Things to Share With Me as Your Behavior Consultant

Collaborative communication is useful for teamwork across the board, for example, working with a personal trainer or striving to reach a goal with another person.

I admit that my former career influences how I approach pet behavior consulting. My prior background involved a lot of problem solving, looking at why behaviors develop or not develop in the face of circumstances in which you’d bet they would occur, and the consequences of these behaviors or actions. I’m kind of a whole picture gal who wants details to help color in the scene. Hence, I ask a lot of questions to better understand not just the specific behavior a pet parent may be wanting help with, but questions to gather details to provide a more holistic picture. Sometimes in the course of asking questions, a pet parent may say “you know my dog does this, which I kind of thought was maybe just my dog being a little odd” and their insight may help provide important details to understanding the big picture.These questions usually lead me to feeling like I have a good foundation to start working together with the pet parent. 

So why this blog topic, “Things to share with me as your behavior consultant?” 

Have you ever worked with a personal trainer? When I look back to the one where I made the most progress with, I see these factors:

  • We met on a regular basis, this helped to hold me accountable to work on the things I was supposed to work on between sessions and also it meant if I wasn’t doing something right or somehow got derailed they could get me back on course sooner rather than later

  • I had the ability to say “geez, I understand this exercise is meant to work on core strength (a goal), but I hate doing this exercise, can we sub for something else?” rather than silently dread and probably avoid doing the thing

  • I could say I didn’t have time that week, energy, or whatever to work on this and it was ok ie I didn’t feel guilty about not being able to do the thing and by being able to be honest, if there was a barrier that could be addressed to make it happen, we could together troubleshoot a solution

  • Getting instructions in a way that I can accurately do my exercises; lol, I sometimes feel like there is a significant gap between what my brain hears or intakes and then getting my body to do something which almost resulted in failing my scuba class; thankfully I found an instructor who was able to give info in a way that I could process and then accurately do what I needed to do – yaah I did pass my certification!

Working with a behavior consultant is a collaboration. I recognize that depending on the issues a pet parent wants to address or work on, sometimes it can be a longer process and maybe hard to see the endgame. This is certainly the case, for example if your dog experiences separation anxiety. There isn’t going to be a quick fix and building a foundation for your dog not to fear you stepping out the door can feel like it’s an enormous hurdle to overcome. Being able to share your frustration or concern is part of collaboration as much as celebrating the wins. Pet parents often put in enormous time and commitment to training and behavior modification so the last thing I want is for those efforts to be off track or not directly on target; so updates aren’t about trying to see if you did the homework, but rather to make sure my info is clear and whether you accurately received the info so you could do the exercise correctly to ideally make forward progress toward agreed-upon goals.  

I love being part of Team Fido and helping pet parents and their companions be happy together. I can do this a lot better if communication can be open and collaborative. 

Cheers, Tracy

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Tracy’s Top 5 Behaviors to Put on Cue