Attention is trained (and yes, that includes you)

Recently, I ran my young dog, Kelsea, in her first real agility trial. There were glimmers of brilliance hidden within the chaos — flashes of speed, some magical sequences, and yes, a few detours to say hello to the ring crew. But she always came back. Every single time, she returned to me and showed me that the skills are there.

I drove home smiling, proud, and honestly, excited. Watching her “stressing up” reminded me of something important — something we forget to apply to ourselves: attention is trained.

If you and I were talking about our dogs, that would make perfect sense. Of course, attention is trained! But if I flip the conversation and apply it to our own minds, are you still nodding? Because… sorry, it’s the same.

When it comes to focus, we humans might actually be harder to train than our dogs. Positive reinforcement is everywhere. Scroll too long on social media? Dopamine reward. Check your phone mid-conversation? Dopamine. Gossip, multitasking, the endless little “pings” of life — they all reinforce our brains to split attention or bounce it around. We are, quite literally, training ourselves to have the attention span of a puppy.

So when clients ask me for help focusing, this is what we’re up against — years of reinforcement for distraction. It’s not that we can’t focus; it’s that we’ve built strong habits that reward not focusing. And when we walk into the ring, those habits come with us.

Focus, presence, attention — they’re all flavors of the same thing: keeping your mind where your body is. And like any skill, it needs conditioning. We build attention stamina the same way we build any criteria — with intentional practice and repetition.

One of my favorite tools for this is visualization, because it has its own kind of dopamine baked in. When you can see yourself doing something correctly, your brain lights up as if you actually did it. It stores that success as a “memory,” which builds confidence and mental muscle.

But here’s where handlers often struggle: they try to visualize a full run and can’t make it thirty seconds before losing the thread. Totally normal! That’s just feedback — your focus stamina is short, not broken.

So let’s train it. I start people with what I call “reverse visualization.” Open your photos and find a picture from a day you loved — maybe that ribbon pic after a great run. Then set a one-minute timer and think only about that day. The weather, the run, what you ate, how hard it was to get ears for the photo — all of it. Keep your mind only on that one memory until the timer ends.

You’ll be surprised how quickly your brain tries to wander — and how satisfying it is to gently bring it back. That’s focus training.

Do this daily and you’ll notice your stamina grow. Over time, you can move to visualizing short sequences, then full runs. It can take months, but it’s worth it. You’re literally re-training your brain.

And maybe, in the process, you’ll have a little more compassion for your dog. After all, they’re learning attention too — and they don’t even have apps.