looking at what has nature given you with this dog. I have sort of a temperament test. It's not really a test. It's you answering questions about your dog from what you know of them, trying to answer them honestly in terms of what is this dog, who is this dog, what do they bring into the world in terms of core characteristics? In humans we talk about something called the “big five personality characteristics,” so I sort of built it off of that, that these are the things that people think are genetic. Where do you fall on introvert/extrovert, where do you fall on resilience when something bad happens and you recover from it — those kinds of things. So we'll look at that, but of course the flipside of that is your environment and experiences. They matter. They may not again override what you normally are going to be, but they certainly matter a lot. So we'll look at those as well and talk a little bit about it. It used to be the early behaviorists like John Watson would say, “Give me a baby and I can make him anything I want him to be.” And I'm, like, Oh, I don't think so. Parents everywhere would tell you that is so very wrong. That's not the case at all that you could possibly … nobody comes into the world a blank slate, or the Tabula Rasa idea that we have from John Locke. That just doesn't happen, really. We're not all interchangeable when we could be whatever we wanted, and that's not true for our dogs, either. We know they're different, and we have to take that into account. So we look at that interaction. I'm going to talk a lot about that the first couple weeks of class, the interaction of nature and nurture, and look at where we're standing with these dogs right now. So, what is my dog, to the best of my knowledge, really like? Then we're going to talk a lot about arousal levels. I've mentioned arousal a few times because you can have too much. Too much, too little, over- and under-arousal. But that's something that we can modify. Classical conditioning, in particular, plays a huge role in this process of arousal. We connect certain stimuli to being over-aroused or under-aroused. So we'll talk about how that works, and look at how we might change some of those fairly automatic responses. They just happen. When you are exposed to stimuli, you have that response. I've had dogs, personally — Smudgie, the old dog, right now is a good example of that. You get within a certain distance to the agility ring, and he had no brain. Absolutely no brain. Screaming, lunging, just … you know, he didn't do it on purpose. It was just his automatic response because the stimuli of agility brought out that response. We had to work very, very hard to change that and to get him at an appropriate level where he could think at least a little bit as he went into the agility ring, because if you go in like that, nothing good ever happens afterwards. It tends to be a train wreck. So we'll talk a little bit about — I've had some train wrecks now and again — we'll talk a little about how arousal levels and classical conditioning work. One of the things that has been fascinating to me lately is to think about what they call “tells.” Tell is a subtle sign that you could easily miss that something is happening or is going to happen. They talk about it in gambling, that if you're good at understanding another player's tells, you can tell what kind of hand they have, even if they're trying to hide that. So learning this about our dogs, what are the precursors to arousal changes? If we can see those early, we can jump in there and make some changes so that they don't go too high or too low. We can get them in that optimal state of arousal where they have plenty of energy and yet they still can think and learn. Tells are really different for every dog and very, very easy to miss. I think here's where video is really helpful, because you didn't see it when you were training, but when you go back and look, you start to see this pattern. I was actually doing some video for this class, for the later parts of this class, talking about tells, and I realized that I was ignoring one from Star. I was getting it regularly that it was definitely one of her tells, and I was ignoring it and not even thinking about it. When I looked back over the videos, I was like, Oh, she does do that regularly when she's too aroused, and then the next thing's going to be a bark. So that led me to go, If I could change when I see this, the very beginnings of it, then everything would go better. So we'll work with people to try to figure out what their dogs' tells are, and to pick up on them earlier in the training process. I think there's a lot here, and it's taken me a long time actually to pull it together in a way that made sense to me. We still go on things like … typical things like the reinforcers we're using, when we're using them, how we're using them. Even the markers and the fact that markers can lead to different levels of arousal. I know I see that in many dogs. There are lots of dogs that the click is a signal for over-arousal, and as soon as they hear a click, they're off. They're just higher than possible. I can't even use a click — I rarely use a click, I should say — with Zen in shaping anymore because I realized I had done that with him. So I switched to a verbal marker, and he doesn't get nearly as high when we do that. The other thing we'll look at here and talk about are energy levels from us and our dogs, and the fact that we want to change their energy level. We want more or less of something, but we have to be very subtle and careful about how we go about doing it. You can't force it. You have to move them very slowly in the direction you want. If we change our energy levels too drastically, it doesn't really help. It only frustrates them or causes them to avoid us. So you have a low-energy dog and you're acting like a clown — clowns are on my mind because I'm doing the webinar on classical conditioning, and scary clowns seems to come up a lot — so you're acting like a clown, and you're actually going to turn your dog off and push them even further away from you, rather than if you just bring up your energy a tiny bit, they'll likely come up to meet that. So we have to experiment with that and see what works for any particular team. A