Bonus Episode 5: Shaping Behaviours

 This short episode dives into Shaping, reinforcing small steps toward a bigger behaviour. We explore how to break behaviours down, how to celebrate progress, and how shaping creates confidence and curiosity in learning. Ideal for anyone wanting more softness, clarity, and joy in their training. 

Voice note your questions on WhatsApp to +353 85 143 8688 to have your questions answered on the Podcast.

Meet Your Hosts

Barbara Hardman (Bright Horse Equiation)
www.brighthorse.ie

📧barbara.j.hardman@brighthorse.ie ☎️+353 85 143 8688

 Jen Nash (The Equine Method)
www.theequinemethod.co.uk

📧 Info@TheEquineMethod.co.uk ☎️+44 7902920923

Transcript

0:00

Hi guys, welcome to your next bonus episode of Danger to Both Ends Trick in the Middle. You're here with me, Jen and Barbara, and today we are going to be looking into the topic of shaping, shaping behaviour, what does it mean? How do we use it? Why is it important? And you know, just general considerations to have when we're using shaping as a training technique. So, what is shaping? Let's let's define it, let's give it a go. So, shaping is also known as a successive approximation, which is fancy language, for basically a method of training where you take very small steps towards predefined goal and you reward and reinforce for those small steps as you gradually lead to that final desired behaviour. So, one of the things about shaping is you do need to know what your end goal is to get there. And I would argue you also need to look at it from a perspective of you know the do's rather than the don'ts. And I know we talk about that quite a lot, but if we're starting from a place of I don't want my horse to kick the stable door, we're not setting ourselves up correctly to shape that behaviour. So what we need to do is break it down from a I would like my horse to stand quietly when tied up. So we have to break down what that actually looks like and chain each one together through small little goals so the horse or the dog understands what the final end goal is in the desired behaviour. Yeah, absolutely. So every time I do a shaping plan for my clients, everything is a what is it we want to achieve, what is the end goal, what is the behaviour we want to see. Because, like you say, you can't have a don't behaviour, you can't train a don't behave. It's always a case of I want my horse to lift its legs or stand confidently with its head and neck in this position for needle training for whatever it is, even if it's a case of you don't you want your horse to ideally, I don't want my horse to spook or barge or you know it's clipper fear, my horse is scared of clippers. Well, the shaping plan is all about building confidence and what is the beh desired behaviour we want, which ultimately is to stand still while we clip them, but then we need to break that goal down into much smaller, smaller chunks to actually make it bite-size and manageable. But we're gonna go into this in a little bit more detail. So, Barbara, why is why is shaping important? Like, what's why bother talking about it? Well, I think everybody is familiar with the SMART acronym, right? You know, um is it specific, measurable, uh, is it attributable? Um, R standard. I thought it was achievable. Is it achievable? Is it achievable? Was it specific, measurable, achievable? Specific, measurable, achievable, R, realistic, and then T tends time bound. Yeah, yeah. So we got there. Um you know, we're we're all familiar with that when we we we talk about our own goals, you know, and everybody's been to a personal trainer in January in the gym, and it's like, okay, well, you know, what's what's the what's the goal? You know, I want to run a marathon or I would like to lose weight or whatever it happens to be. It needs to be very specific, whatever that goal is. You need to be able to measure the the outcomes and stuff, and you know, it needs to be like achievable, like it needs to be realistic, it needs to be time manned, you need to set it to certain things. So effectively, shaping is taking that kind of you know, is a very similar principle in that sense, which is why I really, really like it, because it means that we can go, okay, well, what's my specific goal? You know, I would like my horse to, you know, tie up, you know, on on the yard and stand quietly while I pick out their feet and groom them. You know, that's a very specific goal. Like we can do that. It's not just um, you know, oh, I want my horse to stand still. Okay, you know, what's the context? Where's the environment? What is it that what's the goal that you want to do? It needs to be more specific than that rather than I want my horse to stand still. Because that's very open-ended. You know, you could say, Well, I want my horse to stand still in the middle of a firework display, you know, and that's it's an is that an achievable or realistic goal? How would you shape that? So we need to have that specific element to it in order to go, great, now how do I measure each level of success? Does my horse stand there for 20 seconds? Can my horse stand on the yard? Can my horse even go onto the yard? Is my horse scared of being on the yard? So, how do we measure that and how do we break it down? Um, and and as I say, being realistic is really important as well. That's why, like a folk, I you