A week of conflicts and learning
- Jun 12, 2025
- 4 min read
As a new week started I tried to put some more emphasis on the self control with the toy and setting boundaries for working together.
We worked with a toy on the side and it was quite frustrating for me.
Only after I watched the session I was able to see my mistakes and understand I was not really fair to her with my expectations because I wanted her to work with the toy on the side while she can really see it but she was not ready for it.
It was a really bad session for our relationship because I used the word “no” and was not clear on what I wanted while she worked, but I feel I learned a lot from it.
She showed me that if I ask for too much she will not do it. And that she can walk away from me if I am putting too much pressure that is not at the level of her comfort so I am actually quite thankful to her for that.
I always try to remind my self that we are here to learn from our dogs, and that we should listen to what they have to say.
And what Seraphina told me in this session was very clear.
“I like you and I enjoy working with you, but we are not good enough friends so that I will do anything you want without knowing that it’s worth it for me”.
With a puppy like that it can get quite confusing; on the one hand she is so highly motivated but on the other hand she is also very opinionated so I have to learn how to harness her to what I want to do in a way she would think it’s her opinion and idea.
I know for many people this session would be considered an EPIC fail, but for me it was educating and I am happy it happened now and that I can still fix it before I make more mistakes so when the evening came I was able to be better for her, and to work on the things she IS ready for.
Starting from a front paws target where I tried to reward for static position of the legs… not obedience position but just making sure she does’t move the legs so much from excitement while feeding her.
Then, I changed to a full body platform with self control before going on the platform and also while standing on the platform. I took the session to also work on her ability to ignore touch as preparation for future exercises.
I could already feel the improvement from the morning session and how our communication was much better so I tried to also work on body awareness on the platform from time to time.
I was mostly happy that we were able to turn the day around and stay friend without any bad blood between us.
The next day, in the morning I started with some food work.
(For this video I am sorry but the sound is not working, I am not sure why)
I wanted to remind her and myself again how much fun we can have together so my first move was the reinforce and release to follow up games which she was super good at.
Then we did some nose touch practice and some tricks and the main focus was duration and repetitions. I noticed I should give more breaks and releases OR lower the difficulty by less marking and more stick to my hand type of luring so I did my best in that too and when the time came to finish the session and I moved to social rewarding I could see on her reaction I did good 😊
For the next few days we almost didn’t train and I had my friend taking care of the pack for most of the days because I had 3 wedding parties that kept me away from home. It is not ideal, but I was thinking it is actually good to give ourselves time to be only cuddling when my brain was not able to work.
We often tend to think that we need to work with the puppy or our dog all the time, but truth is that also working too much is harmful for the motivation and relationship, so less training but with more accuracy will bring the better result eventually.
The next training session we did was after 4 days and it was really good! We got to work on her ability to work despite the big street noises from cars and motorcycles which were a big problem at first as you probably saw in earlier posts, but it was more than that.
We had a different energy. I was present for real in the session and so was she, I could see her mistakes and learn from them but more importantly understand them and that helped me to get to know Seraphina better.
We enjoyed the connection and you can see on her that she was with confidence while communicating with me for the whole time!
We changed between behaviours and she got many breaks and working stress release moments very often so her energy was extra good during the session and her motivation to engage with me and try even when she got something wrong remained super nice.
The session was a bit long for a puppy but I think it was ok because she was really enjoying it 🥹
After we finished with the food I changed for toy and we were using the disc as a reward.
I started using some rollers, a lot of tugging and rewarded her by playing a lot even for small things as one circle around me.
I might have gone a bit over excited and forgot she was a puppy for a moment because I later realised I allowed her to go above the ground but luckily she has enough body awareness so she kept a solid good movement during our playing time.
She even had her first catch in the air and I was totally excited about it because it is definitely not an obvious thing for such a young puppy to do 🤩🤩🤩
And the best part in the session - her retrieval, I could really feel she is starting to enjoy bringing the toy back to me for playing together!