Ep. 146: Leaning Into What Works with Jason Heng

Jason Heng is a longtime member of the Nose Work community, having traveled across the United States to compete with his dogs, who has trained and coached teams as a Certified Nose Work Instructor and has officiated trials both as a NACSW Certifying Official and Judge for many years.

In this episode, Jason shares his observations both as a trial official and coach, particularly as it pertains to container searches. He discusses how trials have evolved over the years and ways teams have adjusted in response. Jason also highlights what he will cover in his upcoming webinar, Do You Have a Team Mindset? Webinar. For instance, how it could be more advantageous for teams to lean into their strengths, to do what works for them and their dogs, as opposed to attempting to do "all the things", obsessing about what went wrong or what not to do.

Be certain to check out the Do You Have a Team Mindset? Webinar today!

Speakers:

• Jason Heng
• Dianna L. Santos

Transcript

Dianna L. Santos (00:00:01):
Welcome to the All About Scent Work Podcast. In this podcast, we talk about all things Scent Work that can include training tips, a behind scenes look of what your instructor or trial official is going through and much more. In this episode, I have the distinct privilege of speaking to Jason Heng, a very longtime member of the Nose Work community, all about his perspective on trialing. Before we start diving to the episode itself, let me do a very quick introduction of myself. My name is Dianna Santos. I'm the Owner and Lead Instructor of Scent Work University. This is an online doctrine platform. We provide online courses, webinars, seminars, virtual events, and ebooks, a regularly updated blog, the All About Scent Work podcast, free training tips, free live streams, video reviews, Zoom consultations, and instructor mentorship program, and the newly launched Scent Work U community, and so much more.

(00:00:49):
So if you're interested in Scent Work, we likely have something within our large library that can help you and your dog. Regardless of where you are in your sniffing journey, you're just getting started, you're looking to develop some more advanced skills, you're interested in competing, or you're trialing even at the upper levels, we likely have a training solution for you. So now that you know a bit about me, let's dive into the episode itself.

(00:01:12):
So in this episode, I have the distinct privilege of having a conversation with Jason Heng, a longtime member of the Nose Work community, all about his perspective on trialing. Let's take a listen to that conversation. So thank you so very much for joining us for our podcast today. And also we are very excited. We're going to be hosting you for a webinar coming up very soon, so I'm very excited to have this conversation with you. But before we do, can you do us a really quick favor? Can you just let everyone know who you are and what your background is and knows work, please?

Jason Heng (00:01:40):
Yeah, so I'm Jason Heng. I live in Texas these days. Before that, I lived in Colorado for a long time, so it's kind of a second home. And I've been doing those work as a competitor since about 2011 when I got my first dog in 2010. I had two Shiba Inus that competed at about the same time. They were very different, and so they took a little bit of getting used to. And I competed for a long time with three Shiba Inus. I also had a Labrador that I competed with. And then soon after that, did the Nose Work certification program to be an instructor with NACSW in 2012. And then I became a certifying official with NACSW starting in about 2014. I think I judged a few times and then became a CO and did all the CO training, which was very different in 2014 and 2015 than it is today.

(00:02:40):
It was much less developed. So there was a little more, "Hey, here's what you do. Hey, here, go have fun." Which was quite a different experience at the time. And then I also taught at a bunch of the K9Nose Work camps, did the operations role at the Texas camp and taught here when we had the one camp in 2018. And then I taught in Georgia and Wisconsin and PA and Colorado. So it's been going for a while. I've been COing the whole time. Some years there were a lot CO assignments, some years a little less, and this program has grown significantly, so it's certainly changed over the years. Unfortunately, all my nose work dogs have passed now, so I do have a dog, but she's not into the competition at this point. So we're just having fun playing and doing all kinds of stuff.

(00:03:35):
So I travel a lot. I traveled to, I don't know, 24 states doing competitive nose work. My first ORT was in Colorado, so I had to drive just to do Birch, drive a thousand miles, do Birch, miss, and drive a thousand miles home, and then find somewhere else to do at ORT. And so my first four NW1s was California, Virginia, Alabama, and maybe Missouri.

(00:04:10):
Yeah, I was just to do an NW1. It was certainly a different sport at that point, but I've had a lot of fun and I continue to do it. I continue to teach just mostly small groups now. I do a lot of seminars and obviously COing and Camps have changed a bit too, so there's a broader group of people teaching at camps now, so that's also interesting. And just continue to try to figure out how to learn stuff, how to coach people, how to better coach people, because things that I did long ago didn't work. Things that I may have said to people 10 years ago, I don't generally cover anymore. I used to tell people a lot of things not to do, and that doesn't work. I found telling someone not to do a certain thing or trying to get them to do a certain type of style just doesn't hit the mark with everyone.

(00:05:07):
And there's such a different learning style with people that certainly in 15 years of teaching, the things that I highlight are much different these days than they were even five years ago. It's just vastly different. And the sports changed and the experience levels changed, and so you're just focused on different things.

Dianna L. Santos (00:05:27):
So I love that introduction because I think it helps people, first of all, be like, "Oh, that's the Jason guy. I may have seen him at a trial." And then for other people who may not be involved in NACSW or maybe they're just getting started, maybe they primarily are doing AKC. It's like, "What do you mean you've been traveling the whole country just to do one trial?" Whereas now they have AKC trials in their backyard. So your background, I think, is a really important one for people to understand because you have this wealth of knowledge. You did come up at a time when it wasn't a trial every weekend. You had to wait and you had to travel. And I can remember being on social media reading about your ventures while you were traveling crisscrossing across the country, and it was impressive. It was very impressive.

