Confidence-Building Training Techniques for Dogs Who Are Shy, Fearful, Anxious (Patreon Article Unlocked!)
Video: https://youtu.be/h5WY1T2ZBIY
This article is a TRANSCRIPT of the above video!
Hello, hello! This is Cori from Venus and Mars K9, and today we’re talking about common confidence-boosting strategies.
Formal Skills/Obedience for Building Confidence in Shy Dogs
I’m a dog trainer, so I’m typically talking about training formal skills—sit, down, go to place, come when called, heel, etc. But just to be clear, you don’t always need formal skills to boost a dog’s confidence. Sometimes you just need gentleness or toughness, exposure or a safe space, freedom or structure, or simply good old-fashioned time and patience.
That said, a lot of the time we do train formal skills to help dogs with fear issues. When we do that, what we’re generally trying to accomplish is to increase guidance and control from the handler over the dog. I often call this influence: trying to increase the handler’s influence over the dog’s behavior.
We’re often trying to train the dog to look to the handler for information instead of making choices independently—especially when those choices involve staring, fixating, freaking out, barking, or similar behaviors. We’re trying to increase the dog’s ability to disengage, redirect, and/or settle while still perceiving the distraction they’re nervous about.
Here are some common training techniques for working with fearful dogs.
Counter-conditioning
Of course, we have counter-conditioning. The most classic example that people are familiar with is using food.
It’s important that you expose the dog to the things they’re nervous about at a level they can handle. When you’re doing counter-conditioning successfully, the dog is exposed to the stimulus without becoming overwhelmed.
A common example might be a dog who is nervous about a hair dryer. You turn the hair dryer on, turn it off, and feed a treat. Then you do it again: turn the hair dryer on, turn it off, and feed a treat.
Pretty soon, the dog hears the sound of the hair dryer and becomes optimistic. Their mood changes. Their feelings about the hair dryer change. They’re now happy to hear it because they associate it with good things.
You can use more than just food to counter-condition something. You can use toy play or anything else that has a positive enough association to change the dog’s association with the stimulus. Food is often the simplest option.
There are, however, some limitations.
For example, a lot of dogs are concerned about fireworks. We will often tell people to use a YouTube video of fireworks. The reason is that, with counter-conditioning, it’s helpful to be able to control the trigger. You can give the dog breaks and stop the stimulus while they’re eating, for example.
Having a video or playlist allows you to pause it, feed the dog for a moment, and control the pacing of the exposure.
However, some dogs can tell that a recording of fireworks isn’t the real thing. They can tell it’s just a recording, so it doesn’t work.
It can also be difficult to organically find fireworks at the appropriate distance and intensity for training. When you encounter them in real life, the stimulus may be too intense—the firework may be too loud or too close—to counter-condition properly.
People will sometimes try to recreate the sound by popping bubble wrap in the house, for example. But it can be tricky when you can’t find the actual stimulus and manipulate it in a controlled counter-conditioning situation.
Those are some limitations of using that simple formula to solve a problem. But there are also plenty of situations where counter-conditioning works extremely well and is very easy to do.
The Premack Principle
Something similar to counter-conditioning is called the Premack Principle.
Basically, what this means is that a dog might have a scary experience—for example, going to a pet store. They’re nervous about going inside because they’re shy. Immediately afterward, they get to go to the park.
The experience of going to the park after the pet store is so awesome that, the next time, they may be a little more willing to go into the pet store because the last time they did, they got to go to the park.
Counter-conditioning Within a Skill
Sometimes you can do counter-conditioning within a skill. Some people might call this operant counter-conditioning.
Going back to the hair dryer example, maybe you don’t just turn the hair dryer on and feed the dog a cookie. Instead, you practice having your dog on a place bed where they’re used to controlling themselves. They’re also used to getting food there and, ideally, they already have positive feelings about being on that spot.
The dog is on place. You turn the hair dryer on, and the dog thinks, “Oh, this is a stay drill. I can do that.”
Then you feed them.
You’re still using the reward to change their feelings about the thing that was scary and turn it into something that makes them feel neutral or good. But you’re doing it within the context of a formal skill they already know.
Habituation and Desensitization of Specific Fears
Another technique is habituation, or desensitization.
Basically, this means that the dog gets used to something because you continue exposing them to it at a level where they’re thinking, “Maybe I feel a little nervous about this, but it’s okay.”
