Everyone Starts Out As A Beginner

Have you ever admired someone as being an expert in our field? Think about the people who have written books, taught courses, written blogs, or demonstrated great skills at training, teaching, or sharing information. We look at these high fliers, and it is easy to feel like we will never get to the same level of confidence and ability. When we watch someone who is really good at their craft, it can be really hard to imagine that today’s expert was yesterday’s novice. It can be tough to imagine this on days when we make a complete mess of a training plan.

Becoming an expert is a long journey. It takes time; generally, you need to practice your skill for 10,000 hours to become an expert. If you were to practice training dogs for 40 hours a week, this means that you would need to practice for 5 years before you hit 10 000 hours. One of the real frustrations is that if you have been practicing something that is not actually training, you cannot really count those hours as time toward becoming an expert. That expert you are thinking about spent at least five years actually training dogs to become an expert. If you are a dog walker or a kennel attendant, you DO practice SOME training, but not in such a way that you will amass consistent input on your skills as a trainer. Those ten thousand hours are a collection of experiments and memories that plug into your soul and help you learn what works, what doesn’t and what might just be an interesting phenomenon that does not have anything to do with anything at all. For all those hours to do their magic, you to live them in close proximity to one another. You are unlikely to remember that offering a treat to the left of the dog’s nose created a different result than offering it to the right unless you repeat those actions over and over again and have to live with the result of the outcomes. This means that ten thousand hours spread out over thirty years is nowhere near as effective as 10 000 hours spread out over 5 to 8 years. Becoming an expert takes time, but that time needs to be doled out in a relatively short period.

Experts are not afraid to make mistakes or to take coaching. The people who are most successful never lean on the idea that they are so talented that they don’t need an education. They seek out opportunities to read, watch videos, watch other people training, and practice, practice, practice. Experts are usually really easy to coach too. They work hard to learn to be easy to coach. They take classes from a wide variety of people, and they work hard on learning to listen to people who have been doing this longer than they have. They learn to listen hard and then try out what has been suggested. True experts continue to take classes and learn and engage with new ideas even when they are already recognized as experts in their field. Most of them still have mentors, and most of them still have coaches too.

I have been very lucky over the years to have had access to many different mentors. Some of my mentors are people I count as close friends now. Some of them I have parted ways with. All of them have taught me things I never expected to learn. Over the years, one of things that comes back to me over and over again is simply that all these experts were once beginners and so was I. I am often struck by the frequency I am pointed to as an expert. Many of my friends who were beginners at the same time as I was are experts now, too; that feels amazing. Sometimes I think about myself as a shiny new young beginner trainer, and I think about what I might advise myself. It comes down to this.

When you are a beginner, no matter how talented you are, invest in your education. Be open to new ideas. Be thoughtful about what you see, and ask good questions. Don’t ask questions just to ask questions and don’t ask questions to try and show what you know or what the expert does not; ask questions with a goal of learning. Read the books, the magazine articles, the social media posts and the articles in the vet’s office. Grab every opportunity to watch others' training; in person, online, on video, even in the movies (those are really fun because most folks who are making movies are not trainers, and they make some hilarious mistakes about what we do!). Watch every dog you can. Listen to people you disagree with. Cultivate a culture within yourself of openness to new ideas while also being critical of all information. Ask yourself if you believe in the information given if you feel that the person sharing it has the background to have a valid opinion and if the material you have looked at is in line with the understanding we have of the science. Learn the science; above all learn the science! And understand that at its core, science is about productive disagreement. To all of the students I teach, thank you for being the beginners in my life. Thank you for calling me an expert. Thank you for being beginners.