(00:06:12):
But the other thing I really liked that you were pointing out is how things have changed and that it's important for us to recognize as instructors and coaches how best to reach the people, how best to give the information, and that it's okay that we may and I'm in the same boat where you had a lesson that you covered in the beginning and then you look at it now like, wow, that's changed a lot, but it can be very difficult for our clients to wrap their head around that of like, well, isn't it the same all the time? No, things are going to change and that's normal. So I love all of that. And that kind of leads us into what it is that you're going to be covering inside of this webinar, which is the, do you have a team mindset webinar? And I think it's important for people to consider this because oftentimes we think about those work, we're always thinking about the dog, but the person is very important too, but the relationship between them is really important.

(00:07:03):
So can you talk about some of the things that you've been noticing when you've been officiating or coaching as far as that's concerned and how that may be tying into what you can be talking about in the webinar?

Jason Heng (00:07:12):
Yeah, so a little bit of certainly judging. I love judging. It's a lot of fun. You get to see teams that you don't see. You get to see your own students sometimes that you only see in class when they're relaxed and comfortable, and then you don't get to see them when they walked out of the other search and walked into your search and they just had a really bad run or they perceive it as a really bad run

(00:07:38):
And you get to see their decision-making and what they're doing under pressure. And I think the mindset piece is more about, I want to control what I focus on in each search. So it comes out of the experience of trialing everywhere, certainly. And when I look back at some of the venues, we used to do the walkthroughs and you'd go in and you'd see certain things and it could get in your head and you would start to like, "Oh man, there's lots of grass and my dog's going to pee on that tree." And I didn't have any success with myself or others saying, "Well, you kind of have to put that out of your head. You can't think about those things." Instead, I think that lately as the sport has grown, and I see a lot of different styles of how people perceive a search or how people go into a search and the things that they're trying to do, I look at it from the judge, and even as an official, as a CO, when I watch the searches, I sort of want to be able to stand back and say, "I see what you're doing there.

(00:08:54):
I can tell where your training is at. I can tell what you're actually trying to do in the search. I can read what you as a handler are trying to do, and I can see sometimes when the dog is on board with that, and sometimes when there's a little bit of a misperception on either one of your parts. So the person goes in, in this case for the webinar, I'll focus on containers because it's a little narrower of a playing field, but the person goes in and maybe they decide to go down a specific row and let the dog engage with each consecutive container. And the dog may respond very cleanly when it hits odor or may encounter odor on a previous container and then exhibit sourcing behavior as they sort of bracket back and forth and make a decision. And for the folks who rely on that style of having this reliability check going to each of the containers and making a decision, they feel very comfortable in that sort of realm, and then things go off the side.

(00:10:09):
So you'll get about halfway down the row or two-thirds down the row, maybe you've found an odor, maybe you haven't, and then maybe the dog says, Hey, I'd like to go over here. And the dog will make a dramatic shift in their body direction and sort of go off in that range. And that's the decision point. What does the handler do in that particular moment? Do they allow the dog to take that detour or do they encourage the dog to come back and finish the last three containers in that row? And how do they do that? Do they do it very reasonably where they just encourage the dog to come back, they give them some leash, they draw them back. And a lot of that has to do with experience, but sometimes even people with a lot of experience will have a very dramatic leash check to bring the dog back into the mode of operating for that particular search.

(00:11:07):
And neither one is bad.

(00:11:11):
I can't tell you which one's right. I can tell you which one the dog is comfortable with and which one that isn't just by reading the dog's behavior. But whether that's right or wrong is not really my, that's not my judgment. My judgment is sort of, okay, you're testing your training when you go to trial. If you've done a good job training and the dog is reliable to odor and you can execute that in trial search, you generally do, I mean, nine times out of 10, you will do great. It's a fabulous watch. I enjoy it. It's beauty. It's incredibly rewarding to see somebody come in and just hit a couple of hides, pay no attention, distractors. If there are any, it's nice and clean, the dog knows its job, goes down the line, no problems. Those are great searches, but because either I just happen to be fortunate enough to get wack kind of environments or you just do it enough.

(00:12:11):
And so every time you start to see the oddities of a particular search, or it has to do with what we have created with the trial searches in containers these days is that simplifying to the number of containers there are and the number of patterns and the number of types of containers also creates a lot of extreme variation even though they seem very simple. So it doesn't take much of air movement in a room when the containers are in three rows to observe the dog being responsive to the odor and not being responsive to the training of going down the row, hitting each box, even when they're reliable. And so that's where the sort of change of direction happens and how you respond to that. So when I stand back as a judge and I look at that and I say, okay, so if I was coaching this person, what would I encourage them to do if the dog just completely turned off in another direction and that is not that person's style when they tend to go in and search?

(00:13:18):
And how did that person respond to that? If they're able to adapt and let the dog go all over and investigate some other row and then maybe come back a few minutes later or allow the dog to go investigate, but not leave with the dog and then allow the dog to come back and finish, either of those are great choices and it's about how you execute that. So if you're able to allow that dog to go investigate and bring them back and then still finish those other rows in a very structured way, I can tell, I can see that you've done that in your training. You did a great job of executing what you've done all the time. And that plays a little bit to something like a couple years ago, the NACSW started selling off the trial video from the very first trials because they had all this trial video and we weren't having trials because of the COVID stuff.

