We set some goals yearly and quarterly – this can help keep me on track and not get too distracted by other things. I am an ‘over-packing’ ‘over-preparing’ sort of person and this also means I over-set goals – I’m happy having more than what we can accomplish than to cross everything off the list.
In most ways, we did about half of our 2015 goals. We had some unexpected challenges with Viktor’s health (money and time to him rather than on trials and seminars – and he wasn’t able to do the things we hoped!). The training center move took up a lot of time and energy and time not knowing what/when the move would occur. I did really well with some of my business goals (get back all equipment I let clients borrow – I only ‘lost’ one treat pouch and a few harnesses to 4-H’ers).
Dog specific goals – Blaze and I met most of our goals, it also helped we didn’t have many due to his age and health limitations. While Griffin and I didn’t do as much, we spent half of the year not being able to trial, we ended up much closer to our goals and with just a few more trials we’ll finish some of the title-related goals. Viktor’s goal list was somewhat accomplished (going to class 70 times – he was there more than 100 if we count puppy classes and the manners classes he assisted in). He did great at playing and eating in most environments. Crating quietly….. went well the first half of the year and now needs more work.
I like spreadsheets and numbers. Here’s a summary of a few trial-specific things. I learned when I looked at what we’ve done.
- 27 Days of trialing
- 7 Events (AKC obedience, CDSP obedience, AKC rally, WCRL rally, AKC agility, UKI agility, CPE agility)
- 14 year old Blaze had 3 days of WCRL rally, 100% qualifying rate in that class and finished his Level 1 Championship!
- Griffin got did amazing, the quality of his work got better throughout the year and his qualifying rate improved towards the end of the year. He did a total of 92 runs with an overall qualifying rate of 76%. We finished only a few titles (UKI Novice NID, WCRL RL3, Rl1x, ARCH) but are very close to finishing many others. His “best” qualifying activities were WCRL where he qualified in all 20 runs we did this year and CDSP obedience where we qualified in 2 of the 2 runs. We had many ‘firsts’ for me as well as him – AKC obedience, UKI agility, AKC agility.
- Viktor did three runs of puppy WCRL rally – qualifying twice and not so great.
2016 plans? Well – apparently there’s controversy about whether or not it’s good to publicly state goals. Like most years, I have a set of business goals for me and a set of title specific and a set of training specific goals for each dog. I did plan a little better this year and used an estimation of how many trial days we can realistically attend as well where I think we’ll want to spend out time. We’ll see what happens!