Note: Some Speaker Topic Summaries are still coming! We ll update as we get them!

Note: Some Speaker Topic Summaries are still coming! We ll update as we get them!

Brian Bergford Growing Your Business by Growing Others: Creating Greater Freedom Through Impact Mentorship If you want to take your business to the next level and have more time to do the things you re most passionate about, mastering mentorship is a must! As a trainer, you re a teacher. Yes: you teach dogs, yet you likely spend just as much time teaching people how to train their dogs and live with them more effectively. But if you want to have the greatest possible impact in the dog training world, you need to take things to the next level by becoming a great mentor. When you mentor people, you don t just teach them a few skills you take an active role in developing them and helping them grow toward their potential. If you properly develop employees, they will represent you and your brand well and help carry your message farther than you can alone; they can also grow to take on tasks that have been chewing up your time time that could be spent engaging in higher-level functions like planning and creative innovation. Or maybe you just need some time off for a change but you need to be able to trust that your business is in good hands. If it s an up-and-coming trainer you re mentoring, you can help them grow to make a difference in the training community and your legacy can live through them long after you re done training professionally. Bottom line? Mastering mentorship enables you to do greater things than you could ever dream of doing alone. So what are the characteristics of a great mentor, and how do you become one? How do you find the right people to mentor? How do you create mutually beneficial relationships? In this session, Brian will focus on helping you develop strategies to build relationships, grow your business, and maximize your impact by growing the people around you! Erica C. Boling, PhD K9 Peak Performance Unleashed! Do you want to learn how to design canine fitness programs that allow your dog to reach peak performance while minimizing the chance of injury? Are you interested in learning how to use your knowledge and passion for canine fitness to create profitable programs and additional income for your business? In this session, learn what it takes to have a highly conditioned dog that excels in various canine sports and working conditions. Develop a critical eye for noticing subtle signs of soreness before injury occurs. Recognize strengths and weaknesses in your current fitness program and understand steps you can take to make improvements. Take action to become a leader in the K9 Peak Performance Movement and turn your passion into a business success! Marc Goldberg and Brother Christopher Presenting Our New Book: Let Dogs Be Dogs by the Monks of New Skete and Marc Goldberg The book is a comprehensive guide on what leadership is, why dogs need it and how the reader can provide it. LET DOGS BE DOGS is compatible with virtually any training style and helps the reader create and take advantage of teachable moments to improve their relationship with their dog. The reader will learn how to prevent or solve most dog behavior problems. We believe the dog trainers will also love this book because it will help them prepare their clients to be the sort of owners who strengthen the dog trainer s work rather than undoing it. We will also tell the inside story of this book, including all the challenges that arose during the three years it took to bring LET DOGS BE DOGS to life.

Karen Laws Unravelling the Mastery of You Your Path to Success Many dog trainers transition their hobby to a business because they love to connect with dogs. Unraveling the Mystery links the personal satisfaction associated with a profession in the canine industry to connecting with the true client - the person who pays your fee! It may seem like a no-brainer in the canine profession, that connecting with owners is the key to ensure sustainable business success. However, research shows that everyone communicates, but few people genuinely connect. Failure to connect with your potential client may mean leaving money on the table. Unraveling the Mystery is a combination of lecture and role-playing that explores connecting with people in a meaningful way for success in business and in life. This presentation will explore a simple model to discover your unique personality style and to teach you how to genuinely connect with your clients. You will learn answers to questions that perhaps you have never thought about Answers that will prepare you to become more and that will set you above others in the highly competitive professional canine industry. You will develop a deeper knowledge of your own personality style and a greater understanding of others. What you take away from this presentation will sharpen your intuition of the personality styles that you will easily connect with and those that may take more effort on your part. Equipped with this knowledge, you will know how to best approach and connect with each client s style to optimize your personal relationships and business successes. Bring an open mind and be prepared to have fun while you get to know yourself and understand others! Chad Mackin Train the Brain: the Biology of Behavior What is the emotional range of dogs? How do emotional states affect learning and performance? Why does it matter? How can we, as trainers, apply biology to speed up results and make training stick better. Skinner didn't have the ability to look inside the animal to see why things worked, but neuroscience can. The insights gained in recent years gives us a more complete picture of behavior than has been possible in the past. How can we apply new findings in how behavior is formed in order to make ourselves better trainers? That's exactly what we are going to explore in this presentation.