(00:14:10):
And so they were trying to just operate and keep everything going. And so I bought a bunch of video from the first trials and I couldn't even watch it. I mean, I watched it and was like, "Oh my God, I'm going to pull my hair out and I don't really have a lot of hair to pull out. " And things that I don't do now, things that my students don't do now, or things that I would see where I would see someone very sort of randomly who had been doing those work a long time, and I would see them doing a particular style like that, something that just was a throwback to how we were instructed. And again, nothing wrong with that instruction, it worked great. But because of the way that trials developed, those styles got phased out because we were, again, funneling down into these sort of standard patterns, circles, squares, U-shaped multiple rows, sometimes scattered, but for all of the NW1s and two and threes, 90% of the time you'd see these standard patterns and people were getting good at replicating this what's efficient and what feels good.

(00:15:25):
And it was a lot less about coaching people how to go down the containers and move so you're out of the way of the dog and occasionally something like the box at the end of the row because you spend more time because you walk past the box at the end of the row where you try to loop around the corner, you spend a little bit more time and the dog has to get used to you sort of lagging that situation. And so sometimes they throw off some communication on that last box or something like that. There were less things to coach people to be hung up on, and there were less things that I think people were getting comfortable executing in competition because of how the trial started. So that's sort of the thought of my webinar is that if you can stand back as a volunteer when you're timing that search, if you can stand back as whatever role you're playing and you can watch someone and you can kind of see like, oh, okay, I see what you're doing there, you have confidence in the dog going down that row, or you have confidence in taking a pause at the start line and letting that dog choose which direction to go and following them and allowing them to do a general sweep of those containers in response to what's available to them.

(00:16:46):
And you're okay keeping track most of the time. Again, 90% of the time you keep track. Occasionally you'll get lost, but you just allow the dog to continue on until you feel like you've gotten comfortable. And if I can stand back or if you can stand back and watch that, you see a lot of people doing all the right things. There isn't anything to change there. And then when they miss something where they call false or they hit on a distractor, all the questions start, "Well, what am I doing wrong?" And my point is from where I've evolved to is you're not doing anything wrong. There's nothing wrong with what you did. The environment is fluctuating all the time. That's the one uncontrollable that you have. So if you're going to make a decision about to change, and if you allow that dog to go in and meander and make some of its own decisions, and then you revert to this hard decision to then go and sort of dictate that the dog has to go to every container when the dog doesn't necessarily have, maybe you've done it once or twice or 10 times, but that's not really your skillset.

(00:18:02):
That's not really what you can execute under a trial conditions. You'd be better off just turning around at the end, restarting the dog and letting them go right back into the search in the same way that they went into the search before. And it's easier for me to coach that and to focus on what you're doing right and re-execute that on the search than trying to say that you have to have 50 things in your toolkit and you're going to implement 49 of them in one search. And as soon as one thing sort of goes off what you expect, you start throwing these different hammers into the search. And I don't find that people are very successful with that. That's where the things go off the search. And I'm speaking not only about the Nose Work community, but I'm speaking about myself because I've done this a ton.

(00:18:54):
I would be like, "Hey, he showed a little interest on this container. I'm going to take him over there and I'm just going to present that container with the leash and just ask him whether or not there's odor there because he's reliable." Well, yes, he is reliable, but you just took away all of the observation that you would normally do and you just asked him to alert on the container. And so what does he do? Well, he alerts on the container and you call it and you can get a no, and you're like, oh man, I've been practicing being able to do this, being able to cover all the containers or ask about a different container, but you haven't done it in the way that it can be sort of trial checked as to whether or not it's actually repeatable. It's just we're not that good at those things if we do it once in a while.

(00:19:47):
It has to be done a lot. There has to be a lot of comfort and repetition in those things. And I'm the first to say, I mean, I had Sheba's, so I am not the person who went and did hardcore go to every container and do that. But I'll tell you that when he was given a hundred boxes at nationals, Atlas was my first Sheba. He literally went right down the row. Every single container was like you had trained that, but he didn't do it because I asked him to do it. He did it because he found some efficiency in the fact that there were lots of hides out and he was only going to, he knew because of all the trials, there's a limited sort of time that's involved. So he chose the efficiency. I didn't train that in him. I mean, I trained that in him in the sense that he had all the experiences of having a lot of container searches, but a hundred boxes, oh my gosh, that'd give me a coronary if I had 10 ORT boxes at an NW3 after we had no ORT boxes for years.

(00:20:54):
I probably trialed an entire year and never had an ORT box at an NW3 container search. It was all luggage and all kinds of stuff. And then to get 12 boxes in a circle when you hadn't done that in forever, I mean, that was hard. And that goes back to what we've done to containers. We've almost self-reinforced the idea that it's simple and easy because it's just a bunch of sterilight boxes, the shoeboxes, the paint cans, which don't get used very much because they're a pain in the ass to store as a host, the ORT boxes, the black or red toolboxes, which are kind of eh at this point, but all these sort of focusing the containers into something that we know what it looks like, people get really aggressive with containers in calling alerts. And I think that's where we've maybe gone a little bit, the pendulum has swung a little bit too far in how we train and then what we try to replicate in competition.

(00:22:01):
And I just want to isolate that one thing because I haven't looked lately as to exactly what the container search pass rates are at three, but sometimes they're not great. There's nothing, I say I don't like the hard or easy kind of observation, but there's nothing that you haven't seen already. But what people are doing less of is executing the things that they're really good at. So as soon as things start to miss, they're not sure things start to go off the rail. And I like to watch somebody who has a little patience and says, "Oh yeah, I saw the dog over there. They hit on that third container, but boy, it was not what I expected." And I throw out an old saying, which I've always said, which is if you're not damn sure you should not be calling alert because you don't get another ... I mean NW3, back in the day, you didn't get a qualifying score.

