You Can Teach an Old Dog New Tricks

Wait! Something is wrong.

Isn’t that title supposed to say, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks?”

Nope.

I am proud to say that I have officially proven wrong the old adage found in John Fitzherbert’s “Book of Husbandry” published in 1523.

It has only taken someone 499 years, but I have done it! (Okay, I admit that it is highly probable someone else has done it before me.)

I am proud to say that I have officially proven wrong the old adage found in John Fitzherbert’s “Book of Husbandry” published in 1523. It has only taken someone 499 years, but I have done it!

In case you are wondering though, here is how I did it.

Before I started The Bulb, I was highly engaged at my previous role—meaning I was completing or supervising assignments 25 hours a day. Whenever something came up necessitating a skill set that I did not possess or did not have the time for, I found someone on my team or a trusted partner who could assume the project. Usually when the skill was technical or required getting to know a new product, it meant that the person was specialized in that area or had more time than me to take on the role of figuring it out. In both cases, it usually meant that the person was a “year or two” younger than me. (Haha! I even made myself laugh.) The worst part of that situation was that I crave learning new things, especially when they entail technology and are highly detailed. It killed me to pass things off.

Here at The Bulb, I have no one to delegate to other than myself, and I prize when end products exude excellence. So, when a client requested a highly designed deliverable, my first inclination was to open my desktop and start fiddling with tools I currently knew so I could get going and get going fast. (I value a pretty quick turnaround too.) But try as I might, my product testing left me unfulfilled. This was not how I wanted to turn over my finished product to the client. So, I did the right thing: I turned off the billable clock and submerged myself in hours of tutorials.

Twelve hours later, I was ready to rock and roll in Adobe InDesign. Before long, I was floating in the Adobe Cloud with an all-access pass to tools that I had always given direction on but had never really used myself other than to hop in a file to make a tweak. Ten days later, the client had a 60-page document made to custom order.

Since then, I have moved beyond Adobe InDesign and muddied the waters in everything from learning how to set up a business with the Internal Revenue Service to how to be my own chief financial officer to what it means to make a clipping mask. My tolerance soon registered high enough on the resistance charts that I decided to try out my theory that you can teach an old dog new tricks on an actual dog. Looking around the office, I set my sights on Bailey, Chief Operating Pawficer at The Bulb.

Bailey is a nine-year-old mini Goldendoodle. Within her first year of life, Bailey learned how to sit, shake, wave, give kisses, lay down, play dead, roll over, crawl, pounce, hop and jump (they both look the same), go get the ball, come, stay, walk, turn, and at the end of her repertoire, give me a high “ten” to celebrate all that she knows. You get it: she is an overachiever and best dog ever. I would like to take all the credit, but she probably learned this from her best friend and housemate at the time, Rocky, who is no longer with us. Older than Bailey, Rocky was a Shichi (half Shih Tzu and half Chihuahua) who could also sneeze and speak upon command, yet he never barked at people passing by outside the window. Bailey, who barks all the time, still refuses to “speak” upon request.

Possibly, it was Bailey’s refusal to speak that made me lose my steam to perform the nightly ritual of having to drag myself off the couch at 9:00 p.m. when these tricks occurred (yes, the dogs also knew how to tell time and request this), or maybe I just got lazy. But for whatever reason, I stopped trying to teach my dogs new tricks eight long years ago.

So, out came the bag of bacon treats and a bench. Soon Bailey learned how to go “under” that bench and “over” it with either verbal or hand commands. It took less than a week for Bailey to learn those new tricks at the age of nine (52 in small dog years). I am so proud of myself, I mean, Bailey for picking up those new skills so quickly. Now, Bailey and I have moved on to learning how to give hugs which is essentially her standing and putting her paws on my right shoulder and me hugging her.

Now, I know what you are thinking: “Where is the business tie-in here?”

Well then, let me give it to you straight. If you are thinking that you or your team cannot learn a new skill or start down a path that leads to a refreshed culture, then you are clearly as wrong as I was pre-Adobe InDesign and bench-leaping days. Your team is merely waiting for you to stop being complacent and to open the door to new engagement practices that will make their performance soar to new heights.

If you are looking for a place to begin, why not open your day with a themed meeting to jumpstart process improvement? Or host an internal pitch session parodied off “Shark Tank” to see what innovative ideas your team is harboring? What if you took on the role of customer and brought a high-profile demand to your sales team to solve in three business days? Or found a book detailing a challenge facing the team and dove into a team read? If fishing is your thing, why not share a bit of yourself with your team by bonding over how to tie a simple fly and then asking them about their personal hobbies to get to know them better?

I bet if you did any one of these suggestions, you would in fact teach some “new tricks” to any two-legged co-workers involved.

Every dog has its day. Let today be yours.