Thoughts on My Dog Training Classes

I signed up for an online dog training class in February. It was a lot of money and I often suffer buyers remorse. Part of the problem was that it was a really bad time to do start something with this kind of time commitment. I was still in classes until May so my time was limited. But I felt compelled to sign up because this course if only offered every couple of years. It's for Dog Agility.

My mistake was thinking that I'd be getting more of the basics with it, but really, that was the course I signed up for last summer and dropped because I was concerned about the amount of money it cost and I had to pay for car repairs in addition to school and I was quickly running out of money. I'm mad at myself for not dropping this class and getting the refund while I could but rather trying to convince myself that this would all work out.

I am still trying to make it work. That is if I can find the drive to. I have the time now, but I still can't seem to bring myself to practice regularly. I think it's because there are basic obedience problems that I thought would be covered in this course that aren't and it's very frustrating to me. That and I can't seem to get my dog excited about some of the games. Maybe because I'm not acting excited enough about them. Hmmm. Food for thought.

I'm using this blog as a therapy session. Can you tell?

While re-watching some videos this morning I had a couple of ideas that I'm going to work on that will hopefully help.

1) I don't think I working in a big enough space.

2) The videos contain beginning, middle and advanced difficulty.I need to break them down and stop trying to work through the whole video at once.

3) Watching the videos without immediately following up with training isn't doing me much good at all.

4) Despite what I just said in "3", I need to look in every single link as there is information that I haven't stumbled upon yet that might help me. ie. Ruff Love

 5) I need to stop being lazy and making excuses.

The program advises doing record keeping so you can mark how far your dog has come. I've decided to try using this blog for that purpose. Obviously I haven't been actually blogging, so why not.

Plans for tonight:

Work on "Drive to the Hand"

Review games in Ruff Love