By being around it again and again and again, they habituate to it. They become desensitized, and eventually they’re fine with it.
I use this a lot with dog reactivity. For dogs who only get to see other dogs for ten seconds at a time on walks, they can develop very big feelings about those encounters.
Instead, we might spend more time around other dogs—an hour at a time, for example—and allow the dog to calm down through habituation.
Flooding
The last item on this list is flooding.
I put a little crazy emoticon next to flooding because it can be controversial. It certainly works sometimes, and it certainly does not cause psychological damage in every situation ever. But it can backfire, go wrong, and be very scary for the dog.
A common human psychology example would be your dad throwing you into a swimming pool. You either get over it and learn how to swim, or you decide that it was the most traumatic day of your childhood, you never forget it, and it fundamentally changes your relationship with your father forever.
Something similar can happen with dogs.
A common example is going to a daycare environment where the dog gets thrown onto the play floor and suddenly finds themselves surrounded by 60 dogs. The same thing can happen at a dog park: there’s just an enormous amount of stimulus, and it can be very scary for the dog.
There’s so much stimulus that the dog may either work through it and eventually get over it because they simply don’t know what else to do with all of the information, or they may experience it as frightening and overwhelming.
So flooding is definitely something to use with caution.
Encouraging Dogs to Use Their Noses to Decompress
Another common category of treatment plans for confidence building with shy dogs that I often use is encouraging the dog to use their nose.
Why?
Because dogs naturally use their noses to decompress and destress themselves.
You’ll see dogs do this a lot in organic social situations. Once you learn to recognize it, you should start noticing that dogs will become stressed by something and then start sniffing to calm themselves.
It can be hard to identify before you have that on your radar. A normal person might look at the dog sniffing and think, “Oh, it smells good over there!”
But a lot of times, it’s an intentional choice by the dog—or at least an instinctive behavior that helps them destress.
Dogs who are really nervous, especially outside on walks, will often use their eyes too much. They’re constantly scanning the environment and remaining hypervigilant.
I think this may be even more common in dogs who are bred to use their eyes more, such as herding breeds. They’re bred to watch and track things visually, but that can backfire when you add anxiety to the mix.
So you want to encourage the dog to use their nose more instead of constantly scanning the environment visually.
Don’t Rush Decompression Sniffing
One very simple thing you can do is intentionally not rush decompression sniffing—or sniffing in general—while you’re on a walk.
Some people find it very annoying to walk slowly and let their dog sniff everything.
I’m from the city, and I like to walk fairly quickly. I find it annoying, too. So if I’m intentionally trying to get a dog to use their nose more, I have to consciously make that choice when I’m walking them.
I have to remember not to rush them and not to try to move them away from the spot with the leash. Let them finish that sniff.
Find-It Reinforcement
You can also use find-it reinforcement strategies as a reward.
Say a dog looks at you—or maybe they simply notice a trigger. You can say, “Find it!” and throw a treat for them to sniff out with their nose instead of tracking the trigger visually.
Try throwing the treat into tall grass or somewhere else where they have to sniff it out. You can also scatter several treats so they have to use their nose to find them.
You can even reinforce the act of sniffing itself.
For example, your dog is sniffing a little bit. You can mark that with “Find it!” and toss a treat for them to get while they’re sniffing.
The sequence becomes:
“I start sniffing. I find more food. I sniff some more. I find even more food. I should start sniffing more often.”
That’s a good idea!
Formal Nose Work
Finally, we have formal nose-work games.
This can be done inside or outside. You hide something for your dog, and they have to conduct a big search around a room. Maybe they’re finding their ball in some bushes outside.
You can also teach formal nose-work training where the dog learns to find specific objects. For example, you could teach them to find your keys rather than food or toys.
In competitive nose work, dogs are taught to search for specific scents, such as birch oil and other essential oils used in the sport.
These are all great things for boosting confidence in fearful dogs. Sometimes you’re boosting confidence simply by helping them become calmer.
Encouraging Dogs to Use Their Bodies
I also like to focus on teaching dogs to use their bodies.
Why?
Because a lot of times, dogs go into situations that scare them and become shut down. They’re afraid to explore.
We can teach them to move around and interact with the environment more with their bodies, and they become better at exploring.
