Karishma Warr CPDT-KA, FFCP, CSAT

If you asked me five years ago to work with an aggression case completely online without ever meeting the dog or client in person, I would have said, "not a chance!" Fast forward to today and I've realized that you can absolutely work with an aggression case successfully from start to finish --- all remotely. Karishma Warr is my special guest for this episode, and we chat about a number of tips and tricks for using technology to help dogs with aggression issues, and scale your business as a dog pro.

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About Karishma:
Karishma Warr is dedicated to providing practical, effective solutions for guardians of dogs struggling with behavior challenges. Specializing in aggressive dog cases in intense urban environments, they are committed to humane solutions for often complex problems and are passionate about the use of technology to innovate the dog training industry. Alongside their team at Calm Canine Academy they have coached thousands of dog-human teams in over 15 countries and provide free training and behavior content via their growing instagram account (@calmcanineacademy).

https://www.calmcanineacademy.com

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https://aggressivedog.thinkific.com/bundles/the-aggression-in-dogs-master-course-and-expert-webinar-bundle-2024

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Transcript

0:02

If you asked me five years ago to work with an aggression case completely online without ever meeting the dog or client in person, I would have said, Not a chance. Fast forward to today. And I've realized that you can absolutely work with an aggression case successfully from start to finish all remotely. Charisma Noir is my special guest for this episode, and we chat about a number of tips and tricks for using technology to help dogs with aggression issues, and scale your business as a Dog Pro. If you're enjoying the by the end of the dog, you can support the podcast by going to aggressive dog.com where there are a variety of educational opportunities to learn more about helping dogs with aggression issues, including the upcoming aggression in dogs conference happening from September 30 Through October 2 2022. in Providence, Rhode Island with both in person and online options. You can also learn more about the aggression in dogs master course, which is the most comprehensive course available anywhere in the world for learning how to work with and help dogs with aggression issues. Hey guys, I'm really excited for this week's episode. I'm here with charisma wire, and we're gonna be talking about technology and aggression cases. So it's a really cool episode. I hope you guys are going to enjoy this one, a lots of good information in store. Let me tell you about Krishna. Krishna provides practical effective solutions for guardians of dogs struggling with behavior challenges, specializing in aggressive dog cases in intense urban environments. They are committed to humane solutions to often complex problems, and are passionate about the use of technology to innovate the dog training industry. Alongside their team at calm canine Academy. They have coached 1000s of dogs, human teams in over 15 countries and provide free training and behavior content via their growing Instagram account at calm canine Academy. I follow that account. You guys should too. There's tons of great information on there. So welcome charisma. Hi, Mike, thank you for having me. I'm amazed to be here and very, very grateful to be chatting about this topic, which I think is I think it's important and topical for this time period, for sure, is definitely something and we were chatting about this before as well, as far as the how much the pandemic has affected our work and really shown us a lot of new things that we can do as trainers and consultants using technology. And the pandemic kind of forced us a lot of us to shift to using technology. I know, thinking back five or six years ago, before the pandemic was even something on our radar that you know, people would ask Oh, so do you do stuff virtually or online. And like I don't know about aggression cases, there's only so much you can do. So my baby taken like a minor case or something like that. And then as time went along, and then the pandemic hit, it was just this, either sink or swim with the technology aspect, right? And then it really opened some windows as far as what is possible. And now I'm taking aggression cases that are much more severe and putting up air quotes there, of what we would see that I would have typically taken maybe five or six years ago. So tell me about what you're seeing in that regard. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of what you just said really resonates with me, I like most of us, I spent the beginning of my career working in person in that kind of, I guess, traditional format, where you go to the client's house, and you observe the dog and their behaviors. And as working with aggression, many of those dogs feel a certain way about a strange person entering their home. So you're, you're in that environment, you're experiencing that putting the dog through that, yourself through that and the Guardians. And then often I would actually work hands on with the dogs myself to install behaviors and skills. I think that's like a pretty traditional format that lots of us are quite familiar with. And I think similarly to you when the pandemic first hit, and my wonderful team, it pushed me to work virtually I was staunch and adamant that it would not work. I was convinced that I would be doing a disservice to the profession, and it would be dangerous for the public and all sorts of things. And I really had to be controlled by my team to start just investigating what it might look like to work virtually. And and for me, I took a bunch of courses, because that's what as a as a dog nerd, you know, we all learn that when we don't know what to do. We all go and we learn. We break it up into small incremental steps and we acquire a new skill, right? So that's kind of what I tried to do. And so my surprise, my case resolution just shot through the roof. My success stories from my clients were better than I'd ever experienced pre pandemic and pre moving to virtual training and to virtual coaching And then I spent a good year trying to figure out why. And sort of a full year of like tinkering with things. Me and my team, I have to say, it's not just myself, it's a team of three other fantastic trainers who we all work together collaboratively. And we're very data driven. So we keep a lot of records and watch each other's sessions. And so we've kind of tried to be to distill down what it is about virtual training that's so effective. And I hope that's