Congratulations, you just got a new puppy! Some features of a puppy are perfect out of the box: they are loving and warm and cuddly. Other features, like going outside to go to the bathroom, are things that need to be added with training. The good news is that there are some simple steps you can take to get your puppy trained in almost no time. The recipe includes:
- Clear expectations – Let’s start with the bathroom project. It’s simple: don’t go in the house and do go outside in the yard.
- Positive reinforcement – There are quite a few steps involved in the “going outside to go to the bathroom” project, so there is no way your puppy will get it right perfectly from the first try. They will make many mistakes as they are learning. The key is to give them praise when they make any positive move toward the goal.
- Incremental progress – Even moving toward the door and not making it all the way outside is improvement. Reward and encouragement for failures that are getting closer to success is the key to keep having them make progress.
- Repetition – Doing the same routine over and over again in a consistent way helps to turn it into something that happens reliably over time.
So there you go. Follow those steps and you’ll have a house-trained puppy in no time.
Word swap
Now, go back and read the previous section and every time the word “puppy” appears, put in “brain” instead. Voila, you have the perfect recipe for training your brain. Clear expectations, positive reinforcement, incremental progress, and repetition.
The amazing thing is that for some reason, most of don’t treat our brains like we would treat a puppy. We expect instantaneous results, beat ourselves up over every mistake, and give up after only a few failed attempts.
The first “upgrade?”
When we talk with people about “upgrading” their brain, they frequently want to work on some important issue in their lives, from family to personal health to career to just being happier. What we often find, however, is that before those issues can be upgraded, the first thing to work on is upgrading the process they use for training their brain.
Often, learning to train your brain like a puppy must come before training your brain on anything else in life.
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Contact us to inquire about beginning your upgrade today.