know, I know it's a bit tongue-in-cheek about standing in the middle of a firework display, but again, is it a realistic goal? You know, and we need to set our expectations. Um, and I think this is something that myself and Jen will work with you like when we're working on tailored goals as well, is we're looking at the whole horse as well as all the underlying behaviors that support the final behavior, and we're looking at that and going, like, okay, we're gonna set realistic expectations and a time frame, you know, and what that time frame looks like. You know, is this gonna be achievable within three months? Is it a six-month goal? Is it a one-month goal? You know, and what are the steps to get there? So that's part of our plan. We do that, and we're going, okay, well, step one, you know, my horse is scared of the yard, let's help and do some desensitization work, like coming onto the yard. Okay, can they stand back to negative reinforcement? Okay, can they stand there for 20 seconds? Can we add in distraction? But I like calling it the three D's, so distance, duration, and distraction. Uh so the distance from maybe a trigger if they're scared of something, or the distance from you if they're trying to follow you around, you know, um, the duration, how long they can stand there, and then adding in different distractions and stuff to it to really foolproof it, so you get that final behavior. So, arguably, we can say that before we even think about creating a shaping plan and shaping behaviors, we have to start with our smart target. And like Barbara's just said, there, you know, there's lots to consider there. What is the specific behavior that we want, and that involves your environment, your person, your environment person task. Be very, very specific about what it is you want your horse to be achieving. What does that overall image look like? Being able to measure a behavior and measure success is so important for staying motivated. In our last full episode, we talked about forming habits, and you know, habit tracking is a form of measuring success and measuring behavior, but that measurement could take anything from looking at reduced conflict behaviours to duration of you know performing the behavior or the frequency of performing the behaviour in that time frame. So there's loads of different ways you can measure behaviour. Um, is it achievable for that horse? So you might also want to look at things like age, health of the horse. Are we asking the horse to do something that actually they physically can't do? Or is it is it achievable because do we actually have the facilities to do that behaviour? You know, if we're looking for a particular exercise-based activity, is the ground condition are the ground conditions suitable for doing that activity? Do we have the arena for it? Is the weather an issue? Do we need to actually wait until better weather to to train that behavior? Um, and as we talked about timeline as well, what is the time frame we are working with? You know, a lot of owners are are brilliant in the oh, you know, I'll take whatever time it takes, it doesn't matter how long it takes, I've got the time, but actually it's easier and almost helpful to set a time limit because we want to see if we're making progress. Now we might not always achieve the goal within that time limit, but it'll give us an idea of right, we're going to reflect and check in our training at that specific time to give us an idea of what our progression has been so far. And one of the things that I think is really a little bit more maybe accessible for everybody is like when we're actually riding and achieving like our goals, and let's say like a leg yield, right, Jen? Like, what is you know, a leg yield? We we go, okay, that's the final goal. Um, and but what does it actually involve? Well, it involves you know, a little bit of go, a little bit of stop and turn, and that is you know, we have to shape those behaviours. So if your horse doesn't understand slow down and stop to the reins, then asking them to leg yield is going to be incredibly challenging. So it's really important to make sure that like we have the foundations, so all of our training should look like a pyramid with a really strong base and a foundation on the bottom where our animals understand the very basics, and the very basics are stop, go, turn, you know, then and without them, we we you know we're really stumbling through through the rest of our shaping plan. Um, because if you think about again being tied at the yard, there is an aspect of stop and wait to that. Um if your horse doesn't understand stopping to negative reinforcement, then that's going to be very hard for them to be tied on the yard. If you know your horse doesn't understand how to turn, you know, from negative reinforcement, then it's going to make it much harder for us to say load onto a trailer and turn around if it's a lorry. Um so there are lots of little components of just the basics and that set foundation where we start from. And even if you are so sure that you know your horse is like, nope, my horse knows all this, it's brilliant. It's still really good to start from a really basic level and assume no matter what you do, that your horse doesn't know, that doesn't know it, and you can kind of build up from there. It's actually something that exercise