Train... everywhere!

With every new behaviour, it's best to start your training in a quiet, calm and undisturbed place with minimal distractions. This will more often than not be at home, where you are best able to control the environment and hold your dog's focus.

As important as it is to start to master your skills at home, you must generalise every new behaviour to different environments. If not, you'll more often than not have a pup who can enact, for example, the perfect "heel" at home in peace and quiet without an audience, but when it comes to where it really matters, such as on walks or at the park, loses all control and forgets every last shred of all your hard work.

Gradually changing the environment in which you train a behaviour is vital for your dog being able to retain their new skills in a variety of places. Slowly increasing the number of distractions as you progress until your dog is able to retain focus almost everywhere (and even more importantly, going back a "level" of difficulty if they begin to become overwhelmed or distracted until they master that stage) will set you both firmly on your way to completing you and your dog's training goals.