Every relationship is unique, and that’s true for every dog-human relationship as well. But as different as they are, all great relationships have one thing in common: harmony. The Harmony Model is a five-element roadmap to getting to your best life with your canine companion.
What is the Harmony Model?
Simply put, the harmony model distills the essential elements of living well with our dogs, and shows you how to apply them to your specific goals, issues and relationship with your dog. The harmony model allows you to:
- Connect the dots between safety, wellness, and behavior, and act on it.
- Learn to listen and communicate with your dog.
- Use socialization wisely throughout your dog’s life.
- Use smart enrichment to build ease and joy into a busy life.
- Design and implement positive training to build skills, relationship and trust.
Together, these skills are what make life with dogs joyful, and each element plays a part in every solution, every proactive plan, and even every lazy afternoon well spent with your dog.
And when you pair the Harmony Model with the power of the Positively Pillars, both you and your dog are well on your way to living your best life together.
Who needs the Harmony Model?
First, let’s do a thought exercise together. Think back to when you first met your dog. Maybe she was a young puppy (and perhaps she still is. If so, kudos for getting going so early in your journey!), or maybe you adopted a fully formed adult. Why did you bring her into your life in the first place? How did you imagine she’d fit into your life, and you into hers? Did you have dreams of going on adventures together, or maybe just a neighborhood stroll? Maybe you envision just being together, cuddling on the sofa? Or hanging out together in a cafe? Maybe, like a lot of us, you dreamt of all of that. We humans have big dreams for our relationships with our dogs, and we should!
Fast forward to where you are now. Some of those dreams that seemed so simple when you brought your dog into your life may look far-fetched now. Suddenly, the ideal relationship that brought your dog into your life may not cross your mind quite as much. Instead you may be dreaming much smaller dreams – some peace in the house! A walk without embarrassing or downright scary behavior! Maybe you are overwhelmed by the endless stream of advice, methods, and recommendations people give you – they seem to come from all sides and often contradict one another. On busy days, the dream of the kind of life you want to live with your dog–the one that brought her home to you– is replaced with obligations, and you end up focusing on how to get your dog to STOP doing something bothersome, annoying or downright frightening. In the hustle, bustle, overwhelm and day-to-day reality, we lose sight of the reason we chose to share our lives with such an extraordinary animal to begin with. We’ve all been there.
Although everyone has different dreams for the kind of life they want to have with their dog, every one of those dreams is built on the same thing: harmony. And every one of those days where that dream seems out of reach is likely because one or more elements of harmony are missing. When our dogs are in harmony with us and we with them, both human and canine partners get to be themselves, enjoy one another, have their needs met, and live their best life.
The Harmony Model is a simple way to make your dreams with your dog happen. It can help you build them from the get-go, or get back to them – living in harmony and enjoying each other for the very differences that make living together enriching and worthwhile.
Harmony: Five elements for every dog
In each case, getting to harmony involves the same five elements, but how and when you bring them depends on you and your dog. By evaluating each element in your dog’s life, you can succeed with your dreams right from the start and can allow healing and help if you're struggling. It is both a prescription and a preventative in one, in other words, for canine and human joy. Let’s take a brief look at each of the elements of the Harmony Model.
Training
Yes, training! This one is no surprise, right? But no, by training, we don’t mean mastering a set of artificial poses, like sit. It’s not even about checking off a standard set of boxes of the “six cues every dog should know.” This is about real-world, dog- and human-friendly teaching that allows everyone to meet the challenges of their modern world prepared and relaxed. The more we learn about the rich lives, cognitive abilities, emotions, and species-specific needs of our dogs, the better and wider the scope of training. Positive training encompasses the whole dog and your individual needs as a family.
Positive training is understanding your dog’s experience of the world in order to choose and build the skills needed to navigate your lives together successfully.
Training, in the term positive training, is about teaching dogs the skills they need to thrive in a world that’s not necessarily built with them in mind – our human world. In order to live your best life with your dog in our world you will have to teach her a few skills and those skills will vary depending on your dream and where and how you live. So what to teach and how to teach it. Identifying and teaching YOUR dog the skills she needs to thrive in YOUR world is key. As your dog’s trainer, or teacher, you will work to identify those missing skills, to set up the learning environment so that your dog can build richer and richer repertoires that allow her to navigate this foreign world by your side and with your guidance.
If your dog’s jumping on visitors is upsetting and maybe even upending those visitors, you can teach the skill of greeting politely, by teaching her the skills inviting wanted attention in more human-social ways. If her barking is part of the background of your Zoom calls, investigate what skills she may be missing that could help restore quiet in your home, and how she might occupy herself more quietly during that time. In other words, positive training is fundamentally about building behaviors, skills, abilities and teaching your dog in what context to use them. Stopping unwanted behavior is no exception to this rule. In order to stop our dogs from doing things we don’t like, we ultimately need to teach them new ways to act and feel around the things that trigger those behaviors. Recognizing that our dogs aren’t born understanding our modern world or human expectations helps us see where we can step in and teach. And this in turn can open up so many possibilities for harmony. Read more about how training fits into the Positively Pillars here.
