I’ve loaned people (borrowed if you’re from MN) the book, The Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin. I fully expect all eyes that read those pages to weep with joy. Josh shares his journey with such clarity and insight you can feel his experiences radiating off the page. Yes, this book is about performance, but not a shortcut to performance. It is not step by step, it is not paint by numbers, it is not method this or system that. High performance is expressing the core of who you are through your art. High performance is unlearning more than learning. High performance appears like magic to others. The steps others see as most important in a given activity, the high performer lives between those steps. The high performer cultivates a hundred moves where others see only one. Read The Art of Learning, then come along with me as we go deep into its pages and live between the words. Let’s live in the transitions with our scent work dogs and tap into the greatness of our search partnership.
Playing In The Park
The way that 6 year old Josh plays his first chess game is so pure and organic and full of creative, life-affirming energy. Young, rambunctious Josh runs up to an old man in Washington Square Park and asks him to play – and the man says ok. With a mix of concentration and innocent exploration, Josh gives the old man an unexpected challenge. Josh walked through the park many times before with his mom, and days before his first game he’d observed a couple of men playing an intense game of chess. Whatever changed for Josh the day he challenged the old man to a game was not planned, but it was cultivated from that moment forward.
Scent Work can be such a pure, organic, creative, energetic experience for a dog. How can we know when a dog is ready for such an experience? 2 year old Josh probably wouldn’t have had the interest, coordination or cognitive ability to play chess in the park, and 11 year old Josh might not have wanted to embarrass himself playing a game for the first time in a public setting. A puppy sometimes appears to enjoy scent work – and some really do – but, most puppies aren’t actually equipped to search and solve complex problems. A 10 year old dog can enjoy scent work, but he might have more questions to ask about the context of the game. A 2-4 year old dog will often experience scent work just like 6 year old Josh experienced chess in the park: alive with the possibility of exploring a new world, changing that world and being changed by it.
Gifted Players Begin With The Ending And “Play Between Knowledge, Intuition And Creativity“
Josh describes his early years learning chess from Bruce Pandolfini as foundational and formative, but not typical. Instead of starting at the beginning of the game, with opening moves and tactical play aimed at winning games quickly, Bruce and Josh started at the end of the game, with a blank board, then with just two pieces, working out the intricacies of each piece and appreciating the beauty of the gameplay.
What is the scent work equivalent of Pandolfini’s teaching style? Well, I know what the antithesis of it is: start lines, known number of hides, clear boundaries, restrictions on hide location, time constraints, overvaluing the judgment from human to human compared to the communication from dog to human.
How does one approach scent work with an eye towards building a solid foundation? It starts with creating opportunities for the human to observe clear contrast in the behavior of the dog when there is no odor, odor collecting, and source odor. Someone who gets comfortable with these distinct patterns of behavior is building a great foundation. Someone who learns to truly trust her dog very early on in the scent work journey is learning the intricacies of scent work communication and appreciating the beauty of the game.
As Josh learned chess by focusing on principles of the game, he writes, “I was also gradually internalizing a marvelous methodology of learning – the play between knowledge, intuition and creativity.” He contrasts this style of learning with an analogy of the typical learning style in chess: “It is a little like developing the habit of stealing the test from your teacher’s desk instead of learning how to do the math. You may pass the test, but you learn absolutely nothing – and most critically, you don’t gain an appreciation for the value or beauty of learning itself. For children who focus early on openings, chess becomes about results. Period.”
For scent work humans who focus early on the dog putting his nose on the hide, on the dog staying close to the boxes or the vehicles, on the dog finding hides fast, scent work becomes about results. I’ve seen it a thousand times. And, it’s a hard habit to break.
Just to be clear, I am not advocating for a “wandering, lackadaisical, unreliable scent work dog having a hippy-dippy time searching for dandelions and fairy dust. Yes, you need a dog who agrees on the value of the target odor and shows reliability to hunt for the target odor, locate and source the target odor, and persist at source, indicate source, or communicate the likely location of a hide that cannot be sourced. Yes, you can fail to reach this stage or reach this stage suboptimally. But, this is arguably the easiest part of scent work.
