When we try to do everything perfectly, or perfectly planned, we waste a ton of time.
What we are really doing is attempting to avoid discomfort and fear. Meanwhile, during the process, we’re experiencing discomfort anyway.
In this episode I share my journey through decisions, and execution of those decisions, regarding Joyful DVM and The Joyful DVM Podcast.
From the early days where fear kept retreating over and over, to very recently when I found myself hiding once again… I share it all.
The physical mind has an amazing ability to protect us at all costs…
Only through remaining curious so we can recognize our own patterns can we continue to gain clarity and speed in our journeys forward.
Perfection has no place in this journey.
Let it be messy and you’ll find the journey is much easier, and more fun, than you could have ever expected.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is auto-generated and may contain typos. Faulty conclusions that limit our lives. That's what we're talking about in episode 108. Hey there, I'm Cari Wise, after graduating from veterinary school over 20 years ago, struggling to create balance and failing to protect my mental health and emotional wellbeing, I finally ditched all the rules and forged my own path forward. I used my professional education in ways I didn't even know were possible. And through that journey, I developed a deep sense of who I am, a brand new set of skills, and a clear understanding of what I'm meant to contribute to the world. Each week here in the Intentional Joy Podcast, I'll share what I've learned along the way in order to help you develop your own deep sense of personal identity and connection with yourself so you can live an empowered life on your terms too. This is what I call aligned living and it begins with intentional joy. So if you're ready to claim this for yourself, let's call my friends. Welcome to episode 108. Today we're gonna be talking about faulty conclusions. And the truth is that we are drawing faulty conclusions all the time. We're actually conditioned to continue to do so, but it has a really negative and wide span kind of impact on us. When we do that, we have to understand what's happening before we can change it. So let's take a step back and really let me explain what I'm talking about. I'm talking about what leads us to draw opinions about ourselves, whether we are good or bad, whether we are more than or less than better or worse all the time in our environment, in our lives, we are constantly comparing ourselves to other people and we use that comparison as a point, an anchor point through which to evaluate what is possible for us in the future. This is really important for us to understand that what's happening because all of it, this constant comparison, this constant state of evaluation, this constant conclusion that we are less than. Because let's face it, more often than not, when you're comparing yourself to somebody else, you're not coming out on the upside of that. This constant comparison that we do though it puts us into a place of reinforcing a belief system that is actually completely false. And this is the heart of why I wanted to record this episode today. So I wanna think about our lives and I wanna think about the state of our lives and the things that we have done. And I'm pretty sure you just like me, can come up with a list of achievements, things that you have been successful in, things that you believe that where you have succeeded. For any of you out there with a professional degree, part of your sucHi there. I'm Dr. Cari Wise, veterinarian, certified life coach, and certified quantum human design specialist. If you're a veterinary professional looking to up-level your life and your career, or maybe looking to go in an entirely new direction, then what I talk about here on the Joyful DVM podcast is absolutely for you. Let's get started. Hello my friends. Welcome to episode 109 of the Joyful DVM Podcast. Now, if you have been listening to the podcast for any period of time, you know that back at episode 100, we changed the name to the Intentional Joy podcast. And having done that, I have decided to change the name again, which is why I've titled this episode Let It Be Messy. Sometimes as we're making progress in our lives, as we make forward movement in our lives, there comes a point where we have clarity over decisions that we've made in the past. And it's very important for us to all understand that as we make decisions in our lives, clarity will always be a byproduct. This is exactly why we want to make decisions and why we want to take action to move forward. The more quickly we take action, the more quickly that clarity comes. And so in my own clarity, I wanna share this with you, share the entire journey. Of course, I definitely could have tried to just fix all the episodes and change all the names back and all of that, and I thought about that. I'll be honest, I thought about trying to clean it all up so that it wasn't messy when it came to the way that this all unfolded. But then I thought, you know what? No, they need to know that life can be messy and it can still be exactly the right journey. And that's exactly what I wanna share with you today. So we've been over here at Joyful DVM plugin away since 