Control Unleashed games and patterns can be a powerful tool whether you're working to rehab reactivity or build bomb proof sports behaviors. But how we do go from just learning the games to actually using them in the real world? Kim and I discuss exactly that in this week's podcast! 

 Transcription

Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today I'll be talking to Kim Palermo about taking Control Unleashed games into the real world for real world situations. Hi, Kim, welcome back to the podcast.

Kim Palermo: Hi Melissa!

Melissa Breau: Excited to have you back. Do you want to start us off with just reminding everybody a little bit about you?

Kim Palermo: Yeah, sure. So I'm Kim Palermo, I live in New Hampshire. I am a Certified Control Unleashed Instructor and I'm also an ACE practitioner. So that's animal centered education. And yeah, I love all things dogs.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. That's good because that's what we're talking about today. At this point, I'm going to guess that probably most of our listeners have at least a basic understanding of CU or Control Unleashed pattern games.

But for anybody who's maybe less familiar, they've kind of heard it bandied about a little bit, but aren't really sure what it is. Can you give us the short definition or explanation?

Kim Palermo: Yeah, definitely. I can't take credit for Control Unleashed. It was Created by Leslie McDevitt and then she created this certification program for others who want to teach CU and Control Unleashed. You can kind of break it up into a couple different parts.

There's patterns. So, you know, games like the 1, 2, 3 game and the up down game, these are patterns that create predictability and consistency for our dogs, which really helps in our world that is very unpredictable. And then we have the Look At That Game which I think a lot of people are familiar with. I absolutely love teaching theLook At That Game and really diving into changing the dog's feelings and not just, you know, clicking for a dog looking and that's it.

So the Look At That Game is essentially a conversation that we're having with our dog about things in the environment which could include triggers. And the idea is we're actually changing our dog's feelings about those things in the environment, including their triggers. Then we have our relaxation skills like Take a Breath where we're actually teaching our dog to take a deep breath and mat work skills, relaxation on the mat, those kinds of things.

And then finally we have some more behavior modification type protocols like voluntary sharing to help dogs who might have resource guarding issues or requested approach training, which is for a dog who might be concerned about a person or dog or someone approaching them. So it's a pretty complex program and lots of amazing skills that you can develop for your dog through it.

Melissa Breau: When we're looking at Control Unleashed, what kind of results are we aiming for?

Or, you know, what kind of results do you see are kind of commonly achievable? I would say when we look at Control Unleashed, I tend to kind of now break it up between management and then true behavior change. So you can use it for management. And really, there's nothing wrong with that. Right. If we're just using these skills to help our dogs stay focused when there are distractions in the environment or whatever it might be.

But what we're truly looking to do with these skills, if we really want to dive deep into them, is changing our dog's feelings about the world around them. And so that's what I'm looking for when I'm working on CU with my dogs. And they can become skills that we don't necessarily need to use. So we're going to start with, let's say, some patterns and teaching the dog to take a deep breath and they'll look at that game.

And I end up with students who, over time, don't need to use those skills on a daily basis because they've essentially given their dogs the ability to learn how to modulate their arousal on their own and their feelings on their own. And to me, that's ultimately what we're looking to accomplish here. Not something I'm going to have to do for the entirety of my dog's life, but something that's actually going to help them feel more comfortable in whatever their world entails.

So, as I mentioned in the intro, I'd like to talk about how we take those games and kind of go from that initial setup, right, which I assume is usually taught in a quiet and safe space, into, like, having a dog that can show control. Right. It is called Control Unleashed even in real life situations. So since we can expect to go straight from, you know, quiet space with lots of props and lots of treats to high pressure situation without some intermediary steps.

Melissa Breau: What are those steps? How do you kind of split things down to kind of get closer to that goal?

Kim Palermo: Yeah, I mean, so my mentor and good friend was Julie Daniels, and she taught me all about varying the variables, and I just love that concept, and I use that a lot with building a dog's ability to generalize their skill set. So rather than focusing on, okay, my dog now knows these skills in the living room or in the training room, and they're fluent there, I'm now going to start to add distractions I think when we think of the word distraction, we're thinking of actually pulling our dog's attention away from us.

So when I'm looking to build generalization into these skills and start taking them on the road, I'm looking to just add variation to the patterns or to my dog's environment or even to what I'm doing so that my dog can start to adjust to that. So that could be even as simple as, you know, if I'm playing, let's just say the up down pattern game. So the up down pattern game is I place food on the ground, my dog eats that food.

