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Some submissives become more obedient the longer you train them. They become more confident, more trusting, and more devoted over time. But then you've got the other kind, the ones who become more resistant and more anxious or more bratty with every new role you add. But most of the time, the difference isn't the submissive, it's the training. So today we're breaking down five ways DOMs accidentally train the exact behavior they don't want and what to do instead. Welcome to the Dom Subliving podcast. What's one thing every obedient submissive has in common? We can answer that by looking at five training mistakes I see over and over again. I'm Alessandra from Dom Subliving, and I've taught and coached hundreds of dominants and submissives, everyone from complete newbies to people who have been in the lifestyle for years. And here's what nobody tells new DOMs. Almost every one of you is going to make at least one of these mistakes I'm about to walk you through today. My Dom made two of these himself back when we were starting out, and sometimes he still slips up when he's having a bad week. So this isn't about being harsh with yourself or nitpicking every little thing you do or don't do. We're all human, which brings us to the mistake almost every Dom makes. Mistake number one, treating training like a checklist instead of a relationship. Quick question for you. And I want you to actually sit with this one for a second instead of just rushing past it. If you're a Dom, could your sub tell you why they followed the rule you gave them? Not what the rule is, they probably have that memorized already. I mean why the rule exists, what purpose it serves. If they can't answer that, that's not a them problem, that's a you problem. You need to own that instead of getting defensive about it. This is the mistake almost every new DOM makes, and it makes sense why. You read a book, you watch a YouTube video, you find a list of protocols online that some other DOM swears by. Maybe it's even ours, coughcoff, doms of living.com slash protocols. And all of it sounds good and you start running through it, you know, checking off every single box without ever stopping. And all of it sounds good, and you start running through it and checking off every single box without ever stopping and questioning if it actually fits or if it's relevant for you and your dynamic. And I'll give you an example of this. So we had heard of a lot of couples having a protocol that when the DOM comes home, the submissive greets them at the door before you know the DOM even walks in and they're just kind of kneeling there at the entryway waiting. Now, again, that sounds good on paper, but that wasn't going to work for me and my Dom because we had two young kids at the time that were running around the house and would see that and start to ask a lot of questions. But the problem isn't the role, but the why behind that role is to have a connection ritual when your partner comes home and you haven't seen each other in a while. So we were still able to create that. So we talked about it and we created the role for us that when my dom came home, that no matter where I was in the house, I would stop what I was doing and come meet him in the entryway and give him a kiss and say, Welcome home, daddy. So real training starts with a conversation, not a list. Before you write a single role, sit down with your partner and actually walk through what training means for the two of you. So real training starts with a conversation, not a list. Before you write a single role, sit down with your partner and actually talk through what training means to the two of you. Not what it meant to whoever wrote that book sitting on your bedroom nightstand, but what it means here in your house with your history, your limits, and your actual goals as a couple. If you're the DOM, ask your sub what they want to get better at. Ask them what part of submission still feels unclear or shaky to them. You might be surprised by their answer. That conversation might feel slower, but it is slower. It's the difference between building something that lasts versus rushing into something that looks hot and kinky but crashes and burns and just resorts back to vanilla a couple months later. A lot of times when I have a student whose protocols aren't sticking, one of the first things I do is ask them, why do you have that protocol? Sometimes I'll have them even journal about it, but then they go and have that conversation with their partner and they're able to move forward. Once your sub understands the reason behind a rule, following it stops being obedience for the sake of obedience. It becomes something they're choosing because it actually makes sense to them, not because they're afraid of what happens if they skip it. And here's a simple way to test whether you're doing this right. Pick any role you currently have in place and ask your sub to explain it back to you in their own words, like the way they'd explain it to a vanilla friend who was curious about the lifestyle. If their explanation seems kind of vague or they're just repeating back to you what you said word for word without any reasoning behind it, then that's a good sign to go back and revisit that conversation that you probably skipped the first time around. Even if you get that part exactly right, there's a second mistake waiting right behind it. And this is the one that turns a sub into being afraid of you instead of devoted to you. So training mistake number two is using punishment as the default teaching tool. If a sub disobeys but didn't actually know the expectation, was that disobedience or was that just poor communication on the Dom's part? They're calling it disobedience just because it's an easier excuse. Let me say that one more time because it's more important than most DOMs want to admit, but if a sub didn't know the expectation, it's not disobedience, it's poor communication. This trips up a lot of new DOMs, and I'll be honest with you, my Dom fell into this trap early on, too. He'd correct me fast, he'd correct me hard, and a lot of times because he was so excited to correct me, he'd rush and skip past the part where he was actually teaching me the role. It happened more than once in the beginning of our journey. I can think of one time specifically where he was at work and he was actually working close to home in the same city that we lived in at the time. He's a foreman for a construction company, but he had texted me a