In Daniel Coyle’s 18th Tip from The Little Book of Talent, he advises us to choose five minutes a day over an hour a week. Why is this? Well, he says that with deep practice, small daily practice “snacks” are more effective than once a week practice binges. This has to do with the way our brains grow – incrementally, a little each day, even as we sleep. Daily practice, even for 5 minutes, nourishes this process, while more occasional practice forces your brain to play catch-up. Music education pioneer Shinichi Suzuki says to “Practice on the days that you eat.”
How short can these daily training sessions or snacks be? Here’s an example from the book: Hans Jensen, a cello teacher at Northwestern University, provided an example when he taught a time-strapped medical student who desired to practice only two minutes a day. With the student, he worked systematically, breaking down a piece in to its component passages, tackling the toughest ones first. The student was able to learn a complex étude in just six weeks!! The key, as Jensen said, was total focus, and being ruthless about noticing and fixing every tiny mistake from the start. Even Jensen was shocked at how well it went.
This brings up an important point – being ruthless about noticing and fixing every tiny mistake from the start. I had a similar conversation with two different students on two separate occasions in the past few weeks, about noticing things. When asked if they had seen their dog do this or that on course, they reported no. They were running their dogs but basically unaware of what the dog was actually doing.
If you aren’t watching, if you aren’t seeing what your dog is doing in response to your cues, how will you know if your dog is doing what you’ve trained it to do, what you’ve cued it to do? If you don’t know, how will you know if you, or your dog made a mistake? The first step to being able to fix a mistake is to NOTICE that it happened! It’s almost more important than anything else – after all, if your handling isn’t great but you’re aware of the effects of your handling on your dog’s behavior, and you SEE it, you’re going to have much more information to work with than a handler who is lucky enough to have a dog who toes the line even when they’re not watching – we all know that most of us don’t get lucky enough to have that dog, and if we do, it rarely happens twice!
You’re much better off being aware, fully present and in the moment, and SEEING what your dog is doing, so that you can notice and fix mistakes you’re making with your handling, or, so that you can notice and fix mistakes you’ve made in your training. Note that nowhere in here am I putting this on the dog – the dog’s errors are either a result of OUR training, or OUR handling, so there’s no need to be ruthless to the dog – it is we who must hold ourselves to the highest standards for the sake of our dogs. After all, they are happiest when we are clear, concise, and communicative!
One of the other big advantages of daily 5-minute sessions over weekly binge sessions is that if you practice daily, even for a few minutes, it becomes a habit. The act of practicing, of making time to do it, and to do it well, can be thought of as a skill in itself, and it’s perhaps the most important skill of all! And with this, as with all things, you have to give it time, because remember, according to most research, establishing a new habit takes about thirty days.
So, with that in mind, do you have 5 minutes a day that you can set aside for focused, purposeful practice and training with your dog?