When they look up at me, I'll mark and then place another piece of food on the ground, and then we continue that. So it's a pattern, it's repetitive. So I might start to practice, you know, when I'm out in the real world walking my dogs, sometimes I have to look up at my neighbor or the person who's like, oh, are they friendly? Right? And I have to say, no, no, they're not friendly.

So I have to look away from my dog. But I want my dog to understand that the pattern resumes regardless of the fact that someone's coming towards us, there's another dog, and I'm looking away. So I might just practice me looking away while we're playing the up down game in the living room. And then that way my dog starts to understand that these patterns work in a number of different contexts.

Another thing I might do is just kind of rearrange my furniture and then do some patterns, bring my dog out, maybe change a pillow or two around, bring them back in. So I'm not looking to make these giant changes because the more I can vary the variables when it's easier for my dog, then it's going to be easier for them when things become more novel, more complex, more different.

Along those lines, I'm also going to use some of my most basic CU skills to see my dog's comfort level and their ability to play these simple games before I start asking them if they can do something more complex. So, again, I love the up down game because it's perfect for that. What I'm looking for is I essentially kind of figure out, like, a fluency baseline for my dog.

So how long does it take for my dog between eating the food on the ground and giving me eye contact? And at home, where it's nice and easy, this might be, let's say, one second. If I bring my dog to the front door and suddenly she can't look at me for five seconds, then that's information for me. I took way too big of a leap, and I'm going to start making things easier again or change some different variables.

Can we be halfway at the door? Maybe. So I'm going to pay attention to that baseline to give me information on if my dog is actually ready to start to bring these skills in new environments. I also love take a breath for this, because if my dog can't take a deep breath, and especially, I think a lot of the people listening to this podcast, they've got those drivey dogs who love food.

So some of our dogs like that they're gonna eat food regardless of the environment. And I do find that some of our workaholics do tend to, like, mask their feelings with the food. And sometimes the patterns then can be a problem for them because they get so into that reinforcement of the food that they actually forget to take in the environment. And then when we're suddenly decreasing the food, our dog's like, oh, my gosh, look at all these things around me.

So in those situations, I'll use take a breath. And I actually experimented with my workaholic collie Jane the other day with this. I was doing just some basic skills, and she's working, working, working. And then I bring her over to the mat and I ask her to take a deep breath. And she couldn't. And so it's good information for me because even though she was able to work, she was saying that something was too challenging for her in that environment.

And so we had to spend a lot of time in taking a deep breath. So that's where I'm going to start. And then as my dog is more fluent, we'll start building things bigger variable. Taking things on the road.

Melissa Breau: That makes sense. Speaking of kind of taking things on the road, can you talk a little bit about the idea of combining patterns, like how you use them together to create routines?

Kim Palermo: Yeah. So I love to do a routine of patterns to help my dog, especially when it comes to, like, coming into a new environment. So we'll call this, like, our arrival skill set. So a perfect example is when you're arriving at a trial, and you can use your arrival skill set, but it could also just be when you're going to go take your dog for a walk. Right.

So rather than my dog being all jazzed and excited and ready to yell at the other dogs in the neighborhood, if I had some sort of routine for my dog before we went for the walk, that would help. So when it comes to our patterns, we've got some more stationary patterns. We've got some movement patterns. We've got some that's going to build duration between feeding. So I'm going to start to kind of combine those together so that I've got some stationary stuff and then some movement stuff, and then I can go back to stationary.

And again, this is something that we can practice, you know, at home where it's easy. Okay, so before we go for a walk and we're using our patterns, we're going to practice, like, can you combine the 1, 2, 3 game with the up down game? You know, can my dog actually do that? And if they can, then we'll start using them to, you know, bring. Bring them places and start to.

To put things together. There's also going to be times when one pattern might work better for your dog than others. And so by being able to quickly progress from one pattern to the next is going to help you in those situations where you might say, okay, you can't do this pattern, but can you do one where we're just staying still? Interesting. I hadn't thought about it quite that way before of, like, the pat putting them into a routine as a way of progressing through different patterns to kind of see what your dog needs in that moment.

