Reading a dog is like working a book

I had an epiphany today, in regards to attention in dog training. Inspired by the trend of mistakes I've been making, and doubly inspired by Willard Bailey's recent blog posts on attention that I stumbled across.

Ideally, when I'm working with Lotte, I want the experience to be a lot like reading a book. 

See, I love to read. I love getting pulled into a good book so deeply that all of my focus is in the pages, my subconscious painting the written world in my mind, and time easily gets lost. It's with those books that I have a hard time putting down that my awareness of the "outside" world is nil. It's a connection. With the book, the words, the characters, the author. 

That level of connection is what's missing. It's not her that's lacking focus, but me. Of course, I pay attention to her. The problem comes with distractions - I'm too aware of them, to the point of pulling my attention off of us and onto knowing that there's a tempting distraction coming our way. To use my book analogy, I'm not reading, just skimming. I'm connecting with her on the surface of what we're doing, but I'm not connecting with her while we're doing it. I'm connecting with the book but not the author, if that makes more sense.

Lotte, on the other hand, is reading... me. It's almost like I'm giving her a very passive permission to get distracted. Not my intention at all, of course. I can see it happening though every time it does. The more aware of it I make myself, the more I realize that I'm changing my own body language when we face a distraction. This happens even if it's something as simple as a spot in the grass that I know she likes to sniff.

Workworkwork, I see distraction, subconscious body language change, Lotte gets distracted.... I'm cuing it! Hello. Have I really trained my dog to get distracted? Maybe I'm imagining it, or maybe I really did. The possibility certainly exists, and it makes sense. Really makes sense. 

With that in mind, I think the first thing I need to do is to spend some time practicing staying aware of my body language. I need to break the habit of tipping Lotte off when I see a distraction, and I really need to focus more on her than on worrying about what she'll do when we walk past a pole that may have been peed on. It won't be easy, but I do think I owe it to both of us to try.