Positive Reinforcement, An Interesting Parallel Between Dog Training and Tennis Lessons

You have to communicate ‘the good’. This is because in most activities (other than vices), there are many, possibly infinite ways of doing it the wrong way.

From this dog trainer, it is far more productive to indicate what behavior you expect from your dog – which works! I only realized the pervasive shortage of positive reinforcement when I started training our dog and was concurrently learning to play tennis. As you might have guessed already, my tennis instructor was only giving me negative feedback. This was frustrating as I wanted to know how to swing, move and so on and  could not see my own actions with a good perspective. Perhaps the only time were knowing the wrong actions is when there’s been inaccurate communication about right behaviour.