(00:23:02):
You got a no, and then you were done and it was the next trial that you're off to. So I feel like if you're not sure, it's okay to continue and it's okay to guess. It's okay to ... I'm not sure, but I'm going to, because the time's running out, I'm going to take a chance. But when you do that, you accept the responsibility of, "Yep, I didn't get everything that I wanted. I'm going to call alert and I take it as it could be, but it also could be no, I'm a little bit on the outside here. I'm not sure." And I'm happy for people when they get the yes in that case, I feel bad when I have to say, "No, that was not it. " That was the chicken or the tennis ball or whatever.

(00:23:46):
But even the distractor situation, they have shifted, they have changed. There's potentially a lot more of them before they were defaultly in this narrow range of types of things that were generally put out until unfortunately someone like me would put out something that was not a standard. I don't know. The last time I put out a banana, I got six or eight people who falsed on a banana. It was a couple years ago. So as soon as everybody gets used to what's put out, a few chips, a few of this, a few of that, then the variability is taken away and that's what people miss in their training. And so that's the gap that you see in competition. As soon as the number of containers, the first NW1 I did in Colorado had 28 ORT boxes in a asterisk pattern of a gymnasium, so three crossing rows, so an X with another row as an NW1.

(00:24:58):
I looked at that and I was like, I don't even know what to do with that. I don't even know. And if you put that out now in an NW1, I mean, you would get the same response. And I'm not suggesting that we do that for competition, but I am suggesting that there's be some novel practices because that will help you. How do I go about searching that? Am I okay going down one row and then looping out and going down another row? Am I okay letting the dog sort of meander around and not knowing where I am? If at NW1, I can meander around because if my dog's reliable to odor, as soon as I hit one, I'm done. There's nothing wrong with that. And then the NW2, I know how many there are, but as soon as I allow them to meander around a little bit outside of what I can keep track of, now I run the risk of hitting the same odor again and being lost.

(00:25:57):
And so there's a little bit of complexity there. If you do that at NW3 when there's unknown number of hides, although it's the same as NW2 in the sense that sort of this bounded range, NW3, you have to be a lot more confident about where you've been and what you've called. Throw that to Elite or Summit.

(00:26:18):
And when there can be unknown number and there could be a lot and they could be right next to each other, there could be multiple hides in adjacent containers, there could be blank areas with distractors. Or I think one of the videos somebody sent me had all distractors in one set of containers and then lots of odor and a second set of containers, and then a third set of containers all blank. Wow. And it wasn't even my trial. I didn't even set that. I was impressed. I saw that and I was like, wow, someone was a little creative here. This is nice. I like this.

Dianna L. Santos (00:27:02):
Someone else is getting the Jason Heng cursing.

Jason Heng (00:27:05):
No, no, no. But it was kind of neat because it was very segmented. It challenged, specifically pulled on the thread of, can you tell when there's distractors? How good is your skill there? Which is what Elite is or Summit, it's versatility. Can you tell when there's consecutive containers? How does your dog engage with those consecutive? It's not normal. I think it was Michael McManus who did this in a seminar when I hosted him where he put consecutive odors in containers and talked about how the dogs would work. And one of the things that jumped out at me is, well, what would it take for a dog to hit all four consecutively, like one, two, three, four? Not many dogs are going to do that, but if you put a hot dog in each one, there was a hot dog there, they'd hit all four right in a row, wouldn't they?

Dianna L. Santos (00:28:04):
Yeah.

Jason Heng (00:28:05):
So it's possible that they could hit all four. You could possibly train them to do that. If you did that an exercise with a hundred different trainers, there might be 10 who could reliably take a dog and train that, maybe more. Depends. If I've seen that my dog do that and they're not good at hitting multiple containers that have odor that are consecutive, what do I need to do or what do I need to observe in the dog that I would even know to come back and revisit the containers? So if your style is a more of a one pass or a one with a, "Well, I did see a little bit of something there, I'm going to be generous and take a second pass," that would be in this idea when I'm observing you and you do a one pass, which again, not a criticism, I enjoy it.

(00:29:01):
I love it. One of the most entertaining searches to me was to watch Michael run his own dog and do one pass and then turn around and loop back to the hide that he missed and the dog hit it because he saw something in it so I could observe what he was doing as a style and I was like, "Yep, that's talking, putting into action what you preach. I got no issues there." But then he had the wherewithal to say, "Oh, I think I saw something in my dog and so I can just maneuver back and hit part of that area at a corner and the dog hits the hide and calls it and calls finish and has no second thought." And that's what I get excited about watching someone is you watch someone do something, even when it's not a standard setup of something, you see them run through the search and even if they get a no somewhere and then still execute what their training ... Is intended to do and pass the search.

(00:30:04):
If it's a week, they get a "No" or an even NW2 or NW3 and they still get their title because it's a qualifying score. So I think that's the greatest thing in the world is that you can recover from having the "No" in those cases.

Dianna L. Santos (00:30:17):
Absolutely. Absolutely. So much there. And so I want to pull on a couple of threads if I may. So for people who are listening to this part, they're like, oh God, Jason, you are trying to tell me that I have to come up with an idea of what I'm actually doing. I can't just come to the line and just say, okay, I took a webinar, I went to class and somehow there's knowledge that's gone into my brain through osmosis and just magic will happen. I'll release my dog and I'll magically find the hide. Everything will work out. I have to actually know what I'm doing.

Jason Heng (00:30:50):
It's good. It could happen that way.

