How Fast Can Your Parrot REALLY Be Trained?

How fast can you really train your bird?

In many of my training videos I continually show examples of how to train birds to stop biting, or step up in very short periods of time. It is not uncommon for me to be able to get a bird to stop doing bad behavior within 2-3 days.

Many of my clients send me comments about how implementing one of my training concepts or strategies fixed their birds problem in less then 15 minutes.

On stage at our Total Parrot Transformation seminar I trained a parakeet to touch the end of a stick in front of hundreds of people in about 30 seconds.

But can every bird be trained in such a short period of time?

Is your bird’s behavior so bad it might take a year to train him, and you just need to be patient?

It’s possible, but I think that answer is typically a cop out for people who don’t fully understand what it takes to tame parrots.

I don’t mean that to insult you if you currently believe in your heart of hearts, that the only way to fix your bird’s behavior is with more patience, I’m sure you’re a good person and love your parrot.

It’s just that I’ve been there before, with an abused African Grey Parrot who was not responding as well to my training techniques as I would have liked. I was quickly able to teach him several things, but there was so much emotional FEAR inside this bird that I was not able to help him overcome those fears and his progress hit a brick wall before I could consider him tame.

For four months I continued to work my normal techniques on this African Grey with little to no results, which forced me to make a decision…

I either needed to ‘give up’ and take the patience and time approach. Or I needed to drastically rethink the way I was doing thing.

I decided to drastically rethink the way I was doing things.

The determining factor in this decision was actually made while simply watching my African Grey try to get to his water dish.

The way my African Grey’s cage was set up, there was a perch that lay across the main perch in his cage that he would have to step OVER if he wanted to get to his water bowl. For any normal bird this wouldn’t have been a problem… but with my African Grey, the perch was an obstacle to be feared, and he refused to touch it.

Over the course of the first four months I had him in the cage, he never built up the courage to step over this perch.

Instead he’d come up close to it, and then leap over it… literally jumping into his water dish.

This is when I had my big breakthrough and realized, “if a perch that had always been in the cage, and had never moved, and had never fallen down while my bird was standing on it, couldn’t be patient enough to earn my birds trust, then how in the hell was I going to earn his trust with nothing but patience?”

So I decided that patience was mostly BS, and that I needed to rethink my training approach to scared birds completely.

This is how I came to evolve the 3 Phases Of Fear training model that I taught to at our live Total Parrot Transformation seminar, that was eventually responsible for training my African Grey to stop biting and step up on cue within 30 days of me finally figuring out the formula.

The 3 Phases Of Fear training model is a holistic approach towards training your bird that is based off one key principles. They are:

Key Principle #1: Your birds progress is being blocked by EMOTIONAL reasons

Just like almost all of the problems we humans have are based off of unhealthy emotional reasons, like our Daddies not spending enough time with us, being abused, etc., parrots typically are held up from becoming more tame from emotional reasons too.

As the name of my Training Model suggests (The 3 Phases of Fear), there are three MAIN emotional roadblocks that parrots run into that prevent them from being tame. Each of these Mental roadblocks seem to be caused by specific, and very different emotional reason.

This means that in order to help your parrot develop, and overcome a certain type of fear he has, you need to use a training technique specifically designed for overcoming that particular fear; and STOP using those techniques once the fear has been overcome.

But it’s a little more complicated then that…

Not all Emotions are weighted equally!

Have you ever seen Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid?

In his pyramid, Maslow suggested that people can’t work on filling the needs at the top of the pyramid before filling the needs at the bottom of the pyramid, because some needs build a foundation for even having the ability to want other needs.

In birds there are three stages of emotional needs that you will need to work on to ever have a tame bird. I call these these stages:

1) The Getting Closer Phase
2) The Accepting Contact Phase
3) The Initiating Contact Phase

In each of these three phases a parrot has a particular type of fear that is triggering him to bite or be afraid of you, and it takes a particular type of technique, or several techniques to help your bird get over that type of fear.

And like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you’d better not try to work on the 2nd and 3rd phases of fear before first addressing the emotional needs in the first phase.

A perfect example of this is my free video online that teaches a technique that I call the Power Pause technique. In this free video I show how I got two different birds to stop attacking when people came near them. (The Getting Closer Phase Of Fear)

It’s a specific technique for people who’s birds have an emotional problem with their owners getting to close to them, and in a few short minutes helps most birds fix this problem.

Some of my clients think this technique is MAGIC and want to use it to solve everything wrong with their bird… but it doesn’t work that way. It’s a technique that’s awesome at addressing one of the emotional roadblocks parrots still in the first phase of fear have.

If any of my clients who’ve had success using the Power Pause technique during the first phase of fear, were to try to use it to train their parrot to do a behavior in the second or third phase of fear, it wouldn’t work.

This is because the emotional roadblocks that your parrot has to overcome to be comfortable with you coming close to him, are different from those he has to overcome to enjoy being pet, and different again for the emotions he has to overcome to be comfortable stepping up onto your hand.

When you are clear about where your parrot’s emotional weaknesses are, what techniques can help you overcome them and what ones can’t, that’s when you can achieve incredibly fast taming and training results.

If your bird is not getting noticeably better behaved 9 out of every 10 days you train him, then you are most likely not using techniques that are addressing his emotional needs the way they need to be.

If you’d like my most advanced teachings on how to match up the most appropriate training techniques help your parrot overcome his emotional roadblocks, I would encourage you to watch my 3 Phases of Fear & Mistrust DVD presentation. You can get a copy here:

Total Parrot Transformation Seminar DVD Series

We are running low on these sets, so there might be a couple week delay while we wait for a new shipment to come in, so please be patient, and feel free to email us if you can’t wait that long for your copy to show up.

Key Take Away To Ponder:

If your parrot does not have a lot of emotional roadblocks to overcome, his training should be incredibly fast. With these types of parrots, you can drastically increase the quality of your relationship with them by simply doing daily trick training exercises. The parrot owners who talk about how they fix their bird’s behavior in minutes or a few days are typically owning this kind of bird with a low level of emotional baggage.

If simple daily interaction and trick training sessions are not improving the relationship you have with your bird, your bird likely has more Emotional Baggage, and you should consider investing in more training education to fully understand how to work with the issues your bird has developed. Your bird is probably not ready for trick training yet, and needs to have some emotional roadblock removal first.

The more emotional baggage your parrot has, the MORE training techniques you will need to use to tame him, and the more you will need to fully understand his behavior. But this does NOT mean it has to take a long time. You may not be able to fully tame your bird in a few days, but you should be able to drastically transform your bird in 30 days.

I’m not saying anyone can completely eliminate their birds problems in 30 days, but if your doing things right, you should be able to make enough progress that you’re incredibly encouraged to continue working with your bird.

Try to remember that you are probably on track if 9 out of 10 times that you interact with your parrot you are NOT getting bitten, and he is making noticeable progress. If this does NOT describe how the relationship with your parrot is going, and you do not make daily progress with him, consider investing in more advanced training like my Seminar DVD series or from another professional parrot trainer that can help point out why your not getting the results you’re after with your bird.

Here’s hoping this helps some of you get a little better understanding about what you should be able to expect out of your training.