Basically, they start thinking:
“I’m so cool! I’m so brave! I’m going out and touching everything. I’ve been taught that this is a good idea, and I get cookies for doing it.”
Or maybe they simply get the gratification of feeling awesome.
Foot Targeting
I will often teach dogs to do foot targeting.
For example, I might teach them to put their front feet on something and hold them there, or put their back feet on something and hold them there.
I teach this as a formal skill because, well, why not? I’m a dog trainer!
But surely you can do something less formal and get equally good results.
Honestly, I haven’t experimented with that too much because it’s easy for me to teach it as a formal skill. But I’m sure you can do it without formalizing everything—without requiring the dog to wait until you say “break,” “free,” “release,” or whatever your release word is.
It doesn’t have to be a formal stay for everything.
You can teach a dog to balance on things. People love teaching dogs to balance on fire hydrants. That’s cool.
You can teach them to climb on things, balance on bleachers at the park, stand on benches, and interact with different surfaces.
That can be good for them and can boost their confidence.
Dogs also tend to love agility-type activities.
Choice and Problem Solving
Choice-based shaping can feel very empowering for a dog.
What I mean by that is that, a lot of the time when we train, we’re guiding the dog quite a lot.
We might say, “Okay, dog, I want you to go onto this bed.” Then we move them with the leash, show them a treat to get them there, point to the bed, and position ourselves in that spot to show them where we want them to go.
That can be done in a forceful way—“You have to get up here!”—or it can be done by simply trying to convince them to do it with food.
Either way, if you strip some of that back and let the dog figure something out and choose to do it themselves in a training context, that’s what we call shaping, or free shaping.
It can feel very empowering.
Some dogs who feel out of control can gain confidence from this newfound sense of control that these games give them.
This can be especially true for newly adopted dogs or dogs who have had little or no training.
It can feel like they’re going out into the world and simply can’t do anything to stop everything from constantly overwhelming them.
Then you teach them that they can actually make choices and successfully influence people and situations.
That can be incredibly empowering.
There’s also something to be said about the logic and predictability of patterns being comforting.
For example:
“You go on the bed, and I feed you.”
Even something that simple can become a predictable routine.
Predictability can be very soothing for anxiety. Uncertainty is usually aggravating to anxiety.
Offered Behavior
Shaping is one example of this.
I already described it with the bed example. You want the dog to go onto the bed, and you’re going to give them food on the bed, but instead of telling them exactly what to do, you wait for the dog to do it automatically before you feed them.
That’s offered behavior.
Other problem-solving exercises, such as trick training, can also be incredibly confidence boosting for the same reason.
The dog gets to use their brain. They get to figure something out. That makes them feel cool and awesome because they solved a problem.
There’s also something to be said for the fact that they figured it out with the human.
You worked as a team to figure something out together:
“How can I teach this?”
“How can I learn this?”
That can be very confidence boosting.
Consent Procedures
Under this category, I also have consent procedures, such as husbandry procedures and cooperative care.
I’m not going to go into that in this presentation, but it’s essentially about teaching the dog to have a language for saying yes or no to things.
This can apply to almost anything, but people most often talk about it in the context of veterinary care and husbandry: nail trims, wiping the eyes, wiping the paws, vaccines, and so on.
Teaching the dog to voluntarily participate in those procedures can be very confidence boosting because of the sense of control and autonomy they gain.
And remember: all of this is situation-dependent.
I don’t know if I’ve emphasized that enough, but these are simply different things that can help different kinds of dogs with different personalities.
Response to Pressure
Kind of the opposite of the choice-based approach is the idea of response to pressure.
Some people believe in this very strongly. For some dog trainers, it’s essentially their whole philosophy. Other people care about it much more than I do.
But it is definitely important for some dogs.
A response to pressure can look like different things. The most common example is probably teaching a dog to yield to mechanical pressure or leash pressure.
In this specific example, you’re teaching a fearful dog that the handler can make them slightly uncomfortable through the leash or their gear, and the dog learns how to make that discomfort go away by performing the skill they’ve been taught.
The theory is that this makes them feel braver because they develop a sense of control over the uncomfortable situation.
The dog learns:
“When I feel uncomfortable, I have the power to stop that discomfort because I know what the right answer is, and I know that I can behave in a way that makes the pressure stop.”
That can theoretically be empowering.