(00:30:53):
I think that because the sport has grown so much and as much more performance ... I mean, I had no intention of competing with a dog when I got a dog. I just thought, hey, it'd be great to have a dog and I could go hiking with my dog and go running and biking. And I just wanted a dog. And then I got a dog that he was having no part of that. He'd love to go hiking and biking and whatever, but every other minute of the day he wanted something else going on. And the things that you generally wanted going on were

(00:31:25):
Not good things. So the job aspect of it was more out of necessity than out of desire to compete. And I didn't really think he was going to be able to do that. So once I did it, I was like, wow, watching the dog is amazing. Not knowing anything, literally anything about odor and then watching him just go find the odor and be so deliberate about it is an amazing thing. It's an amazing experience. It's incredible. It's beautiful. It's poetry. So it's not that when you start out, you have to have this grand format of what you're going to do. But after you do it a little while, after you do a bunch of searches where other people are setting hides and you do the ORTs or maybe a trial or a mock trial or something like that or run FEO, when you go into the container search, you have the experience to know how the dog generally is going to approach that environment.

(00:32:38):
If they want to come in and they're maybe a little bit more aware of the environment around them and they have no interest in going to the containers and they just want to go investigate the environment, you already know that. You already know that's how they're going to come into the search. They're going to go over and check out the timer's shoes and they're going to look at the judge and it's quiet in there and they're going to sort of meander around maybe you already have a good idea of that. So if you're in a training class that is very much structured towards reliability and you go into the competitive environment and you've never seen your dog go to each one, it's a little disconcerting. I'll pull up the video in the webinar because I can't criticize other people's videos or show other people's videos without judging my own.

(00:33:31):
So I'll pull up a container search from an NW1 with my dog. And I mean, it was all over the board. If you were to ask me at the time, I knew nothing. I couldn't tell you where he went, when he went, why he was doing what he was doing. And he was turning around, turning me around in circles. I'm standing in the middle of this 15 boxes on the floor. And so there was no structured plan there, but that's not what was being taught in the very beginning. So it wasn't until later when people got the leash handling skills, got the dog reading skills, where somebody who may have done detection work, could come in and coach a bunch of people who knew how their dog would find odor that they were reliable. They're already confident in that, that they could come in and put out a row of boxes and say, okay, we're going to train each one if the dog passes one or skips over or bosses, you're going to turn around and come back to the beginning or something like that.

(00:34:36):
If that sort of structure was generally not coachable to a population of people who had never done detection work. So that was just about the experience level of the people that were there. Now the experience level is completely different. And so the pendulum is swung the other way, which is we do a lot of that. I mean, I've done that. I've put out eight or 10 boxes in a row and there's one hide or a couple of distractors at the beginning and one hide at the end or something like that, and we're going to go down the row and your job is to clear all the containers. Certainly that is a skill to have. But once you've done that a few times or you've had that experience, you should know pretty well that the dog either is on board with that or when they're on board with that and when they're not on board with that.

(00:35:29):
Are they on board with that when it's in the grass? Most, maybe not. Are they on board with that when it's in the gymnasium and it's a slick floor? You pretty much know. So all those things that we watched or did in the walkthroughs that freaked us out, they don't necessarily freak everybody out anymore, but they sort of have in the back of their mind like, "Oh, the floors, I got to put booties on my dog." Nobody ever did that in the beginning. They just had to overcome or I have to slow down a little bit because the dog is going to be chasing everywhere. Or I mean, you're going to run an NW3 container search off leash when ... I remember, I think it was probably one of the only times years ago, and they gave that as an option. And I'm like, "Oh, hell no, I'm not running my dog." I mean, I'm comfortable running my dog off leash, but off leash on containers, I have no idea what that would look like.

(00:36:33):
That would be crazy. But some people are like, no, I know my dog and they run off leash and I'm totally comfortable with that. So that's where I'm saying the team mindset is knowing what you're good at, knowing what your dog is good at, just lean into that. Just do that. Don't worry about doing everything in specifically the container search, but don't worry about doing everything in the search that you have been taught or exposed to, but lean into the things that you're really good at and the dog is really good at and then you can feel like you have some confidence in the search because there's nothing worse than ... We've all watched it, that somebody at NW1 and the dog hits the hide once and then twice and then three times, and you want to be right, you don't want to be wrong.

(00:37:22):
And so the fourth time the dog hits side and the person says, and the judge says, yes. And you're like, oh man, I had no idea. We've all had that, right? We've all done it. And it feels relieving when it's a yes. And because you may have gotten a no at some point, we work towards to not have the experience of having the no,

(00:37:54):
Instead of focusing on, "Hey, if my dog alerts and gives me everything that I want, I think I should just call Alert."

(00:38:03):
And it's okay. I'm okay if they're wrong. I'm okay if I called it wrong. I'm okay if I read it wrong, but what I don't want, I think the bigger negative, which is more the negative reinforcement that happens in trials is that you don't call it because the dog doesn't give you everything that you want, and then you take the dog back and the dog still doesn't give you everything that you want. And then you leave and then you kick yourself later for not calling it because it was there. I think the dog probably learns more from that than they do about the calling it and just being wrong.

Dianna L. Santos (00:38:49):
Right. And I think all that is so important. It's just the way that you're framing it, I think can really be impressive for a lot of people of leaning into your strengths and not just trying to pull upon this library of things they may have heard, they may have experienced, they may have seen in classes or workshops or whatever, where they just have decision paralysis where they're like, "Okay, I have this Rolodex of a hundred things I'm supposed to pull upon. Let's try this one."

Jason Heng (00:39:16):
Yeah, and it's not a criticism about anything that you would want to add into a search. When you get to NW3, and I mean, really, I think the skill that's being tested is the ability to know whether there is another hide.