2017, and I can't even believe it that we are coming up on our six year anniversary. And actually, as I say that, and I think about the day that I record this, we've actually passed it because the six year anniversary of Joyful DVM would've been at the end of February of 2023. Unbelievable. During that time, you know, we've helped well over 20,000 veterinary professionals and we've changed a lot along the way. We've developed our program about Life Academy, we have created coaching programs, we have done one-on-one coaching, we have done workshops, we have done master classes, many, many webinars, all kinds of stuff, and many of you have had the opportunity to participate in those. And along the way, we started the Joyful DVM Podcast. Now, back last year, I started doing some episodes where we expanded what we talked about kind of beyond veterinary medicine, so veterinary related, but then also beyond, because this really is about life, joyful dvm and everything that we do over here. And even Vet Life Academy is about your life. It's not about your profession, though many of us think that our profession in veterinary medicine limits what is possible in our lives, which is why it's been important for me to weave these two things together. But as I started to kind of do this shift into kind of changing some of the focus of what we do here, it got super confusing. Now I thought it was gonna be simpler, and this is where just taking action when you get clarity is a good idea. But just being open to the clarity that comes following the action is critically important because I spent some time deciding how exactly am I gonna make all this work? And it really made a lot of sense to me at that point in time to kind of put everything together under one brand. And we started shifting toward that way, kind of putting it all together under my name actually. And here's what I found on the other side of it. When it comes to the podcast in particular, it gets really confusing on what we do. And that was never my intention. It turns out that I have enough information, I have enough content, I have enough interesting things that I wanna talk about to fill two different podcasts. And so that's why we are shifting this podcast back to the Joyful DVM Podcast. We are going back to talking about primarily veterinary things. Now, of course, I'm going to be relating them to your entire lives. I mean, I think that is so important, but I think that as I got further and further away of talking about veterinary topics, that it became a little bit of con confusing as to what we did, especially if we offered invitations to workshops and stuff at the end that were veterinary related. And so in order to help clarify this for all of us, my team, for me, for you all, I think it's just much easier and much cleaner if we go ahead and we shift this podcast back to the Joyful DVM podcast, which is why you are hearing it introduces that again. And then as we move forward, I'm actually going to be starting another podcast, the Carrie Wise Podcast. Now, it's not out quite yet, but it will be coming out soon. And you're more than welcome to listen to both podcasts if you want to. I know some of you guys out there, you write into me and you're like, I hear your voice in my head saying this and that, and I always get a good chuckle out of that. It's always a compliment, which I appreciate. And so if you want a little bit more of my voice in your head, you're gonna have the opportunity for that as we move forward. But for today's episode, what I just really wanted to focus on was this journey itself, because so often what happens and what happened to me in the very early years of joyful D V M, we think we have to get everything perfect before we ever take the first step. And we never do. The thing of it is we can never guarantee that everything that we are going to do is going to turn out perfectly the way, exactly the way that we plan. And so when we first start on this journey of doing different things in our lives, we get stuck in the planning stages. We try to predict all the potential outcomes, and this really keeps us from taking any Ford action at all. Once we finally get ourselves to a point that we believe we've got all the ducks in a row and we're ready to take action moving forward, and we think that we believe that it's all gonna be perfect, then we take that first step forward. And you know what happens? It's not perfect. Something's messy. Somebody reacts negatively. Something doesn't turn out the way that you wanted it to turn out. And when that happens, especially when you've spent so much time trying to make it perfect before you've even gotten going, then those blows are just even more painful. Those evidences of the lack of perfection, they hurt and they sting just a little bit more. But here's the thing that we miss, was that we never know exactly what's gonna happen. And so it doesn't mean that you did something wrong on the front end if all of your preparation wasn't enough to avoid some kind of negative outcome on the back end. And the more important piece of this is that it's not supposed to, the way that it works out is the way that it's supposed to work out. So no matter what it is that you're thinking about doing next, whether you're