The biggest secret to dog training is understanding the system of positive conditioning. All that’s really required after that is a lot of patience and being very consistent. Most dog behavior problems stem from not understanding reinforcement or from not applying it consistently.

To apply it consistently, you'll find that you need lots of patience. You need to appreciate the time and effort required to train a dog. You should also understand that being consistent doesn’t just mean during a short training session but whenever you and anyone else are interacting with your dog. This means that you also need your family members and anyone who interacts with your dog to be consistent also.

Positive conditioning means that a positive reinforcement i.e. an enjoyable stimulus when your dog performs some behavior will encourage him to perform that particular action again. It's unfortunate that a lot of owners positively reinforce unwanted behaviors in their dogs. For example, they give affection to their dog as it jumps up on them when they enter the house. Affection is a positive reinforcement and so the dog is being encouraged to jump up on people.

If you ever watch the Dog Whisperer on TV, you will see that even though the families have watched his program, maybe even read his books and know intellectually what they should do, they still reward all sorts of unwanted behavior without realising it. The Dog Whisperer is very different which is why the dogs behave differently with him. He behaves consistently and ignores the dog if it’s doing unwanted behaviors. In nearly every case that he helps, the problems are with the owner and his inconsistency.

It requires a lot of self-discipline and awareness to restrain from giving your dog affection when he is doing an unwanted behavior. You also need to be aware that any attention, even when it’s shouting at your dog “stop barking”, may act as a positive reinforcement. So, it may be best to respond to unwanted behaviors by ignoring them and turning away from your dog.

It’s more effective to focus on reinforcing positive behaviors rather than focusing on using negative reinforcement for unwanted behaviors. As the dog is encouraged more and more in positive behaviors, less time will be given by him to negative behaviors which go unrewarded.

Obviously, you may have to stop your dog doing unwanted behaviors For example, if he jumps on the food counter, you can just pull him off.

How do you positively reinforce behaviors you want to encourage? You reward the behavior by giving a tasty treat or by giving affection. Using small tasty treats is probably the most efficient method. The treat needs to be given as close in time to the action as possible. This is where using clicker training makes this process easier. The clicker sound is used to mark the behavior precisely as it happens and the treat comes immediately afterwards. I encourage you to look more into the whole subject of clicker training since it does streamline process of positive reinforcement.

Read more about the Secrets of Dog Training, about clicker training with dogs and about dealing with behavior problems in dogs in general.