what we can chat about today a little bit. There's yeah, there's so much I want to ask you about doing and but I think we should preface that a little bit with you telling us about your background a little bit, because you do have a tech background. So this, you have some additional insights, I think that you can share. Yes, I do. So I come from a nice, lots of intersecting areas, I guess, that inform my practice. So I have a master's degree in ethics, which obviously plays a big component and our family background in technology. And my mother is Director of Technology and Innovation, I don't know robotics, and does a lot of work with spinal cord injuries. And she herself is disabled and has accessibility requirements. And so all of these intersecting factors, working with animals, thinking about the ethics of working with animals, and aggressive animals, and then how can we innovate and I'm your classic millennial, you know, I do all of my learning through apps, and through the platforms, like the wonderful platforms you provide Mike, where I can click a button and get instant answers to questions that I think are really I really need. And I wanted to try and inject some of that into my practice and divert from that traditional, we sit in a room for an hour together and discuss the plan to how can I bring my my work to make it as accessible for me, you know, if I needed it as an Yeah, and I guess, coming from looking at my family background, as well as the fact that, you know, I've spent my whole life with, you know, my mother is a person who's disabled, I, myself, have a disability as well as neurodivergent sees, and all of these things kind of intersect together. For me to really find that the virtual side and using that technology can be, it can be a real game changer, honestly, for any behavior problem as well. You know, it's a really cool thing. And when I, when I talk to other trainers, or I have guests on this podcast is hearing about other people's backgrounds that weren't necessarily in the dog training community, or in that kind of work, right. And what's fascinating is how much we draw from our past experiences. And we can bring that into our work with dogs. And the clients that we're working with. One of the things that people don't know about me is that I used to work in the casino industry in the US probably thinking like, what does that have to do with dogs, but part of my job was taking care of all these high rollers and people with tons of money and an influence and, you know, industry leaders that would come to the casino and gamble, but they would the conversations, it really taught me about navigating conversations, and sometimes dealing with very difficult people in a way that was not going to upset them, but also having to, you know, kind of meet certain levels and certain standards. So that's my experience drawing from it. So it's, it's cool to see that in the background and ethics and technology. And all that is, is it's really neat to see that and incorporate into our work. So let's talk about that in the in terms of tips and tricks for since again, this isn't a aggression podcast, we'll focus on aggression cases. But, you know, one of the things I saw when I started doing a lot more online cases was, you're not upsetting the dog when you have to. So like your first consult. And I've moved to mostly just, you know, if I'm going to go back to in person consults, it's mostly zoom or online consult first, that first session, I think it should be pretty much mandatory to do that for a session online, because most of that session spent history taking and kind of giving the client overall prognosis and setting goals and kind of, you know, a lot of that time you're actually not working with a dog. And so why going in upset a dog that has issues with people to to begin with, for that full hour, and then the client is stressed about what the dog might be doing. And the dog might be stressed about what their fur owners doing or what you're doing in the home. And so that was one of the first benefits I saw. What are some of the things you saw in in when you first started? Well, yeah, I mean, I think it's one of the first things that our aggression specialists will say is, you know, you can't really learn and when you're really over threshold, and I find that in lots of traditional dog training sessions, all the animals are kind of at their panic point. The dog is at its panic point, because it's being triggered by the trainer, the guardians are triggered by the dog's behavior. And let's be real, you know, my heart rate shoots through the roof. When I'm sitting in a room with a big German Shepherd that's really unhappy that I'm there and the Guardian is holding on to that leash. I'm only 25% Thinking about what I'm saying. There. So WMI is scanning the environment, making sure I'm safe the clients save, how can I minimize stress with the dog. So removing all of that from the equation, I think has a really big effect on actually to be perfectly honest amongst, as well as resolution burnout, and the amount of resource saving for you as a as a dog trainer and as a consultant for The Guardian. So I completely agree. And I love how you make this idea that that especially the first session should be virtual. And with me and my team, we actually take a step back even further. And I know most of the things I need to know about a dog before we even enter into that first session. So I know that lots of trainers have intake forms. And I think part of what we've done with our virtual practice, is we've really hybridized the way that information transfers between the client and the consultant. So before I get, I see a dog, I've got a nine page intake form that took the Guardian about 45 minutes to fill out, and I have already requested videos of the dog, I would really read that intake form and say to the client, okay, I would like about that second video of the dog walking outside, I'd like a five minute video of you playing a five minute video of your training with the dog. So before I even enter into a consultation, I've watched half an hour of footage of their environment, their house layout, I'm, I'm a freak, I know everything about them, I'm creepy. I'm like this creepy dog trainer that knows everything before they've even met them. And so I'm basically trying to make that information transfer happen as smoothly as possible, with as little emotional stress on like all of the animals. So by the time we get into the session, it's all about client coaching, we are just like fine tuning the plan a little bit. And I think that's like a huge thing that we can start to change. Like, for me, when I see people asking, you know, an hour of questions that are not necessarily as necessary, if we can get all that information