looking at maybe trying a new specialty in veterinary medicine, you're ready to enhance your skills and dive into something like acupuncture. You wanna get better at ultrasound, or you maybe if you're a veterinary technician, you're ready to go after a vet tech specialty. Or maybe you're ready to get outta clinical practice and you wanna go a different direction. You're thinking about doing a house call practice or you're thinking about doing relief work and you're scared about starting your own business. Or maybe you're considering getting outta clinical practice altogether and looking at something like industry and you don't know where to start there. Maybe you're even thinking about getting outta the career field altogether. Those are just a few ideas of some changes in your life. Perhaps this is, doesn't have anything to do with your career, maybe it has to do with a relationship, right? It has to do with where you live or a new hobby you would like to start or a new, a new skill you would like to develop outside of your clinical medical skills. Whatever that thing is that you're thinking about doing, that you're in the planning stages and you're kind of trapped there, failing to start because you're afraid it's not perfect. I want you to know that at some point you just need to jump. And it's not going to delay the sting. Any I, it's gonna delay the sting, I guess. Lemme lemme back that up. It is gonna delay the sting of the reality that you're gonna encounter, like because you're just procrastinating and avoiding it, but it's not gonna prevent it. That's the big deal. It's not gonna prevent the discomfort that you are gonna feel when you jump because you will feel discomfort. And the truth of it is, right now, if you're stuck in that procrastination stage of making a change in your life that you know you need to change, you're already feeling that discomfort. That's the most interesting thing about the whole deal, is that you're already feeling uncomfortable. And so you're delaying starting or going on that new journey because you're afraid you're going to feel uncomfortable. Well, you already feel uncomfortable. And so it's much better to just get going. You know, do the minimal viable product action items. Like what are the minimum things you need in place to be able to move in the direction of where you want to go and realize you will never have a roadmap for the entire destination when you start off? We never do. There isn't a single person in this world that has decided to go on a journey that knew exactly how they were gonna get there the day that they stepped foot on the path for the first time. We have a general idea of the direction we're gonna go. We know the first step or two that we're gonna take, and that is it. And then from there, clarity comes to us. And so I think back to our earliest days here at Joyful dvm, and I think about my vision for what we wanted to do with this organization and how we wanna help veterinary professionals and really help them to become empowered over their lives and get us off of that top 10 list and help them to realize that it's not inevitable consequence of this career field. That's always been our big vision here and how exactly we're gonna do it. You know, I don't know, I still don't know exactly how we're gonna do it, but what I do do know is that we've had, we've made a positive impact. And I know that because of all of the emails that I get from all of you. But I think back to those early days, and I was scared because you guys know I have a lot of really strong opinions and you probably, you know, aren't gonna be too surprised to learn. And especially if you've listened to our podcast for a while, those strong opinions are not always well taken. So as you know, for as many positive emails and positive responses we get on social media posts, I probably get twice as many negatives. Not so much now as in the early days, but in the early days for sure. And in those promotion periods where we're out there, we're, we're spending money on advertising to promote our free resources, our workshops, our webinars, our our job guides and things like that. Whenever we're doing that kind of thing, which actually increases the social awareness of our organization, then the volume of that negative stuff increases. It's just more eyes on our stuff until we get more negative feedback. And my motives are good, you guys know that about me. My motives are good, but it doesn't matter because it's always in however it's received, whatever emotion that's evoking out of somebody is going to then drive their actions. It's no different than it is for you and me, right? Emotion drives action 100% of the time. And in the early days when I didn't really understand that relationship to the extent that I did now, because when I started Joyful dvm, I didn't have my coaching certification and I just started it with a vision and with my experience. And when I started that and I didn't really have this firm grasp on what we teach now and what I use in my own life now, I, you know, I, what was actually happening in the space, if you will, in those early days, those comments and those emails gutted me and shook my confidence to my core. And I remember two or three times just throwing into town saying, I