Overthinking Things

As a professional executive coach and a master dog trainer, one of the opening lines from a client that makes me smile is "I'm probably overthinking this, but"....and then I get a long rambling explanation that typically is circular in nature and has so many 'what ifs' in it that it makes my fingers tired reading it. This applies to working with humans in any aspect or in dog training. But since we are usually talking dog training in this venue, we will stick with dog training.

Our end state is typically a complex behavior chain with several small behavior chains made up of skills, overlayed by individual behaviors. We usually try and lump these together because we are impatient beings. Then we are frustrated when it falls apart in new locations. Because dogs do not generalize well and we didn't take the time to build our foundations, which is made up of spending time on each of those individual behaviors and then building all of those small behavior chains into the complex behavior chains and knowing when to parse them apart into the small behavior chains to reinforce them appropriately. So then we spend lots of time overthinking all of the complex behavior chains and what they might mean and how to train them in their complex end state instead of breaking them down into the simple components of each individual behavior and training those because it makes us feel better to work on the whole chain instead of working on each individual skill. Because then we feel like we are making real progress and it's about making us feel like awesome trainers and us getting reinforced for our dog finding and not really about teaching the dog what it needs to learn.

Okay.

Yes.

That is word salad.

My usual response....What skill are you trying to work on in this training session? What behavior are you working on?

Stop overthinking your training. You can't build a monument in one sitting. It has to be built one brick at a time.

What brick are you working on in THIS training session.

Go train.

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Keep an eye out for a new opportunity in 2026 to master your mechanical training skills!