lot of this, in fact all of this, is very, very customized to different teams. The good thing is usually in Gold spots you get enough variety in dogs that you see a little bit of everything. We don't get dogs that are all the same. So we'll be looking at over-arousal, under-arousal, we'll be looking at things I've probably never seen before in terms of arousal, and working with that, which is always the fun part of teaching — when you get something you didn't expect. OK, so that's the long version of what the class is about. Melissa Breau: It sounds even more fascinating now than it did before. I just think it's going to be such an interesting topic. It sounds like the Gold spots are going to be invaluable in that class. Deb Jones: I think it can help people in many ways. I think it really can. As I said, it's going to be challenging for the trainers because they do more work than the dogs. It's the same as trained Focus class. It's more about giving you a lot of information to help you start to see things differently and start to approach your training differently. I think that that's definitely going to be something that comes out of this. Melissa Breau: I know the title includes the word balance, and you talked a little bit in there about looking at different skills and thinking about where your dog is. I've always thought of it as a little bit of a game of tug-of-war, where you work a little bit on precision, then you have to work a little bit more on building drive, and they impact each other. Is it ever really possible to have a dog that's equally motivated and controlled? Deb Jones: I think that there are some dogs who just by nature are pretty equally balanced. It's nothing we do. They just came that way. In fact, Judy Keller's first Sheltie, Morgan, I'd say he was just the perfect dog. In terms of arousal and control, he was ideal. She didn't do anything to cause that. He was her first performance dog. She didn't even know what she had at the time. Looking back now, you know what you had. But it's like, yeah, by nature, some dogs are just like that. They just come prewired that way. But most of us are not that lucky. We're going to get dogs that come at all different levels of this, and yes, we're going to be constantly working on it. It's maintenance. It's always maintenance. You will push your dog too far in one direction and then have to go a little bit back in the other, though most of them we know. For example, I know with Zen, his lifetime is about a little more control, because he's got all the motivation in the world. With another dog, like my Papillon from years ago, Copper, he had so much control just naturally, and he was a little inhibited naturally, so everything for Copper was always about more motivation. That's all we worked on. I never worked on control because he didn't need it. He already had that. And in fact the day in agility when Copper actually was running so fast that he missed his contact on the dog walk, we were stunned, and I'm, like, Good for him. The fact that he was in it so much, and moving so fast that he didn't even hit the contact on the way down, I was proud of myself and him because it's like, that's the motivation I want. And in fact the judge didn't even see it and didn't call it. We didn't realize it until we watched the video later, because he was so fast, and I'm sure the judge never expected that this little dog was going to miss a contact zone. So yes, we're constantly trying to get them in the zone, in the optimal level or state of arousal is how we often refer to it. There's something called the Yerkes-Dodson Law that is well known to quite a few dog trainers. It talks about your level of motivation, and when you get too much or not enough, that's not good. You want that optimal middle state that you're in, where everything is flowing along, and it's perfect, and you have enough of both things. You do everything with lots of energy, yet you can still make thoughtful decisions as you go along. Melissa Breau: Stacy talked a little bit about that when she was on, just looking at that curve and what it means and what it's like. I know she's got her puppy now who's on the opposite end of the curve than what she's used to. Deb Jones: Yes, she does, and that's exactly the thing. It's almost like you have to learn to train all over again when you get a dog that's the opposite, because if you don't, you'll make some pretty big mistakes along the way and have to try to fix them later on down the line. Melissa Breau: Looking at it as a balance, how can people start to get an idea of where their dog is now on that scale or in that balance, if they're too much on the control side or too much on the motivation side? Deb Jones: First thing I always look at is the energy and enthusiasm level. How excited is the dog to do whatever it is you're asking them to do? It really doesn't matter what the task is, but how much energy do they normally bring to it? And is it appropriate for the task? Is it going to be enough? The energy level you need for competition obedience is different than the energy level you need to do well in agility. So are they bringing the right amount of energy? If you take the energy for agility and you put it in a competition obedience ring, it's probably going to be a hot mess because you're just going to have too little control. So we look at are they doing what's appropriate for what we're working on? The other part of that is looking at how, say, clear headed your dog is. Can they think while they're working? Can they seem to make decisions? Can they learn to regulate themselves a little bit and come up or down? That's one of the things we work on, we want to help them with, is this idea of modulating arousal. Can they do that? Can they respond to well-known cues? Do they have enough control for that or not? If they don't respond, it isn't usually a skill problem. It's a problem of arousal, much of the time. Melissa Breau: If you have a dog that you know tends to be more on the control side, or more on the arousal side, how do all those different factors play into that? How many different sides of a dog can there be? Deb Jones: Everything affects it. Everything affects it, and every moment can be different within a given dog. It's a constant