It's not uncommon for a wife to compare her husband, usually unfavorably, to an animal. But Amy Sutherland took it one step further. Irritated that her husband of 12 years could never find his keys, she decided to train him like an animal - a dolphin in fact.

Sutherland, a journalist, uses the same type of behavioral reinforcement that was used at Sea World San Diego on all sorts of animals including killer whales and dolphins at Shamu Stadium. She then applied them to her husband. The focus was on rewarding good behavior rather than punishing bad. The result for Sutherland was a happier marriage and thus she wrote an article for the New York Times titled "What Shamu Taught Me about a Happy Marriage," which became the most e-mailed New York Times article for 2006.

Finding that she was less judgmental and more optimistic in her marriage, Sutherland decided to expand her Shamu like tricks to other people in her life including her mother, her friends, her students at Boston University, the clerk at the post office and now to the rest of us, in a book titled "What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love and Marriage" (Random House 2009, $12).

"It makes such sense to reinforce what you like about someone's behavior," says Sutherland. "The beauty of it is that from a dart frog to a killer whale, it works. How weird is that? The principals are simple but the scope is humongous."

For those who might be a little uncomfortable with training the people in your life, relax. It's not about teaching them to fetch (though for some of us, that doesn't qualify as a bad idea), instead it's about opening up the lines of communication. When we nag people, they turn off. When we commend them for doing what we like, they respond.

"It's much more pleasant to be praised rather than shamed," says Sutherland. "I had a guy tell me the other day that the first time he cleaned the kitchen floor his wife came in and told him he had done it all wrong. His first thought was I'm never doing this again. Instead she should have let him know that she appreciated the effort."

Now when Sutherland is confronted with a situation she'd like to change, instead of raging, whining or nagging, she instead asks herself "what would a dolphin trainer do?"