How To Build Your Dogs Confidence

Dogs like humans have their own unique personality, temperament and confidence. How do you teach your dog to have confidence and teach it to trust it’s ability to make decisions? Like all behavior you have to train it.

Baby Steps

You are not going to be able to transform your dogs self confidence in just a weekend. This is something that will take months and even years to do as you encounter new experiences. However if you take baby steps you can see incredible incremental growth. It may start with something as simple as learning to go down the stairs, and end with something as incredible as swimming out to a dock and back in a large lake. Both of those will test your dogs confidence and yet both are baby steps depending on your dogs breed and abilities.

 

Leadership

If you want your dog to be come a leader and do difficult things, you need to lead they way by demonstrating how to do those things and make your self grow. Do you want your dog to be a fit athletic dog? Then you need to work on being a fit and athletic owner. Take your dog for runs regularly, exercise can teach your pup a lot of very valuable skill. Your dog will able to better interact with other dogs, it will learn quality leash behavior and other very important abilities.

Do Hard Things

Doing hard things helps increase your dogs confidence more than almost any other thing on this list. If you have a retrieving breed make your dog stick to difficult fetches. Throw balls or sticks far and in hard places to retrieve and encourage them to use their natural sense of smell to locate the item without giving up.

It seems like a simple tip however implementation can be difficult. Teaching our pup to go down the stairs took some patience. It was hard for her to overcome and yet forcing her to do hard things has increased her ability to do hard things. This point is one of the most important things to do when it comes to mental toughness. Teaching your dog to obey commands for long periods of time can be very useful. We once had a friend who could tell his dog to sit and stay and would walk over a mile away before using a dog whistle to call the dog to come. It takes a lot of mental toughness for a dog to have that kind of self control.

Reinforce Good Behavior

Focus on the positive things that your dog does and reinforce those good behaviors to help you dog understand when you are happy and pleased with it. This allows your dog to not only learn the right things, but it also increases the loving relationship you will have with your dog. No matter how strong your relationship is, loving on your dog will increase and deepen that relationship.

One of the best things of running these exercises is it will also build your confidence not only with your dog but with yourself. Teaching your dog all of these things will strengthen your own resolve to do and be better. What are some things you have done to build your dogs confidence?