process of adjusting to what your dog is giving you right now. It's definitely different from dog to dog, but it's also different in the same dog, I would say, not even day to day but sometimes moment to moment, if you have dogs that can be wildly inconsistent in terms of their ability to work and respond appropriately. So it's this constant fluid process. Arousal isn't a static thing. You don't get the same level of arousal, because it's what is the behavior itself, what are the reinforcers you're using, what is your mood? My little Papillion Copper, for example, who was fairly inhibited, if he thought for one second I wasn't in a good mood for whatever reason, even if it had nothing to do with him, he was done. That was the end of the day. I might as well just not even bother. So it's a constant fluid process. We always have to be thinking about all of those factors and how they're affecting what we're trying to do right now, because people say, “Well, my dog did great in this situation and not in another one,” and I'm, like, “Well, I believe that.” I believe that to be the case, and there are probably a dozen things that went into that difference. So at least being aware of them and knowing that there's going to be a lot of variation. Our job is to read our dogs and to try to help them stay on the path, to try to help them be as consistent as possible with their emotional states and their reactions. That's what we do. Melissa Breau: I wanted to ask you to share a couple of tips. First, looking at the dog who is well-mannered and very much under control, but maybe who they are struggling to get to enthusiastically respond or feel really motivated about training or work. Do you have a tip or two that people can try or do to work on that? Deb Jones: Yeah, kind of a general suggestion. Dogs that are too controlled for whatever reason, either they're inhibited themselves, or they're controlled because the environment makes them a little nervous or uncomfortable, or they're worried about being wrong, there's a million reasons, but they don't have enough energy or confidence to do what we want them to do. For these guys, I think the most important thing you can do is to never, ever, ever let your dog know that he made a mistake, ever. The dog is never wrong. You have to keep up that hugely high rate of reinforcement so that success builds on success, and success also builds confidence. A more confident dog is a sturdy dog. A confident dog can take things that don't go perfectly and roll with it and move on. But a very sensitive dog cannot, and so letting them know they're not right is the biggest mistake I think people make. So I'd say that's the one thing: Don't ever let them know they're wrong. And they learn that, of course, our behavior tells them. They don't know it's wrong unless we tell them it's wrong somehow, so you're going to have to control your own reactions in order to not let them know that there are mistakes, and then make it easier, or make it easy enough, so they can be successful. That's the one thing about those types of dogs. They need to feel free to make mistakes, just to do things, and once they start to feel freer, then you start to get a lot more confidence building. Melissa Breau: What about the opposite? What about those dogs that are driven, they're motivated, but maybe they're a little less under control. Deb Jones: Yeah, a lot of experience with these dogs. A whole lot of personal experience. The dogs that are like, “go, go, go, do, do, do, move, move, move,” any activity is often very addictive to them. Moving feels good. We call them adrenaline junkies, because movement starts to release a lot of these different hormones, adrenalin being a big one, and they're like, Oh, man, this feels so good. It feels so good to do things where there's lots of action. It doesn't feel so good to do things where there's a lot more control. The problem with these guys is if we try to squash that enthusiasm, to overdo control work, to stop them from doing the things that they want to do, that typically leads to frustration, and so we get a lot of frustration behaviors like barking and spinning. At the end of agility runs you'll see dogs that, because they have to stop now, they leap up and start biting their handlers. That's a frustration, because they're now having to inhibit something that felt really, really good to them. So it's a little tricky here because we want to help these dogs see that they can still do everything. They don't need to be high as a kite to do it. I have a little section in the class called Arousal Modulation: learning to change your arousal level without going immediately from zero to a thousand, but coming up a little bit and then going back down, and getting used to these changes or transitions in the amount of energy that you would see from a dog for different exercises or different things that we're training. We start to see these guys like to move. So what happens if you do a moving exercise, and then you go into one that requires more thoughtfulness and control? We work through some experimenting here to see what kind of transitions work best, how can we move from one activity to the other and help them not get too high when we're doing it. So teaching them basically to gear down, but doing it carefully, and not completely squashing their desire to do anything, because that usually ends badly then. Melissa Breau: Everybody wants that dog that's perfectly balanced between motivation and control. But I wanted to ask who you really think is an ideal fit for a Gold spot in this class. What would make a dog a really good candidate? What skills do they need? Can somebody take it with a brand-new puppy? Should they be taking it with a slightly older dog? What kind of dog are you hoping will enroll?   