before if I can see the dog before. And most people, if you look back through their phone history, have a bunch of videos of the dog performing unwanted behaviors, and a bunch of videos of the dog in a variety of different contexts, we don't have to put the dog in that position. For most folks with an iPhone, you know, we're all obsessed with filming our dogs. So you can gather so much information. And I think that's one of the biggest sort of misconceptions that people have is that if you're working virtually, you won't be able to see the dog, you won't see the dog's behaviors in the home and in person. And I kind of think I see, even more than that I get a fly on the wall experience, I don't impact the dog's behavior at all with my presence. And I get to see what's actually really going on, which I think is extremely cool. And makes me feel like a detective, which is also cool. I have lots of questions to go off of that as well. So first is, and I'm sure the listeners as they're listening to that part of the conversation or maybe have the same question like getting that information to you as far as like the videos, what kind of format to use to use any kind of file sharing services? Yeah. And this is a great question. So everything that I do is usually through the Google sort of world. So we're each of our clients will have a portal. And in that portal will collect all of the information. So I'll have PDFs of the intake forms, all of the videos that they've sent to me pre initial consultation will be stored there. All of our notes and session recordings will also go in that portal. So it's almost like an individualized learning platform for the guardians that I curate. And I develop as the case progresses. So that could look, I think that springs to mind is a case that I had with a resource guiding Husky a beautiful white 50 pound adopted an adolescent Husky called Moon. And she would resource God a variety of different resources. It took us about three weeks to really figure out all the things that she was guiding as I'm sure lots of us watching people watching I know with resource guarding cases, it can be slightly like Whack a Mole trying to figure out what it is that's what are the trigger, what are the antecedents and the intersecting antecedents distant and immediate, etc. And we did that via a back and forth on WhatsApp, where they were intermittently sending me videos of strange behaviors, where I would then explain back to them what was going on. And it just allowed for conversation to be really fluid. And it felt very natural for a team of myself and the two guardians a team of three millennials to communicate in this way, it felt extremely natural and easy for us especially and I imagine for the upcoming Next Gen Z generation it'll be even more second nature for information transfer to occur that way, and little tips and tricks, things that you can do that really set you apart. Like I'll put a video that they sent me into iMovie and narrate a voiceover of the body language. I can even send you an example of the dog that I'm talking about where there was low level guarding signals going on that were being missed by The Guardian and I was able to voice know over it splaining exactly what what was going on with that dog saying, Okay, you see how she's luring her head, and her eyes are becoming more sort of fixated and still, etc, etc, and pop it in their portal, and they have this like, hub of learning about their dogs and, and I like that that puts the focus on empowering the guardians to really learn about how to live with these animals, because we know aggression doesn't ever get cured, quote, unquote, like, it's never going to go away completely. So it can be pretty powerful, I think in an empowering for the clients. I'm gonna pick your brain further about the communication aspect of it. But you also mentioned, you know, you're working with a couple of millennials, and maybe it'd be great to see is like the other generations picking up on this. But what happens with your clients that maybe are Gen Xers or maybe baby boomers, and they're not quite as tech savvy, and they're like Google, what's that? How do you do find? Do you have like a tutorial or some way of helping those clients? Such a fantastic question. And even amongst the millennials, and the Gen Z is sometimes we need to split the criteria even more for the human learners, right. So I actually have a client in one of my classes right now, my group group coaching programs, and I've had to make both three of us have our trainers have made individually video tutorials for the client on how to use the viewing equipment that they should be using to do their training sessions. So in each video, we record for them, we've approximated towards the end goal of the client, being able to put the recording up, set it up properly, and deposit the video in the in the drive. And we simply said, Okay, how do we split up that behavior, and then impart that over to the client. And we can do it not, we don't have to give it all to them in one hour sessions. On Monday, I teach this first skill and then on Tuesday, I teach the next skill. And I usually do that back and forth through WhatsApp or some sort of free messaging app. So you have a mixture of like this Google file where you deposit all of the information and then a whatsapp where you go back and forwards, just like messaging your, your neighbor or your friend about anything. It's interesting WhatsApp is a it's an interesting app in the United States anyways, not a lot of people actually use it or know what it is. In every other country I visit or talk to or, you know, travel to is that they're using WhatsApp, it's very normal, very normal to use WhatsApp, but in the States, they're like, what's that? What's that? And it's always a shock to people like UK or South America to hear like, you don't know what WhatsApp is. Yeah, actually, it is a great tool, because it's free. You can do exchanges, and it's and it keeps it all time stamped. And you know, when you've exchanged communication, somebody, so here we use a lot of text messaging. And that's what I do with a lot of my clients provided somebody is okay with that, you know, establishing boundaries of when to text and how often you're going to text. Yes, and that is something that I'm I'm a staunch rules about this. We have I tried to differentiate between like work equipment and recreational equipment, so work phones versus recreational phones. And it's very important to have a master schedule, where you set out time in the day to check and communicate with your clients. Because I think that there's a lot of benefit to having, I guess more back and forward, less pressure being on one hour long sessions and more learning being distributed on a day to day