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Mistakes - Ignore Them Or Embrace Them?

"The mistakes you make are information of what you need to train next." Watch a video of Leading OneMind Dogs Coaches Janita Leinonen and Jaakko Suoknuuti practicing independent weaves with their dogs!


The leading OneMind Dogs Coaches Janita Leinonen and Jaakko Suoknuuti usually teach their dogs really strong obstacle skills. Janita says: “We try to avoid situations where the dog´s obstacle performance skills limit our handling options. The more independently the dog can do the obstacles, the more possibilities we have to get through all kinds of sequences and courses.”

Things went a little differently with Janita’s young Border Collie MiG, who was in an accident when she was a puppy and it took a while for MiG to recover. Due to MiG’s history of a twisted pelvis, Janita had not wanted to practice weaves as much as she would have liked to.

MiG and Janita started to compete 12 months ago. Some of the competition courses they have run recently required a lot of independent obstacle performance from the dog. Janita wanted to thank judges Heidi Viitaniemi and Eija Berglund, whose courses inspired Janita to finally teach the missing skills to MiG. It was not just MiG who got to try these challenges, but also Janita’s other dog Fu and Jaakko’s dog Dao got to do them!

Janita says: “If you ignore your mistakes, you will never learn anything new. If you feel that mistakes are your friends, helping you to improve as a handler and helping your dog to become more skillful, you won’t be annoyed if you get faults when training or competing, you will only take away information on what to train next. It's all about your attitude, even when dealing with faults.”

These are the competition courses that inspired Janita and Jaakko to build compilation courses to test their dogs’ skills with:

Thank you Heidi and Eija for the permission to publish these course maps!

If you decide to try these challenges with your dog, we’d love to watch your videos!

Share your training video on our discussion forum!

Our mission is to give a happy life to dogs by helping people become amazing dog owners. We are passionate about increasing the mutual understanding between the dog and the owner, making a life together more enjoyable for both.