Deb Jones: It's true for almost everybody that you want that perfect balance, so I would think that a lot of people would. Of course we'll see certain people who are having problems right now and they want to work on those. If you're having issues training and showing, and it's not a skills problem, so you see lots of times dogs do great at home, or great in familiar environments where they're comfortable, but then you get them out into other settings, and they get too high or too low and they can't perform, that would be the kind of dog that I think this could help, and the kind of team, I should say — not just the dog; I hope to help the whole team — that this should help. So when you see that inconsistency between different contexts with your dog. Of course what we always say, “My dog did it perfectly in the living room,” and if I had a dollar every time somebody told me that, I'd be rich. And I believe that. I believe that is very true. Your dog did do it perfectly there because their arousal level was at a good level. It wasn't too high, it wasn't too low. So if you see different things in different situations. If you are one of those people who find yourself saying, and I've done it too, “He knows how to do this,” when your dog is clearly not doing it. It's like, “But he knows this.” Again, I don't know that it's a skills issue anymore. I think that is definitely much more an arousal issue, and so that means we have to look at the bigger picture, not just look at, OK, I'll train some more on this behavior. It doesn't ever hurt to strengthen behaviors, but I don't know that that actually addresses the problem that you're having. It only partially does. So anytime you have a lot of inconsistency in the dog's behavior. We don't have any sort of restriction on age or experience for dogs for this class. In thinking about it, a lot of the things that I think about and do, I do this with my puppies, I start very early on, and I work on it basically their whole lives, so young dogs are fine. Older dogs that are having issues are fine as well. The one thing I would hope for is that you have a few behaviors that are on cue. It doesn't have to be much. But for some of our later exercises, we like to move between some trained behaviors and a few behaviors in process that you can use in the exercises. I don't care what the behaviors are. We're not even actually going to be critiquing your behaviors in any way. They're just necessary so we can work on the new things that we're going to try to be instilling in this class, so the exercises are sort of just we're going to ignore those. We're going to ignore the behaviors that you bring in, unless you really want feedback, but that's not the point. The point is can they do them in these different settings and states and in different ways. So the class is pretty open, I think. As always, our job is to adjust for every team that we get. We do the best we can to meet them where they are, and to try to help them from that point. That's why I expect that there'll be a lot of variety in Gold spots. I think we'll have it all over the map, and so that makes it a little challenging for me in terms of I can't just give you any sort of canned answer to something that comes up, but I think that's also what makes it more interesting for people to watch, the people who are in the Silver/Bronze spots, to be able to see that much variety. So we're pretty open, and people can always contact me if they have questions about whether they think their situation would be appropriate for class. I'm very happy to answer any questions they might have about that. Melissa Breau: It really does sound like a fascinating class. I think it's going to be great. The students who get Gold are going to be lucky, lucky people. Deb Jones: Let's hope they think so when class is done. Melissa Breau: I have every confidence that they will. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Deb! It was really good to chat again and to learn a little bit more about the new class. Deb Jones: Oh, thank you, Melissa. I always have fun talking about training. What could possibly be better? So I always enjoy this. Melissa Breau: Thanks again, and thanks to our listeners for tuning in! We'll be back next week, this time with Denise Fenzi to talk about Play. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Credits: Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

SUMMARY: Stacey Barnett is an active competitor in Nosework, Tracking, Obedience, Rally, Agility and Barn Hunt, and the host of the Scentsabilities podcast -- but Scent Sports are her primary focus and her first love. Links www.scentsabilitiesnw.com Next Episode:  To be released 1/19/2018, and I'll be talking to Lori Stevens about how you can help your dog reach optimum fitness in about five minutes, so stay tuned! TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we'll be talking to Stacy Barnett. Stacy is an active competitor in Nosework, Tracking, Obedience, Rally, Agility, and Barn Hunt, and the host of the Scentsabilities podcast — but Scent Sports are her primary focus and her first love. Hi Stacy, welcome back to the podcast. Stacy Barnett: Hi Melissa. How are you? Melissa Breau: I'm doing well. So this is our third take, thanks to technology. So hopefully this time we have good sound and everybody does well. To start us out, Stacy, do you want to tell us just a little bit and remind listeners who your dogs are? I know since last time we talked you have a new addition, so maybe you could share a little bit about that. Stacy Barnett: I do, I do. I love talking about her anyway, so that's really great. I have four dogs now, so I'm getting closer to the “crazy dog lady” status. I don't think I'm there yet, but a little closer. I have four dogs. My oldest dog is a 10-year-old Standard Poodle named Joey, and Joey is competing in the NW3 level right now in nosework. I have a 6-year-old miniature American Shepherd, or mini Aussie, and he is at the end of E2 level. Then I have two Labradors now, so my main competition dog that I've done most of my competition with out of these dogs is Judd. Judd is — I can't believe it — he's 8 years old now. Time flies. He's an 8-year-old Labrador Retriever, and he's a dog that's my elite dog that I competed at the 2017 NACSW National Invitational this year. He's really the one that brought me into nosework in a big way. Then I have a brand new addition. I have a — she's going to be 9 months old, believe it not, this next week — and she is a Labrador Retriever from working lines. I'm very proud of her breeding and her breeder because they produce professional dogs for the professional sector, like FEMA dogs, cadaver dogs, that kind of thing. So she's bred for detection. She's