basis. But for burnout sake, and for, you know, our lifestyle, and mental health reasons, we have to make sure that we are sticking to the plan. So I give my trainers, for example, only are allowed to do two half an hour check ins on their work, messaging apps, and checking all of our clients work only twice a day in the morning and in the evening. But if you're a very diligent client with a really challenging dog, and you're getting an answer to your question, twice a day, how fast are you going to see progress and transfer of knowledge and skill using that kind of a method? And I think it's, it's exactly how we say with the dogs, right short, frequent reinforcing training sessions, while we're slowly increasing the difficulty and providing a lot of just Do you know how many gifts I send, I send so many gifts, I don't know if anyone knows what gifts are their little, tiny little animations, and it'll be like a little cat giving the thumbs up or something like that. And I'm sending these to my clients after they send me a video. And we know science studies show us that this like humans love this stuff. We love getting an emoji with the thumbs up. It sends off all the right chemicals in our brains, and it will increase the behaviors that we want to see in the humans, right. So it's using tech to help the human beings change their behaviors so that we can then see behavior change in the dogs. And now for a quick break when we come back more from my conversation with the amazing charisma warrior. Hey, friends, it's me again. And I hope you are enjoying this episode. You may have figured out that something I deeply care Air about is helping dogs with aggression issues live less stressful, less confined, more enriched, and overall happy lives with their guardians. Aggression is so often misunderstood. And we can change that through continued education, like we received from so many of the wonderful guests on this podcast. In addition to the podcast, I have two other opportunities for anyone looking to learn more about helping dogs with aggression issues, which include the aggression in dogs master course, and the aggression in dogs conference. If you want to learn more about the most comprehensive course on aggression taught anywhere in the world, head on over to aggressive dog.com and click on the dog pros tab, and then the master course, the course gives you access to 23 modules on everything from assessment, to safety to medical issues to the behavior change plans we often use in a number of different cases, including lessons taught by Dr. Chris pockle, Kim Brophy and Jessica Dolce. You'll also receive access to a private Facebook group with over 1000 of your fellow colleagues, and dog pros all working with aggression cases. After you finish the course you also gain access to private live group mentor sessions with me where we work through practicing many different cases together. If you need see us, we've got you covered. We're approved for just about every major training and behavior credential out there. This is truly the flagship course offered on aggression in dogs, and it's perfect for pet pros that want to set themselves apart and take their knowledge and expertise to the next level or even for pet owners who are seeking information to help their own dog. And don't forget to join me for the third annual aggression and dogs conference either in person or online from Providence, Rhode Island on September 30 Through October 2 2022. This year's lineup includes many of the amazing guests you might have heard on the podcast including Suzanne Cole the air, Jen Shryock, Simone Mueller, Dr. Ampere, Batson Kim Brophy, charisma voir, Lara, Monaco, tirelli, Dr. Simone Gadbois, and many more, head on over to aggressive dog.com and click on the conference tab to learn more about the exciting agenda on everything from advanced concepts and leash reactivity to using positive reinforcement to work with predatory behavior. And if you'd like to show off your support for the podcast this year, we teamed up again with the folks over at Wolf culture for some catchy limited run conference merchandise. Wolf culture is known for their witty, nerdy endo nonsense apparel that was created in 2019. To spread more awareness towards the use of humane training methods. They're powerful is here to help you start conversations, advocate for your animals and rep force retraining in a different way. Don't forget to get your conference gear, it leaves the site after 1231 2022. If you want 10% off your order, use the code bitey 10, B I T E y one zero at checkout. And now back to my conversation with charisma noir of calm canine Academy, where they were telling us about gifts. There's so many things I want to say. But there's that point of the gifts or like even an emoji or something like that. Yeah, I remember I was at a conference maybe 10 years ago, and I was catching our call catching some flack from a couple of professionals that were there. And because I use I was using emojis in my in my communications and they're like, that's really unprofessional, you should stop doing that. Or texting, that's completely unprofessional. Everything should be in a documented email with, you know, an attached document official document and, and because it's going to ruin the professionalism of the industry. And so I had to think about that for a moment. But I realized just what you're saying, it's how we communicate, you know, it's in this day and age of everything's texting in text format, or you know, you can't see the person's face, we need that, that additional layer of communication to help us, you know, with those emotional aspects when we are communicating because words will get you so far. But I do think emojis and GIFs and fun videos and all those things can really, let's face it aggression is is, you know, emotional and difficult enough as it is. And so we need to lighten the mood sometimes. So those can be done with those gifts and emojis and you know, videos that we send. So the other thing I want to talk about just to back up is I'm at 100% agreement, you can get so much more information when we're seeing video when a client sends us video of their dog their interactions, the play. And I did want to mention, a very common question I get is you know, if somebody sends you a video of the dog's aggressive behavior, and I think it's boring, I'm sure you agree Krishna is that we don't ask for, for the clients to show us a dog trying to bite somebody or set them up in any way that's going to elicit that aggressive behavior. Unfortunately, sometimes it does happen where the client has pre existing video so a ring camera or security camera has caught the behavior on video. That's totally fine. I will say sure send that to me because that'll give me a lot of