can't do this. I'm not strong enough to get the hate mail. I'm not strong enough to get these negative social media posts. I just can't, if this is the path, like I don't want, I don't want this, I don't, I can't take this. Remember thinking that to myself, I can't take this like this is just gonna be too hard. And I would walk away. I would give myself, you know, permission to basically like walk away from it and lick my wounds and just kind of hide out in my house and you know, go about doing other things. And then that pull would start again that that nudging that calling to go try again, do it again. And so then eventually that desire, the vision just would not go away. And so I would go again and I would do it again and I would get out there and then over time then here would come the negative comments again. And, and then once again I would run away and I did this two or three times where I really just thought about like, I'm not doing this anymore. And then something shifted and I know exactly the moment that it shifted. Actually as I think back to this, the exact moment that it shifted was May 9th, 2019. And the reason that I remember that day so clearly is because I did a Facebook Live that day and it was just a completely raw, authentic Facebook Live. I even cried on Facebook and you can go back and find it, the video is still there. And it was the, that day, the reason that day was so important to me was because, because that was the 20 year anniversary of graduating from veterinary school. And that in that moment to see that we were no closer to getting off of that top 10 list of suicide than we had been, you know, 24 years before when I had started veterinary school. It just really hit me. And it really brought home to me that this whole idea that we have here, joyful DVM is so much bigger than me. It's so much bigger than my fear. It's so much bigger than the haters. It's so much bigger than the ugly emails and the nasty comments. It's so much bigger than all of that because it literally becomes a life impacting mission. And that is what I held onto as I continued to get the negative as I move forward creating what we did. And then later in 2019 when we launched Vet Life Academy for the first time and it just kind of went, you know, from there has blown up from there. And that's why we do what we do. And as I've continued in this organization since that time and as we have continued to have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people go through Vet Life Academy and as we have, you know, helped people on the one-on-one coaching programs and all the workshops and the webinars and all the things that we do over here, I have kept that in mind. And our vision has grown. We don't know exactly yet how we're gonna get where we're going. We just know that we wanna continue to serve. We know that we wanna continue to make an impact. And as my own life has continued to evolve and I've had new interests that have come into the picture that I think only have been able to come into the picture because of the way that we have expanded possibility through what we do and teach here at Joyful DVM, that has also broadened the opportunities for the ways that we can help people. And it has broadened it even to beyond veterinary medicine. There have been some twists and turns in my path that I never saw coming. I remember when I was introduced to human design, I felt like something clicked that like this piece of the puzzle dropped into place. And I was like, oh, that makes so much sense. And for me it did. It made so much sense for me, which is why I just couldn't get enough of it. I, you know, I dove straight into getting a lot of education. I am now quantum human design specialist. I'm, you know, certified in that and I love that. And so we kind of trickle that in here and there into the things that we do over here at Joyful dvm. And then as many of you, you know, know, there's a spiritual aspect that has come into play with this, you know, gifts of, of intuitive abilities and mediumship that I had no idea that I even possessed that somebody pointed out to me. And you know, I explored that outta curiosity and I'll be darned if they weren't right. And so that's another piece. And then you can kinda see how it all starts to get really confusing cuz how does it all fit together? Well, I do think that I have figured out how it all fits together and, and it, for me, it really all comes down to this concept of alignment. And you've heard me talk about this before. When we are aligned with the true essence of who we are, then our lives make so much more sense. When we stop trying to be who other people are teaching us or telling us we should be and try stop trying to live the lives that other people are telling us are the responsible lives, the practical lives, the ones that keep us safe, and we stop doing that and we really lean into our own inner knowing and we pursue our lives and our careers from that aspect, everything starts to fall into place. And I see in behind that 100%. And in doing that, what I've realized is that the, the synthesis, the combination of all of this into one is a little bit confusing for a lot of people. And it was also confusing for me to figure out how to, to, to, to make it all make sense