definitely living up to her breeding, which is really exciting. But she's a really super dog, I absolutely love her, a little peanut, she's only about 35 pounds right now, but she may be small, but she's mighty. Melissa Breau: I know that you mentioned on Facebook a little bit, and some other places, that Brava's been a little bit of a change from some of your other dogs. She's a little different. Do you want to share a little bit about that? Stacy Barnett: Sure, sure. Brava is, she actually thinks her name is Bravado. That's her attitude. Her nickname is actually Big Bad. She's really a piece of work, but I absolutely adore her. She is what people would typically refer to as a high drive dog, but she's also a high arousal dog. With my other dogs, I can get them into drive, but they are not what I would call high arousal dogs. I would say that they're either low arousal or moderate arousal. But with her, she's a high arousal, so it's totally on a different side of the Yerkes-Dodson arousal curve. Melissa Breau: I want to talk a little more about that. Do you want to explain what the curve is and how it works, and what you mean by saying she's on one side and they're on the other? Stacy Barnett: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'm actually really interested in Yerkes-Dodson Law because I find that it is the number one success criteria. Like, if you want to be successful in nosework, and probably a lot of other sports, but the number one key to success is managing this curve. So this is a really important concept. Basically, with the Yerkes-Dodson Law — and it's a law, by the way — it's not something you can break. Picture a curve that looks like a bell curve. It's actually a normal distribution curve, but it looks like a bell curve. As your arousal increases, your performance increases. So as the dog — or whatever we're talking about, but we're talking about dogs right now — as the dog's arousal continues to increase and increase and increase, the dog's performance also goes up until it gets to a point at the peak of the curve. And at the peak of the curve, this is the point at which I consider the dog to be in drive, and that's at the point where you're going to get the highest amount of performance, the highest degree of performance, out of the dog. But now what happens is, as the dog continues to increase its arousal — so your high arousal dogs tend to live on that side, on the right side, of the curve — so as they continue to increase that arousal, their performance actually decreases. So as the dog is more and more aroused, the performance gets worse and worse and worse, and it gets to the point where it becomes beyond arousal. It's actually the high anxiety, and it's that anxiety that is kind of like there's a point of no return at that point, where the dog's totally out to lunch. That's basically the curve, and like I said, it's a law, so to be successful, you can ride the curve a little bit. So trying to figure out, you want to take a look at what your dog is giving you, where their emotional state is, and then modify that emotional state so that you can try to get the dog back to the peak. When you get the dog back to the peak, the dog's in drive and you're going to have the best performance. Melissa Breau: To talk about that just a little bit more, what does it look like when the dog is on that right side of the curve and getting to the point where they're so over-aroused that it's impacting their performance? Maybe what are some of the things people can do to bring that back down? Stacy Barnett: OK. Let's talk about the right side. The right side is — this is the part of the curve that Brava is really highlighting to me. I have to say, though, she's just to the right, like, she's able to focus, which is really nice. With a dog who is high arousal, you're going to see a number of different things. You can see … let's say the dog is waiting. Waiting is really hard on these dogs. They tend to sometimes … they might be barking. So if you see a dog and they're obviously very agitated, and they want their turn, they want to go now, they want to go now, they want to go now, they want to go now, those dogs that are barking, they're in high arousal state. Or if the dog is pulling you to the start line. Or they're coming off of the start line and they're exploding into the search area. These are indications that your dog's arousal is too high. It's basically picture a 3-year-old child on a sugar high. That is high arousal, right? They can't focus. Melissa Breau: Sort of the way people think of a dog who stresses up. Stacy Barnett: Yes, yes. And actually there is a direct relationship, like, if you think about stressing up. I actually like to think about this in terms of real arousal and perceived arousal. We perceive high arousal dogs that stress up to be high arousal dogs because it's very obvious to us. So the real arousal equals perceived arousal. Interestingly, there's also another kind of stress that we see that doesn't look like high arousal, but it really is, and that is when the dog stresses down. So the dog is still stressed, the dog still has high anxiety, and it's still on the right-hand side of the curve, but you see these dogs and they're shut down, and it's very easy to misinterpret this, to think that the dog needs to be lifted up in its arousal state. So sometimes you see people try to jolly the dog, or “Hey, let's go, let's go, let's go,” maybe some toy play, and all they're doing is actually increasing the arousal even more, they're increasing the dog's arousal even more, and the dog actually can't get out of that anxiety state. That's where the perceived arousal is very different than the real arousal. Melissa Breau: You started to touch on it there, the other side of that curve, the left side of that curve. By contrast, what does that look like, or how does that work, and what should people be looking at? Stacy Barnett: The left-hand side of the curve is our lower arousal. If a dog is really low arousal, he's basically asleep. So you have the really low arousal that might be a little … very laid back, very like, “Hey, I'm here,” they might be a little bored, they might seem bored, they might be a little slow, they might be a little over-methodical, they might be