(00:39:32):
That's all that endemic three is. Everything else that you've already covered, it's really just being able to say, "I don't think there's anything else here. I'm going to call finish." And you can let the timer make that decision for you when they get to 30 seconds and everyone wears a watch now or a timer now, so you get to whatever. But if you are good at knowing when the dog, oh, the dog goes back to a hide because there isn't anything else here, or they start to go investigate certain things in the environment because there isn't anything else to get rewarded for. As soon as you read that in the dog, if you're good at that, you should be able to call, finish in any of those searches and feel confident most of the time. No, there'll be a trial every once in a while where you're like, get down in the end and you're like, "Yeah, they called 30 seconds and I have no idea whether or not I found everything." And I couldn't tell one way or the other.

(00:40:29):
And that's just the environment. The environment dictates that. There wasn't anything wrong with your skill. And you could video that and you could give that video to someone to watch and ask them what they think of what you're doing here. And they'd say, "I think you did everything right. You covered the area, you allowed the dog to search or you detailed the perimeter and then cut through the middle." I can see exactly what you did as your primary operations, your primary skills that you were implementing, and you did all those things right. Now, if you missed a hide, you could still do all those things right and miss a hide. I mean, I've watched it, unfortunately as a CO, I've watched it dozens and dozens of times where, I mean, I don't know, I've probably COed a couple hundred trial days, maybe 300 trial days, and I probably had, I don't know, maybe 20 searches where no one found eye in that search.

(00:41:30):
I mean, there's nothing that those people did that was wrong. There's nothing that they did that made them not find the search. There may have been nobody found the hide for 25 dogs. I've had that happen, and then four or five dogs find the hide and then nobody else finds it. I've had it happen where two or three dogs at the very beginning find the hide and then no one ever finds it again.

(00:42:01):
I mean, I can't tell you, there's nothing about setting a hide like that, that nothing changed. There's nothing particular in what the official does in setting that hide. So if you did all of the things that you did right, it's hard for us to accept the idea that, well, if we do all those things, we should be good enough to find every hide. If that were true, then nobody would smuggle drugs across the border because they would always be found, right? Well, that's not true. It's a volume thing. As long as you have so many searches, eventually you're going to come across a search where you did pretty much everything that you would've done and felt confident. And oh, by the way, you didn't find that hide.

(00:42:48):
And I've also run a dog that you were one of two dogs or three dogs that found that hide. And I can tell you in the moment why I continued in the search versus thinking it's blank, I can tell you what the dog did that made me continue instead of just calling it clear and moving on. But other than that, there's lots of speculation as to what might've happened, but there's inevitably everything that you execute, if you just do a good job of doing what you're good at, most of the time you're going to find it. And then because people come and say, "Well, I missed this hide and I missed this hide and they seem kind of similar and I missed this side and it seems kind of similar." And I'm like, well, yeah, those guns do sound similar, so let's work on what we think that gap is.

(00:43:41):
Somebody comes and says, "Hey, my dog fringes." They were close, but this used to be a bigger problem because you had to be so close to the hide. It was nose on a nickle kind of thing. So if the dog wasn't right on source, you would get aware or know.

(00:43:57):
Now there's a little bit more latitude and understanding about what we're doing. So the dog is making an effort to get to source and somebody calls it, it's generally as a judge going to be a yes. And they've read the dog correctly, the dog's doing their best efforts, but that latitude may be a little wide for what the group is or somebody will get aware because they're a little far off and that's really uncomfortable because now you're asking me to articulate where the hide is under pressure. So that's another skill. So if you have those experiences where you've missed some that seem they rhyme, hide's kind of rhyme, they're not exactly the right thing or are they fringed in these kinds of situations, then you can go and say, okay, I need to set some more types of problems like that and make sure that my dog understands that it's the drive to source that I'm rewarding, that it's the, they can't just generalize odor and make a decision that's not what I'm after.

(00:45:00):
They've missed something in my training. But when I watch people execute, especially in containers, there isn't anything in what they've done wrong other than they call the alert at an inopportune time, if you want to call that wrong, they were guessing or they were aggressive or they misread the distractor versus the odor or the dog didn't give them everything that they wanted. And so they sort of hesitated and now the dog doesn't go back in the same way or they get flummoxed by, it's been two minutes and they haven't found anything. I mean, it used to be about a minute. If you hadn't found anything in a minute, I could watch and you could ... I mean, it was like watching someone's blood pressure go up. You could see the discomfort if they hadn't found a hide in a minute. Now people cope a little bit better and it's not so short, but still, I mean, if you go two minutes without finding a hide, especially at the upper levels, if you're running a larger search for Elite or Summit and somebody's in there and they're in there for two minutes, I mean, internally you can watch them and you can feel the discomfort.

(00:46:25):
And so the challenge is being able to regulate your own sort of emotional state in that moment and still be able to execute what you're good at and not stumble and not meltdown or call something just because you feel like you get the least amount. If the dog's totally in tune with you, the dog's like, "You're melting down over here. What is going on? "

(00:46:54):
And you'd read that as, "Oh my gosh, my dog's looking at me, " or the dog will sit because they're confused by what's happening on the end of the leash and you're going, "Oh my gosh." And that you're a third time looking at your watch, trying to figure out how much it's been or looking around the room, the dog reads that stuff You're throwing off all kinds of communication down to the dog, and that's about knowing how the dog reacts to that too. So when somebody dog looks at you and you go, "Oh, yeah, I see you. It's okay. Let's go back to work." It takes a lot of experience to focus back into the search and not get sidetracked by the noise of what's happening of the time limit.

Dianna L. Santos (00:47:37):
Absolutely. And I think, again, so many things there that you were touching upon. The big thing I wanted to really stress is the importance of really understanding that you are going up against the environment and there are going to be times that the environment will win, and that doesn't mean you have to blow up your training, that you probably did everything right, like you said, and you just weren't going to get this hide this day, and that's okay. And that is such a difficult thing for people to wrap their heads around because I think, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems as though the perception is, yeah, this is a test, but it's a test that I'm guaranteed to pass, and that's not necessarily true.