Melissa Breau: That's kind of an interesting way of thinking about it. You mentioned food drive in there. I'm not sure if it was for that question or the previous one, but we're talking about these patterns that we're really building around food. How do you think about reducing reinforcement? What does that look like in this case?

Kim Palermo: So there's some patterns where we can really do this a lot, and then there's some patterns like, okay, if we go back to the up down game, like, we can build a little bit of duration in there, But I'm always going to tell my dog that if we're playing the up down game, I am going to give you food for giving me eye contact.

I'm not going to build a ton of duration into that. Same with the 1, 2, 3 game. It's you count to three at the number three, your dog gets a treat. I'm always guaranteeing a treat there, but there's some other games where we can start to build distance in between the points where we're feeding our dogs. And the predictability the pattern helps the dog with that decrease of reinforcement.

So my favorite example of this is the chair game. With the chair game, we'll start by kind of building value for, like, a certain location. It could be a chair. That's what it was originally. But let's say, like, the bumper. My car. Okay. So I'll play the up down game there first, just to build value for the bumper of the car is where, you know, good things happen.

Then what we start doing is when my dog gives me eye contact, rather than just feeding at the bumper of the car, I'm going to walk out into the environment, put food down. When she gives me eye contact, I'm going back to the car. And then we build from there. So we're always. When we're at the car and I get eye contact, we're always going out into the environment.

And then when we're out in the environment, when I get eye contact, we're always going back to the car. So the dog learns to kind of essentially acclimate to the environment, understanding that it can always and will always return to the safety of the car. And then if we go back to that fluency baseline, I'm paying attention to how long it takes my dog to give me eye contact.

So if they're really slow to give me eye contact when they're out in the environment, that's telling me that it might be a little too challenging. They really want to take their time to take in and look around, which is fine. But if it's taking them a very long time, then the next time, my next rep, I might not go out quite so far. Right. Same with, I see in classes a lot the dogs that give eye contact super fast from their chair or their home base because they're like, I want to go back in the environment.

So it gives you information. Right. But then it also allows you to build that duration between food. Okay. So if I start from going from the car to, like, say, three feet out, but then I might end by going 30ft out. Right. So that's 30ft of us walking together in a new environment without any reinforcement. We use this game all the time with our pet dog clients locally to teach loose leash walking and walking past other dogs in the classroom setting.

And it's really quite amazing how these dogs will walk all the way across the room without pulling towards the dog that's right next to them, because we've built that pattern and that predictability for them, and it allows us to practice, too. And then another great skill for this and one that we're going to focus a lot on in my next class is the Give me a break game, where we can actually use that pattern to start building in some of our, you know, whatever our sports skills might be.

So it would be rather than just participating in the pattern, it would be our dog would engage with us, we would cue them a few of their skills, and then we'd go back into the pattern. So it allows us to start to delay reinforcement for their actual sports skills with the predictability of that pattern.

Melissa Breau: Can you talk just a little bit about what the give me a break game is? Just so that we kind of have that context?

Kim Palermo: So the give me a break game is I'm walking out into the environment, placing food down on the ground, I'm turning my back to my dog, and I'm walking to the same location. So again, when Leslie created this program, she taught it in a classroom setting, so chairs were always there. So if you're familiar with the original version of give me a break, we would go to a chair, and you would sit down, and you would just wait for your dog to come up to you and basically orienting to you and giving you eye contact.

You know, being within a foot or two from you is their cue to say, okay, I'm ready for the next rep. And so then you would stand up, walk out into the environment, put food down, turn your back to them, because that's really disengaging from them. That's why it's called give me a break. I'm saying, you're off the clock. I'm disengaging from you. And then it's my dog's choice to come back and reengage.

And that's when we can start building in our sports skills. So I can place a treat down, say, go to the chair, sit down. When my dog comes up to me, rather than just walking out into the environment and putting food down again, I might cue them to do a couple behaviors. Then I'll walk out, put the food down, and wait for them to re-engage with me. So not only am I delaying reinforcement for those skills, but I'm also teaching my dog to opt in to work, which, I mean, isn't that what we all want all the time?

Melissa Breau: Absolutely. What role does the handler's body language and their own ability to kind of regulate their emotions or their emotional state play in kind of how well these advanced skills transfer, especially in more challenging settings?

Kim Palermo: Yeah, I mean, in my opinion, so much. For one, I am a stickler for mechanics, and I think most of my students know that, and I actually think it's really impressive. The level of mechanical skills my teams have by the end of a class is pretty amazing.

