01/07/2025
Confidence is a muscle, exercised in lots of ways. I'll explain how by talking about swimming.
When I was a child, I was petrified of water. Lakes, the sea, swimming pools? I hated them. It was so bad that I used to get anxious when my younger sibling walked near a local river I would panic and pull them away.
I disliked the feeling of water, I was concerned I might be swallowed up by the waves. So I avoided it for years. I was an anxious wreck as a teenager anyway, and this was one of many things I ran away from.
Today, a friend wanted to go swimming in the sea. So, we did. We swam for a little while, and it didn't bother me at all.
This is probably the part where you expect me to say I'd worked relentlessly to overcome my fear of water, with little successes spread throughout the last few years.
Nope.
In truth, I've swam maybe three times in about eight years.
So how did I overcome it?
Because in every other way I've become more confident. In life, in my work, in trying new experiences and broadening my horizons.
We think of confidence as being solely tied to a specific behaviour or skill, but it isn't. Confidence is a muscle that can be worked in numerous different ways.
For your dog, it's the same.
If your end goal is getting your dog comfortable around other dogs, but they're panic when hearing noises, tackling that will feed into the dog reactivity.
The more we build your dogs confidence in general, no matter what it involves, the better they'll get at tackling the specifics.
Work your dogs confidence muscle and they'll thrive.