physiologists speak about when it comes to training horses, say from a physiological perspective. So, say if you have a new horse and you start on your training regime, even if the previous owners have said, yeah, they can, you know, they can do this much counterwork, they can do this much trot, you sort of go in assuming that there's no baseline level of fitness, because then you're kind of setting yourself up for success no matter what. Just assume that it's a fresh start for your horse, you know, start that you know low, slow duration work, start doing some walk work, you know, you start building up slowly, and it's exactly the same with shaping. So when we look at say approaching our horses like into a trailer and we want to start shaping that behaviour, we just go, okay, well, rather than just assuming assuming that they can complete the entire behavioural repertoire by getting straight onto the trailer, you know, just start nice and slow. Just go, can you take a step towards the trailer? Fantastic, brilliant. Can you take a step away? Can you turn? Fantastic, right? Can we walk up here? Brilliant. Can we do that again? You know, breaking it down to smaller steps, and it'll actually just set you up for success. So it's not just necessarily about training new behaviours, but I also think that doing the shaping steps sets you up for success in every other aspect. And uh, it's funny you say they're about you know, can you take one step towards the trailer? Can you take one step back? Even in some cases, we even start way before that. It's can you actually take a step forward in the stable? Can you stop on the yard? Can we just walk? Can we actually do stop and go before we even get near the trailer? So I think people sometimes underestimate with shaping and shaping plans how small some of those steps need to be. Because you could write down your shaping plan, and I know some of my clients will have had some shaping plans for me, and they're probably go, Oh my god, there could easily be almost a hundred steps, depending on what the behaviour is that we want. But for leg lifting, an example uh for is one where you know Barbara's heard me talk about baby lifts. So before we even want the leg to come off the ground, I want to know can that horse shift its body weight so that it's basically on three legs, and just just the weight is just shifting off the limb that you want, it hasn't even left the ground yet, you know. And how long can we hold that for? And then can we lift the leg so the toe is actually still in contact with the ground? How many times can we do that? How long can we hold that for? And it's once you start writing shaping plans and getting used to shaping, you'll be amazed at how much traditional and other methods will miss. When you start shaping effectively, it'll feel like there's oh my god, there's so many steps to take. But you could easily cover 20 steps in one training session if it's a good training session. You could fly through a hundred-step shaping plan. But the beauty of using a shaping plan is you're not missing, you're not skipping steps, and as Barbara's just said there, you're building that big triangle that that baseline. If you think about the German scales of training, we start with rhythm and relaxation, you've got that bottom wide base of the triangle, and that's what your shaping plan is helping you do as well. You're building a strong foundation of the small little movements and small activities that will then come together later on to provide your finalized behaviour, which can actually be quite complex. Yeah, absolutely. And like shaping itself isn't without its own challenges. I know we're kind of like explaining it in a oh, this seems really simple, and you just do X, Y, and Z, and you know, lo and behold, you know, you've achieved all your goals. But one of the biggest problems I find, um, you know, and this is this is a human problem, I suppose. Like, we're we're all guilty of this, is that our horses or animals don't understand what the final behavior is that we're trying to teach. And I know that sounds like it's really oversimplified, but like again, going back to that human example of like going to the gym, you're aware of what your end goals are, you can see your big picture, you know. You you can see all of that, but the horse or the dog or the animal doesn't, you know. So they don't know that your end goal is to load onto a trailer or to you know get x-rays done and go to the vet. They don't they don't know what the end goal is, like they have no clue, all they understand is the steps in between. So if we move too quickly or we miss a step, you know, it's the the horse isn't able to fill in the gaps between what's kind of missing, whereas we are. So if I was training for a marathon and I stepped it up too quickly and I didn't do my stretch work, or I didn't get the right trainers, or I didn't do any kind of pedoti work, so I was like moving a little bit better, then I'm able to look at my big picture of running a marathon and go, okay, well, I went a little bit too fast here, and this is my end goal, so maybe I need to go back and look at better equipment or do X, Y, and Z. So I can reflect on that, but your horse isn't able to, they're only able to do the training that's in front of them and that we're asking them to do, and you