unmethodical. Those are the dogs where you just want them to give you a little bit more. Those are the dogs around the lower side, and as long as they're not too low on the arousal curve, it's actually pretty easy to get them up the curve. I actually find that the ideal state is slightly to the left as a natural state, because a dog has a natural arousal state, and then they have the state that they're currently in. So if their natural arousal state is slightly to the left, just the fact that being at a trial will actually put them at the top of the curve. I'm actually very lucky Judd's one of those. He's slightly to the left as his natural arousal state. I take him to a trial, he loves trialing, it puts him right at the peak arousal, and he's in drive. Melissa Breau: We all want that dog, right? Stacy Barnett: Yeah, right. Everybody wants Judd. Everybody loves Judd. Melissa Breau: We talked before this and we talked a little bit about this just kind of outside of this context, but I know another big thing for you is really adapting your handling and training to the dog you have, and not just in terms of arousal levels. You also talk about the importance of adapting your training and handling based on how secure your dog is, or how confident they are, and whether they're more handler focused or more environmentally focused. I wanted to ask you a little bit about that. Can you share what some of that looks like and how people can adapt accordingly? Stacy Barnett: Absolutely, absolutely, and I just want to give a little bit of a plug for Denise's book Train the Dog in Front of You. Now, again, this is focusing on nosework, but I think every competitor, if you do dog sports, buy the book. And no, she's not giving me any kickback on that — I just wanted to let you know! Basically because the most important thing that you can do from a dog training perspective is to know what kind of dog are you dealing with. I don't mean are you dealing with a Border Collie, a Labrador, or a Shih Tzu. It's the dog, the personality type, the very specific what makes your dog tick. What's really cool is Denise has actually broken down the dog's personality into dimensions, and these dimensions, if you can understand where your dog falls, it can give you insight into what's the best way to train your dog, which is really cool. For instance, what I like to focus on specifically, especially for all our nosework stuff, is there's two particular dimensions that I think are really important. One of them is, is your dog secure or is your dog cautious. The dog who is secure, that's ideal. We want that secure dog. The dog who's cautious might be a little bit more timid. Actually Judd, as an example, is a cautious dog. So you have a cautious dog, but then you compare that to Brava, who is very secure. You see the difference in their searching style. I did a search just the other day in my back room, and there was a tight space. Brava was really pushing into that tight space, where Judd was like, “Ooh, I don't know, it kind of makes me nervous.” So you have secure versus cautious. Then you have another dimension, which is also really important, which is either handler focused or environmentally focused. Along with other sports, we do like to have the dog fairly handler focused. However, in scent sports specifically, we need to have a dog that's a little bit more on the environmental side, but not so environmental that they're prioritizing their environment over target odor or over working with us as a team, because again, this is actually a team sport with you and your dog, and you have to work together as a partnership. So ideally you actually have a dog who is somewhere in-between handler focused and environmentally focused. But if you can understand which side your dog is, that can give you insight into how to train your dog. Melissa Breau: So what it seems to me is like what you're talking about really is balance, this idea that you want to hit this perfect in-between on a couple of things, right? Working to balance out our dog's natural tendencies, whatever they may be. So I wanted to ask about one more skill where balance is important. How do you achieve that right balance that you're talking about in teamwork, between teamwork and independence, especially during a search? Stacy Barnett: There are some handling things that you can do. For instance, one of these things, I actually call it proximity of influence — it's just a term that I coined — that the closer you are to your dog, the more influence you're going to exert on your dog. There's actually a sweet spot, and every dog is slightly different in terms of where their sweet spot is. You don't want to be so close to your dog that you're influencing your dog too much, because at that point you're providing a little bit too much input into the search, and let's face it, we don't have a nose. I mean, we have a nose, but it doesn't work very well. But you also don't want to be so far away that you're not a partner with your dog. So by understanding a little bit about is your dog environmentally or handler focused, it can tell you how sensitive they're going to be to your proximity. I know, for instance, with Judd, Judd is actually quite independent. He's pretty … from an environmentally focused perspective, he's more on the environmental side versus handler focused, and he will actually tolerate a lot of handler interference because he just tells me to get in the back seat anyway. Whereas if you have a dog like Joey, my Standard Poodle, who is actually very handler focused, he's very open to suggestions. I actually did a search this morning where I had a hide, and it was in the proximity of an area where there's probably a little bit of residual odor from a few days ago. Joey paused for a second and he looked at me. I made the mistake of saying, “Joey, go search,” because as soon as I did that, I actually prompted him, especially because of my proximity and where I was, it in effect prompted him to alert on residual odor, because he was like, “Oh, OK, you think this is where the hide is absolutely. I think it is too,” so he alerted. These are the types of things that had I been a little further away from him, or not talked to him, I think he would not have alerted there. So this