For Josh, the play between knowledge, intuition and creativity is all about the transitions – the space between the moves. The space where you learn to sense what is going on and shape it to your advantage. For scent work humans, the transitions are where the magic happens. Just the other day I was coaching a Poodle and her human in a single hide search and the human was trying to figure out why the dog didn’t want to face the search area. In the transition from crate to search area there is opportunity for knowledge (I know what my dog typically does and is likely to do when we head to a search area), intuition (something is not right, what has my dog’s attention?) and creativity (how am I going to handle this right here right now?) to play. There is no right response to this situation, in fact, there may be a thousand right responses over the course of a thousand searches. To paraphrase Josh, “you’re doing the math, not stealing answers from the test.”
It takes so much more time and focus to internalize the fundamentals of scent work partnership than it does to be told what to do and to try to apply what you’re told to every situation. Be like Josh, take the time to build YOUR foundation in scent work and become a joyful problem-solver.
Reveling In Apparent Chaos
Josh describes himself as thriving in chaos, where he is confident he can “sort through the mayhem” more effectively than his opponents. Not everyone is built like Josh – or, for our purposes, not every dog or human is built like Josh. Be honest about who your dog is. Some dogs love to be kinetic and unpredictable. Some dogs are pensive and predictable. Some humans work best under conditions of uncertainty. Some humans won’t color outside the lines. Be true to your dog and true to yourself.
For Josh, being true to himself meant playing with intensity, playing in the “crazy space” as opposed to executing a pre-rehearsed strategy. Because Josh built a foundation in chess based on endgames, he had no need for a particular opening – in fact, he had the advantage when the game went off-script.
It is so easy to get sucked into a scent work script, especially when the people around you help reinforce that script (coaches, trial officials, classmates). It’s also easy to get used to the way your dog “normally” searches. Even if you aren’t as much of a chaos connoisseur as Josh, sometimes you may want to play as loose as you can when you search with your dog so you can learn how to react to any situation with confidence and creativity.
Strong Opponents And Learning From Losing
As a 10 year old Josh faced adult chess players in serious games. Imagine facing an opponent that has more experience, more mental and physical stamina, more cunning. Josh lost to some of these strong opponents, and as he tells it, “Losing is brutal.” How are we to balance the joy of winning with the necessity of losing to strong opponents and growing our skills? Josh suggests staying process-focused, and highlighting the road that got you to your big wins, as well as reflecting on the mental mishaps that contributed to losses. With the right mindset, strong opponents and losing performances are not to be feared.
Josh is clear about the value of strong opponents, writing that “growth comes at the point of resistance. We learn by pushing ourselves and finding what really lies at the outer reaches of our abilities.” Strong opponents help you to give your all and try your hardest. They also help you to experience the learning benefit from a win or a loss.
As a scent work human, you can directly relate to Josh’s thoughts on strong opponents and learning from losing. But how do we put these concepts into practice for our dogs? Josh was 6 when he began playing chess – someone was shaping his mind and his environment. That someone was his mom. Of course, there were others, but Josh calls out his mom as the most formative figure in his life. You can be Josh’s mom for your dog. You have the power to shape your dog’s attitude towards giving his all and reveling in the challenge of strong opponents. Even better, your dog can shape you! If you are willing to give up your own self-defeating narratives and the self-defeating narratives you place on your dog, you will find that your dog is very comfortable with venturing into new territory, pushing to his limits, and “losing”. Before you question that, ask yourself, “does my dog really share the same goals as me and see his experiences as meeting or failing to meet those goals?” If you don’t know the answer to that question, I’ll suggest that it is NO! Your dog sometimes aligns with your goals, but your dog does not share your goals. Your dog has goals that arise from whatever he is experiencing in the moment. If your goals can be flexible, you can journey into new territory, push limits, and “lose” in partnership with your dog in a very meaningful, fulfilling and successful way.
Make Sandals
As Josh journeys deeper into the world of competitive chess he has many experiences with distractions from the outside world. Some of these experiences, like hearing a Bon Jovi song and getting it stuck in his head during a match, have disastrous outcomes. One experience, an earthquake during the world championship for chess players under age 21, left Josh with a profound realization: unexpected conditions happening outside you and happening to you can be a source of awesome creative problem-solving power.
From 6 year old Josh playing hustlers in the park, to 10 year old Josh playing polished adult chess players, the progression from strong opponents to pushing your limits now opened up this whole new dimension of play, what many people know of as “the zone”. It’s one thing to be in the zone when everything is going to plan and nothing is inhibiting your play. It’s another thing to be in the zone despite distractions and surprises – it’s rarified territory to use distractions and the unexpected as your gateway into the zone, as your fuel in the zone. At age 16, Josh was playing in this special place and touching experiences few people can even comprehend.
