Throughout our lessons, we will gradually progress with the difficulty of training locations.

As a first task, fill out this sheet with the different locations you can train your dog in, and rate them by distraction level.
Here is your download:

And here is an example of how this could look:

We will practice every skill first in the low-distraction environments and only once the dog is really good there, advance to more difficult places.

The reason is that when we are asking a dog to perform a behavior in a place with distractions, the dog actually has to carry out two tasks:
1) perform the behavior you’re asking for
2) ignore all potential distractions!

If your dog does not have a solid history of performing the behavior in easy situations, they will fail in a place with more distractions.

We do not want our dog to have to use 90% of their brain power to understand the task at hand – because then there is way too little brain power left for focusing on us and not the environment!