I feel like people completely miss that so-called "submissive training" is also training for the dom.
Like, your rule about how you should be addressed feels undermined if you overdo it with a punishment, instead of a casual verbal reminder.
Your rule about how much water to drink doesn't feel like care when you don't call out when they need to drink more.
Your rule about bedtime is meaningless if the bedtime itself isn't consistent.
Training for the sub is to learn how to perform an expectation for a dom, and the flipside for the dom, is learning how to perform authority and understanding what kind of authority your sub will respond to in which situations. Being an authority figure is less like being the boss and more like being a gardener.
Rules that you train your submissive to follow are not something that you 'set and forget;' no, rules are like gardenbeds. You must actively care for and tend to the rules that you and your sub plant. Weed out the rotten rules that don't work or tweak a rule that's struggling so that it can thrive. Have a healthy soil for your rules to take root and grow and blossom. You don't "just know" how to be a good gardener. If you don't tend to them, rules wilt. Like with anything else, you have to learn and practice authority.
You don't have to be domineering when you practice authority either. In fact, I'd say that most rule enforcement feels warm and cozy when you're doing it right, but that can be subjective depending on your D/s dynamic. You have to show that you care both about your sub and about your garden of rules and that you are the authority that they specifically crave to be cultivated by.
So, what kind of garden have you planted? What parts of your garden need weeded? What rules grow and thrive easily there? How are you going to cultivate your authority?
Our garden has a clematis (rule for what title to use for me), but we needed to put up a lattice for it to climb in order to give it the structure (a public-friendly title) it needed to thrive year-round. That rule doesn't need much tending to in our garden, just a good structure and healthy foundation and it can be easily maintained.