know, it is a fallacy to think, oh, but my horse knows what they should do. They really, really don't, they only know what we present them, and it's really important that what we do is clear and consistent, that we take it in small steps, and knowing when to move on to the next step and how to achieve that, um, and how we ask for that next step because there's lots of different ways to ask for it, and being adaptive and going, okay, they didn't quite understand that. It's not that they know what they did and they didn't do it right. Maybe I wasn't asking it correctly, and maybe I need to work on shaping a different behaviour, or maybe I need to take a step back and make sure that the step before that is really, really robust. Yeah, and that's one of the things I love about shaping plans, is because when we write it down and we have an actual format to follow, it's so much easier to pinpoint exactly where the the concerns, the areas of difficulty are coming from. So sometimes it can feel like you've just hit a brick wall and you don't know where to go and don't know how to progress. But if you have a shaping plan that's been written by someone like ourselves who knows how to write them and how to formate um formulate them for you, is that it's you're never left in the lurch of going, I don't know what to do, because the answer usually always is go back to a point in the shaping plan where you were confident and competent, and the horse understood what they were doing, and then you build up again. And if you keep hitting the same blocks, we go, right? Well, it's at point 42. This is the one that we really struggle with. We're good at 40, but when we move through 40, 41, and 42, things start to go wrong. We have such a specific area to look at, it's so much easier for us to work out, well, you know, this is where we start moving the ramps. Okay, is it the sound? Is it the duration of the trailer? Is it the visual of going from light to dark? Because obviously, if the trailer ramps go up, the trailer's going to get darker. It's so much easier for us to pinpoint and think specifically what trigger is it for the horse rather than looking at all of the training and going, it could be this and this and this. It's keeping us so much more on track, but it also helps us become more flexible because if you've gone and done 40 training steps, you've already identified loads of things your horse is comfortable with. So then, if we need to alter the training plan, we can look back and go, okay, well, they've been great with this and great with this. We've got all of this information recorded, we know they enjoy doing all these exercises, these next ones going forward, we're struggling with, how can we break those next ones down even smaller to meet the kind of steps we were taking before? So it just provides you with so much information, so your training actually becomes efficient and it becomes targeted, which is it's just the way we always want to do because if we can be efficient and targeted, and we for me, training and shaping plans are a massive opportunity for just saying yes to our animals because you're reinforcing every correct step forwards and every effort forwards towards that predefined goal. So a shaping plan essentially is just a system training in an animal where we're constantly saying yes, yes, yes, that's what we want, that's what we want, we're getting those behaviours we want. And I like to say to my clients a lot, you know, slow start, fast finish. You very often find it's a very slow start, you're building up that base of your triangle, and as you start to get a little bit more, you both of you get more skilled and confident, your second half or your second your last quarter of the shaping plan can actually go quite quickly because all those jigsaw pieces are starting to come together to form that that final picture. What training plan do you have that's 40 steps? Oh, most of them. Really? Yeah. But I I'll define I'll define every last second. So if we're doing a leg handling, that people will skip things, right? So if I write into a shaping plan, progress from holding your horse's leg in the air from one second to ten seconds, I know they won't do it. They won't, they won't give it, they won't give it the respect that that deserves, that that horse might actually struggle from going from three seconds to four seconds. I want to know, right, how many seconds can it can the horse hold that leg for? And they will be like, oh yeah, one or two, three or four, and I'll go, okay, which is it, three or four? Because so many times I have seen it, and the horse does have a cutoff point. So yeah, I you know, it's interesting, like you know, and I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna keep this in. So like this is um you can see how the the the sausage is made. So me and Jen have different ways of kind of measuring. So uh that's obviously like you know, in that sense, um we're measuring duration, right? So how you know what's the duration that that horse is able to before progressing, right? Is it 10 seconds, is it eight seconds, whatever it happens to be. Um I measure based on the behaviour that's performed, you know, and repetitions of behavior. So if it was uh say halter training or a head shy training, you know, it's like asking, you know, the horse and the dog