Not only do they have good CU skills, but also they're better handlers. So those clean mechanics are going to help because when we're trying to create predictability through these skills, if we are unpredictable, that's going to harm our dogs, right? It's not going to make the pattern as predictable. So very often I'll use targets that I'm putting the food on because that's telling the dog every single time, this is where the food's going to be.

And so they have that level of predictability, which is what we're trying to provide them with these patterns because otherwise our world is very unpredictable. So there's definitely. The more we can have clean mechanics, the more it's going to help. I also appreciate that a lot of the skills, the control unleash skills, are actually because they're patterns, they're pretty easy for us to rely on as well. So if you think about it, if I'm out on a walk and I have a reactive dog and I'm finding that, let's say the up down game is really helping my dog, it's helping me too, because it's telling me exactly what to do in that scenario.

And I just keep doing the same thing over and over again, right? So it's easy. And I feel the same way with the 1, 2, 3 game, to the point where, and maybe I shouldn't say this out loud or on a podcast, but I'll actually count. There's nobody listening. Don't worry, I'll actually count to three over and over again when I'm getting a little stressed out. Of course, I'm not getting food at three like my dog does, though that would probably.

If I got a chocolate, like a little M and M or something at each three, that would be great. But that repetition, right, it really even helps us humans just as much as it's going to help our dogs. So the patterns do help us as handlers. And then it also, we also gain this opportunity to co regulate with our dogs. Take a breath is definitely a challenging skill.

I think a lot of handlers see it as quite complex, more complex than I find it actually is if you can really break it down, but if you can actually successfully build the skill. So just essentially my deep breath is a cue for my dog to take a deep breath. And that's like what I do at trials now. I used to. I remember years ago, you get your dog all jazzed and you're practicing before going in the ring and.

And now I'm like sitting in the corner, breathing deeply with my dog, but it makes me such a better handler. Right. Because breathing is going to help us just as much as our dogs. So there's definitely a lot that we can do through CU that's going to help us bring that calm, kind of those calm feelings for our dogs, which are just going to help them when it comes to bringing these things out into the real world when things get more challenging.

Melissa Breau: So I think a lot of people hear us talk about Control Unleashed or hear conversation about Control Unleashed, and they think, well, my dog's not reactive or, well, my dog's not whatever. So can you talk? Obviously, we do a lot of dog sports stuff here at Fenzi. That's a big focus of the podcast. So can you talk a little bit about just specifically the sports applications, the benefits for dogs when we build Control Unleashed games into sports and trial settings?

Kim Palermp: Yeah, yeah, definitely. So, for one, there's the, okay, well, you can breathe with your dog in the corner. So there's that. And then there's our, you know, routines. So the combining patterns together can create some nice routines for our dogs. I also find that our patterns can really benefit with building skills at home and in a way that's gonna lower our dog's arousal. Not so much that they don't wanna work, but enough where they can think.

I have such a lovely team who had a gold spot in my last class and fortunately got a gold spot for my current class. And her dog agility was the primary sport. And her dog would bark a lot in between reps. So when they were working on the weave polls, there was a lot of demand barking, if that's how you want to label it. And we even found that just in basic sessions, just working on some of the other CU skills, he would start barking as soon as he got frustrated or excited or over aroused or all the things she began to incorporate up down, you know, before sending him through the weaves and then when he'd come back to her.

So between each rep, she would do some up down. And then we started to incorporate this little cool start button where he would do a few reps of up down, which requires looking at her, and then he would actually look over at the weave poles and that's when she would cue him. So he stopped barking, like, entirely. Like, it was amazing. He was very. Like his. All his reps were great, right?

Very successful. And what was nice was that she was able to keep him focused and his arousal low enough where he could successfully do the skill, but it also gave him the opportunity to say, okay, I'm actually ready now to do this. And he didn't have that opportunity before, you know, and I think that was a lot of what made things difficult for him because he maybe needed time to take a break or process things or, you know, whatever it might be.

Otherwise, he felt very rushed. So there's a lot of ways we can kind of incorporate these patterns into our training sessions. In addition to at our trials, I also find that they kind of help to teach a decrease in a lot of that offering type behavior. My miniature poodle, he's 12 and a half years old. When I first got him, everyone was free shaping. So that's what I did with him.

