STAY! Pipe Dream or Reality?

Excellent advice all over, I just wanted to mention, I know with Honey I was just amazed with how quickly she seemed to pick up on tricks. Half the time it was almost as if she had already figured it out and I just had to assign a signal.

Which is great, but it can also make it very frustrating when you're working on something that doesn't come as naturally. You end up thinking you're doing something wrong, when all it needs is time and patience. (For instance, teaching Honey to crawl, literally 2 mins, teaching Honey to shake, 1 month)

I know for stay it took a long time before I could move more than a few steps away from Honey. Than we had to work up to me going around the couch where I wasn't in her direct line of site, and than another week while I went up a few stairs and was fully hidden. A few weeks with me being able to go into another room, and when we moved outside it brought us back to square one, and retraining her to listen and ignore all the distractions took almost as much time as the initial training.

For Honey it was very important to have a hand signal with it, something that looked exactly the same the whole time I was asking her to hold the move. Something she could see for several seconds before I moved away, and something that was still in place after I moved back into her line of site. For us, it's my hand held at waist height palm out, a very unnatural position that is only seen when we're doing that specific behavior.