Hi {{first_name}} ,

A while back I was out in the park with Schmoo working through some focus exercises. He was 14 months old at the time. High drive Belgian Malinois, still a puppy in a lot of ways, full of energy and opinions.

At one point I took a cookie and threw it as far as I could.

He watched it land. Looked at where it was. Then turned around and came back to me.

That was the moment I knew the work was paying off. Not the sit. Not the down stay. Not any command. The fact that he came back when he had every reason not to.

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I used to see this all the time when I was training clients' dogs.

Owner gives a sit command. Dog sits. Gets a treat. Then the second the session is over, the dog is off chasing another dog, eating grass, doing whatever he wants.

And the owner thinks: well, he knows sit. He did it.

He did it. But he didn't do it for you. He did it for the treat, in that moment, because it was easier than not doing it. The second the treat was gone and the leash dropped, so did any connection to you.

That is a command. That is not a relationship.

What I build with Schmoo, as well as all my dogs, is something different. When he works with me, he isn’t looking at other dogs. He isn’t scanning the ground for scraps. He is on me. Watching. Waiting. Not because he is afraid to look away. Because there is nowhere more interesting to look.

That is what a relationship produces. And it has to come before the obedience, not after it.

One of my other videos got some criticism around this time. People were saying I was repeating commands, which is a training no-no. What they saw was me saying "down, good, down, super, down, good boy" and assuming I was just barking the same word until the dog complied.

That is not what was happening.

When Schmoo went into a down and I said "down" again, I was not asking again. I was telling him: yes, that thing you are doing right now is the thing I asked for. Keep doing it.  It is reinforcing the command and connection to me and the training!

Without that piece of information, the dog is guessing. He knows he got a treat after he laid down, but he does not know if you wanted him to stay there or if you're satisfied with the position or what exactly you're asking for. You fill that gap with information. You reinforce what they're doing right while they're doing it.

I have competed with dogs. I have put titles on dogs. I know what I need to do in a competitive obedience context. This was not that. This was teaching a puppy what words mean by confirming them in real time.

There was a line I kept coming back to during that period of Schmoo's training.

It's like a dance. If I'm not leading, you're leading. That's it.

A relationship with a dog is not static. It is always in motion, it’s dynamic. And the moment you stop directing that motion, the dog fills the gap. Not out of defiance. Because someone has to lead and they are not going to stand there waiting forever.

The cookie throw was a version of this. I threw the cookie partly to see what he would do. He had every option in front of him. He could have gone and eaten it. He could have gotten distracted by whatever else was in the park. Instead he came back, because the value of being near me was higher than the value of the cookie on the ground.

That does not happen by accident. It took months of building that into him before he was 14 months old.

Something I said in that session that I want to be clear about: I wanted the mistakes.

Not because mistakes are fun or because I was not correcting them. But because a dog that is making no mistakes is either not learning anything new or is too shut down to try. Neither of those is what I was going for.

Schmoo was a 14-month-old puppy who still wanted the toy, still wanted to investigate, still had opinions about what was more interesting than what I was asking him to do. When he made a mistake, I could help him. I could show him what I actually wanted. A correction, in that context, was information.  It is also a connection.

But here is the order that matters: I could not correct him for something I had not clearly taught him. The sequence was relationship first, then teaching, then corrections when he knew what I was asking and chose something else anyway. Skip any step in that order and you are not correcting. You are punishing. The dog cannot tell the difference between the two unless he understood what you wanted before the consequence arrived.

At the end of the session, with Schmoo lying down next to me while I was wrapping up, I said something I meant.

I think that session was probably the most important video lesson I had ever put out.

Not because of the techniques. Not because of anything fancy. Because the concept of relationship being the foundation of everything, before obedience, before corrections, before competitive work or bite work or tracking, is the thing most people skip. They go straight to commands. They go straight to correction. They wonder why the dog listens in the kitchen and falls apart at the park, or anywhere there are distractions.

The park version of your dog is the honest version. And what you see there tells you exactly how much relationship you have built.

If you've ever corrected your dog and immediately wondered whether you did it right, this is for you.

Not the person looking for shortcuts. The person who genuinely wants to communicate better with their dog and is not sure corrections are helping or hurting.

I've been building a Corrections Masterclass around that exact question. When corrections work, when they don't, and what has to be in place before they do anything useful.

Subscribers get first access when it opens.

1. FREE Training Content on My Website

Hundreds of free training videos covering everything from puppy foundations to aggression and reactivity. Start with whatever your dog needs most right now.

Head over to [ROBERTCABRAL.COM] and dig in.

2. The Schmuley Journal - inside the membership

If you want to go deeper on any of this, everything is inside my membership. 250-plus lessons, over 85 hours of instruction, organized so you can find exactly what you need. Right now for only $29/mo. [BECOME A MEMBER]

3. My Youtube Relationship Video: If you’d like to watch me live explain this concept. [RELATIONSHIP-VIDEO]

Until next Tuesday,

- Robert