Does your Yes life need a tune-up?

I wrote a Facebook post last night. It was very satisfying, at first, because I got to say NO, confrontational dog training isn’t right. Stop It.

But that’s really ironic, right? That I am trying to use something negative to fix the problem of being too negative? I can do better than that. If I really want change, there’s a better way to teach, which I use all the time with dogs.

My goal with dogs is to maximize chances for positive reinforcement in their lives, in all forms. I want to be able to say YES a lot to dogs and that applies to people too.
So what do I want to happen? What do I want to see? I do try to use positive phrasing when talking to people, but sometimes on social media, or with my husband, my inner 2-year-old comes out. No No NO.

So I’m working on my Yes life. Today I started my own challenge, and I hope you’ll join me. For the next two weeks (and maybe more) I am going to focus on phrasing all social media posts and comments in a positive way, and add the hashtag of #CelebrateTheGood to remind myself. If I look back and see that I could have done better, or missed an opportunity to be positive, I will revise or repost, and add the hashtag of #CelebrateTheGood to those, too.

Examples of positive posts and comments:

• Why you train dogs the way that you do (if you catch yourself pointing out negative things about the other side, just replace those with information on what TO do and why it’s awesome).
• Something great that happened to you.
• What you agree with about XYZ (especially good for comments)

I picked social media because in a way, it’s easier than real life. You can take your time crafting your words. You can revise when you see that it could have been better. That’s a  great learning opportunity.

Flags that indicate your post may have room for improvement:

• Words like no, not, never, wrong,…
• Judgements like hate, can’t stand,…
• Name calling or insulting someone’s character (idiot, uneducated, mean, bitch, jerk, troll, you get the gist)
• Reading through it gives you a bad feeling

Here’s my original post from yesterday:

So let’s try that again, with positive phrasing. First, I would leave off the blog post share because it’s all about negative phrasing, “things dog trainers hate.”

So there we go. Let’s positivize the internet and fix our Yes lives. Can you join with me and take the #CelebrateTheGood Challenge for the next two weeks?