Can you get your dog into this box?
The challenge…
It’s one of many dog tricks… get all 4 of your dog’s feet into increasingly smaller boxes. But for a long time I couldn’t help my dog progress to smaller sizes because I didn’t believe it was possible. Then one trainer (Susan Garrett) explained it to me… imagine your dog taking a poo.
Oh. Got it.
It’s a well know fact that it takes a lot longer to do something the first time. For example: flying (Wright brothers), running a 4-minute mile–to name a few. Why?
Well, I think it’s because if you spend a lot of energy worrying about whether something is possible, you waste time and energy that could be spent just doing it. When I encountered the multiplication tables in elementary school, I had a lot of negative thoughts at first. Was it possible to memorize all of that? Could I do it? Then I thought about my older sister. She’d done it–and we had the same genes. It must be possible. So I stopped stressing about whether it was possible for me to do it, and just got on with it.
That doesn’t mean it’s all easy sailing–just tell yourself you can do something, then do it. Often there’s a lot of hard work ahead. I found that I also have to pay attention to my motivation–why I needed or wanted to accomplish that thing. Sometimes the bigger challenge is working on the motivation, which is a different problem. There are many strategies that can be used to help build motivation. But it helps to believe you can do it first, because that can prevent you from even starting. And if you never start, you never get anywhere.
What do you do to accelerate your learning curve? Let me know!
Cheers!
MK Tufft