information. I do want to throw that out there just so we know that everyone's on the same page. We do not need to See the dogs aggressive behavior? We never want to ask for that. I'm sure you agree with that, especially with your ethics background. Oh, yeah, I mean, I sometimes I forget that I absolutely do need to make sure that that is stated in Big Red Riding. And it is stated in Big Red Riding on my intake form, do not put your dogs in a position that will elicit maladaptive emotional or behavioral responses. However, upon signing up to lots of our programs, we will especially for working with aggression in their home, part of our plan will be to install these sorts of cameras so that we're getting that footage. And if there is an incident, they're not going clients aren't going well, I think it was that I bent over and then we I think I might have reached for something but I didn't know it will happen very quickly, I can actually just pull up that footage, we'll go through it frame by frame together, we'll figure out what happened. And then we'll come up with a solution to make sure that it doesn't happen in the future. But I can't say how useful it is to be able to just quickly download that footage from the internet from your, your wise camera or your whatever sort of camera that you're using, again, 20 $30 of an investment to get something like this set up in the main living space. And then you can go through it frame by frame on a big screen with your guardians. And like with the moon, this resource guarding dog, we ended up finding out that of discovering that, among many other behavior problems that antecedent for her recent Guardian behavior was specifically when the Guardians interacted with something in the environment for more than approximately 30 seconds, it kind of imbued that thing with power with some sort of value. And that became an antecedent for gardening behaviors as well as very weirdly, I don't know if you've ever experienced this Mike floral scents, the scent of floral hand lotion of ours of flowers, cleaning detergent, especially floral scented detergent, and we figured all of this out through looking back, and kind of assessing lots and lots of tiny little incidences logging them all in her Google Drive file. And then being able to look back at something that I really took from certification and separation anxiety, I'm a certified separation anxiety trainer. And if anyone knows, Milena Demartini is prices work, she is a stickler for data and got me very good at tracking and logging behaviors and applying that to aggression. And then using technology as your eyes and ears can be extremely powerful and demystifying for guardians, you can go back for a stressful event and and take them frame by frame through it and make it less stressful for them. I think video is such a powerful tool that's under utilized right now in our on our work. Because you can see so much I mean, you can really show the clients as you're mentioning what's happening with the dogs, sort of those micro behaviors, the micro signals that we might not catch when we're watching it in real time or watching we're not we don't have the video to analyze what's going on. And think about how useful that could be as a tool and other aspects. You know, so a veterinarian may be for instance, the dogs not doing the behavior or showing the symptoms or signs in the veterinary setting because it's a different environment. Or maybe we're not replicating the antecedent arrangements, which we don't need to of course, in many cases, but sometimes it's something from you know, a health level. That is we may not see unless we get it on video, and then somebody can walk in with the video back. This is what happens at this time of day or, you know, in this environment. And we're able to go through that and as you mentioned to is the coaching aspect. So you use iMovie or like editors where you play the video and you record your voice over to I do something very similar using loom LLM, which is similar, you do a screen record. So you the client can send you a video you do just watch it on your on screen, and you can talk right over it. So be like, Hey, this is looking at the three minute mark, you can see where that little tongue flick happens or all that stuff. There's so much and then of course, you mentioned the data that you're tracking. So I kind of want to pick your brain further about that, because that's another area where I think of our industry that we could do a little bit better with is tracking data to see if what we're recommending to clients is actually working. Is it working? How do we measure that? So talk more about that, how you tracked it and how you kind of apply it to your cases? Yeah, 100%. And I totally agree with you there, Mike, that I think that we really want to be working with as much like functional database analysis as possible. And it's something that I really learned working with separation anxiety, where if you've ever watched the separation anxiety trainer, we log every lipolytic we log every year flick in our training sessions, to desensitize to learn time. And it's something that I started bringing to my work with counter conditioning and desensitization to various triggers and antecedents. With my aggression cases. I personally don't use spreadsheets because my neurodivergent brain I can't, I can't handle that many tiny squares. So I use a simple Google document that I collaborate with my guardians on so for some of my clients, I will literally write step by step every single training session that Do all of my guardians will when we're working on with maladaptive behaviors, we'll do five, sort of training sessions a week, I guess, that are based around changing behaviors with their primary aggression, antecedents or their primary sort of triggers. I think that going to therapy five days a week, for 20 minutes or so it's more than enough. And when we have that 20 minutes of work, we can really focus what are we doing? What's the setup going to be? What's the distance? What's your reinforcer? How are you delivering your reinforcer? What is the dog's body language look like when you're arguing behaviors, or there are environmental cues for behaviors, and I get my guardians to write down everything that happens. And I'm like this annoying little Jiminy Cricket on their shoulder every day, like, Hey, how was your training session? And the behavior change that you didn't see doing? That is amazing. I now have my guardian sometimes coming to me being like, what's my training session for today? Krishma? And I'm like, Yes, that's what we're looking for. So it's a lot of logging and tracking, I usually say to clients that you'll be working actively, for 20 minutes and spending 20 to 40, reviewing videos and writing, writing