Setting Up for Success
People hear the phrase “set yourself up for success” a lot, but I rarely see it carried out. No one sets out to fail when they start something, and rarely do we want others to fail, so some may assume just starting with a positive attitude is all it takes. Let’s explore what it means to be set up for success and how we can apply it to our training, and our everyday lives.
To set yourself or someone else up for success is to manipulate things related to your goal so you can be certain to achieve the target. This may be physical things in the environment, or it may be the timing or frequency of activities. With the new year recently started, many people try to set lofty goals or resolutions. This can be a great thing to do, but we all know how successful people usually are in sticking to it. Most of these resolutions involve a drastic overnight change, so they are naturally doomed to fail. We’ve all tried to quit old habits or start new ones a bit too fast and seen the results.
In the human world, you may have heard of S.M.A.R.T. goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based). This is a way of setting up for success! You make a highly specific goal that can be objectively measured, and is easily achievable, is relevant to your values, and has a date by which it is achieved. An example of this would be instead of going from never being at the gym to going every day (a great way to burn out quickly!), you could make several SMART goals that work towards that larger goal. You could start with going to the gym for 30 minutes once a week and you want to do that consistently for 1 month (these are all variables that can be manipulated based on your needs, or what you think is realistically achievable). You want to do this because you would like to be able to keep up with your family easier on hikes. This goal and your reason would be written down somewhere you see it often and you can keep track of your progress. Every time a goal is achieved, you set another larger goal. You could change it to going to the gym for 1 hour once a week, or going for 30minutes twice a week. Just change one thing at a time. Maybe setting it out for 1 month is too much for you, so just start with going to the gym for 30 minutes once. Then throw a little party for yourself! (You’ve got to reinforce those wins! Just be sure your reinforcement aligns with your goals—eating an ice cream sundae every time might throw that off…)
Now that you can see how this works generally for goal setting, how can we use it for training? Its the same thing! When you select a behavior you want your pet to learn, you create essentially the same step-wise goals. If it is an elaborate behavior they would never do on their own, break it down to the most simple parts, and then see if you can break it down some more. Your pet may not need all those little steps, but you might not know that until you start working. If there is an object they need to interact with for the behavior, you might not start immediately with putting their paw on it. The first thing might just be a sniff or even a glance in its direction. Think about where you can place that object or how you present it so they immediately are interested in it. Setting up for success in training is also referred to as “errorless learning”. This means you are working to reward the learner at a high rate with them having little to no error in their trials. This boosts their confidence and can help progress learning faster with fewer issues from frustration. When we are training a new behavior from nothing, it is essentially a guessing game for the learner. We want to be sure they are given as many “hints” as possible, to the point of it being obvious what we want (and that has to be obvious from the learner’s prospective, not yours!! Brains all work differently, especially across species).
Are you going to go tweak that new year resolution that you maybe failed at already? It’s worth a shot! If you are in the Colorado Springs, CO area and would like some help doing this with your pet, reach out today!
