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Behavior SMARTS

Learn Your Craft, Master Your Skills, Love Your Role!

 

 

Feel Alone, Isolated, Unsure & Sometimes In Need of Help?

The  Professional’s Dilemma: High Demand, Zero Support

Pet industry clients—from private sessions to board-and-train programs—demand nothing short of excellence. We must master precise mechanics such as shaping, capturing, and luring, and possess accurate behavioral knowledge to train pets and, crucially, coach their owners effectively.

Despite this high bar, pet professionals operate in a vacuum. Support systems are scarce, and there is no safe, objective venue for structured feedback or assistance. This isolation stunts career development and prevents professional improvements.

How Do You Bridge the Skill Gap? While industry credentials exist, they don’t guarantee performance. The PPG’s recent matrix evaluation confirmed that many industry programs overlook performance competency and lack rigorous ethical standards. This makes a reliance on paper qualifications risky.

The Solution is Human: Finding an experienced professional mentor is the most powerful, direct way to gain the guidance, advice, and support needed to speed up your career growth and ensure the highest quality of service.

The Solution is Human: Finding an experienced professional mentor is the most powerful, direct way to gain the guidance, advice, and support you need 

🎉 Immediate Access Upon Registration

As soon as you register for the Mentoring program, you immediately gain access to several essential resources designed to kickstart your learning journey:

1. Your Onboarding Video Call:

    • A 1-hour video call is scheduled at your convenience.

    • The goal is to evaluate your current skills and knowledge and develop a customized needs assessment for the program.

2. Access to Learning Platforms:

    • Immediate access to your Member Area and the Online Support Group.

3. Discount Eligibility:

    • A 15% Discount on all DogNostics products and services (excluding mentoring memberships).

4. Bonus Training Program:

    • Immediate access to your Bonus Short Program: Your Dog Training Pro Starter Kit—covering the essential must-know fundamentals.

5. Mentor Access & Networking:

    • Access to Your Mentors for support and assistance.

    • Access to the specialized Behavior SMARTs networking group within your member area.

  🎁 Monthly Content & Support Breakdown

Each month, the certification program provides a variety of educational and practical resources designed to build competency, deepen scientific understanding, and offer real-world case support.

1. Skill Mastery and Assessment (Practical Application)

These resources focus on developing and refining practical training skills.

  • A Monthly Skill To Master: A new skill is presented via video and PDF support. You can submit your own skill video for assessment and personalized feedback. Skills become more difficult throughout the program.
  • Your Monthly Skill Assessment: You can submit a skill video along with your goal and operational definition. The team provides detailed feedback on your performance competency.

2. Deepening Scientific Understanding (Core Concepts)

These handouts and modules ensure you confidently understand the behavioral science underpinning force-free training. All of these can be used in your own business.

  • Learning & Behavior Concept: Designed to help you review, apply, and confidently articulate the core concepts of ethical and force-free pet training and behavior.
  • The Language of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA): Each month, a key ABA term is unpacked to strengthen your understanding of the science.
  • A Knowledge Concept: Provides clear, concise definitions of complex scientific terms (e.g., respondent conditioning, motivating operations) in practical language for trainers.

3. Real-World Case Study Support

You receive valuable experience and templates from genuine behavioral case reviews.

  • Monthly Behavior Case Support: Join a live Zoom session to review and analyze a case study using the DMAIC process.
    • Benefit: These sessions are excellent for learning and support, and you receive the Blueprint template for use in your own business for each case study you attend.

4. Case Study Selection & Practice Topics

During the Monthly Behavior Case Support, one of the following high-value topics is also covered, allowing you to learn and practice advanced techniques:

  • Functional Assessment of Target Behavior: Master how to conduct a data-driven Functional Assessment, covering informant interviews, direct observation, and functional analysis.
  • Counter Conditioning Plans, Techniques, and Methods: Learn and practice different methods for counter conditioning.
  • Consent and Preference Testing Protocols: Understand and participate in protocols for consent and preference testing tasks.
  • Play, Toys, and Other Secondary Reinforcers: Learn what and how best to utilize these in your training and behavior modification programs.

 

Top Five Reasons On How A Mentor Can Help You Elevate Your Operational Practice: Why Pet Professionals Seek Case-Focused Mentorship

For the advanced pet professional, mentorship isn’t just about general career advice—it is an essential operational resource. When managing complex behavior cases, executing precise behavioral modification, and designing human-centric training plans, having a seasoned mentor ensures your protocols are scientifically sound, ethically robust, and effectively executed.

Here are the top five reasons professionals seek clinical case mentorship:

1. Mastering Functional Analysis and Case Conceptualization

Reading about operant and respondent conditioning is vastly different from accurately identifying the maintaining variables of an intense, real-world behavior problem. A mentor helps you look past symptoms to analyze the true function of a behavior. Together, you can systematically review antecedents, consequences, and motivating operations, ensuring your behavior modification plans target the root cause rather than just managing the surface expressions.