down your observations. And that's a major part of the training plan. I can hear a question from the listeners in my head right now. And it's how do you juggle the schedule for yourself. So you're checking in with clients, you're following up, it sounds like you do a really nice job of doing that sort of motivational aspect of what we do, and checking in with the clients to see how they're doing. But say you start to add in a caseload, especially with you, you're doing multiple types of different cases. So like separation anxiety, and then you have an aggression case. And maybe you've got 10 or 12. Clients, you'd have to check in with on a day, how do you juggle that schedule? Or do you have some system that's in place? Yeah, so it's interesting, I think, because almost every single one of my team have significant neurodivergent sees, whether that be sort of attention in ADHD diagnoses, autism, diagnoses, etc. So figuring out how to set up our antecedent arrangement as trainers is really, really important. So we have a master schedule, which is extremely it's God, it's our it's our all our all knowing master schedule that we stick to. So I will have set times of the day where I will check my client or my clients and I will have lists of all of the clients that I'm checking on at those different times. It's many therapists work this way. And many therapy apps, whether as a kind of like collaborative approach between therapist and patient, I guess. So, for example, I'll wake up on a Monday morning, and my master schedule will say to me, okay, between the hours of eight and nine, while I'm drinking my coffee, I'm going to check in on all of my ex cases, all of my maybe private aggression cases. So I will go through my whatsapp, I will check in I will watch the look at the videos, if they sent me any reply. If there are no videos, I go, Hey, what's up, where's my video, I'm still here. And I keep in kind of collaborative dialogue with those guardians. Again, every day that I will go and do my classes or my virtual sessions, or my whatever it is that I have to do, it's all sheduled. In, then maybe in the evening, I have another 45 minute window, where I'm checking in on my clients, or bearing in mind, when you start to work virtually, you cut out a lot of travel time, I'm not spending 45 minutes or half an hour going between every single client. So instead, I can schedule into my day, the time that I would be spent physically going to my clients, I can digitally reach out to my clients. And I can be there for them in little ways throughout the week, rather than being there for them in this big way, once a week. And I find that as long as you're extremely measured and disciplined in the way that you you do it, it works. I've definitely experienced before I managed to get my master schedule in place, a great deal of burnout and learn from my mistakes. Don't just check every time that the phone buzzes and my friends and family often say you know, oh, are you going to get that? And I'm absolutely not, I'm gonna get it at 7pm. Today, even if it is, you know, a picture of something really scary and awful from a client, I need to make sure that I don't check the phone every two seconds. But those kinds of boundaries once you get them in place, and you have that discipline, it opens up so much for you to be able to change behavior in the humans. I think the time management aspect is something that we all struggle with, especially when we're taking on a lot of cases at first. So I'd love to pick your brain on time efficiency tips for both the trainer and for the client that you've seen in the technology that you're incorporating, you know, so automations and things like that are very important for us as trainers, like you mentioned the master schedule. So if you had to think of a couple of things that were really helpful for you for your own time management and then something that you've realized that the clients enjoy from the technology using to help them Um, save time? Can you think of a couple examples of that? Yeah, a really good question. I think the single biggest thing that I can do to help me is to accrue videos that are educational for the clients. So obviously, the biggest con to working virtually is that you cannot put your hands on the dog, you can't do that wonderful training magic that we do, you know, and it's a big way that you win over clients, I think as you, you pick up the leash, or you start tossing food, and the dog changes its behavior and often, Guardians go, Wow, that's amazing. And I think that that can, that's what a lot of us rely on, right, that behavior change and seeing that happen. For me in terms of saving time, and getting guardians participation, and in terms of just like being a good virtual trainer, it was all about accruing resources for myself, when I worked in person, I could just turn up and I was enough, you know, I could do my talking, I could show them what I was going to do, I can just bake some cookies and some cheese. That's all I needed to work virtually efficiently. The way that I do now, I have a library of videos of me training with guardians as well, I collaborate and I bring together all the videos that I get sent. And I put them all in one place a library from of work that I can then pull from to teach people. So for me, the biggest tip I can give folks is that you are alone on the screen is not going to be enough, I don't think you need to be able to show them videos of you working a long haired fearful dog in an urban environment, if they're going to be working their long haired fearful dog in an urban environment. So I really think resources and collecting resources for yourself are really important. So that could look like saving the Guardian videos that they give to you. And then we have people sign a waiver when they first start working with us saying that that okay, you're not okay with this, obviously. But I will be getting so for example, just today, I got an amazing video of a client in Canada whose dog has, you know, one of those cases too many bites to count level, you know, two to three, over handling related issues, couldn't get a muzzle anywhere near this dog couldn't, you know, touch a tear, to pull a bar out, I just got sent a video of them doing full consent handling to put a muzzle on and do the clip and the third strap. And it was beautiful with the dog chin resting as a long duration Start Button behavior. And immediately my first instinct is in the vault, keeping that because I'm going to show that to somebody later down the line, who has a big elk hound dog who struggles with handling issues, and I'm going to say hey, look at this. This is banjo in Canada. And this is what we were able to achieve. And I save all of it. So my biggest time saving