Measuring Your Dog’s Progress Can Be Very Motivating!

There’s a popular saying in business “you get what you measure” or “you are what you measure” . It’s a somewhat flawed premise, but it has its good points!

The idea is to encourage people to track what is important to them, what really matters. In the belief that this helps improve results. 

Of course there is a risk that we can become too focused on the measuring and the tracking. Which might bias our behavior. And not always in a good way.  

In addition, some kinds of outcome, improved happiness for example, are challenging to measure. But on the whole, I do believe that measuring things we want to improve is beneficial.

The Benefits Of Tracking Your Progress

If we don’t measure our progress, its all too easy to focus on the wrong things and make poor use of the time we have. 

So I’m a fan of measuring, or tracking, progress in dog training. I think it is motivating, and that it improves the outcome for both you and your dog. And I recommend you do it. 

Perhaps the biggest question is how? But first, let’s quickly look at how to make measuring work for you. 

Rewarding Yourself

In order for measuring to be motivating, you need to build some rewards into your life. 

All too often we battle away, trying to reach goals, hoping the outcome will be sufficiently rewarding in itself. 

But because dog training, and most other worthwhile or permanent changes in your life, take time, there’s a huge risk that you will lose heart, before you reach your goal. 

When you start to measure or track your progress, it gives you an opportunity to reward yourself at each stage along the way. Rather than deferring the rewards until you reach the final outcome. 

That’s got to be more fun!

What kind of rewards have to be entirely up to you. Just as our dogs are the best judge of what is rewarding for them, you are the best judge of what is rewarding for you. 

It’s no good rewarding yourself with a candle lit bath – a popular reward suggestion in self help books – if you hate candle lit baths. 

It must feel rewarding for your progress to be reinforced and for your motivation to get that all important boost. 

And the rewards need to arrive straight away. Tickets to a concert next year, won’t cut it. 

How To Measure Your Dog Training Progress

There are several ways to track your progress. From measuring the time you spend, to recording yourself on video, to plotting your progress along a path

• Time spent training
• Visual records
• Milestones on a journey

Time Spent Training

You could measure how much time you spend training. This is a popular one.  And it’s really important to start small. 

Habits take weeks, not days, to develop and if you make the task too onerous at the start, you won’t stick at it. 

Fortunately you can teach a dog a lot in just a few minutes. 

So start simple with a two minute session each day. Then build up through three minutes, to five minutes and beyond. 

Record the time on a calendar or a card on your refrigerator. And reward yourself after each two minutes. 

As you increase the time, you can give yourself better rewards. And you could add in some ‘super rewards’ as the total training time builds up, after each hour of accumulated training for example. 

There is a problem with this approach. The problem with measuring time is that there is no benefit to the dog in increasing the session time beyond a certain point. 

You can fit more sessions into a day of course. But again, only up to a point. 

Visual Records

Tracking progress using photos or video can work really well for some people. I like the photo approach for cleaning goals. I take a picture of a room, or a part of a shed or outbuilding that is a mess, and use that to compare my progress against.

With dog training I use video and it really is a brilliant tool for this purpose. 

Not only because you get to see hard evidence of how much you and the dog have improved, but also because it helps you  improve more. 

It’s amazing how many mistakes you will spot in a video, that you were not aware you were making.   

Another way of measuring your progress is to make a plan of your training journey and to divide that journey up into stages and record which stage you have reached at the end of each training session.

Milestones On A Journey

This last method is my favorite. I like to break down the training journey into stages and further divide each stage into a series of training games.  There is more information on this in: Game Based Dog Training.

Each of these games is a progress milestone. And you need to complete each game in order to start playing the next one

You can then reward yourself after completing each game or at the end of each stage. Or both if you are feeling generous!

You’ll find details on how to construct your own training plan this way in my article: How To Make A Dog Training Plan. 

So Do You Get What You Measure?

I don’t wholly agree with the statement ‘you get what you measure’ when it comes to life in general. But I think that the concept is worth considering when it comes to any kind of goal oriented outcome. 

And dog training is happily a process where there are lots of clear goals and objectives.

You want your dog to sit and stay when told. You want them to come back when you call them, in all kinds of different situations. You want them to walk nicely next to you when you attach a leash to their collar. 

These are measurable outcomes and the stages in the process that lead up to them are measurable too. 

At the very least, it’s worthwhile keeping a written record of your training sessions. When they took place, how long they lasted, and what you achieved during them. 

Those achievements might seem small today. But added up over the course of several months, you’ll be amazed at your progress!  That in itself has got to be a reward worth having.