Robin MacFarlane...and then he replied, "Well, maybe you're a lousy... If you re burned out with clients not following through, tired of hearing excuses, dread teaching classes, or prefer to spend your time just training the dogs then you may need to rethink your career choice. Being a Professional Dog Trainer is only partly about dogs. The bulk of the profession is about people and most success (or failure) hinges on our skill level in communicating with them. Join this interactive session as Robin shares a true story that altered the path of her career and left her hungry to learn the nuisances of the profession that no one had previously prepared her for. Together we ll take a journey exploring 3 key elements of effective teaching, that if well developed, will set you apart from most of your competitors, ensure a comfortable living and have people requesting your services with little need to expend time or money marketing your talent. It will also help you sleep soundly at night knowing you gave your clients what they needed to succeed. Mary Mazzeri Linking Languages Linking Languages is a combination of lecture and workshop formats that explores the why s and how s of communicating between the canine and human minds through logical incremental sequencing of training steps. It emphasizes not only how to train the dog but how to educate the human at the other end of the leash. The methodology is a blend of old and new training techniques developed over 4 decades of teaching classes, private lessons and boarding-training formats. Basic training techniques as well as solutions for problem behaviors will be addressed. Bring a dog, bring an open mind and come with questions to ask and training problems to discuss. Tyler Muto Un-mixing Your Messages: Eliminating Conflict for More Efficient Training

Aimee Sadler Training Triage And The Power Of Play Groups The Use Of Canine Play Groups To Enhance Quality Of Life While Sheltered And To Save Lives! EVERY DOG, EVERY DAY LET THEM PLAY! It s more than just fun and games; play groups save lives! After visiting over 175 shelters across the United States and Canada, the team at Dogs Playing for Life has done more than have a lot of fun playing with dogs. Aimee Sadler, Founder and CEO will share case studies and evidence that playgroups improve the quality of life of sheltered dogs and their caretakers. Sadler, who has been directly involved with the development of canine enrichment and behavior programming for shelters since 1998, will address the contextual difference between shelter training and private training and will demonstrate why play groups have begun to reshape the landscape of sheltering in the U.S. Shelters across the country have effectively used play groups to facilitate better adoption matching, more accurate sociability assessments and improved shelter operations. Dogs live to play we let them play to live! Joel Silverman Controlled and Uncontrolled Training Environments Understanding what controlled and uncontrolled training environments are, is something that is essential in the dog training world. By you having this understanding, and the ability to communicate this to your clients, you can simplify animal behavior, which in effect, can make your job a lot easier. Joel Silverman started talking about this about 5 years ago, and started to incorporate this very important message in his personal appearances, books, and DVDs. He even devotes a whole chapter to this in his newest book, More What Color is Your Dog? Controlled Training Environment - Joel will explain what the controlled training environment is, as this is the environment we most often find ourselves in. In this environment, we quite often have a dog on a leash, and the dog is focused on us because of treat or toy we that we have. This is the environment we will be working in about 80% of the time. Uncontrolled Training Environment Joel will explain what the uncontrolled training environment is. This is the environment we find ourselves in where we are not actually training our dog, and this not a formal training session. Instead, the dog is taking it upon himself to play out actions. We might see a dog barking at a person, place or thing out the window, jumping up on people when they come into the house, or counter-surfing. We might even see some kinds of aggression or resource guarding. Understanding how dogs are rewarded or corrected in both the controlled, and uncontrolled training environments is extremely important. The biggest reason is that rewards and corrections often vary immensely from one environment to another. What is great about this presentation is that in the past, several positive only dog trainers have agreed that this kind of explanation makes sense.

Panel How NOT to Burn Out and Fade Away Creating Longevity in the Dog Training World Moderator Melanie Benware Panelists Heather Beck, Cyndy Douan, Nelson Hodges, Leslie Horton The questions are from YOU! Our panelists address surviving and maintaining passion in the dog training industry based on their experience! Rodney Habib Keynote Speaker Wednesday Night Drew Lynch Saturday Last Session Julie Hart Victoria Warfel Fostering Fear: Fear in Rescue Dogs Holistic Training Practices and How to Help Them Using Benevolent Leadership