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[00:00:00] Hey, everyone. Welcome to fostering excellence in agility the podcast. I'm your host competitor, coach and mentor Megan Foster. I help agility enthusiasts, focus on the small details of training and behavior while still having a clear understanding of their big picture goals. Join me as I take you through key elements of dog agility, training, competing, and teaching, and how you can take action today to start improving your skills within the sport.
Let's get started. . Hey everyone. Welcome to episode one, the introduction of this podcast. I just want to briefly give you the story of mine, who I am, where I've been, where I've come from, where I'm going and the goals of this podcast. Um, it was probably the mid nineties and that's when our local obedience clubs started getting involved in agility and.[00:01:00]
That's where my passion began. I was immediately hooked. I didn't have a dog of my own, so I was borrowing people's dogs to train and run with. And when I finally got my first Sheltie in 1998, I was unstoppable. I was immediately training every day after school, I was wanting to compete more and more. I was, uh, asking to travel to seminar so that I could learn as much as I could.
And because agility was so new and especially in Mississippi, where I grew up. There was only one club kind of offering any sort of agility training. I was a part of helping people learn and guiding people through the sport pretty quickly. It was an era of if you had done it before you get to teach the next generation.
And so I was out there with other club members, helping people learn and helping [00:02:00] people teach other people, new people to the sport, new people with dogs. So that's kind of always been. Uh, part of who I am. If we fast forward to 2005, I was already on my second. And. Shelties if you read about me on my and all my website, my bio, those dogs are Ty and Dino in 2005.
I was the youngest USDAA judge. So I started judging when I was 13 and I made my first national final that same year. So I was competing at high levels. Trying so hard to just immerse myself in the sport and to give back in different ways. So I judged, I hosted events. I taught as much as I could. I designed courses, I talked about agility constantly.
Um, obsession does come to mind, but I feel like that's accepted here. So [00:03:00] thank you for that. If we fast forward again to 2013, when I moved to Washington, I started my own training school synergy, dog sports that built very quickly from a couple of classes, a couple of nights a week to. Teaching pretty much all day, every day, Monday through Thursday.
And then I was adding instructors and this huge program was building around all of these amazing teams that I was able to teach and work with while also still competing with my border collies. Now smack and shock. If we jump a little bit further to 2015, when I got my parson Russell, terrier, Shrek. I experienced this huge shift in who I was as a trainer with all of my previous dogs.
I was basically training the way that everyone [00:04:00] around me was training. It wasn't force it wasn't we weren't using prong colors or colors or anything like that. So it wasn't what you might consider a traditional compulsion. But it wasn't the trainer that I am today. It was something in between. It was positive reinforcement with a sprinkling of, or else on top.
And that pretty much worked because the dogs that I had before getting Shrek were pretty cooperative. They enjoyed the work enough that my training didn't have to be super precise, super clear if my handling was. Pretty precise and pretty clear they were willing participants. But when I got struck things changed, my situation was different.
I was working a lot more than I was working when I had my other dogs before and he needed [00:05:00] more precise training, more clear training. And so in two, when I got him, I made a huge shift in how I. Train and how I look at things. And so one might, if you're listening to this, you might understand positive reinforcement, 2.0, or working from a place of wellness or choice-based training and all of those fit.
But it's very hard to put into words the way that I now approach training, essentially bottom line is I'm always working from a place of wellness. That my own needs are met and that my dog's needs are met in life. Before we ever begin the conversation about sports. I accept that the dog that I live with is also the dog that I train and compete with.
And all of that needs to align with who we are as individuals. It really didn't work out in a [00:06:00] competitive sense for sure. Because competing just isn't his thing. It's not who he is. It's too much of, for me to ask him of that, even though his siblings and family members are competing, it's just not for him.
And that's okay. Learning to accept. That was a part of this journey, this big picture journey of being able to telescope back and. Make sure that everyone's needs are met and that everyone has a say in how this goes and accepting who I am as a competitor does not align with who struck is as an individual.
And that's where my passion lies focusing on the big picture of every team that I work with so that when the. Something is not working for a team. They almost always come to me with, these are [00:07:00] all the things that I've tried and it's working for my classmates, it's working for my dog's litter mates. It's working for my friends and it's just not working for me.
That's where I get really excited because that's an opportunity for me to grow as a trainer, as a mentor, as a coach, it's an opportunity for that team to grow. As a trainer and as a competitor. And it's an opportunity for that team to model a new behavior for the culture of dog training, dog sports, dog agility, because the more we push against what has always worked, the faster we were, we will evolve and the faster we will improve.
Every time I bring home a new dog for myself. It's just happened. My puppy sprint is 11 months old, and I'm already thinking about the things that I might do a little bit [00:08:00] differently with the next puppy and that's five or six years away, most likely. So I'm always wanting to. Push against what we've always done.
And what's always been working because there is always going to be a new, kinder, more effective solution that works better for the individual team in front of me. And that's how fostering excellence and agility was born. I created a program that. Takes all of these factors into account who the individual handler is as a trainer, as a competitor, how eat, how the dog comes into this space with their own genetics and temperament and feelings about what we're asking them to do.
And so this podcast is going to take all of the elements of that program and break them down and talk about them from. [00:09:00] The perspective of a trainer, the perspective of a competitor and the perspective of a teacher. When I talk about training specific skills, I will probably often reflect on maybe the trainer that I was five years ago or 15 years ago, and how that looks different.
And how I train things differently today and how that is going to inform how I compete and how that's going to help me as a competitor and vice versa, how I compete, how that's going to help me as a trainer. And also I want to come at this from the teaching perspective because so many of us. All of these things, trainer, competitor teacher.
Sometimes we're doing it at the same time. Sometimes we have to put on different hats during different times of the day. We need help identifying the boundaries between those three things. [00:10:00] And even if you don't teach agility, you model agility, you model training, you model. Being a trainer, you model being a competitor to your classmates, to your friends on the internet.
So we all have that capacity to change the culture of dog sports and dog agility. And that's what we're going to talk about.
thanks for listening, please subscribe and leave me a review. If you'd like to support this podcast, head over to synergy dog sports.com/community to access bonus content and to get your questions answered via podcast episodes and other social media content. If you'd like to know more about what I'm up to and what's coming up, make sure to bookmark my website, www. Synergy dog sports.com.[00:11:00]