question, and I guess I didn't respond fast enough in the time that he wanted me to, but he actually left his job site, came home, took me into the bedroom, and gave me a punishment spanking. The problem is, we never talked about how he wanted me to text him back in a reasonable amount of time and how many minutes a reasonable amount of time is. What we do differently now, looking back, is have a discussion first and an expectation that we're both on the same page about, and that I know as a sub how long I have to text him back. If you want to know what that role is, it's 10 minutes that I have to text him back. So I know if I'm going to do something that's going to take me longer than 10 minutes, like have a shower, I know to text him first to let him know. There's something worth understanding here that doesn't get talked about nearly enough in this space. Obedience out of fear and submission by choice can look exactly the same from the outside. So it could be the same postures, the same silence, the same yes, sir or yes, ma'am, all on cue. But underneath, they are not the same at all. One is compliance, the other is trust. And punishment as your default tool builds the first one. It does not build the second, no matter how consistent you are with it, and no matter how well-intentioned you are while doing it. If you want a sub who chooses to submit, not one who's just afraid of what happens if they don't, you have to lead with teaching before you ever reach for correction. Some ways to do this are to praise the behavior you want to see more of, you know, even the small wins that feel too little to, you know, mention out loud. Also reward the times they get it right. Different subs respond to different kinds of praise. So pay attention to what actually works for yours, whether that's verbal affirmations, physical affection, or something else entirely. Save actual correction for after the expectation has been set clearly and you've given them one or two chances. I had a submissive I was coaching, and she was perfectly obedient and following the rules of her Dom at the time. But she said she just felt anxious and was walking on eggshells all the time because she didn't know what she was going to find out that she had gotten wrong that day. On the surface, this looks like obedience, but that dynamic ended up ending and she found a new DOM who would lay out the why and the expectations behind a protocol before the protocol was even said. She said that she just felt more devoted and at ease and wanting to please her DOM, and that dynamic continued to thrive. So if you're a DOM, when do you punish your sub? Well, a good rule of thumb here is what I call the three strikes before consequences approach, at least while a rule is still new. So the first time an expectation gets missed, you would treat that as information. So did they actually understand it? And then the second time, sit down and walk through it again out loud together. Only on the third time, when you know for certain the expectation was clear, do you actually correct or punish them in the way that's in their agreed-upon limits? Skipping straight to consequences on strike one tells your sub that mistakes are dangerous instead of telling them that mistakes are just part of learning. And this is where training kind of just quietly goes wrong because then the sub may start hiding or lying about their mistakes too. I sometimes fib about my mistakes, but that's just because I'm a little bratty at times, but that's a whole different story. But using punishment as the default teaching tool is related to something, you know, else on this list, a little farther down, because the DOMs who relied the hardest on punishments are almost always the same DOMs who are skipping the last training tip on this list. But hang on to that thought. I'll come back to it in a little bit. But training mistake number three is training in isolation. When's the last time you actually asked your sub how the last week of their training felt, or the last month even? I'm not talking about whether they completed the tasks on the list, how it actually felt for them, like emotionally day to day when nobody was looking. A lot of DOMs will never ask that question, and it's not because they don't care. It's just because they tend to feel that check-ins are awkward or it's just not something they need to do. A lot of times things will look good on the surface and they won't know that resentment has been building up over time. And over time, that just gets worse and worse, and it's just kind of waiting to come out and not in a healthy, productive way, but usually in a big blow-up. I know for me personally, if there's a problem I'm dealing with on my own, or it's just something in our dynamic and I can't check in and talk about it freely with my DOM. And if too much time passes, it will become this bigger problem that we could have caught a lot earlier. That's why we have weekly check-in sessions every Sunday evening. But here's what most DOMs miss Training in isolation goes beyond just skipping check-ins with your sub. It's also never talking to other DOMs and subs about how their dynamic is actually going. It's when they never let their sub read or learn about anything that's outside of their own dynamic and they just kind of think that their version of DS is the only way. And they just kind of treat the relationship like it just exists in this bubble. They don't allow their sub to experience any other perspectives ever because they just feel like getting help or feedback is a sign of weakness on their part instead of a sign of a good dom. And they also kind of don't want their sub to see what other healthy relationships could be like. That isolation is exactly why we built a free community in the first place. Subs being trained in a vacuum with zero outside perspective is one of the most common patterns I see. And honestly, it's one of the easiest ones to fix once you're aware of it. Like I said, our community is free to join. It's at Domsubliving.com/slash community, and it's full of other DOMs and subs who are dealing with some of the exact same situations that we're talking about now. And if you're already inside our All Access Pass, you have access to our step-by-step trainings, including our Dom Sub training course. So letting your sub learn from outside perspectives is so valuable and it's something you can do together. You can even sit down and use it tonight or the next time something comes up. But if you've kind of gotten into these habits, an