We decided to allow members of the public, friends and competitors themselves to vote for the winners in each of the classes for one week in the International Trick Dog Competition.
Public voting feels very different to a competition judged by professional judges- and it is in many many ways much harder. A huge well done goes to all of the competitors who were brave enough to submit their entries for that week!
We wanted to share with you some of our observations and reflections from the Public Vote week. We would be interested to know what you thought about it too- please add your thoughts in the comments!
1) Public choice vote hopefully gave you a confidence boost
Many people get anxious when they have to perform in front of the public. Many dogs also play up when they feel the handler is a bit anxious. Instead, every competitor here produced an outstanding professional quality entry!
Just reflect for a moment on the size of the audience you had there viewing each of your entries!
We had more than 1400 people voting for your entries during the week and I am guessing that perhaps twice as many people were watching them without voting.
Conservatively, we had about 2000 people in the audience watching you perform!
Do you know what an audience of 2000 people looks like?
Here is an image we found on Facebook to give you a feel.
Think just how awesome you are with your dog!
We hope this gave you a bit of a personal confidence boost and a nudge to try to perform in front of a real audience (after lockdown is lifted and life goes back to the new normal).
In the meanwhile, perhaps consider growing your virtual audience by creating a social media profile and showcasing what you do with your dog.
The Talent Show Dog Titles are designed to help you to build the skills and repertoire to perform with your dog, so consider working through them to make your next performance even more polished and professional.
2) Public vote encouraged creativity
Every single entry last week was creative, very engaging, focused and all the dogs worked fantastically! We were particularly impressed with the props you selected, the choice of tricks, flow of tricks and how much thought you put into making your performances shine!
Dogs also enjoy variety and creativity, so keep introducing new elements, new routines and new tricks to help them to keep having fun!
3) You learned from each other
We believe that each of you also enjoyed watching the performances of other people and learned a lot from them.
We all have different styles, personalities, ideas and are at different places in our training journeys with our dogs. Each one is great, but we also learn a lot from watching others.
You also now understand how hard it is to judge such an outstanding selection of teams!
4) We are starting to build a great supportive community
You all like winning and are very competitive, but what particularly impressed us is how much support, positive comments and feedback you posted to each other throughout the whole week.
There were some generous offers of help with video editing, comments of appreciation and lots of encouragements to your friends to view and support other entries.
This was the highlight of the week for us and we want to say again to all of you:
You are AMAZING!
We would like to continue creating together with you the community of enthusiastic Trick Dog trainers, friends and peers who want to grow together!
What would help you in your Trick Dog training journey?
Please share your thoughts and ideas by commenting here or send a message to DogTalentAssociation@gmail.com
Comments