WHY IT WORKS: Through your actions, you dam the old habitual mode of behavior with the baby gate and encourage a new mindset with the golden chewy, and voilà—you have a new behavioral path for your dog to take when a friend comes knocking. Eventually, he will run into the kitchen and wait for the super “visitor bone”.

Long after she relaxes into her life with you and her anxiety falls away, she still breaks out to find a chosen object to chew while awaiting your dramatic return. These behaviors have become habitual to her; sequences of behaviors chained together, they arise in a given scenario—watching through the bars of the crate as a person walks out the front door. These behaviors are now a part of her routine. They may not be intentional, or even conscious.

It’s important to recognize when our dog’s past experience has set the stage for those very resilient habits we observe and wish to change. Becoming unduly offended or personalizing the actions of our canine friend creates resentment, false judgment, and even premature hopelessness about the relationship. Many habits can and will change with the right approach; new neural pathways can be carved out and the old ones effectively dammed.

If we are understanding about the power of habits, we may patiently cultivate new substitute habits, gradually rendering the old ones meaningless. We can be realistic about the amount of time it takes to carve out a new course of action in a mind where the old course has been well traveled for so long. We can be creative about the introduction of new game-changing learning that is spontaneous and powerful, shifting other factors in critical ways for the benefit of the relationship.

Individual Choices—Opening New Doors of Learning

All too often, we pull our hair out as we continue to do the same thing over and over (“No! Sit! Stay!”), getting the same maddening results. We totally miss the leverage right under our nose—our ability to control the environment for our dog in order to invite new choices.

What happens when I . . . ? I wonder if I could . . . ? How can I . . . ? These are the kinds of inspiring questions behind the choices we make when life hands us a new set of conditions. Our brain probably won’t even bother to ask these questions if we have a precedent to go on. Whatever action we have done the last few times (or thousands of times) in a similar moment will just kick in if we have already learned a habit or impulse that had a desirable consequence. We ask these questions only when something is different or new, or when a previous strategy is no longer working for us.