to be able to put their head into the to the halter, um, and instead it's like successful repetitions and then taking a break and going back. So I go go ask harder, ask easier, ask harder, easier, um, and just successfully shaping it that way. Um so the for me the measurable bit would be successful repetitions rather than in that situation. I suppose but it depends what the bait it depends what the behaviour is because I wouldn't I was just I literally I walked myself into the just as I was saying this. I wouldn't I wouldn't expect a horse to hold its nose in the head collar for ten seconds before you do it up. Yeah. But for leg handling, I need to know that that horse will balance for however long the farrier needs that leg in the air for. Yeah. So that is funny, that's a duration behaviour for me 100%. But yeah, it's other ones it not. Yeah, a hundred percent yeah. Like and as I I I kind of walked myself into that one um because as I was saying I was like oh hold on a second yeah it's it depends on I mean I can cut all this um no it's interesting yeah and like this is where what is what you know that smart comes in it's like yeah it's specific but what are you measuring are you measuring successful repetitions and how many so I will try and say like okay can we get at least like if we can't get like three successful repetitions in a row then we're asking too much and we need to make it easier you know because i you know you think about um if you're I mean football or basketball or anything else like if you're trying to get like a hoop shot in basketball is that what it's called Jen I don't know I don't know uh you know why now let's go first um you know if you're trying to get it from like the four court line or I'm sound like I know basketball I've walked oh I don't know why anyway you're trying to like throw it in one you know into into the hoop um like if you can't do that you know then you're asking way too much of yourself and you're just gonna get frustrated like again I know nothing about basketball and if like it was a case of stand there barber and see if you can get that in in one I'd just fail and then if I just kept trying it would just start to frustrate me so much more. Yeah like just over and over and over again I would just get frustrated and I just wouldn't want to do it anymore. Yeah so I think what we're touching on if you heard of dropstick go dropstick go is something I put in all my shaping plans so for every shape for every step right so before you progress from step one to step two I want to know that we have at least three good repetitions at step one before we progress on to step two. So dropstick go I actually think it's a dog has come from the canine world five repetitions if you can get less than three good repetitions in a row you need to drop the intensity or the difficulty and make it easier. If you can get about three out of five good repetitions in a row but you can't get four or it's three four three four you never hit five good repetitions in a row stick with the difficulty level they're learning they're trying if you can get five repetitions at that level consistently good you go to your next step. So I caveat all my training plans with that so I'll detail all the steps but I say to everyone like you have to repeat each step at least five times you know you might get those five good reps first time great move on to the next step but if you're not hitting that at least three out of five if we're hitting three or less or you know it's really not um regular we need to drop drop back a step so you might drop from four to five as in step four to sorry just step four to step three and you're still not getting five out of five so you then drop again to step two now we're getting four out of five five out of five so we build back up to step three and sometimes you have to go back down the ladder to come up the ladder and that's where you get sandwiching at ping pong as well yeah I I say I really like I really like sandwiching um and the reason I did with my very bad basketball analogy the reason I like sandwiching is because you know when you have something that is an easy achievable one and it's something you know fun everybody likes something that we can do no one likes playing a game that you lose at all the time like it's not enjoyable um and it kind of works similar to sort of gambling like you know being able to win keeps your motivation up because it keeps it enjoyable it keeps it fun it's achievable it's something that we can do and it's not a constant level of frustration and it helps the motivation for when parts of the shaping plan are challenging so being able to sandwich in easier tasks or as Jen says step it back it just helps increase the motivation and it's important to have that positive reinforcement and to have that you know achievable goals and again it's the same for us if we're training for something you know we often fall into the trap if we're say training for a marathon or doing something else. I know I keep picking on marathons but you know um it's something that we sort of fall into the trap with ourselves where we see achieving the marathon or achieving the training goal as our reward it's not we need to make sure that we're rewarding ourselves particularly when something's quite challenging that we're giving ourselves some