A “well-behaved” dog IS a dog with a rich repertoire of human-context related skills. And a well-behaved dog has a larger world, since they are able to navigate more contexts with ease. Teaching, or training, is a way to create harmony with your dog.
But, here’s the rub: training is often the first thing we think of when it comes to creating harmony in our lives with our dog. But, in order for teaching to happen, a dog must be in a place to learn. And getting there requires a few other elements to be in place. So keep training in mind, but know that successful training is often the last element we put in place, once we’ve got all the others down.
Safety and Wellness
Teaching takes time, and learning requires safety.
Perhaps you’ve identified three areas that need training attention, and only have time to work on one of them right now. That’s fine! The others just need to have a quick and easy solution that compliments a longer teaching plan. Until those skills are learned, it’s time for a quick fix! Usually, this involves changing the picture around the dog, using management to prevent your dog from practicing in places where she isn’t ready. By keeping your dog out of situations she isn’t prepared for, you keep her and you safe.
Since training often (not always) comes last in our plans, we will need to address safety first! Safety can meet both our needs for immediate solutions and our dog’s needs to both be and feel safe. Safety simply means managing the environment to proactively ensure your dog’s physical and emotional health, as well as their physical and emotional safety. This typically has two prongs: prevention and wellness. Yes, we said emotional safety! One of the big missing elements in many training plans is ensuring the emotional safety as well as the physical safety of all involved.
Why safety and wellness?
You’ve likely done the same for others in your life. Think about teaching children to swim. Before we allow them to swim in open water, we choose a place to swim where the water is smooth and controlled, perhaps a pool or a calm natural body of water. And before we got to swimming in the pool, we likely taught the motions of swimming in a place where they could stand up, it might have even been outside of the pool! Even before that, we introduced the children to water, by splashing around in the shallow end, getting used to the sensation of water touching their bodies, of holding their breath when they dip their heads under. And even before that we would want to show a child a pool, pond or lake, perhaps poking a stick into it, or watching others get in. Water can be emotionally challenging for many kids (and many adults, too)-- not being able to see the bottom, or what might be touching you is new, and developing confidence with that strange new reality is essential to learning anything in it!
This all sounds ideal, don’t go in the water until you know how to swim with confidence and competence! But sometimes we have other plans. We want to go to the beach with a young child who does not yet have the skills to swim. And we can, with an extra dose of safety and attention to wellness. In that case, we use prevention and management to ensure both physical and emotional safety. We make sure the child is always supervised and prevented from entering the water unattended. We might model touching the water, without hands, letting her do the same, or not as she grows confident and curious. If our child is ready to get in, we might use a device, like a life jacket or arm floats to help keep the child’s head above the water even though she does not yet have the skill to do that on her own, even as we go in with her. We avoid putting her in water so rough she is likely to be tossed or drenched, both for her physical safety and so she is not scared of swimming. We might start in clear water where we can see the bottom, and choose just to look at water where we cannot see the bottom for now. We do this both because we don’t want to wait years to go to the beach, and also because we hope our child will get to experience this wonderful place without fear or danger. And we also do this because we hope that, as she grows, these early, protected experiences will be a foundation of joy and confidence in the water.
Give your dog a “life jacket”, and head to the “beach”!
No matter their age, this is what we do for our dogs when we use prevention and management. To take our example above, learning to walk on leash is a set of skills that takes time and practice for both dog and guardian. In the meantime using a no-pull harness or other appropriate walking equipment can help both you and your dog today. Like putting a life jacket on a child so they can enjoy the water before their skills are up to snuff, choosing appropriate safety and management equipment will allow you to preserve your dog’s safety and wellness, to protect their emotional responses to situations in which you want them to succeed, and maintain harmony between you before training as well as during it.
When we consider safety and wellness, our dogs are healthy both in mind and body, are free of pain and fear, and can enjoy their lives. And we develop a set of tools to help do this quickly, so we can teach when we are ready, and enjoy each other along the way.
Communication
Any harmonious relationship depends on communication, and your joyful life with your dog is no exception. In order to teach her, you’re going to need to know how to communicate with her. And in order to talk to her, you’ll need to first learn how to listen. If you can do both you can help fulfill her needs and yours, communicate what you need, and solve your problems! Clear communication will also save you time when teaching.
Dogs whose communication (including body language) is heard and understood can tell us what they need/want in the body language equivalent of whispers. When they don’t have to shout, we can build a fulfilling relationship based on mutual understanding.
The first step to clear, two-way communication is learning canine body language.