Jason Heng (00:48:16):
Yeah. So I would say that I trained a lot with the founders in the NACSW, so Ron Gaunt and Amy Herot and Jill Marie O'Brien. So I would say that Ron particularly had a big influence on a couple of those topics and what you're saying. So one, he told me never to change my training. So what happened at the trial happened at the trial, and you're never changing the training for what happened. Now, you might expose the dog to something that you encountered at trial that you maybe not had worked in your training, but the philosophical basis of what you're doing, building importance of odor, rewarding the dog in a positive way, learning to read the dog's communication, not queuing the dog with fleece handling and other things, those philosophical items, these overarching things that you're working on, those things don't change. So you may choose a different tact like, "I'm going to do it this way," and you may decide to shift that position because you feel like it's in the dog's best interest, but I don't feel like that's changing the training.

(00:49:26):
That's just changing the execution of what you're doing. The training is the dog is the primary driver of telling you about what that scent is doing and no amount of experience or guessing about where that odor is happening ever sort of overrules what the dog is saying. And so the other one is that he would say never underestimate the ability of the dog. So if the dog's telling me something, sometimes it's very difficult for me to understand in the moment what's happening. So I'm in that trial search and some things the dog is throwing off on tons of signals and they're saying this and that, and honestly, I have no clue what's going on. If you were to ask me where the hide was or the judge were to ask me where the hide was, I'm like, okay, well, I know it's not here and not there, but I couldn't tell you where it is.

(00:50:25):
I have no concept of it is other than maybe it's up or maybe it's inaccessible or something like that, but I have no real understanding of it if you were to ask me where the hide is.

(00:50:35):
So I never doubt that capability of the dog to do that, but that doesn't mean that I have to understand it. So I mean, I've had multiple searches. I mean, one comes to mind where it was elevated higher than I had ever seen at a trial. It was the second summit trial in the country or something. And Gene set this hide. It was on a TV 30 feet in the air. I mean, the dog goes up on a fountain, goes out to the corner of the wall, goes into the corner, goes up on a doorjamb. All you have, you're standing there looking at the dog, you have a very narrow kind of view of what's going on. As high as the doorjamb, is the hide on the top of the doorjamb? I don't think so. It's not on the water fountain. And then the dog's in the middle of the wall and just goes up and says, "Hey, it's up." And you're like, "Oh, okay." And then you find out later after you call alert that just says, yes, you're like, wow, that was awesome.

(00:51:35):
And then you go, oh my God, they had to get a crane in here to the cherry picker bucket to get up there to get the ladder. That's crazy that the dog would be able to do that. So that doesn't mean you understand in the moment. And anybody who says that they do is, I mean, they're just working off of their sort of ego that they have that understanding. Sometimes you have a good sense, but a lot of time the dog will do something and you're like, "I mean the dog giving me all that I want, and so I'm going to call alert and I'm okay whatever happens in that case."

Dianna L. Santos (00:52:18):
Perfect. So it's just starting to wrap up, what are some of the things you want people to think about as they're going to be taking your webinar? Is there anything that you want them to sit with to prepare in order to take your webinar?

Jason Heng (00:52:30):
Yeah, I think we had talked, I was thinking about doing a little bit of a poll. I think I'll leave it to the end of the webinar as the second sort of set, but I would say that anytime you watch a video or anytime you watch your own video, I used to say you'd watch the dog and see what they do and see what you'd learn, and then you'd just not watch the dog at all and watch what the person does. That became difficult when everyone started videoing their own video, showing their own videos, like wearing a camera. The one thing that you miss is what you're doing in the moment. So we got a little bit of not a lot, not as many videos show the whole team happening in the moment. So instead, I think focusing on, can you observe in the video or when watching a search what the person is trying to do?

(00:53:32):
If you were an alien who came and watched a nose work trial, could you understand what's happening? John Q. Public comes to a trial, which happens more often than not, somebody just happens to be there and they're watching. And sometimes they're just like, if they're sort of a dog person, sometimes they're like, "Ah, that's great." How did they know that? And they're like, they don't know that.

(00:53:58):
The dog gave them everything that they wanted. So I want that to be the thing that people look at when they look at videos or watching someone say, oh, I see what they're doing there. I can see that they're not necessarily executing a plan, but they understand what the dog is doing. They understand what the dog's strengths are and they understand what they're doing and they're willing to implement that. They're willing to continue that through the entire search. And sometimes they're super confident and then they call finish and walk off and they're happy. And other times they're not so sure and they may have bobbled a little bit or called a false, but they're not hung up on that. If somebody runs a search and they call false and they just laugh because they're like, okay, I don't know what that was or that phone head decision on my part or whatever.

(00:54:53):
And then they go on and the dog hits the next container and alerts and so forth. So if someone were to watch me or somebody to watch someone as a judge or someone to watch someone as you're officiating or volunteering, isn't that the most amazing thing about watching our sport is like, oh, I can see what that ... Oh, that person comes in and does a perimeter and then cuts across the room. That's really smart. Or, oh, that person goes on the outside of the containers and lets the dog kind of draw them in. Oh, but that person goes right down the row and the dog checks each one of the containers. If you were to watch a day of NW2, you could pretty much get a sense of what the population of styles are and where the little gaps are. You could watch someone, oh, I want the dog to move on from that hide and make a choice as to which one to go.

(00:55:50):
Oh, I can see that they're not moving on very quickly. That seems like that could be problematic. Or, oh, that person meanders around and it's in the dog's best interest. The dog likes to chase. You can see them chasing that odor and they usually find it, but they get lost.