is just an example, and the really cool thing is I got it on video. I love video so I can share it with people. It's different kinds of things like that, so you can really work that balance based upon the position of your body with a dog and your voice. Melissa Breau: I think when we talked about this before, you talked about there's a certain kind of angle that you like to see between you and the dog. Stacy Barnett: Yes. The 45-degree angle. Melissa Breau: Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Stacy Barnett: Sure, sure. This is something I actually talked a little bit about in my handling class, but it's also going to be in my Win By A Nose class. We'll talk about it there also. I think, personally, there is a perfect position in relation to the dog, when the dog is searching, for the handler to be. That position is actually 45 degrees behind the dog, but out away from the dog. You're not parallel to the dog. Let's say the dog is searching a vehicle. You're not parallel to that dog. You're actually behind the dog and at an angle of about 45 degrees. What this does is it puts you into a neutral position. That neutral position is something that helps to offset that suggestion that we have. Dogs are very suggestible, and some dogs are more suggestible than others. And understanding how suggestible your dog is actually is really good information to know. The interesting thing, this is my theory, is that our dogs don't understand that we have a really bad sense of smell. Our dogs don't know that because our dogs just assume that whatever they're smelling — they're smelling birch, anise, or clove — that we can smell it too, and a highly suggestible dog is going to be like, “Well, I think it's here. Do you think it's here? I think it's there. Do you think it's there?” And then they start an alert at you. Having a 45-degree angle can help to negate that and offset that. It's cool stuff. Melissa Breau: Yeah. I know that nosework isn't the only sport you've done. It's where your focus and where your career is now, but you started out in obedience, you've done a little bit of agility, so I was curious. Is there anything that you've learned from those other sports that has carried over into nosework for you? Stacy Barnett: Oh absolutely, absolutely, and I think a lot of the times with nosework, I think sometimes people forget that it's just another dog sport. Granted, the dog is out there, they're doing something that they are very adept at doing because they have this great sense of smell, and because it's a dog sport, it has a lot of corollaries to other dog sports. Those corollaries, things like the dog has to be able to acclimate, that sort of thing, and from a behavior, there's a lot of behavioral corollaries. There's also from the perspective of … so I'm going to use an example: movement. If you do agility, you'd learn that your body position and the way you move affects your dog. It tells your dog where to go. Now interestingly, the same thing happens in nosework. But in nosework we're sometimes very oblivious to that because we start off with the dog doing most of the work and we do like to have 80/20, we want the dog really driving the search. But it's very easy to forget that our body movement, our body motion, and our acceleration or deceleration, how we're standing in relationship to the dog, that all that is communicated to the dog. So if we look at, say, agility, and all the motion cues, and the body position cues, and all these cues that you give to your dog, you can actually look at that and say, “Hey, those are natural cues,” and those type of cues also apply to nosework. Melissa Breau: I know that your life has changed quite a bit since we last talked. Not just the new puppy, but you've been working with the AKC on their new scentwork program. I wanted to ask you what being an AKC contractor is about, what are you doing? Do you want to just share a little bit about what you're doing for them, what's involved there? Stacy Barnett: Sure, sure. I'm one of the contractors. There's a small handful of us. We're basically consulting, so we're helping the AKC with … we're just bringing some thoughts, some ideas, to making sure and really helping to support the program so that we end up with a really excellent sport coming out of it, because that is a new sport for the AKC. So we're helping to consult. We're also supporting some of the trials, like maybe if there's a new scentwork club or something like that, to make sure that they have the support that they need for trials, and to answer questions and that sort of thing. And we're working at doing some judges education, so we're helping to define what we need to do to help make sure that we have the very best judges out there. Melissa Breau: Last question. I know you've got your Win By A Nose class coming up on the schedule for February. Do you want to just share a little bit about how much of all of this is incorporated into that class, and maybe a little bit about what else you cover? Stacy Barnett: Yeah, so that's great. A lot of this will be incorporated, but the Win By A Nose class is all about successful trialing and training strategies. So it's how do you get from the point that you're going to be good to great? What is it going to take to help to become a really great competitor? And we're going to get into, there's probably going to be a little bit of mental management in there, there's going to be a little bit of this, a little bit of that, some different trialing strategies, different cue strategies. We'll be talking about arousal, we'll definitely be talking about a little bit of handling, a little bit of what's the best way to set your training strategies up so that you can get yourself ready for a trial, all this type of stuff that comes together to get to the point where you are really ready to go out there and hit a home run. Melissa Breau: Awesome. It sounds like a good class. Stacy Barnett: I think it's going to be fun. I think it's going to be good, yeah. Melissa Breau: Well, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Stacy, and for sticking through the technology fails. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in. We will be back next week, this time with Lori Stevens to talk about how you can help your dog reach optimal fitness in about five minutes at a time. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. CREDITS: Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

