Sprout
The Adventure Begins: 03/31
Coaching Resources
Start Here
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Start Here 〰️
The Handbook is a lengthy read, but has just about everything you might need to know when starting a program. This is the absolute best place to start with your training package.
Start Here
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Start Here 〰️
Guild Hall is a client portal within my website - you’ll find classes and events available only to past and present clients there, as well as discounts on certain future services. You’ll also find recommended outlets for your dog, including sports, events, and sniffspot information.
Your google drive is available to you to share videos and photos with questions or for feedback - I’ve also added the progress tracker Susan created there to access!
Character Sheet
First Session: Consultation with Challenging Dogs
03/31/2025
It was such a pleasure meeting you and Sprout— It’s clear how much you care about helping Sprout feel more comfortable in the world, and I’m genuinely impressed by your dedication to her progress.
We introduced a few new behaviors this week that I’d like to recap and explain a bit more: Food Scatters, Ready Get It, and Really Real Relaxation. Each one is useful on its own, and together they give you a flexible toolkit for supporting Sprout in all kinds of situations.
🥣 Food Scatters
Food scatters are much more than just tossing food on the ground. When paired with a trigger (like a person, dog, or sound), they allow Sprout to hear and smell the trigger without needing to look at it. While sniffing and eating, she’s being reinforced for not reacting, and she’s forming more positive associations with those stimuli.
Sniffing also plays a role in emotional regulation—it’s a natural calming behavior for dogs, encouraging deep breathing and a lowered heart rate. In this way, food scatters give Sprout both a coping strategy and a break from what might otherwise be a stressful moment.
🎾 Ready Get It
This pattern gives us a playful, rhythmic way to shift Sprout’s focus. It can help pull her attention away from a distraction, engage him lightly, and give her a bit of a reset without overloading him.
Ready Get It is especially helpful when she’s nearing her threshold—she can briefly engage with you and then go right back to sniffing, helping her bounce between moments of focus and decompression. This creates a reliable, repeatable pattern that can help keep her below threshold when you’re navigating trickier environments.
👀 Look at That
This game is great for dogs who need to look at their triggers. Instead of trying to block that instinct, we reward it—Sprout gets a treat for simply noticing something, which reduces the pressure around that experience. Over time, we can build in the “reporting” part of the behavior (looking back to you after noticing), but especially in more difficult moments, just rewarding the “noticing” is totally appropriate and beneficial.
🧘♀️ Really Real Relaxation
This approach is a little more organic than structured patterns like Dr. Overall’s protocol, and I like it because it invites you to truly observe Sprout and reward small shifts toward relaxation. Over time, those calm behaviors become more likely as she learns that relaxing is reinforcing.
Start this practice in quiet, trigger-free environments, but as Sprout improves, we can begin bringing this into more challenging situations to help lower her baseline stress level and prevent reactions before they start.
Think of these behaviors as a ladder—you can move up or down depending on the challenge you’re facing. If it’s tough, stick with food scatters. If it’s easing up, Ready Get It gives a bit more structure. If she’s doing well, Look at That pushes her coping skills a bit further.
You’ll find quick descriptions of these skills in your “Skill Tree” below - I also wanted to a include a short video I shared on social media earlier this year on picking our moments during Look At That, as well as a video I shared today actually on my client dog Enzo’s work (he’s “my Sprout” that Susan and I have discussed a good bit!).
Social Media Caption:
When to Stop and When to Stare?
A question I get often when learning “look at that” is when to reward.
Look at That is already a tough behavior for pet owners to work on. We’re told from Day 1 to reward our puppy for engaging with us, and now, suddenly, we’re rewarding them for...looking away?
And then I introduce the idea that my criteria for Look at That is often fluid - depending on the situation, I might mark and reward a dog when they are looking out at the distraction/trigger, or I might wait for the “complete” behavior - and wait for them to look back at me.
When you’re choosing how and when to reward your dog with this, consider:
❓How long has the dog been working off of these distractions?
❓How does the dog feel about the distraction?
❓How new is the dog to not only this behavior, but this environment? This particular distraction?
❓How likely is the dog to react and how likely are they to recover?
❓Is the distraction likely to become more difficult to work off of, easier, or stay the same?
❓What is the potential fallout of a reaction right now?
Take our current board and train, Misa, in these two videos. In the first one, I stop her and reward early, marking and treating her while she's still looking out.
1. She has been working for a while off of dogs - she already worked off of Hunter before this.
2. She's in a new environment at a park we haven't been to before.
3. Little dogs historically are particularly challenging for her.
4. Riz is still growing, and is unpredictable - he's unlikely to do something to make the challenge harder, but he could!
5. If Misa were to react, I risk influencing Riz's willingness to work off of her (and other dogs) in the future.
Whereas, in the second clip, we're somewhere more familiar, she's coming into the training session fresh, and Louis the stuffed Frenchie is both unlikely to do anything unpredictable and unlikely to be impacted emotionally by her reaction. In that situation, I judged it safe to wait for her to "complete" the behavior.
Social Media Caption:
✨ See Me Now: Enzo’s Progress ✨
When I first met Enzo, fear kept him hidden—behind distance, behind a gate, behind big feelings that said “stay away.”
His people put in the work. They built his skills, gave him tools to navigate tough moments, and most importantly, learned to see him—to understand his emotions instead of just reacting to them.
Now, Enzo sees us too. He sees safety in his people. He sees patterns that help him through hard moments. He sees that he has choices. And that’s everything.
There’s still more to come, but today, we celebrate how far he’s come. 💛
#SeeMe #ReactiveDogTraining #FearfulDogs #ProgressNotPerfection #DogBehavior #EnzoTheBrave