(00:56:08):
Oh, I see how you could get easily get turned around. It doesn't take very much if you step back and think, oh, what are the first kind of principles of this search? Oh, I have the dog. They're going to come in and do their search, but I can shade based on what I know about the dog or what my training has been or what I'm comfortable with or what style. And maybe that environment pushes me to one extreme or another, but if I can still stick with what is observable in others, like when we started out learning to observe the dog, you can see where they're broken down, which I would rather do that as a coach because I get so many varieties now. When AKC and UKC started and all that, people started doing different things to start. And it was a little uncomfortable at the beginning, okay, you dropped into a seminar and I got 20 people and they all have a train final response.

(00:57:07):
I got nothing against train final responses. We technically had to have one in the beginning anyway, so I don't tend to train that way, but if I had a dog who was doing something specific and they were more inclined to respond to give the response, I'm totally up with that or the dog who chooses that in a very strong response. And so being able to say, "Hey, I got no problem with what you're doing here, what your objective is, let's make that stronger. Let's make that ... How do I get a cleaner response? How do I get, okay, I don't want the pawing at this, so I'm going to do a different kind of ... I'm just going to strengthen that kind of response so the dog understands that this is what I want you to do. " Or, "I want that dog to move on quicker." Well, in the search, I'm not going to re-reward even when it's uncomfortable for me because I want the dog to move on.

(00:58:00):
Or I can make just a little bit of a shift in my position and still let the dog move away knowing that they're not going to move off that hide as quickly. And then it's a trial, so I don't get everything that I want in trial. I can only create that venue and training. And so if I don't get everything that I want in trial when I look at those videos or I have someone who's watching me who says, "Hey, these things looked like they were ate up a lot of time or caused you to miss a hide or you called a false alert because of this. " Those are the things that I have to go back to training and say, how do I strengthen my skills so that I don't do those things rather than me telling you that don't do those things?

(00:58:46):
No, those doesn't help. I mean, I can tell you the number of years that spending, don't pass the leash behind your back, don't throw it over the top of your head. How many times do I see someone you do that? I see them do it a lot. Even today, don't reward the dog after you call false. That's my latest one. And if I'm doing NW1 or NW2, I probably see it 10 or 20 times in a weekend. The dog calls, "You call false, dog's at the wrong container, wrong chair, judge says no, dog immediately gets rewarded." Again, is that bad? I don't know if it's bad for every dog. I think that some dogs pick up some things that I don't want them to really learn, especially under the pressure of the trial search. So I could say that just stop doing that. Well, that doesn't work.

(00:59:39):
People don't respond that way. Telling people to not look, don't look down, that doesn't work. That's negatively prompting someone and they're going to do it because you just said to do it. So instead of focusing on what you shouldn't be doing, Doing like, "Hey, let's do more of this. Let's

(01:00:03):
Always do this. If you call false, call the dog over and ask them to sit before you move on or let's institute some incompatible behavior just like we would with a dog to get the people focused on. The dog gives a less than response and you're now at the end of the row and you think there's a hide in that row. Don't walk back to that container and just serve it up thinking that's not what we want. Every time, move past the row, turn around, reset the dog, ask them to come back in and search, repeat what you would do at the start line. There's lots of things that we get into the habit of doing and then they help us repeat what we perceive as mistakes as opposed to when I watch the video, 90% of it is perfect. There's nothing wrong with what you did.

(01:00:50):
And so just do more of that. And then when it comes to when you see this situation come up, you go, Hey, I'm going to continue to do what I'm doing, which is I'm going to make another pass because I feel like there's something else out here. I'm not going to reach into my toolkit at this moment because I really don't have enough time to pick the right thing. Instead, I'm going to revisit what I've done and see if that gets me where I want.

Dianna L. Santos (01:01:20):
Awesome. Well, sir, I'm very excited for this webinar. I think it's going to be very helpful for everyone. We'll make sure that there are links where we're posting this podcast, but do you also offer any kind of virtual consultations or anything else? Because I'm sure that people are going to be listening to this or they're going to be taking the webinar like, okay, I want to learn more from Jason. Can I do that?

Jason Heng (01:01:38):
Yeah, so I certainly have done some of that in the past. I don't do it a lot, but I'm certainly open to it so we can figure out how to post for people to contact if they're really wanting that. I don't have a website anymore because it costs too much money, and so I let it go bye-bye. But I certainly have email and YouTube and all of those other things, tools to use. But I felt like the landing page for a website was just too cumbersome to keep track of. So I had to simplify my life. It was something I wasn't good at, so focus on what I'm good at.

Dianna L. Santos (01:02:12):
See, you're learning your own lessons. This is fantastic.

Jason Heng (01:02:15):
I try.

Dianna L. Santos (01:02:16):
Well, I really do appreciate you joining us for the podcast today, and we definitely look forward to the webinar. I want to give a huge thank you to Jason for having this conversation with me. I really like his perspective when it comes to trialing and competing with our dogs, and I'm really excited to be hosting him for his upcoming Do You Have a Team Mindset Webinar as scheduled for April 23rd, 2026. I definitely encourage you to come and check it out. I'll make certain that there are links available where we're posting this episode, as well as our website and social media. But if there's someone else within the community like, "Oh, I really wish you would talk to them." Please let me know. I'm always happy to talk to anyone within the community. I like sharing other people's perspectives, and you are all very delighted to hear from someone else than just me pontificating.

(01:03:01):
But as always, I greatly appreciate everyone for listening to the podcast and for all of your support. We really do appreciate it. Please give a cookie to your puppy for me. Happy training and we look forward to seeing you soon.