The truth about stress-free life and teaching

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Many times I've heard that training dogs (or raising children in that matter) in a stress-free way is not equipping them with coping mechanisms for life. Stress will happen and they need to learn how to deal with it. I completely agree with the second sentence but why do we think that we learn to deal with stress only if we are put into the stressful situation? Even if, you did learn to cope with stress when you have already found yourself in a stressful situation, how is this a proof that stress-free teaching is not going to equip people and animals with necessary skills? Stress-free teaching is not a synonym for hiding people and animals from stress and putting them into a bubble where no stress appears. It's about giving them necessary skills in the least stressful environment to equip them for those more challenging ones and working with them gradually.

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People believe stress-free means pretending that stress is not going to happen. That's probably the biggest misconception. Teaching without stress is about building skills gradually and adding more difficult situations when the learner is ready for them, instead of pushing your learner into the pool and hoping he won't drown.

Think for a second, is it better to find a solution to a stressful situation you knew about when you are already flooded with a fear response or is it easier to come up with a solution in advance? Likewise, if you are learning for a dance performance is it easier to learn during a dance competition or are you practising in a dance class long before the event? Similarly, when you have a presentation to make, are you going with the flow on the day of the presentation or are you preparing ahead of time?

I can imagine that when you had prepared for many situations ahead of time and you experienced the benefits. Of course, you can’t prepare for every situation and imagine all of the scenarios but the more you practice being prepared in stressful situations, the better you get at dealing with them. Eventually, you might be able to deal with a stressful situation without prior preparation, if it wasn’t foreseen, but all your previous practice equipped you for it. In other words, you might not even realise that you went through training that prepared you for it.

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When it comes to dogs that are, for example, stressed by other, unfamiliar people, I wouldn’t simply put them in a situation where they just have to learn to deal with this stress and have no way out. It’s not thinking ahead of time but rather it’s hoping that the dog will come up with socially accepted solutions. What we can do is to teach them socially acceptable skills sooner and only then take them into a more stressful situation. It’s just like you preparing for the presentation safely at home without an audience. It’s not unheard of, it’s widely used. The only problem is, we don’t even realise that we use it. We then falsely attribute our ability to cope with the stressful situation to our inner agent when we went through informal training without realising it. It’s not something inside of us that we possess that is giving us the skills, it is the experience that we went through.

To sum up

I’m not asking anyone to try to create a life for their dogs (or themselves or others around them) that will keep them in a bubble for their whole life. I’m asking to consider building skills ahead of time so when the stressful situation happens, they are equipped to cope with it. That’s what I mean by stress-free life. Developing mechanisms to deal with the stress so it doesn’t affect us or our dogs in a harmful way. I believe we could all use that approach instead of hoping to find a solution when we are thrown in the depths of a stressful situation. Personally, I think it makes perfect sense and it’s not just an ideology that is unreal for real-world situations. It’s only unreal when you hope that you or your animal will deal with life in the best possible way without any preparation. I find the opposite to be true. It’s real, it makes sense and it’s far more likely to work.

Be a superhero for your dog, he will love you for it.

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