And then he turned into a little offering machine, which was so admirable back then and now it drives me insane. And I ended up, I took my TA, Nicole, she actually teaches here at my local place. So I took her CU class and just teaching him like, take a breath and up, down. And even though, look at that game, I got rid of all that offering. He used to whine horribly.

Like if we. As soon as I stopped anything, he would just whine and whine and whine. And I remember an instructor way back when told me, that's really going to be a problem when you get into the ring. And like it just went away just with building these skills that just like lowers his arousal just enough so it really doesn't have to be. For a reactive dog, though it certainly helps the reactive dogs.

But even my current puppy, she's a year and a half now, but I raised her on CU. That was the first thing I taught her proactively just so that she had those skill sets and place. So I think that's so useful to think about. And I know that you mentioned earlier the like teaching your dog to opt in piece and that feels like a big part of it just feels like there's a lot of pieces here that sports folks sometimes struggle to incorporate. I guess. I don't know. I don't know exactly what I'm looking for, but yeah.

Melissa Breau: So you mentioned the new class kind of in passing there. So the reason we're talking about all of this is because you have a new class on the calendar for the October term. Do you want to share a little more about the class and maybe who might want to join you? Yeah. So the class is advancing your CU skills.

ICU in the real world, that's what it's called. It's definitely for anyone who has some level of CU skills on their dog. And are looking to start to bring that. It could be bring it out into the real world, or it could literally be bring it into the kitchen. Whatever your dog needs, that's what we're going to focus on. I'm looking at it almost like kind of a handler's choice, control, unleash class, because we might be using it for trial prep and we might just be using it for a reactive dog.

Whatever the handler, dog, team, whatever their goals are, that's what we're going to be focusing on. So I am going to have some information on how to teach some of the skills, just as a reminder or refresher. And I did have a patterns class and I had a big feelings class, which was more for like the look at that game, Take a Breath. So if someone took only one or the other, I will be sharing some information on how to teach the other skills. But our real focus is going to be how we can start to generalize these skills and bring them out into the real world based on individual goals.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. And since this is kind of a more advanced level class, what level of skill are you really looking for for students who want a working spot? I don't know if there are still gold spots available, but silver even.

Kim Palermo: There aren't. Yeah, but there's plenty of silver, and I love silver, by the way, because if you take advantage of it, you can get a lot of. You can learn a lot. So I would say anyone who's looking to get a working spot, you want to have at least some CU skills. I would say, you know, at least two or three that are ready to start to, you know, be introduced to more challenging environments.

That said, I'm also happy to progress. You know, if someone's just struggling with the. Look at that game, because that is going to be a big one that we'll focus on or struggling with. Give me a break or take a breath. This would be a helpful class for them as well because we are going to be working on. I don't think anyone's going to be past some of the basics.

We're still going to be working on some of those foundations as we start to expand these skills. So I would say some sort of base understanding of CU and some CU skills for the dogs.

Melissa Breau: That's helpful, I think. Any final thoughts or maybe key points you kind of want to leave folks with as we wrap up?

Kim Palermo: Well, I am excited because I'm going to be at the very beginning of this class.

I'm going to be focusing on a model that I learned on how we can focus on, like, one or two goals and use that beginning of our class to then plan the rest of the class. I think often we may get a little overwhelmed by how many options there are to work on, and I have seen that with some of my CU students. And I think also we sometimes get enticed by a certain skill.

I know I have that problem where I'm like, ooh, that looks like something new and fun to teach. So my goal is to help everyone pinpoint one or two things that they'd really like to work on, which CU skills are going to help them with those goals, and then we really have a plan going forward. And I have been doing some zoom calls with my other classes, and I plan to do it with this one as well.

And it's open to all the students. So Bronze, Silver and Gold. And my plan is to have one the first Saturday for this class so we can discuss our goals and everyone can kind of brainstorm together and come up with that. And like I said, that includes our bronze students as well. So my hope is that I can help everyone come up with a really good plan for how they're going to use this class so that they can get the very most out of it.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast to talk about all this, Kim.

Kim Palermo: Well, thank you for having me.

Melissa Breau:: Absolutely. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week. Don't miss it. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available.

Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty free by BenSound.com the track featured here is called Buddy Audio. Editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training.

 Credits

Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called "Buddy." Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.

Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!