Can you build your dog's confidence with enrichment and play?

If you have a timid or cautious dog, simple enrichment games can be one of the easiest- and most fun!- ways to help them build confidence. 

How can enrichment make your dog more confident?  Just providing more enrichment activities to your dog at home or in their safe space won't necessarily build confidence. But a carefully designed enrichment program can.  Here's why:

From a behavioral perspective, "confidence" isn't something that can be trained, since it's not a behavior. But, from the perspective of behaviorism, confidence has been described as a by-product of repeated successes. In other words, a learning history characterized by a high rate of reinforcement (your dog achieving outcomes that they want using their behavior) may be the behavioral pathway to what we would call "confidence." 

Think of a time when you had to learn a new skill, or perform a behavior in a new setting, that you were nervous about.  A common example public speaking.  At first, most of us are at least a little anxious about public speaking. We don't have any history of successfully speaking in public, and we're not sure how it's going to go. But with many successful repetitions, we're likely to feel less nervous, and more confident, about speaking in public. This positive learning history is what we want for our dogs too. 

So, back to enrichment. Enrichment activities involve behavior, of course. Maybe your dog is moving around, sniffing, pawing at a toy, licking a lick mat... and if we set these games up correctly, these behaviors will be reinforced at a high rate. Over time, your dog will accumulate a nice learning history of these behaviors being reinforced. And that is the kind of learning history that we want if we're trying to build confidence.

Sometimes, it can be difficult to find ANY enrichment activity that your very fearful dog enjoys.  If that's the case with your dog, check out my free guid to Your Fearful Dog's 1st Enrichment Game.

Once your dog has SOMETHING that your dog will enjoy (and a little bit of confidence!) then you can start to add variety- variety to the enrichment game in a way that elicits a greater variety of behaviors, and variety to the contexts in which your dog can play the game. One way to think of this process is extending your dog's history of success (and therefore, we hope, their confidence) to additional behaviors and locations.  I'll dig more into this in the next few videos. 

Here's my discussion of the big picture of how enrichment can be used to build confidence: 

Intrigued? I have a special opportunity available for a limited number of students to join me in my Beginning Sniffing Games for Shy Dogs course at a 50% discount, in exchange for sharing your thoughts on how to make the course even better in future iterations. This offer expires 10/17.  The goal of this course is to help your shy dog become more confident exploring- which is ideal if you have a pup who is afraid to move around the house, the yard, go on walks, or really cautious in new places.  I hope you'll join me!