Clicker Expo 2017 - Day 2

Bridge Over Troubled Water: Critical Client-Conversation Skills - Susan G. Friedman

Morning started with wonder lecture of conversation skills. Susan first defined what makes conversations crazy. Reason were pretty usually that takes all of our skills to control ourselves like: opposing opinions, strong emotion, broken promises etc. Anything that is important or has emotions attach to it makes conversation base hard. I know I have hard time holding myself down if subject is close to a heart. Conversation skills is skill we need to learn and evolves during time when we practice it. We had to list reasons to learn to be better in conversation skills and I had many situations that I would benefit like better client service, better out comes and to have better skills to make a difference.

So how become better? Most import is to secure the free flow of information to the pool of shared information. This mean that we need to make sure everyone stays in safe place share that information and we are interested about it. So if conversation get too hot (emotional, I'm right stage) - change environment. Behavior is always a function of current condition. So all around us and our partners in conversation can affect the conversation. It is import to realize that our way speaking can great scary or tense environment. Also the surroundings can affect is the conversation comfortable to the other person (public place, closed room). Next to have your story right which means keep to the fact. Don't assume what the other person is thinking ask and give room to their side of the story. Susan told about story telling roles that should be avoided: Not me!, All you!, There's nothing I can do! These roles that stops the founding of common goal.

Conversation is only really done when you have action plan how to resolve to issue. During conversation is important to keep it open so that there could be resolution in the end. We need self exploration and exploring how other react and think. It is also important to keep your own goal without over powering others. These skills that all of us can train become better at it. It takes time and practice but can have much better results in many aspects of life. How we talk and resolve conversation challenges things can make all the difference. Susan lecture was really good and gave lot to think about.

Assessing Function - The Sexy Side Of ABC - Susan G. Friedman

This lecture went through about the ABC ( Antecedent - Behavior - Contingency) of behavior. First Susan talked about what are known about mind and what we know about it. How our brains developed. Then how everything is connected to each other. When we train we train emotions. Condition produce emotions and frustration is emotion that can happen when we don't get the wanted out come. This is phenomenon happening in training too if we don't plan the training good enough. ABC analysis really makes think what happen and why. Goal is to change the environment to get a change in the behavior and make unwanted behavior irrelevant. This gives power to the learner to control the our comes.

Assessing the problem behavior should be done in detail. When it happens, how often it happen and what happens before it. Then you try analyze the motivation of the behavior. Everything happens for a reason and every action has motivation. Test your findings and make plan for a behavior training by changing first the environment to get the wanted results. Susan also showed how to keep data of the progress. Data will really tell you has the plan worked or not. I think this way of analyzing works also in all dogs training. We have problems for example in OB task. We could try to brake it pieces to find out the motivation why dog does the unwanted behavior. In the end all behaviors have motivation why they occur. We just need find them out so we can change training plan (environment) to get behavior we want. This was a really eye opening talk about everything that happens around us. We shouldn't label everything so easy without analyzing the behavior chain at first. 

Smart Reinforcement - Ken Ramirez

Last in the day I had a training lab with Ken where he told us how to built a non- food (or toy) reinforcement. This meant that you would built clapping or thumbs up to be strong enforcement to animal. This was very interesting idea especially to sport like ob. It would cool to have " toy" in the ring. Ken showed us a protocol how to build up this kind connection to for example to clapping. This process was very long and needed a good training plan to achieve. He should how keep data and how to proceed. Using clapping as reward would need a constant training but it had been successfully done with number of different species. The idea of having reward always with you is very attempting. I thought this was a so interesting that I'm going to try to built it. 

In the lab we tried the first steps in training. It was nice see fast the dog pick up the training. Ken was really good instructor for teams. I would love to one day to attend seminar where I could train my own dogs.  

That's all for day two! We had a very nice evening dinner with Panel Discussion, where the audience could ask questions from the faculty member. This year questions were extra good and we got a lot of interesting conversations about it.

MPL