tip is if you're going to be pivoting to virtual work, start to give yourself resources and get resources available to you keep a library of PDF, so you can pull up that brilliant Lily Chin illustration, as you're discussing body language to show the Guardians really use all the different facets of the technology. And so I love that love the library aspect of it. And do you store those on YouTube? Or how do you how do you get those to clients? Everything is on Google Drive for me. So I have two major Google Drive files. One is training resources. One is client records. In the training resources file. I have hundreds of PDFs, illustrations, I have body language, pictures, I have videos like the outcome getting consensually muzzled to show clients and goals and mid steps. In the procedures. It's extremely nerdy. It's all labeled, so that I can go into my Google Drive and type in consent handling muzzle, and all of my videos of consent handling and muzzle that have these tags come up. And these are all things that we've developed over the last two years working virtually because we realize, you know, my five year old poodle does not want to train with me for five sessions a day to do demonstrations of all of these things. And he's also not helpful for lots of clients because he's very different to their dog. But I can pull up, you know, if I have a client that has a terrier, who's very easily frustrated when they're trying to do relax on a mat, I have that video, and I can show you how I handled it in that moment in 2001 You know, when I was working with that client, so that is one of the limitations I do think is that you need to have handling experience. And I think like Mike, you're always a really good example of this, of being so mind mindful about your body, you know, really really knowing you know, weight, shifting your weight, how you're breathing, these things really matter. Right. And I do feel that to work well virtually, you need to have a lot of experience of training dogs and videoing yourself training dogs and reviewing that footage and doing it again and again and again and again. Otherwise how you're going to be able to troubleshoot with clients when that French Bulldog won't lay down because it's a circular beach ball shape. You know, how do you how do you how do you fix that problem without touching the dog? Yeah, exactly. And I imagine that the additional benefit to is that clients, your current clients are seeing past clients being successful with their own dog. So it's kind of this additional USP or unique selling point for your work that you're doing. Because they're seeing you doing it with other people. So I mean, it's just the wind, it's such a, it's such a win win. And the the thing I was thinking about to the timesaver for the clients is that they can now not have to worry about I've got the one hour training session with Krishna on Thursday at 3pm, or something like that, they can take the time when they are up for it, and they're feeling ready, and they have that space available in their day to actually train recorded and sent to you. So it's not a specific time where all of our clients were meeting at like five in the afternoon or six in the evening, or something like that with a dog may be completely different than when the clients training them at nine in the morning or something like that. So I can see, there's again, it's our argument for will get video, video video video, right? Yeah, 100%, I don't know about your clients. But in lots of our clients working and living with their dogs in really quite chaotic and difficult environments, like you know, Manhattan and New York and places like that. You need to you need to be flexible with dogs in those environments. Because there's so much about that environment that you can't control. So it allows for folks to hire get more, like you said, get more wins under their belt, you know, we can train every day at the time that best suits the guardians and the dog and I can be there for half an hour, every day twice a day to check in and make sure everything is looking good with them. And then of course, we do have our longer sessions just like over zoom, or some other virtual meeting platform, where we can deep dive a little bit more and do live training, as well, if possible, in that moment, just using using the camera. It's it's brilliant, I really, I really think it can be so so helpful. I think with the trainers listening to it's a really unique way of scaling your business, because again, when you're working as a trainer consultant, it's sort of that one to one ratio, your time is your what you're getting paid for. But when you have video or things that you can be sending to the clients what they're watching, even when you're not there, or something on demand or something that you've sent them, that is time saved from our week, which means we're gonna be able to add many more hours with actual spending time with clients and answering those questions. So it's how to scale at that level to get to the next level of being able to take more clients, but you're still providing the same value. So we can argue that, you know, it's not like you're you have to trade off the time for the money kind of scenario, you can still sell it at the same point. But they're getting the same information in a much more efficient way from us. Would you agree 100%. And I think scalability, and energetic resources, for me were really big, emotional issues. beginning when I first started working as a behavior consultant and started working with or trained that works with behavior and started working with aggression cases and other cases where there's extreme fears or anxieties or phobias, I did feel like I was repeating myself over and over and over and over and over again. And it was tough for me as especially as a neurodivergent person to repeat this over and over again, after the three or four years of teaching reactive dog classes in person in Manhattan. I was like if I have to say this one more time, I'm gonna put my head through a window, and I had to figure out a way to make it easier. And this is so much easier. Now when people sign up for one of my programs, I'll immediately send them recordings of me talking through all the issues that they need to and you know what they can get in the bath, and they can prop their phone up and they can watch me teach walking them through the aggression, ladder of aggression, and talking through antecedent behavior consequences while they're having their morning coffee. It doesn't have to be as emotionally and energetically draining for me and for the Guardians. And it makes me as well, every all the work that I do, I'm creating more content that can then be replicated and use again and again and again. And additionally many