Training is a conversation, and we want our dogs to listen! Before they can learn to listen to us, we need the skills to listen to them. They don’t use words, but with a little practice, you won’t need them to. Once you can listen so that they can talk and talk so that they are listening, your relationship will deepen in ways you never imagined possible.
Socialization
Dogs are social animals just as humans are: it’s part of why we love each other as a species, and part of our ancient bond! They also have exquisite senses and awareness of smell, hearing and others. Being social and environmentally attuned is beautiful, but it also means being socially sensitive. Dogs notice a lot, process a lot, and learn a lot about what’s safe, what's fun, what’s worth engaging and what’s worth avoiding, from how and when they meet these things. Seeing the world from the dog’s point of view can help us understand what socializing is joyful and what’s just too much.
This is the meaning of socialization. As our dogs’ guardians, we can bring harmony into our dogs' lives by intentionally planning exposure to places, people, animals and things, always keeping their experience in mind.
By planning well, we help our dogs form neutral or positive associations with everyday life. And in order to exist harmoniously, these associations are fundamental. That’s because how we feel about a place or thing is a powerful driver for what we do when faced with it. Training is great, but often what we mean when we say our dog “needs training” is actually better socialization.
As you can see, when we think of socializing as the result of socialization and not the process of getting there, we are much better equipped to introduce our dog to our world and our world to our dog. Socialization is of fundamental importance for puppies, and those early experiences often have outsized impacts on how your dog will feel and react to elements in your shared environment. But it doesn’t end with puppyhood. Throughout our lives with dogs, we share the world with them, doing it wisely is also socialization. It can be as simple as sitting on your front porch with your dog, having a play session next to a local playground, or passing another dog when on a walk.
Socialized dogs are comfortable and confident in our world. They are ready to develop new skills and take on new adventures. And in order to train around a person, place, animal, or new thing, socialization must happen first.
Enrichment
Even the most sophisticated modern dog is, well, a dog! Which means he has dog needs, dog interests, and dog hobbies, such as:
- Digging
- Chewing
- Foraging/scavenging/hunting
- Sniffing
- Resting
- and many other species appropriate behaviors
These doggy hobbies will find a way to express themselves, even if we try to suppress them (and we shouldn’t). And it should be in a dog’s bill of rights that he is allowed to be himself, maybe especially in these quintessentially canine ways.
Because our modern homes and environments often don’t naturally present convenient places to express these canine needs, enrichment is an important part of living in harmony with our dogs. Enrichment, simply, is creating opportunities for your dog to express natural behavior in an appropriate way. Effective enrichment creates chances for your dog to :
- Forage for their meals
- Sniff in new places
- Chew appropriate items
- Enjoy unrestricted movement
- Express appropriate & functional play
- And pursue their individual joy when safe
Not only is this good for our dogs, it’s key to finding harmony for those of us who share our lives with dogs as well. Dogs who have learned to enjoy chewing their own appropriate items aren’t motivated to choose your heirloom dresser, or the edge of your favorite rug. Dogs that have a fun, interesting place to dig are less likely to choose your recently planted garden as their digging spot. And dogs that are satisfied and allowed to be dogs are prepared to socialize and learn.
And the benefit of enrichment often goes far beyond preventing unwanted expressions of those exact behaviors– it can improve the welfare and behavior of your dog generally.
Most dogs in homes today could use more enrichment in their lives, and this must be combined with prevention strategies or management to decrease unwanted behaviors. Enrichment improves your dog’s life (and yours) exponentially.
Enrich your dog’s life so she can be herself in your world, and you can enjoy it with her.
More than the sum of its parts: BRAVE
That’s it! Training, Safety and Wellness, Communication, Socialization and Enrichment are the keys to a joyful, fulfilling relationship with a joyful, fulfilled dog. Often, we take care of one or two of these elements, and put a lot of effort into them, only to find that we don’t see the changes we hoped would occur. Or we might skip right to training, without finding a foundation in harmony, first! But every plan and solution for our dogs that brings us to harmony needs to account for each element, there is no harmony without all five. And here’s the thing..... when we put a little effort into ensuring each element is a part of the plan, our overall efforts go down, not up. Because harmony isn’t hard, but it sure is difficult to get along when it’s missing. If you got your dog to enjoy her, and you want to give her a life, instead of just keeping her alive, the Harmony Model is for you.
At the center of applying the Harmony Model is BRAVE. Taking all elements of the Harmony Model and applying them to real world opportunities and skills, BRAVE brings harmony down to earth. Each element of BRAVE reinforces the bond that you have with your dog and begins by considering the dog’s experience to:
- Gain mutual understanding
- Ensure safety
- Provide fulfilling choices
- Build resilience
- Increase adaptability
- Create confidence
BRAVE is the Harmony Model in action.
