Picture this: you are scrolling through your favorite social media site and see a post where a groomer claims that she can dry a standard poodle in twenty minutes. There's a picture of said dog, and it has lots of long coat and looks nicely prepared. You know it would take you longer than twenty minutes to achieve that level of dry fluffiness, and you begin to wonder what you are doing wrong.
Here is what you need to know: You are not doing anything wrong. Several things are at work here. The first thing is that maybe that groomer lives in an arid climate, like Arizona, and you live in Seattle, where the air is full of moisture most days. That groomer might have a more powerful dryer than you have and might use different products that help speed up her drying time. It is unfair to compare her grooming skills and timing to yours because the situations are different. What you could do is ask that speedy groomer some questions about her equipment, products, and techniques and see if she will share her methods with you. Maybe you could learn some tricks to shave a few minutes off your drying time while still achieving excellent results. But be realistic; the chance of you drying a fluffy standard in twenty minutes is slim.
We recently had a potential customer call requesting that we put her small terrier on our schedule for a haircut. "Our previous groomer got him done in about 25 minutes." I'm a pretty speedy groomer, but I can't think of any dog I can groom from start to finish that quickly. I had a momentary pang and thought, "That's super-fast. I can't do that." This brings me to another point: sometimes, people stretch the truth. In this case, I'm not sure if it was the groomer telling a "fibber-lie"or the customer trying to wiggle her way into our busy schedule, but I'm pretty sure one of them was playing fast and loose with the truth.
The World Wide Web is terrific in many ways. It helps us keep in touch with people we like with the click of a few buttons, and it opens ways to increase our knowledge about grooming from the comfort of our own homes. The downside is that it can be a rabbit hole when comparing our skill sets to other people's skill sets.
Let's say you post a picture of a groom you are proud of on social media. You might get twenty people who compliment your work and tell you how cute the dog looks. Then, you might get three people who randomly criticize your work: the background in the image, the scissors you left on the table, or a bit of hair sticking up that you missed. The human mind is a funny thing. It will likely gloss over those twenty compliments you received and laser focus on the critical posts. We have been wired that way since prehistoric times as a self-defense mechanism, but we can override the tendency to concentrate on the negative if we make an effort. Re-read the twenty nice things and move on.
The bottom line is this: don't compare your skills to those of groomers you see on the 'net. The situations are different, and the stated "facts" may not be accurate.