of the videos that get sent in from my clients I then use to spread the word you know about how we can be working with our clients. I did a fearful dog webinar yesterday with before and after videos because every time that we walked that dog we had a chest harness with our camera on our chest I have from the start to the end it all documented and it's very very cool to be able to say this is our first walk and the little Romanian rescue is you know, tucked and shaking and wailing and then here is you know, three months later and same you know, happy privacy body language, tail swishing, standing on her little platform looking all sassy and you can really you can make content and may make stuff that will then inspire behavior change, right? That's the whole point, like we need to inspire behavior change in people. So I like to use technology and the social media and all of these quirks that hijack our brains, and use them for good rather than for evil. And use them to help us build new skills that will help animals, the animals that need them. There's so many benefits to it, right? It's you're showcasing your skills, you're kind of marketing yourself in a way when you're putting that those kinds of videos on social media, but you're also demonstrating that it's working, you know, the methods and techniques you're using are working, positive reinforcement is working in your cases, and you're demonstrating it, and you're going to be able to do it over and over and over with all of the videos that you're getting. So it's just a win win in so many different ways. It really does feel more like I guess, like a snowball effect. Whereas before, I felt very much like I was trudging up this hill for if I was given some sort of, you know, visual metaphor like that, that's what it felt like wading through the cases, almost trying to get this information out there. And now I will do a session, pull a little bit of content from that session, put it on Instagram, and it'll have 20,000 views. And then I have 20 people messaging me saying, Hey, I saw that you were touching that Huskies is and that Husky had bitten its guardian, my husky has bitten me, I'd love to be able to do that, too. And it's just like a machine for behavior change. And it's, it's very gratifying, very reinforcing for the trainer. Absolutely. So you're going to be speaking at the aggression in dogs conference, and you're going to be talking about technology and aggression cases, and giving us a very nice thorough talk about how to apply it. But if you're going to throw us a few nuggets that we can expect before the conference, what would they be maybe a particular case you've had you can tell us about or something that's that where technology has really helped you out and your particular case? Yeah, good. It's a good question. I've honestly been, like, sort of experimenting and solidifying the way that we've been practicing over the last six months to a year. And where we're at now, I'm just at the point where I'm starting to come up with a framework. We did it through trial and error, and kind of feeling our way to see what works and what doesn't work. But what I'm really hoping to do at the aggression in dogs conference with you, is talk through communication. Because what I find is that the way that we have to communicate with clients, when we're using technology, it's very different to how we would communicate when working in person. And I think what I really want to do is be able to operationalize that talk through the individual skills that the trainers will need to get in order to see success. So a client, I guess that springs to mind is a dog that I'll be working with, called fuzz, and I've been working with him for a few months now. And he's got multiple level four bytes to strangers and children. And I'm working alongside of that behaviorist in New York to get the dog ready for potential child in the home in the future. And so much of what I've been doing with this client has been about coaching their physical mechanics when working with this dog, and I've been using a lot of tagteach. So I don't know, if you've ever experienced tagteach They use it a lot with a variety of physical skills from neurosurgeons, to ballerinas. And I want to be taught when I kind of start to operationalize and talk through the different ways that we can coach plans virtually to physically train, because I find that most trainers are quite good at implementing management plans, protocols for reactions, enrichment plans virtually, but when it comes to actually imbuing, like physical skills in the human beings, that's where it can be really challenging. So I'm hoping to really deep dive into some of the techniques that we can be using and ways that we can incorporate video and cameras to be teaching humans physical skills. And I think Mike menu even may have a little demonstration that we're thinking about doing to show how I might use just words to effect complex behavior change in someone across an ocean with a physical task, right? So training is, it's almost like dancing, right? It's a physical task that we need to learn. So I'm really going to focus a lot in on that, I think it should be really fun. And we could all learn a little bit more about how the nuances of inter human communication, not just interspecies communication. I'm really looking forward to your talk, which we're What are you up to now? And where can people find more about you? Yeah, so I'm currently based in London in the UK, but we work virtually with clients in I think it's almost 20 countries now around the world at this point, so it's an ever increasing number. So most people find me on Instagram Calm canine Academy, that's where I am probably most active with my new puppy as well. I'm gonna be on there a lot sharing lots of cute puppy content as well as content, dogs that struggle with aggression and anxiety. So you can check us out there. And we have lots of free webinars as well on our website at calm canine academy.com. So you can have a little look at that the programs that we offer for virtual coaching for clients there as well. Excellent. And I will link to all of that in the show notes as well. Krishna, thank you so much for coming on. This is very insightful and informative. I'm sure that listeners will be trying out all this tech stuff and downloading WhatsApp if they live in the States as well. So thank you for coming on. And I hope to see you again in the future. Thank you for having me, Mike. This has been really fun. Thanks for joining me for the by the end of the dog. If you liked the show, please feel free to subscribe, share and give a rating and hop on over to aggressive dog.com For more information about helping dogs with aggression. 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