Do you want to know the SECRET to successful trialing?  It's AROUSAL.    This podcast is focused mostly on canine scentwork however these concepts apply to all dog sports.  Getting your dog into peak arousal is the key.  What really IS High Drive?  In fact, does it actually exist?  What about anxiety and longterm implications of high arousal?  Get an overview with this short minipod on arousal in canines with this podcast!

I've talk a lot about breaking out of your comfort zone on Instagram. Saying yes to more things, being available to more people. This all leads to vulnerability which can cause anxiety. The key here is to learn to embrace without being confide by it. How I Broke Out of My Social Comfort Zone by Saying Yes to Everything When I first started making this podcast, I thought a lot of scary stuff about it. Not necessarily shaking but full of anxiety. My thoughts of feelings were in a new strange place. I had open myself to criticism and judgment. It was hard to focus on work out of fear of what people might think. I would read comments, reviews, and took it all personally. The good thing was I got a lot more positive feedback than I ever imagined. People who didn't like what I did didn't even care enough to say anything and those who did, well, may their voice heard. Vulnerability Is Important, But Not If It Stresses You Out Too Much Even though having my writing out for all to see scares me, I don't stop because I want to improve myself, not just in being a writer. It helps me visualize and talk to myself about what's really important. Think about your deepest relationship, whether a friend, a spouse, or your parents. Chances are you told them personal details you wouldn't tell anyone else. When you get in a fight with them it probably isn't pretty. But it always strengthens relationships because you get through it. They learn how you function, what makes you tick, and the empathy it requires to make you feel at ease. Granted you don't need these conflicts to strengthen, but they make you feel better about how you present your true self. Vulnerability humbles the confirmation bias. It can difficult to talk about how you honestly feel about certain things while being in constant fear what they might think. You open yourself up to criticism but also to opposing views. Which can broaden your horizon about what you know. These little things actually are good in the long run. Four Resolutions that Got Me Out of My Comfort Zone This Year Yes, breaking out feels scary, but it's actually good for you. It improves your performance as said by Yerkes-Dodson Law. Psychologists Robert M. Yerkes and John D. Dodson explained that uncomfortableness leads to to a more consistent level of performance. But if you want to improve performance then you need to improve the level of anxiety and stress exposed. So that feeling of stress and anxiety is telling you are growing just like sore muscles after a workout the next day. But bear in mind too much stress and anxiety can cause you to fatigue and bestsellers less productive though. So you need to find your optimal anxiety. Set Realistic Goals to Hedge Your Anxiety In the last few weeks I've felt lethargic with my comfortability. Being more honest, being able to follow through with what I say, and being more reliable. It's difficult to accomplish all these things at once. So that's why I broke them up into smaller goals that are more manageable. Blunt honesty comes super easy for some people, but people like me can be difficult about how to go about it. So I made it a goal of mine to be more honest about myself with people in general. So if I saw a bad movie with a friend I will tell them it was a bad movie. Stop Caring About What Others Think, and Get Back Your Self-Respect Even telling yourself it's not a big deal can make it more of a big deal. Which causes more anxiety than anything. This made me realize that sticking to my plan easier overall. But not if I set a clearer goal. By just crossing it off my list gives you motivation to express honesty. Without a goal, I probably would have lied to him without thinking about it. The most important is though, is the goal, wasn't about his reaction. This allowed me to know we care too much about how people think. Looking at the perspective of getting it done was worth more. It's when you do something and find out it's not as scary as you thought it would be. It's actually the anticipation that's what scary. Partner Up With a Friend You can also team up with a friend to go through this discomfort together. I used to hate networking events. So whenever I was asked to go to one, I would always bring a friend. I feel anxious when I'm meeting new people, but being with someone who knows me makes me feel better. Also having his confidence and energy takes off the edge. You probably know people who are used to being uncomfortable. They are spontaneous and live life on the edge. Those are friends we need in our lives to accelerate where we are in our lives. They encourage you to get out of the house and have new experiences. What ever social activity it is, having someone you know helps deal with the anxiety of something new. Whether it be networking, surfing, dancing, or whatever. Your friend can even introduce you to new experiences. Just be vocal about your anxiety with your friend. Accomplishing your goals is tough, so it helps to have some support to keep you accountable. I always hated interviews. Wether it's interviewing someone or they interviewing me, they always winded just thinking of them. I always worried I would saying dumb or not answer a question well enough. My thoughts always concentrated on them no matter what I did. But I've gotten better at handling them through, you guessed it, mindfulness. Keep practicing about your awareness and what you feel. The longer you stay in your comfort zone the harder it is to get out of it. When you break out, the process isn't as scary as it can be. Yes, you'll still feel vulnerable, but you'll feel it less and gain from it more with time. So when is the time you're going to be more vulnerable?