Failure. It’s something that we all fear and do our best to avoid on a daily basis. Failure leaves us feeling incompetent, wasteful, and worthless. The only problem with failure is that it is an integral part to learning anything worthwhile. As dog handlers, we experience failures quite often in our training sessions, especially if we are new to the sport. But without these failures, we would not be able to learn and grow. As C.S. Lewis once put it, “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.”
One of my failures, and I am sure one that resonates with a lot of other new dog handlers, is the failure to make haste slowly. Too often it is easy to get lost in what can feel like the monotony of daily training sessions. We want to rush the dog onto the next step as soon as it is showing some sign of understanding. But if the dog isn’t ready, you are really just setting both you and the dog up for needless struggles down the road. I am not ashamed to admit that I have fast tracked my own dogs on occasion, but really all that accomplished was me having to go back and fix cracks in our foundations.
Creating visions of grandeur about what our dogs will be like once they are fully trained also leads to many failures and setbacks. We are all inundated with videos of dogs who are already at the top of their game via social media and film/tv. We want to have that dog who takes a whistle-sit and can handle out to 400 yards. Or the dog who busts through brush without hesitation to find that pheasant or recover a wounded bird. Our dreams of the future limits the enjoyment that comes from training our own dogs. We fail to see the beauty in certain training moments, because our dog is still “not there” yet, whatever that means.
As humans, we all struggle with criticism, even if it is constructive. We take everything to heart and take every comment made about what we are doing as a personal attack. This causes us to not be able to truly listen when older, more experienced trainers are giving us advice. We’ve all been there before. You’re out with someone new, who knows what a good hunting dog is, and your dog has some struggles. But you look past those, whether purposefully or not. The more advanced handler gives you some feedback on something and you immediately get defensive and snip back with something, just to make you feel like you are not a failure. Much later, when the moment has passed, we are able to truly hear what was being said. And 9 times out of 10 that person is right.
Failure is really something much more positive than the word leads us to believe. It is through failure, as C.S. Lewis stated, we are able to find our way to success. If we constantly think that we have the best dog of all time, your dog will stagnate and not develop into the hunting partner that it could be. Challenge yourself to see issues, failings, etc. as learning opportunities. Dissect them and get to their roots. Once you have done that, you will have a great starting place to fix any problem/setback you may be facing.
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