Josh highlights the importance of the zone (specifically, “The Soft Zone”) through an ancient Indian parable: A man wants to walk across the land, but the earth is covered with thorns. He has two options – one is to pave his road, to tame all of nature into compliance. The other is to make sandals. Josh goes on to say, “making sandals is the internal solution. Like the Soft Zone, it does not base success on a submissive world or overpowering force, but on intelligent preparation and cultivated resilience.
How do we “make sandals” in the scent work world? One way is to build some routines to help address the challenges of a dynamic search environment. Have a routine for getting your dog from the crate/car and connecting with each other, as well as observing each other’s ability to focus (is your dog fixated on something in the distance, are you chatting with a friend?). If either or both of you are unable to focus on the task of searching for target odor, take the time to understand what’s going on. Just because you can physically move from the car to the start line, doesn’t mean your dog’s or your mind will move, too. Have a routine for handling unexpected behaviors or communication from your dog (I like to use a process that goes from supportive observation all the way to clear and commanding interaction – if needed). Have a routine for working through complexity with your dog. Have a routine for taking a break from the search, and for ending the search. Routines are not robotic executions of pre-planned scripts. Routines are living conversations you have with your dog so you can better understand what the two of you are facing when you partner together to search for target odor.
Another way to “make sandals” is to promise yourself you won’t make the scent work world around you responsible for your comfort, happiness, and performance. Years ago, I was at a trial walking towards a search area and a volunteer hurried over to me, ushered me off the main walkway and urgently whispered, “Hans is coming.” For a moment I thought my childhood dream of being a secret agent had finally come true, this must be a code phrase to activate me for my mission. Nope. It was a very large, reactive white shepherd handled by a woman who might at any moment become no more effective than a poop bag tied at the end of the leash if Hans decided to launch himself at something. This is a literal “paving of the road”, to use our Indian parable. No one is helping Hans and his human by paving their road. The moment the road ends, Hans and his human are worse off than it may appear. If you need others to pave your way, step back from competition and work on making your sandals.
Sometimes, an entire group of competitors will forget their sandals on trial day and then complain that the official or judge made them step on thorns barefoot. The common refrain is, “that search wasn’t fair.” “Those were bad hides.” “That CO is hard. He just wants everyone to fail.” Josh calls this “righteous indignation”, and strongly rebukes this mindset. From Josh’s perspective, there will always be unexpected and unfair challenges, just like there will always be bad weather and broken plans. When you cherry pick your experiences (“that’s a good official, I’ll only trial under her”) it’s easy to convince yourself you’re walking strong, barefoot over every challenge laid before you. Don’t forget your sandals on trial day – even if the road ahead ends up paved for your enjoyment, there may be potholes or a washout. And, if you find yourself at the “trial of thorns”, you’ll be ready to journey through the challenges with your own “intelligent preparation and cultivated resilience” to find “the zone” and use adversity to fuel your play.
Remember The Woman And The Bike
In the chapter, Downward Spiral, Josh details how easily one error can lead to a cascade of errors or a fatal error. It’s one thing to create routines, to make sandals, to practice and prepare for competition, it’s another thing to be in the dynamic flow of a competition search and probe for what is unfolding before you, walking the razor’s edge between success and defeat. Imagine you’re about to cross the street against traffic, but instead of walking, you must leap across a series of dominoes. If you aren’t careful and responsive – but also confident and decisive – you’ll knock the dominoes over, if you’re too slow, a vehicle – or the wind – may knock them over. Your margin for error is razor thin, your self-confidence must be high, and your awareness must be finely tuned to keep you on course.
