07/02/2024
I’ve been thinking a lot about beliefs lately.
“If you pet a dog when he’s fearful, you’re reinforcing the fear”
“You can’t stop a behavior with cookies”
“The dog is always looking for an opportunity to become dominant”
“If you train with food, you’ll never be able to get reliable behavior without it”
“Never repeat a command, ‘sit, sit, sit’ isn’t a command”
“Verbal corrections are just repeated commands”
“If you let the dog win at tug, he will lose respect for you”
“Dominance is fixed, and dogs only understand dominance and submissiveness, good dog owners have to always be expressing dominance, or the dog will be confused, feel unsafe, and act out”
These are a just a few of the things I used to believe, that I now consider to wrong, or at least misleading. Changing my mind on some of them came with a lot of stress and anxiety. Some were core beliefs that were at the heart of everything I did as a trainer. I felt like if I changed those ideas, I would have to change everything I was doing. Others were less important and changed far more easily. “More easily,” is not the same thing as easily though. They all came with their share of stress and discomfort.
Changing your mind can be tough. The more strongly we believe a thing, the harder it is.
It takes a type of grit to give a new idea enough consideration to actually challenge a deeply held belief. Most people will only do so under intense pressure. We tend to hold onto our beliefs as if they are gold.
True growth often requires us to be more committed to truth than we are to our own comfort and security. As Muhammad Ali said “A man who sees the world the same at 50 as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”
