Sometimes, when a handling technique is challenging to ourselves, instead of training it, we start avoiding it. Why should you even try it, when you know  it ain’t going to work? That  kind of thinking limits your chances to learn and succeed! Remember to move outside your comfort zone and challenge yourself. Trying is the only way to succeed.

Last Wednesday, when I saw the course map for evenings training, the first thought that came to my head was: “oh no, rear crosses!”. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that rear crosses are very useful and that every good handler should know how to make them. They are one of the basic handling techniques! But… they are super hard for me. Rear crosses are always on my training-list, but somehow I always come up with something more fun to train. But now, they were the theme of our practice and I couldn’t avoid them anymore.

Very often we think “it ain’t going to work” or “we can’t do this, it is too hard“. The problem is that we constantly limit ourselves with this kind of thinking! How can we succeed, if we won’t even try? Without trying, we won’t even give ourselves a chance.

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I guess that you have already heard that working only in your comfort zone doesn’t get you better. And that is true! When you train, remember to challenge yourself and your dog. Perhaps the handling technique that you though would be impossible, will now be easy! But you can’t know if you don’t try.

Mistakes are important part of learning, so don’t be too afraid of them. However, the way you handle those failures is extremely important. It is easy to think ”blaah, it will never work, I’m not going to try this ever again”. But that attitude doesn’t get us very far. Maybe the better way to see, would be “hmm, this is something I should train”.

I would love to hear your thoughts about this topic! Do you for example remember a training sequence or competition, where you didn’t believe that you would be able to succeed, but then you surprised? Tell about it in the comment section!

PS: Even though I was sure that we would get stuck already with the first rear cross, we mastered a course full of them! I just smiled the whole evening after the practise :) So next time when the theme of our training feels challenging, I promise that I will try it with an open mind and think ”yay, this is something we needed to train!”

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