positive reinforcement that we're rewarding ourselves with something and it's exactly the same with our horses if even if it seems like a really simple achievement like it's still a high effort to do it so we need to make sure that we're rewarding that high effort even if it's a small step in our shaping plan. Oh yeah absolutely the f the reinforcement has to match the effort maybe not the task but the effort that was used to perform it and that can be mental or physical I like to say to my clients just imagine you were sat in in school and pick pick a lesson that you hated the most for me it was maths. I love physics because I understood those numbers meant something they had a value to them but maths was all theoretical I hated it anyway so imagine that every time you get asked a question and then you get it right the teacher's like brilliant wonderful right a couple more percentages in your overall grade but here's another question you got that great well done awesome here's another question it's even harder and every time you you get something right instead of having the effort and this instead of getting a break and some sort of relief you might still get like an overall increase on your grade as you were because that's reinforcing you're working towards something it's my positive reinforcement in this scenario the next question is still harder and harder and harder and eventually at some point I'm gonna go it's not worth it you know it's just not worth it whereas if it was then okay I've asked you a really hard question great now we're gonna go back to some simple arithmetic for the next lesson now you know and then we'll build up and ask a bit of a long division that was really good because the brain needs time to consolidate that learning and if the brain is also always in a state of stress mental stress physical stress it doesn't really matter but if we're always in a state of stress it's really hard to actually formulate those bonds and like say consolidate that learning actually turn it into something meaningful you but your brain also has to learn which was the important hard question to remember yeah because we do we do have a limited capacity. So if we if you're if your quote unquote reward for answering a hard question in you know in a classroom situation is to answer yet more hard questions there's a couple of things that happens you know you're you're gonna reach cognitive overload your brain has to go well which one of these important questions do am I solidifying for long term learning so you can miss some key aspects like and it also decreases the motivation you know whereas as say if you look at like how we teach primary school children you you know I think everybody's kind of familiar you know you'll do like um you know history or maths or English you know and then you'll go for a break or you'll do music or you'll do art and the reason that we kind of you know or it'll be like okay y'all get 20 minutes to to play a game together or we're gonna do something that's slightly different and the reason that we do that is it supports learning and that's the way we really want to be supporting it with our horses too. Uh in our typical fashion we're going off tangent so how does shaping work in practice so we've kind of alluded to this already it is about having your end goal and then working backwards so if your end goal is going on the trailer or lifting a leg for the farrier you then want to work backwards and every time you make a step break it down into two or three more so if you break down you know lifting a leg up for the farrier it's going to be okay I want the horse to stand still for the farrier for 10 seconds okay I want it to stand there for nine seconds eight seven six five four three two one you want your horse to be standing still while the farrier approaches them you can break that down even more I want my farrier to be able to stand on the yard while a man or a woman or a stranger approaches them you can break that down even more I want my horse to be able to stand on the yard. You know every step you can break down more and more and more and then we haven't even talked about the actual contact of human skin on the horse's skin everything can be broken down into smaller smaller amounts so you start with your main goal work backwards and make those steps as small as you possibly can and it's a fluid document you know it's something that you will add to and it will grow and it will alter depending on the horse that you work with. Does that sound about right for you Barbara yeah and the absolutely and the the last point that I would make um is you know we keep a journal keep diary that again we talked about the measurability but it's also important that we are able to reflect on things because a lot of the time as we're shaping and we go along we'll get stuck you know there's plateaus you know there's a honeymoon period things go up and down training is not linear and what I often see happen is we get so far down our shaping plan and we get stuck somewhere and that's all we remember rather than all of the other success that's come before it and the knock-on effect that that training has brought into other aspects of how we interact with our animals. So it's really important to keep that journal and to reflect and you know go okay these are the things we