Ready to transform your dog training business and help your clients achieve lasting, real-world success in their struggle with reactivity?
It feels like everywhere you look in the dog training world these days, certain topics just seem unavoidable. And reactivity is always at or near the top of that list. Try as you might, you can’t keep up with all of the webinars, courses and protocols that focus on trying to manage life more successfully for households with dogs showing reactive behavior.
Understandably, we’ve become inoculated to believing that anyone ever has anything new to say about issues like reactivity. But every now and then, the paradigm does actually shift.
Very occasionally, something new happens that delivers an opportunity to truly move the ball down the field in our collective yearning to make the world better for dogs and the people who love them.
This is one of those things.
The recent launch of VSA’s latest course, Reactivity for Dog Training & Behavior Professionals, represents a seachange in how pet industry pros will be able to help dogs and people struggling with this all-too-common barrier to living a fulfilled life together.
My team and I have spent the past couple of years developing something that truly upends the way that positive dog trainers have been approaching this issue and offers an actionable, holistic new alternative designed to solve reactivity more effectively.
So what makes this course different?
For years now, I’ve been unsettled with the traditional approach to dealing with this all-too-common problem. It felt like there was something else – something different out there waiting for us to identify and build upon. Focusing on desensitization and counterconditioning (DS/CC) has been at the core of our approach since the advent of positive training, but it seemed to me and the VSA/Positively team that there had to be another way.
We were confident that there must have been an alternative to trying to manage the situation once the dog had already crossed the threshold. Triggers were stacking and we were all trying to treat the problem once it was in front of us.
So we did something crazy.
We put DS/CC to the side and began to focus on what ultimately became a truly revolutionary way of thinking about solving reactivity: the Reactivity Zones Approach™.
The first step was creating the Help! Stop Reactivity online course on the Positively.com site, which introduced guardians to the concept of using the zones with ‘reactive’ dogs. And the feedback to that within the dog world has been overwhelming.
And while serving the needs of dog guardians is the mission over at Positively, here at VSA we’re focused on providing elite-level learning experiences for training and behavior professionals. That’s why we’re so excited about this new online course based on the Reactivity Zones Approach™ but developed specifically for pet industry pros:
The Reactivity for Dog Training & Behavior Professionals Course
How is the course built?
This 10-hour course is now open for registration, featuring 11 self-paced online lessons, downloadable worksheets, client handouts, and practical action steps to incorporating the new approach in your training and behavior business. It is available for CEUs with VSA as well as PPAB, IAABC and CCPDT (pending).
Each chapter of the course offers a dual-learning approach, with the learner first experiencing the Positively-created foundational lesson, followed by a ‘Pro Deep Dive’ lesson focused on how professionals can apply the Reactivity Zones Approach™ content in their existing pet business.
What makes this Reactivity for Professionals course so powerful and unique?
- Go Beyond the Traditional. Discover how to move past traditional “stay under threshold”-based approaches relying solely on DS/CC techniques to a more holistic and effective alternative that builds genuine comfort and resilience for dogs
- Live in the Real World. Apply a new approach that is designed to work in real-world situations for real-world clients, not just in contrived and unrealistic setups.
- Find the Missing Piece. You’ve felt the need for something more, now unlock the power of an approach built to avoid the fragility of client compliance.
Watch a free preview:
Who can take the course?
Like all VSA learning experiences, we built this course to support you, the working professional who deals with training and behavior. While guardians are encouraged to take Positively’s Help! Stop Reactivity course, pet pros need more.
The Reactivity for Dog Training & Behavior Professionals course contains all of the Positively course content plus critical application-based material specifically catering to professionals running an existing pet business. (Those looking for options to become a certified dog trainer should consider VSA’s flagship professional Dog Trainer Course.)
What are the next steps?
Ready to transform your dog training business and help your clients achieve lasting, real-world success in their struggle with reactivity?
Learn more about the Reactivity for Dog Training & Behavior Professionals course page. Enrollment is open now and available to professionals around the world with no pre-requisites. All you need is a passion for helping clients succeed and a willingness to move past the traditional concepts to solving reactivity.
Onward!