easy thing you can do to fix most of this is just once a week sit down together outside of you know the normal scenes that you're having and just ask, what's been going well? What do you want to keep doing? What do you want to improve? What maybe hasn't been working and you want to maybe stop or change? If you are a member of our All Access Pass, we actually have relationship check-in templates that walk you through this step by step. They're the same exact ones that my Dom and I use. We were just using them last Sunday. When you do this consistently, though, every week, those small little things don't snowball into something bigger that will kind of take over your whole dynamic. And that brings us to a mistake that quietly does the most damage of all over the longest amount of time. So training mistake number four is being inconsistent. If your ruled three times last month, whose fault is it really when your sub stops taking them seriously? Inconsistency shows up in a few different ways. And most DOMs only recognize one or two of them. But one way is saying you're going to do a scene this weekend and then letting it just kind of quietly slide without any acknowledgement or explanation. Or it's promising your sub that you're going to punish them for something and then never actually delivering that punishment. So the words stop meaning anything. And it's also changing the rules every single week because last week's version stopped feeling exciting to you personally. Inconsistent expectations create anxious and confused submissives, not confident ones. If the ground keeps shifting underneath them, they can never fully settle into the dynamic and relax because part of them is always bracing and waiting to find out which version of the role is actually real this week or this day or this hour. Before you say a role or a plan out loud, ask yourself one honest question first. Am I actually going to follow through on this, even on a night when I'm tired? Even on a week when work has been a mess? If the answer is maybe, don't say it. A promise you're not sure you'll keep does more damage than not saying anything in the first place. So I'm sure we've all heard the saying, underpromise, over-deliver. But here's a simple fix. Just make fewer rules and don't add any more until you can hold those consistently. We're going for quality over quantity here. If you're building protocols and you're not sure where to even start, we built together a list of 50 of them you can pick from at domsubliving.com/slash protocols. The link is in the description too. But just pick a small handful and work on doing those even when you're busy, even when you're tired. Don't touch that list again until you've actually proven to yourself and to your sub that you can actually stay consistent with those ones that you already have. Which brings us to the last one on this list. And this is the mistake I told you about earlier, the one that ends relationships slowly over time. Training mistake number five that DOMs make. If you want to know how not to train yourself, do not do this. And this is not training yourself. When's the last time you actually learn something new about being a Dom? I don't mean skimming a Reddit post or watching a TikTok clip on your phone. I mean actually sitting down and studying something on purpose because you genuinely wanted to get better at this. The best DOMs never stop learning, no matter how long they've been doing this or how confident they feel. If you're asking your sub to keep growing while you refuse to grow yourself, eventually they will outgrow you. It's just what I see happen over time in DS relationships where only one person is developing while the other stands still year after year. It's one of my biggest pet peeves when I'm hosting a virtual summit or my online boot camp, and I see so many subs posting, I signed up because my DOM sent me the link, or my Dom wants me to attend these sessions. And I'm just like, okay, and where's your Dom? Why aren't they here attending the sessions too? Why didn't they join? Education and training is something both a Dom and a sub need to do. And if a DOM delegates all of the education and training to the sub, that is just bottoming from the top. We like to blame subs all the time for topping from the bottom, but so many DOMs are also guilty of bottoming from the top. And here's another trap a lot of DOMs fall into without ever realizing it. Being loud or angry or stubborn doesn't make you more dominant. It just makes you harder to live with day after day and week after week. Real dominance isn't measured in volume. It's being steady and having self-control. It's willingness to keep improving even after you're convinced that you have this all figured out. Because the moment that you think you are this experienced DOM is usually the moment you stop improving. Training yourself doesn't have to mean a huge overhaul. It can be as simple as joining a community and actually participating instead of just scrolling through it. It can mean finding a mentor, someone who's in a similar dynamic as you or one that you're working towards. It can mean taking a structured course to help you work on different aspects of your dominance that you really never thought to address before. But pay attention to how you actually react the next time your sub pushes back on something, even if it's just a little bit. So do you get curious about why they're doing it, or do you get defensive and shut the conversation down? If you do notice yourself shutting down instead of getting curious, that doesn't mean you're failing. It just means that's the next thing you need to work on. So here's the full list again of how not to train your sub. So number one, treating training like a checklist instead of a relationship. Number two, using punishment as the default teaching tool. And number three, training in isolation. Four, being inconsistent, and five, not training yourself. At the end of the day, bad training can leave a sub bratty and disobedient, but it can also destroy an entire DS relationship. Masters of this lifestyle look at these exact failures to understand what to avoid during the training process. Every single piece of training has to fit perfectly from the very first conversation they have with their sub. If you want to get more ideas for how to train a sub, check out that list of 50 protocols at domsubliving.comslash protocols or click the link in the description. And until next time, keep embracing your power and pleasure through Dom Subliving.