2. Translating Knowledge Components into Fluent Physical Skills

You can thoroughly understand the mechanics of a counter-conditioning protocol (declarative knowledge), but still struggle with your split-second mechanics under pressure (procedural knowledge). A mentor acts as a behavioral coach for you. By reviewing video footage of your sessions, they help you refine your micro-timing, split criteria cleanly, and master the physical fluency required to handle high-arousal or high-risk cases safely.

3. Structuring and Managing Complex Training Programs

A brilliant behavioral protocol is useless if the pet owner cannot or will not implement it. Mentorship provides you with a roadmap for case management, helping you design structured training programs that break down complex behaviors into achievable client milestones. Your mentor helps you optimize your intake processes, set realistic criteria for human learners, and build tracking metrics to objectively measure progress.

4. Directing Ethical Problem-Solving and Safety Protocols

High-risk behavior cases—such as severe resource guarding or intra-household aggression—carry high stakes for animal welfare and human safety. When standard protocols face roadblocks, a mentor provides the vital second pair of eyes needed to troubleshoot safely. They guide you through systematic desensitization adjustments, environmental management overhauls, and the ethical decision-making frameworks necessary for challenging cases.

5. Bridging the Gap Between Client Coaching and Pet Training

True mastery in our field requires a dual skill set: you must be an excellent animal trainer, but an even better teacher of humans. Mentorship helps you bridge this gap, showing you how to teach pet owners using structured instructional systems. A mentor helps you shift from simply telling a client what to do, to successfully coaching them into the mechanical fluency they need to sustain the dog’s behavioral progress long-term.

The Takeaway: Case-focused mentorship transforms isolated practitioners into elite clinical consultants. By systematically breaking down case analysis and sharpening your personal mechanics, you protect animal welfare, supercharge client compliance, and approach even the most daunting behavior cases with absolute confidence.

BehaviorSMARTS

$40.00

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🤔 Is the Behavior SMARTS Mentoring Program Right For You?

 

If you answer YES to any of the following questions, our 12-Month Behavior SMARTS Mentoring Program is your essential next step for professional development and success:

1. Client Management & Business Growth

  • Are you struggling with client attrition (clients dropping out) or failing to fully convince clients of your methods?

  • Are you having difficulty consistently getting the desired results with your clients?

2. Behavioral Assessment & Case Strategy

  • Do you lack a structured, professional process for tackling severe behavior cases, instead of just “trying” various approaches?

  • Do you struggle with performing a data-driven Functional Assessment using Informant Interviews, Direct Observation, and Functional Analysis?

3. Advanced Training Mechanics & Concepts

  • Do you often prefer one training method (like luring) because you are not skilled or competent in other approaches?

  • Are you unsure about how to effectively modify a pet’s emotional response to stimuli?

  • Do you lack the competency, support, and guidance needed to master essential strategies that replace punishment, such as shaping and differential reinforcement?

  • Are you confused by advanced behavioral concepts like blocking, shadowing, reinforcement protocols, or the matching law?

4. Accreditation & Skill Verification

  • Do you currently hold multiple credentials but have never had your practical skills professionally refined, evaluated, or improved?

  • Do you feel intimidated about earning an independent, professional accreditation, but recognize you need help sharpening your core training skills?

Testimonials

Niki has the incredible ability, which is – I believe – unique to the industry, to combine her exceptional skills and experience teaching professionals how to train staff, with her customer service attitude and eye for excellence gained from her years as an executive manager of international luxury hotels, with her passion and talent for animal training. And she combines all of this with her impressive and solid academic foundation in business and animal learning theory to create dog training and dog owner training methods that are scientifically based, effective and above all else, do no harm. R Ingram

Testimonials

“Thank you so much for the feedback, Louise! I am enjoying the course very much, I’m so grateful that you are able to provide the education at such a low cost – all other options are out of my budget! … I have been clicker training for a couple of years now, but I’ve struggled so much to split behaviors to a tiny enough amount among many other issues with my mechanics. I’m so grateful to finally be getting the guidance and feedback I need to keep improving my skills.”   D Iyer

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FAQ’s

  1. When does the mentoring program start? The program begins as soon as you register. Then, each month, new resources are added, and new meetings are scheduled.
  2. How does the mentoring program begin? You will have access to your member area, where you can set up your onboarding video call for your skill and behavior analysis.
  3. How long do I have access to the mentoring program benefits? After enrolling, you have a 12-month subscription.
  4. What if I am unhappy with the content? Due to the time we invest in new members at the front end of the program, we require a minimum 12-month subscription period. These programs are capped at a specific number to ensure we can provide all the support you need. If you feel you are missing something important, then let’s chat. We are here to support you and ensure you are happy with the content and delivery.
  5. What resources can I use in my business? Everything we provide during the program can be applied to your business.  Some resources can be rebranded with your logo, while others must include our logo as well. This is for legal purposes and to ensure others can use the materials without being in a copyright infringement situation.
  6. How does the 15% discount work? It’s simple. If you are a DogNostics Member, you will be entitled to an ongoing discount on all our programs.

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