If you observe 30-50 teams at a higher level scent work competition, you’ll see more than 2/3 of them go into the downward spiral at least once over the course of 4-6 searches. An overwhelming majority of these teams go down because, in Josh’s words, “… when we make a mistake and get frozen in what was, a layer of detachment builds.” I’ve experienced the stuckness Josh speaks of, and the resulting downward spiral. I’ve also experienced rolling with the punches of a search and coming out victorious. Just like meditation is about gently guiding your focus to your breath, and guiding it back when your mind strays, you must do the same as a partner for your dog in a search. You are responsible for your own focus and return to focus and you are on hand to assist your dog. If you’re too rigidly attached to the way you think things should go, you’ll lose connection to your dog and the unfolding search scenario. In competition this is where we might witness a dog trying to work the edge of odor away from the vehicles in a vehicle search and the human reacting with leash constraint and redirection back to the vehicles: the human isn’t present and aware of what the dog is doing, things often go south, and if they work out it’s simply by luck. If you’re too dependent on your dog and just “following” him around rather than receiving his communication and understanding it, your dog will prioritize getting your attention over finding the hides – in a competition, this is when we see a dog go from searching and working odor with a repeating pattern of behavior, to expanding away from the area of interest, pausing and staring into the distance, finding something to sniff and munch on, making an attempt to pee, staring at the human, all in an effort to get the human involved. The involvement the dog is looking for is not control-based, command-based involvement, it is here-now-presence involvement, expressed through body movement, energy, and mindset – it is partnership, connection and understanding.
In the Downward Spiral chapter, Josh is in his late teens, teaching a group of elementary school aged kids to play competitive chess. He walks a couple miles through New York City to meet up with these kids, and in the story he tells he is standing at an intersection observing traffic and taking note of the woman next to him – she has headphones on and is lost in her own world. This woman steps out into traffic without noticing an oncoming bicyclist, and she and the cyclist narrowly avoid each other. Rather than refocus herself and raise her awareness, she gets caught up in anger, yelling at the cyclist while still standing in the road. A taxi rounds the corner and speeds along towards her, striking her and sending her flying into a lamppost.
Josh stays until emergency responders arrive, then he heads off to teach his kids. He decides to tell them about the woman’s downward spiral as a way to emphasize the importance of awareness, presence, and connection in life and chess. Three years later, one of Josh’s students emerges from a critical game in the National Championship, eager to share his experience with Josh. The student says, “You know, Josh, I almost lost… I made a big mistake and hung my bishop. My opponent laughed and I got really upset and reached for my queen. I was about to move, but then I remembered the woman and the bike!” This young man’s ability to recover from an error and return to “the zone” won him the game, and taught him a valuable life lesson about mastering your environment.
There are so many ways a scent work search can get out of your control and move into downward spiral territory, but you don’t have to worry about that, you just need to manage your mind, body, and your connection to your dog. I recently watched a video of a student searching with her dog in an Elite interior search. After 4 finds and nearly covering the entire area, the student’s dog moved to the exit doors and appeared ready to leave the search. Instead of panicking and reacting – either calling finish or commanding the dog to keep searching – the student calmly connected with her dog and respectfully, subtly guided him in the direction of the area they had not thoroughly covered. She took a moment, then released him to search again. Within seconds he was in odor, locating edges and honing in on the direction of odor from source, then sourcing and indicating! What a finish! I can think of so many similar decision points that do not result in success. True connection and partnership in scent work is a wonder to behold!
Numbers to Leave Numbers. Form to Leave Form.
What I really love about Josh is his dedication to his inner self. He fully understands the power of the subconscious, of intuitive learning, of trusting yourself without being able to explain the machinery that generates that trustworthiness. Contrast this with a person who is always seeking trustworthiness from the outside – seeking a coach to trust, seeking a dog to trust, seeking a trial official or judge to trust, etc. This person puts in hard work, has a desire to succeed, but this person is not ready or able to be sent off to the seas of scent work alone. Multiple times a day I observe a human who knows more than she thinks she does about scent work and her dog. If I set a blind search with no odor, maybe 1 in 5 humans will act from a place of self-trust and call it blank. The other 4 will apprehensively look for validation from me. Some of them will be relieved and happy. Some will confess that they did not know what to make of the situation. Some will swear they knew it was blank – and I have no doubt they did, but they had not internalized that knowledge. They had not studied numbers to leave numbers.
Josh talks about beginning chess players learning the value of chess pieces (bishops and knights are worth 3 pawns, a rook is worth 5 pawns, etc), and needing to count in their head and rely on numbers while they play. After a short while, these players should begin to leave the counting and numbers and play from intuition. Many people have difficulty sensing the passage of time in a scent work search, so they get a timer, or they rely on the volunteer timer to warn them when 30 seconds remain. At some point, time has to stop being about numbers and start being intuitive. The same goes for calling alert and getting a judge’s feedback. It’s helpful at first, but it can hold you back if you don’t move your trust from the judge to your own intuition. There are many other aspects of a search that should eventually become intuitive.