because it is a journey as I had reflected on this recently. It is a, it was a journey for me. And of course it makes sense that it would be a journey for you. And so in that, you know, I was oh, gung ho, like let's just put everything together and we've made some changes to kind of to do that. But I think that what we need to do now is take a minute and really embrace this season of clarity, which is what has come. And this is, you know, why I wanted to record this episode and why I wanted to share this, this clarity with you in this journey with you. Because so many times we can get two or three or four steps down the road and we can be like, Ooh, that wasn't the best idea. Like on hindsight, we see where there were gaps in our logic and there were gaps in our, in our plan, like just the variables we didn't even know to account for that. We didn't know what we didn't know kind of situations. And so for what most of us would do in that situation, and what I would've certainly done five or six years ago was I would blame myself. I would feel ashamed for making decisions and making the wrong mistakes in air quotes. And I would feel like I wasted time or wasted resources. And as I've looked at this entire evolution here over the last few weeks, I have not felt any of that, which is why I felt it was so important to share this with you because what I have really come to embrace and to learn to be so true, and I had to experience this for myself even though many of my mentors had told me the same thing. And I, and you know, hopefully you will, you will also maybe just try this out a little quicker than I did. But there really is clarity that comes from acting quickly when you know what you're meant to do. So even though we made some decisions and we did a lot of planning to really try to completely rebrand Joyful DVM into Carry Wise, now that we are two-thirds of the way through that process, I realize that in doing that it actually is not going to serve joyful DVM the way that I want it to. It's gonna have a negative impact on that brand and that population of people who we have been helping in a way that I didn't anticipate that it would. And I don't want that at all. That clarity now for me, I see that. And so I could sit here and I could and spin around and try to figure out, you know, how to make it all perfect or I could just be like, Nope, put a pause on it and just shift what I can. This is the acting swiftly, this is the clarity is here, let's now keep moving in the direction we know we need to move, we want full steam ahead in the direction we thought we needed to go. And in only in doing that have I been able to get the, the clarity on over what we actually need to do. And there's another piece of this story that I wanna share with you in just a minute. So what that means for Joyful DVM is that now we're quickly doing a, a pivot. We are reinstating the name of the Joyful DVM podcast. You have this beautiful nine episodes from episode 100 to 108 that have all have to do with intentional joy, still very relevant I think to your lives. And then moving forward from here, we're gonna get back to more veterinary type focus content for the Joyful Deviant Podcast. The next thing that's gonna be birthed out of this is the new Carrie Wise podcast. It's not, I don't have a published date yet. We're working on that right now. There'll be a few of those episodes that'll probably overlap and those, you know, those first six or eight episodes will be pretty similar to those episodes, 100 through 108 ish in the Joyful DVM podcast. Cause we'll just repurpose that and then we'll start moving forward. That's all coming. So if you were interested in those kinds of things that we're talking about, alignment, your, you know, more purpose driven content connection with your personal assets, those kinds of things, and you enjoyed that kind of content, then you're gonna want to come over there to, to dive even deeper. I'm still gonna dive into it here because I've always talked about those things here, but the deeper aspects of those conversations will take place over on the Carry Wise podcast. The other things aren't changing, they never were, the joyful DVM website was never going anywhere and it's still there. The joyful DVM social media accounts were never going anywhere. They are still there. That Life Academy for Life, you know, all of our programs there still, there never were going anywhere. So this really, you know, even though it kind of feels like a really big deal to me, it really does just kind of come down to the podcast, which is kind of funny when I think about it. And I'm glad that I recognized this, this disconnect that was getting created and that I found the strength that I had, the strength and the courage just to quickly make a change. This is an, this is a win for me. I'm gonna share this with you. This is a win for me because even when I went to changing into this personal branding, that is a a, a decision that has been on my mind for two years to do. And you might see, but Carrie, you just said you're not gonna do that. And so here's what's so interesting and this is why Clarity is like taking action is so important because I, I kind of wrestled with this idea of a personal brand for two years before I decided in