struggled with and this is how far we came I usedn to be able to trot in the arena I could only just walk in hand and now we're able to trot and go down to the scary corner. You know that that's progress just because we can't canter yet doesn't mean that we haven't made progress so it's really really really important we have a tendency as humans and particularly as adult learners to focus on the the the funnel points the bits of the bits that we get stuck and because we want to take tangible steps to be able to fix those issues and we forget all of the gains that we've made and we need to be able to reflect so keep a journal you know help yourself when you get to those points because they will come and you can then reflect and go okay great you know we've made all of these small steps I'm not there at my big picture yet I'm not there at my bigger goal but look at all of the things that I've done to help my animal learn in a positive way in a supportive environment and if I've managed to achieve the first 20 steps and we've gotten there then what's to say that I can't achieve the next 20 steps because if you're following Jen's ones you've got 40 easily easily 40 easily but that that is another part part of having these tiny little steps is that when you have a shaping plan especially if you're you know if you're really diligent and you have a document and if you're one of our clients you get your document especially if you get one of mine and everything is like I say it is every single step part of the reason why I do that is so you can go back to me and go oh I'm really struggling on step you know 34 and it's like okay that's great you know there's only 45 in this document and you're on 34 look at all the progress you've made and I always like to have a note section so for every step if you imagine you've got like a spreadsheet or whatever you've got your steps numbered down the side one two whatever your middle section is description of what you're doing and then on the right hand side I always have a gap for notes. So just jot down note and that note can be really proud of myself go back to episode one of season two of our podcast self-talk how do we talk to ourselves I'm really proud of ours that we achieved this I'm really happy or it could be things like today was difficult I found this really worrying but I'm really proud that we gave it a go. Anything like that is great or you can go a different way and just note down noticed five conflict behaviours this is an improvement last week we had seven do you know it can be you can your notes can be whatever your notes are just by taking those notes is a way of tracking because you're you're noting how far down your training pan you've got so it's a great point it's all about making sure that progress is there you can reflect on it and keep that self-positive talk going on that topic what are some of the challenges and considerations that we need to you know be aware of when we're shaping and working of shaping plans and Barbara's already spoken about one of them which is you know the horse or your animal your dog they they haven't read the shaping plan they don't know what the end goal is but also be kind to yourself because chances are you've never done this before you know you can read the document we can have a conversation of what we want to achieve but chances are if you're one of our clients you might never have trained or worked in this way before and it's okay that you're learning as well and it's about going at the horse's pace but also going at your pace as well. So guys to sum up hopefully you found this really uh interesting and useful for and you're gonna now be adding in shaping into everything that you do your horses including yourself and shape your partner's behaviour um it is incredibly effective and it's a really really humane way to train our animals because as we've said like our animals don't understand what the end goal is so that means we can reinforce all the small steps to achieve our bigger goal and just and really help them learn in a positive and supportive environment. And it's worth noting guys that we have just spoken to you about shaping and shaping plans and creating documents and training plans not everyone myself included can learn just through being told how to do stuff which is why we exist as coaches and behavioural consultants. So if shaping is something that you would like to do with your animal but you don't know where to get started and you want to see some real life documents or have someone write these for you and then coach you through them that is what that is exactly what we are here for because shaping as a tool is one of our go-to ways for achieving behaviour modification in all animals. So thank you so much for joining us for this bonus episode guys and if you like this episode don't forget to share it with other animal lovers and horse owners and we'd really love it if you could leave us a review on Spotify Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts it really really helps us reach other listeners like you who want to progress to the next stage of their training. Absolutely as always guys thanks so much for listening remember to celebrate those small victories with your animals as you go as you progress along and we'll we'll catch you in the next episode. Bye bye guys