German Dominatrix

One of my friends is a professional dog trainer (one of those modern, violent-free, understand-your-dog kind of trainers). She has a new trainee, and for one session with a customer and his dog, she told her, “Don’t touch that dog; it bites sometimes and it already bit me.”

Trainee sees dog, goes down and strokes the dog. My friend says, “Hey, I told you not to do that because he might bite!” Trainee replies, “Oh, I forgot. You’ve got to tell me that more explicitly.”

Which left my friend in a certain WTF mode. After I joked a little about using a whip for learning improvement (on the trainee, of course, never on dogs), I also thought about how such things can be avoided.

For once, it’s always good when the answer to an order is phrased as a full sentence.
Instead of: “Don’t touch the dog” - “Sure” or “yes” (instantly forgotten)
it could be: “Don’t touch the dog” - “Okay, I won’t touch that dog.” (better chance for remembering)

(Same goes if you are unsure what somebody expects from you. Rephrasing the work ahead like, “Let’s see. I should start with A, than do B, and if there’s time, C can be tackled.” makes sure that both sides are talking about the same subject.)

But I also think that in this case, there’s a strong reflex that works against not touching this dog. The trainee obviously loves dogs, and I guess she strokes every dog she meets. There are some numbers around how often you need to do something before an old habit is broken, and they are in the hundreds. So one order against a strong tendency of doing something might not be very effective.

For her own self-protection, the trainee needs to learn to heed warnings and that not all dogs are nice and cuddly. Possibly the best learning effect would have been reached if the dog had bitten the trainee (which it didn’t). As it is, I predict that similar situations will happen again with this trainee…no matter how explicit the order is given.

I’m a mole - really, I am. I won every contest of “who has the worse eyesight” in my life. So my glasses are almost hard-wired to my face (my eyes are too dry for contact lenses), and when I started swimming again last year, I always kept them on.

Now I’ve got wonderful and still inexpensive goggles with almost-fitting diopters. With them, I can dive and see everything under water super sharp.

And then I just took them off today and did some lines of breaststroking without any glasses or goggles. And not only didn’t I get lost or ran into anyone else - I also found that in front of my body, every stroke evoked a beautiful wave pattern on the water. The more regular the strokes, the stronger the pattern. I had never seen how my own energetic movements changed the water in front of me, because I had always been so occupied with staring at the end of the pool in the distance.

So if you keep your eyes too much trained on the goal, you may lose the sight of what’s right in front of you. I’m not saying the path is the goal, as I think that’s often a perfect method of forgetting where are you heading to. But the process is part of reaching the goal, and you may miss many things if you only stare at the peak at the horizon.