October to finally, like that's when I kind of came public with this idea that we are going to do this thing. And in doing that, it helped things to start moving again. Like, you know, action creates clarity. So some other pieces started to fall into place and only through that process of the months since then do I now have clarity on the vision on how these two things are held simultaneously. Both joyful DVM and everything that we do there and will continue to do there. And then this whole other aspect that is truly personally branded under carry wise, they will both exist. One doesn't need to exist without the other one. It can be joyful DVM and carry wise and the, and which I've talked about before, how, and is always more powerful than either or the and and is where the clarity came in as I started to move forward with what I thought was gonna be a total rebrand. And I'll be honest, the reason that I decided, I made that decision back a few months ago when I decided to kind of come forward with this, the reason I decided that one was gonna, the the carry wise brand was going to, I was gonna rebrand everything into that was because I thought that it would be easier. I thought it would be easier to do that. And I had a lot of fear and that's something that I'm really familiar with. I'm really familiar with being completely freaked out when I make changes in my life, in my career, in my business. It's all very normal part of the human experience. And the reason I share this with you is because I sat in two years almost a fear of bringing forward this brand, this Carey Wise, personally branded thing. And I know in looking back and reflecting over what's happened over the last six to 12 months, that that fear and the experience of that, of the negative of what happens when you put yourself out there from those early days in joyful DVM with all the haters. I know that's what I thought I was gonna be able to avoid somehow if I planned it all out and did it just perfectly, my subconscious still believed that I was going to be able to do all this without any hate mail, without any ugly comments, without any of that kind of stuff. And I kind of laugh as I tell you the story because I also know, like with my conscious mind, with my, my prefrontal cortex, that that's just not possible because I will never control the humans. I will never control the humans. But it's so amazing how influential that subconscious mind is. The lower brain, the Gertrude in my case is what I've, I call my lower brain avatar as many of you know. And it's so amazing how programmed we are to allow that part of our brain to drive the bus, the part that anticipates threat. We just believe it all the time. And so I, through that fear, I put off making this decision to rebrand under my name. And yes, now that I finally got through that fear and decided, no, we're gonna do that last fall. And I announced it and we started making changes behind the scenes to do it. And now we're, you know, five or six months in and I'm like, oh wait a minute, we're actually not gonna do that. We're gonna hold both. You might think, well, wasn't she right? Wasn't that lower brain of yours, right? Wasn't it telling you not to do something and you would miss the whole point of what I, why I'm telling you this, that that's what you would believe? Because no, it was exactly the opposite. I needed to take action despite the fear. It wasn't reasonable fear, all of the things, the catastrophic things that my lower brain tried to tell me what happened if I rebranded? That's not what happened, that's not what happened at all. But it, that fear would have stopped me from making the change if, well, and it did for over two years and it would've stopped me if I had continued to let it drive the bus. But by making the change, I got out of this, of the experience exactly what I needed, which was clarity on the direction that we were going, clarity for joyful dvm, which which I'm so grateful for and clarity for what is, is the Carey Wise brand and how these other aspects of what I have been interested in, in studying and developing these new skills, how that all fits into my life. Because it was really confusing, I'll be honest. It was really confusing, like how do all these pieces fit together? I have no idea. And it wasn't until I decided to bring it all together and stop hiding behind different aspects of it that I then saw how it would all work. And in that clarity, that's where I saw the separation, where I saw Joyful DVM needs to continue to do what it does because it makes a massive impact on the veterinary community and on the, the everybody who has anything to do with veterinary medicine. Like it makes such a big impact on in that area. And I'm so passionate about that I live that I totally get all that. I don't wanna stop doing that, but then also allow the other interests to come forward as well. And this is so important I think for me to share with you because I think it's easy for us to compartmentalize, compartmentalize ourselves into a single decision. It's so easy for us to say, well I decided to do this and so now I have to do this forever. This is the decision I made. I told everybody and now what if I don't do it, then people are gonna think bad things about me. This is