Now, this post isn’t about dogs but the lead in is that I’m reading a very good book by Zak George called “Dog Training Revolution.” Highly recommended if you have a need to train your puppy or dog. His entire philosophy on training a dogs is to reward the the behaviors you like instead of punishing for the behaviors you don’t like. As I read this book from cover to cover (literally multiple times, highlighting as I go) it makes perfect sense. A puppy when starting out has no idea what is right or wrong. When we bring it home it is in alien territory and has no clue what is going on. If we train by punishing that puppy it is going to live in fear. All the time. Only able to focus on how terrible things are when it does just about anything. The fear doesn’t allow the poor animal to understand at all what it should do to make us happy.
A puppy will learn so much more and bond with us so much more readily and more deeply if we reward the good things. Maximizing strengths while minimizing weaknesses.
We really aren’t any different from a puppy. Let’s think about this. If we were to be punished, I mean literally punished, for all of our sins, I’m not sure we would even be alive. If you literally got hurt you every single time you uttered a curse word or argued with someone then you certainly would learn but it would be learning out of fear. If the person you got into an argument just punched you in the face every time you argued with them, you wouldn’t do it any more but it would only be because you were afraid of being hurt. You’d get to the point where you’d be afraid of saying much of anything to that person for fear of getting punched. You’d live in fear and would ultimately come to resent that person. You may even have someone in mind right now that you feel that way about.
So let’s look at the Godly principle here. If He punished you every time you did anything wrong you’d be in the same situation as I outlined above. You would avoid doing the bad things but you’d be living in fear of doing the wrong thing. You may eventually come to resent God because all you would see are the punishments, the terrible things. Would we really be learning on what to do right or would we be learning what happens when we do wrong?
God does not want us to live in fear. If we were punished for everything we do wrong it would be never ending. I’m not even sure we would be alive if all he did was punish us. We would live in fear and would be afraid every time we did something we thought was even remotely wrong. God doesn’t want that. He wants us to live in love, enjoying this life knowing we are doing the right things and learning all the time how we can use doing good can minimize the bad. He wants us to sometimes go out on a limb to do good things, not avoid doing so because we’re afraid of being punished.
So we have to look for the things we do that are good in ourselves and not focus on the bad things we do. I’m not saying at all that we should just ignore the bad things, not at all. We should always be looking at ways to improve our situations by understanding that what we do wrong has consequences. I am suggesting that we try to minimize the negative impact those things we do wrong have on us and instead think about how wonderful things are when we do the right thing. Maximize the good strengths to minimize the weaknesses.
Unlimited rewards are available to us. All we have to do is focus on the good things God wants from us and learn how to maximize those things to, in turn, learn how to minimize the bad things we do.
I want to mention here at the end that I have no affiliation with Zak George and don’t receive compensation in any way from mentioning his book. He’s not a sponsor and probably won’t even ever know that I mentioned him here. It truly is just a great book that I recommend for training your dogs.
