Dog Training Secrets

Are there dog training secrets? 

I see this kind of marketing regularly. I don’t like it. It rubs me the wrong way, and I’m not sure why.

So, I think of what I know. Is my knowledge a basket of secrets? I wouldn’t say so, because I teach them along the way to my students. No one student learns all of what I know because their individual dog doesn’t need what maybe another student’s dog needs. But I am very clear when describing what we are doing but keeping it simple enough so that my student doesn’t need to read a science textbook to understand. 

On the other hand, I don’t just give it all away for free. 

For rescue volunteers, I don’t give it away for free anymore. I used to, but I learned along the way, with almost 3 decades doing this, that when you give it away for free it often isn’t valued. For some reason, in the rescue world, there is this mentality that they are entitled to what you give away for free, but because it is free it is not valuable. That is not so fun to experience, especially when I have paying students that helped subsidize my time so I could do volunteer work. So, while what I’m offering isn’t a bundle of secrets, it is information that should be treated respectfully and applied thoughtfully to help that dog out. It took a lot of hard work and investment on my part to have this knowledge.

For everyone else, what I have to offer isn’t a bundle of secrets, it is the knowledge that I have earned which I use to support myself. It is a reasonable thing to exchange that knowledge to earn a living. What I do offer is a set of principles and methods that have taken me a lot of years to develop and distill into practical lessons. My hope is always that what I offer has superior value. I like hearing people being happy with what is done, that we aren’t hurting their dogs, and they have never seen what I’m doing before but after experiencing it, they wonder why it all seems so simple. The answers might be simple, but the learning for me wasn’t simple. 

Contrast this to the marketing I have seen over the years, claiming someone has this secret method that no one else possesses. I just think it is not really adding value to the proposition. It is the idea that maybe curiosity, usually without credentials, will cause the buyer to spend some money. For me, that kind of marketing just makes me distrust the source. I don’t want to play games to get the knowledge, but that is how it comes across. At least to me. 

Anyway, the choice is this: sell secrets or sell transparency and authenticity. I’d rather do the latter. 

Are there “secrets”? I’d rather re-phrase it to ask, are there better ways than what you might have tried before?