My Love Hate Relationship With Stopped Contacts

I have a competitive streak. I admit it. I like to win.

This would be my undoing.

I thought my dog understood her two-paws-on/two-paws-off (2O2O) contacts but in October 2017 we hit the wall. My dog, Fate, started leaping from A-frames and dog walks like she had never been trained in her life. Our Agility nationals was a disaster.

I cried. I was lost. How did this even happen?

How was I going to fix this before I wrecked this amazing girl who wasn’t yet 3 years old?

I didn’t really understand the problem or how to resolve it.

If I’m honest, I was focused on outcomes. I wanted to do well. To win. I didn’t even realize what was happening until it was too late. My understanding and knowledge of how to train a successful 2O2O Contact was limited to shaping the 2O2O position.

I was about to find out there is a heck of a lot more to it than that.

Re-training a broken 2O2O Contact with my young Border Collie Fate would have to be ‘one’ of the most difficult challenges I have faced to date. 

So what do you do when you need help to resolve a complex problem? You seek out the best in the business and get the right help, so that’s what I did.

Some say failure is just information and my trainer showed me that Fate had given me plenty of information!

I discovered I wasn’t consistent or clear because I didn’t know what I wanted, had no plan, didn’t have a firm criteria.

Combine that with my overriding desire to do well (accepting anything that didn’t miss) and a dog with next to zero self-control and extreme motion sensitivity, you have a right royal mess! 

No wonder we came unstuck.

So we went back to the beginning with a new plan.

This plan required blind faith and trust on my part in our trainer. I didn’t know if this was going to work. I didn’t know if I could do it. But I believed. I believed we could and I knew I had the best trainer around to guide us.

I reset my priorities.

For months, I worked at home on re-building the layers of understanding Fate needed to be successful.   Before work in my PJs and gumboots I would be outside training. It was the first thing I did when I got up. When I got home from work we did some more.

We failed multiple times. It was hard. It felt like one step forward two steps back at times

When it was time to get in the ring, I ‘trained’ every competitive agility run, again for months.

I’ll never forget our first run working to this regime. I was scared. I didn’t know if I could do this.

But I did.

Competitive by nature, this was hard on me knowing I was going to trials with the sole goal of working on contacts in the ring. But I trusted the process and knew that if I didn’t continue along this line we would be lost forever.

Then came the real test. It was time to up the ante — to run competitively

This was the hardest for ME.

If Fate was going clear and hit the contact but didn’t meet the criteria we had trained, could I make the right decision in that moment and stick to the plan?

Would my overriding desire to do well (often referred to as the ‘red mist’) trump my training goals?

Would all my work, all my weeks and months of training, pay off?

Twelve months from that moment, we ran in our Nationals. Fate hit every contact. She and I even won a class that involved contacts. Eight months later she became a NZ Agility Champion.

I know this journey isn’t over and my struggle with 2O2O Contacts will never be done. BUT I am a better trainer and handler for this experience with a lot more insight into what makes ME tick.

95% of the time I make the right decision in the moment. This still challenges me. I’m not perfect. But I can tell you that it is in those moments of decision that you shape your future success.

Learn to love the process — not the results. I have.

 “It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped”

– Tony Robins