Focus, like attention, should be self-directed. In other words the dog should be choosing to focus on you instead of being cued to. There are times when you are going to ask for focus, but in general, the cues should be environmental and functional not a word or signal.
Dogs look to humans for direction, affection, and connection. If there are mixed signals and commands from owners and loved ones, it will be hard for your dog to understand where it is in relation to you. Communication is vital to insure a clear training message is being delivered to your dogs.
As part of that communication, there must be focus not only from the dog to the human, but from the human to the dog. You must see the dog, really see the dog, the one that is in front of you, not some preconceived notion of what a dog should be or the movie you keep playing in your head about a dog you had in the past.
Getting and keeping your dog's attention is necessary when teaching your dog to do anything. It is also necessary when trying to resolve behavior issues. If your dog is focused on something else, if his attention is distracted from the task at hand, there can be no learning and no change. You having an interest in your dog and paying attention to her communication is just as, if not more, important.
We all focus on things that are interesting to us or that are rewarding in some way. Simple, right?
Something you really need to consider is your dog’s motivation for focusing on you. Why should your dog focus? Are you fascinating? Interesting? Do you have something to offer? You can’t expect your dog to focus on you for no reason. You need to supply the motivation with some sort of reinforcement.
There are many possibilities that you have available to make yourself more interesting to your dog and to make working with you an attractive option. They may or may not be practical and useful in any particular situation. The most common reinforcers available are food, toys, play, praise, and physical interaction. Each of these possibilities has advantages and disadvantages.
Physical interaction of all intensities (from rough wrestling play to quiet stroking) can be used to reinforce focus. When we play without toys we call it personal play. Personal play can take on any number of forms of physical interaction. The key is figuring out exactly what type of personal play your dog enjoys and using that at the appropriate times.
Make your dog addicted to you!
To be interesting to your dog is one thing; but we want to go well beyond mere interest. We want our dogs to be obsessed with us. We don’t want them to tolerate working with us or give us half-hearted effort. We want them insisting and demanding to work with us. So how can we get this to happen?
One way is through the sophisticated and skilful use of reinforcers. Just “tossing cookies” at a dog is not enough. When do you give a cookie? What kind of cookie? And most importantly, why are you giving that cookie? More cookies does not equate with better focus! Using cookies in a smart and judicious way does. Every cookie should have a purpose. That purpose might be to help your dog make a positive association to working with you. That’s a perfectly valid reason to use cookies. Just be sure you know why you’re using them. Mindless habitual feeding does nothing to improve your dog’s focus.
Understanding how your dog feels the world. Understand and get to the heart of your dog's emotional experience of the world around them. Learn how a dog’s emotions are at the root of all of their behavior, and how “problems” are really simply a matter of a dog’s inability to physically relax at high levels of stimulation. Look at the way that your dog experiences the world, which is way more about the way they feel than it is about the way they think.
Our dogs are all hunters at their core. The thing a dog finds most satisfying in life is to satisfy their prey drive. Dogs also see the world through a filter – figuring out what attracts them (prey) and what repels them (predators). The more energized a dog is, the more that dog will be attracted to things that are “prey-like” and repelled by things that are predator-like. Since humans are, in general, more predator-like in a dog’s eyes, that means that our dogs will naturally resist contact with us the more excited they get.