What Do You Value?

If you haven't ever made a Wordle, it's a neat way to visualize text. It takes your text and lays it out, giving "greater prominence to words that appear more frequently." You can take text from your blog, or your training articles, or any other text you have on hand, and paste it into Wordle. I find it's a great way to step back and look at what I really value. It's not a perfect measurement of your principles, but it does help you zoom in on some of the words—and occasionally the values—that permeate your thinking.

This is a Wordle of all the Puppy Tao dog training entries:

I'm pretty happy with what I'm seeing, since I have a practice-and-reward mindset, and those are words that dominate my writing. Seeing words like practice, and fun take such prominence is reaffirming too. I think, though, that I should emphasize marking nearly as much as I emphasize rewarding, and I clearly don't.

Blogger also offers a similar tool if you label your posts with keywords. It ranks your keywords by frequency. I've chosen to have mine displayed on the righthand side of the site by order and by size according to their frequency, and clicking a label word will bring up all entries associated with that word, like "dog training," "Comet," "birds," "puppy foundations," etc. Given that this is the 19th dog training post on Puppy Tao and the 244th post overall, I think it's helpful to have a way to navigate things by topic and to see what themes have dominated my thinking and posting.