why I said this is why I titled this podcast, let It Be Messy because you are gonna get the clarity for you when you take action in your own life. And that clarity may be like, oh wait, wait, no, this isn't exactly what I wanna do. I was wrong about that. This is how I thought it was gonna work, but now I understand this is not how it's gonna work and so we're gonna do this other thing instead and just own it. It's really not that big of a deal. It really isn't. Nobody's gonna eat you over it. And anybody who would have really ugly things to say about you in making a shift or a pivot or changing your mind or deciding to undo something that you did, let 'em judge you. Who cares? Judgment's never about the person that's getting judged, it's always about the person who is doing the judging. Let it be messy, let it be messy. Don't spend years of your life thinking that you need to make a change, but being afraid to make a change like I was. Because you know what's so funny about this as we look at it now, what if I had made this change two years ago and I can't rewrite the past and I'm not, I'm not regretful, please don't misunderstand, but let's just play the scenario out. What if two years ago when this whole idea of putting everything under Carrie Wise, what if I had moved forward two years ago, how much more quickly, what if I had the clarity of all these other pieces? Now that being said, I can also see how it was useful for me to kind of be stuck in this limbo because of some other things that came into play during that period of time. Some other, some clarity in some other areas. And so it took that final decision like yes, I'm finally gonna do this to bring it all together for me to see how actually two pieces of this needed to stay separated. And I, I say it separated and I don't hope, I hope you don't see that as like you know, a concrete wall in between the two. Because I really don't think that that's at all what it is. I just think that when it comes to the focus of what we talk about and what we create, that there are kind of two different, different paths if you will. And the one does kind of of naturally lead into the other. For those who are curious to keep going for the, for the vast majority of veterinary professionals, you're going to want to start with everything that has to do with the Life Academy because that is where it all begins. We think about alignment and becoming really aligned with the true essence of who we are. It's all about the physical mind. It's all about understanding Thinkful act. It's all about leveraging the space, making sure you are the one who decides what you believe, making sure that you are the one who controls your own emotions, your own emotional wellbeing. That's what it's all about. And we have all of that for you inside of Life Academy for Life. And in our new aligned Living bootcamp, which is under the carry wise brand, we also teach the first component, we teach the components of the physical mind as one of three components of alignment. So if we kind of think about the bigger picture of alignment, there's three main components. There is the physical mind, there is the personal essence and the of the universal connection that Life Academy and Joyful dvm. We work with the physical mind primarily. And then we touch on aspects of the personal essence over in the Carey Wise brand. We do all three and we then spend even more time and we will be spending it even more time on some of those aspects like human design and understanding our personal energetic blueprints and our energy, our workflow, our decision making processes, things like that that some of you guys might categorize as the woo category of life and might not be of any interest to you at all. So that's the separation that I talk about. Now here's the final piece I wanna share with you. When I think back, when I think back to 2009, and I'm sorry, I'm think back to 2017, we started joyful DVM kept running away, kept being scared and came back. We get so caught in our own habits and patterns and they've served us well. Can I just take a moment and say that like the habits and patterns that you have in your life, they have served you well. Even when you get to the point that you realize they aren't great for you to continue, we don't need to beat ourselves up for the decisions that we made, the way that we survived up until this point in time because you just did the best that you could with the information and resources that you had. And so if that meant running through Starbucks every single day to get your ass out of bed, to get to work so you could go earn the money you needed to earn to pay your bills. And you now realize that running to Starbucks every day was simply a buffering activity that covered up your emotions and didn't solve the problems. We don't need to punch ourselves in the face for going to Starbucks every single day. We can say, okay, thank you for coming up with a way to get through what I needed to get through and now let me make some new decisions. By the way, that was entirely my own personal scenario. So this is, I'm speaking very firsthand here and what's so fascinating about all of this is just how deeply protective part of your human brain is you have. And this is part of who you are, right? