@Nella68 aha! Def no judgement here, you're safe with us.
As he’s got gundog genes (even if not recently) he's quite biddable, I'm guessing? I always talk about ‘working with’ my spaniel, and though they’re different breeds you can apply the same ideas. You can easily play lots of hide and seek – we do it around hay bales in fields – but also finding games so he gets that the fun comes from you and that he gets rewarded when he engages with you and not other dogs. With my girlie I drop balls and dummies in long grass when she’s not looking and then ask her to find them, always making sure she hasn’t spotted the drop so she gets a genuine prize from the game. When she was younger we used to do it when other dogs were approaching – I would send her away from me only slightly on a ‘job’ and then reward when she succeeded, which she would, as it would be an easy ‘job’. Then she began to associate other (strange) dogs approaching with ‘oh mum’s got a job for me’, and now that more or less translates to her turning round to see me, and ask for permission to approach or, more likely, dive into a hedge as she will choose pheasant scent over any dog any day.
In general I reward madly for every single good decision, be it with a treat or a little cuddle. She isn’t particularly food motivated and lots of dogs aren’t so sometimes I use a dummy retrieve as the reward too so she’s got to come back to me and then she gets rewarded again so it’s a virtuous circle.
A caveat to all of this is that I think a lot of it comes with age. I have worked a lot on our offlead heel and now, much to my surprise, she consistently offers the behaviour to me without being asked and we get through a lot more dog pate on walks now as I reward it every single time. I honestly reckon only about half of that is training and the rest is that she’s now 18.5 months and she’s grown up.