For example, you might bump the leash and collar to the side. That’s annoying and uncomfortable, and the dog doesn’t like it.
The dog yields to the leash pressure, comes back toward the handler, and follows the handler on a slack leash. The bumping, nagging, and leash pressure then go away.
It becomes:
“Come here.”
Pressure, pressure, pressure
The dog yields.
The pressure stops.
The dog is happy because the pressure went away.
There’s also something to be said about strong leadership from the handler and how that can come from a pressure-based approach.
The handler is stepping in and forcibly leading the dog.
I have seen success with this, particularly in the context of forcibly guiding a dog out of an anxious spiral.
Some dogs in the city, for example, hear a noise that makes them uncomfortable. They’ve developed a habit of freaking out—putting the brakes on at the end of the leash, becoming upset, getting stuck, and spiraling.
It becomes:
“I hate this. I’m scared. I hate this. I’m scared.”
And then they pull.
Dogs do this for different reasons, and dogs sometimes do this simply because they’re scared.
But I’m talking about certain types of dogs that I meet who really spiral, and it becomes a habit, a pattern, and a whole behavioral cycle.
For those dogs, teaching more forceful leash skills—“No, you have to move. You have to get out of here. You have to follow me.”—can sometimes make the dog think:
“Okay. I’m going to stop freaking out now. I’m just going to follow you.”
That can be helpful for some dogs in some situations.
Another common example is pulling upward on the collar. The dog sits, the leash pressure goes away, and the dog feels good about that.
Again, the concept is that the dog learns:
“I can control pressure, and everything is better in my life.”
Hooray!
Additional Considerations
Here are some miscellaneous points to keep in mind.
Slow and Steady Often Wins
Slow and steady often wins the race when it comes to confidence boosting.
You can’t rush it.
You don’t want to create a plateau, and you don’t necessarily want to avoid pushing your dog, but slow and steady is important.
Also, progress is not linear.
You are going to have setbacks. You are going to have regressions.
That is just life, baby.
Socially Facilitated Learning
Another thing to think about is socially facilitated learning.
As a handler, you should model the emotional response you want from your dog as much as you can.
This is hard. This is big-time human training.
You can try to fake it until you make it sometimes, although that can be weird. Sometimes you end up looking like an extremely anxious person using a strange fake voice.
So I’m not going to tell you that there’s one specific solution.
Maybe you need to read an empowering book.
Maybe you need to talk about it in therapy.
Maybe you need to spend time around other confident dog handlers and learn socially from them.
Maybe you need to practice deep breathing.
Whatever you need to do, you should try to model the emotional response you want from your dog.
If your dog is out there freaking out and you’re freaking out with them, that’s not ideal.
I try not to talk about this too much with my clients because I have a lot of anxious clients, and I feel like emphasizing it too much can make them even more anxious, to the point where it isn’t helpful.
I don’t usually harp on people about it because I think most of them already know.
But just in case you don’t: try to be that calm, confident leader for your dog.
A Confident Training Buddy
There’s another form of socially facilitated learning that can be helpful if your dog is social: pairing them with a confident training buddy.
Maybe you go to Home Depot together, for example, and that environment is very nerve-wracking for your dog.
But your dog has a cool, confident buddy with them.
Your dog looks over and thinks:
“Man, maybe this isn’t so bad.”
That can be helpful, too.
Final Thoughts
Those are just some additional ideas for you.
That’s the end of the presentation!
I hope you liked it. I know it’s very general, but I wanted to put all of my common confidence-boosting strategies in one place and keep them organized.
Hopefully, as a pet owner or fellow trainer, this gives you some ideas about what to do with clients when you’re stuck, or what to do with your own dog when you’re stuck.
And, as always, please feel free to reach out to me with your questions and concerns.
Have a good one!
Goodbye.
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Venus and Mars K9 provides in-home private dog training and group class for basic obedience, puppy socialization, trick training, dog sport foundations, leash reactivity training, and other canine behavior problems. We travel most frequently to neighborhoods such as Humboldt Park, Hermosa, Logan Square, Avondale, West Town, South Loop, Downtown Chicago, Ukrainian Village, Bucktown, Wicker Park, East Garfield Park, Fulton Market, North Center, Lincoln Park, Lakeview, Roscoe Village, Irving Park, Portage Park, Oak Park, River Forest, Forest Park, Pilsen, and Bridgeport.
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