Josh evolved his chess game and his life game from one of amplifying his natural strengths, to one of deepening his intuition: he was studying numbers to leave numbers. Part of this evolution can be attributed to a coach he had who made Josh play in a controlled, conservative style completely the opposite of Josh’s chaotic, creative style. This coach was not an easy fit for Josh, who writes, “As I tried to play in the style that pleased my coach, chess began to feel alien.” Josh’s play became more uneven, sometimes leading to a brilliant game, sometimes a self-defeating, disconnected loss. It wasn’t that Josh’s coach was ineffective, or that Josh had reached his performance limit. As Josh writes, “In order to make my new knowledge manifest over the board, I had to figure out how to release myself from the baggage I had acquired, and I developed a method of study that made chess and life begin to merge in my being.”
In my experience, the world is full of people (hi, me) carrying knowledge yet to be made manifest, and baggage needing to be released. If you are to apply something powerful you learned in scent work, it won’t happen because you listened to someone’s instruction and then tried to execute it. It will happen because you figured out how to release all of your hang ups and let the knowledge you have integrate into your being. It’s no coincidence that Josh begins to dive deeply into learning and growth when he begins to challenge and question who “Josh the chess player” and “Josh the human” really are. He begins this journey via training he finds unpleasant, incongruent with his identity. He experiences performance mishaps unlike anything he’d experienced before. Instead of rejecting these experiences, he dives deeply into them. He gathers all of the knowledge he can. As Thich Nhat Hanh said, “The way out is in.”
During this time, Josh is living in Slovenia and traveling alone every so often to play in chess tournaments in other European countries. Through his self-analysis and intense study of his gameplay, Josh begins to see that his chess game and his life are intertwined. This might sound trite, as everyone knows that different compartments of your life can affect each other. In Josh’s case, he makes changes to his mindset and his habits to improve his life and his chess game. Any human playing the game of scent work absolutely needs to become deeply aware of their life-scent work entanglement and do the work to release baggage and change habits. This work typically ain’t getting done from the comfort of your favorite chair in your favorite scent work class. To do the work of examining your life and your scent work gameplay requires you to get out of your comfort zone. If you’re not interested in growth, just try not to complain about your problems – in life or scent work.
If you’re curious – or better yet, all in – to follow Josh’s path towards “an inner journey to optimal performance”, be aware that it is not a gameshow where you pick door number 3 and it opens and you get a new car. It is a challenging, painful – potentially long – journey. There are no guarantees of success – especially if you give up before you’ve been transformed. Like Josh, you might start your journey with one goal in mind, and halfway through you realize you must change course (next post we learn about Josh shifting from chess to martial arts). If you take this journey, you take it because what matters most to you is learning: learning about yourself, about your dog, about your partnership, about the environment, about life. You take this journey to be changed, to discover that you are not separate from your dog, from the environment, from the odor. Earlier in the book, Josh used the phrase “hidden harmonies” – you take this journey to uncover hidden harmonies in the game of scent work. You take this journey to learn to actually trust your dog and yourself.
On the last page of the chapter, Changing Voice, Josh writes, “…I was more in love with the study of chess than ever. The game had become endlessly fascinating to me, and its implications stretched far beyond winning and losing – I was no longer primarily refining the skill of playing chess, but was discovering myself through chess. I saw the art as a movement closer and closer to an unattainable truth, as if I were traveling through a tunnel that continuously deepened and widened as I progressed. The more I knew about the game, the more I realized how much there was to know. I emerged from each good work session in slightly deeper awe of the mystery of chess, and with a building sense of humility… as a lover of chess, I was flying, but as an artist and performer I was all locked up.”
This is where I love to live – discovering myself through scent work, through my dog (or any dog I have the honor to search with). I’ve been a competitor earning top placements, I’ve coached teams to top placements (I still give my all to those teams who want to place in competitions), and, like Josh, I’ve come to see scent work as something so much greater than competition. It truly is an art, a practice, a kinetic meditation. Just the other day I searched with a young dobe in an expansive outdoor search, and we flew together across a field, up and down a berm, picking off hides, nearly committing to a swim across a pond to head directly to odor. It was a good work session for a dog and human who love scent work.
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Happy Sniffing!
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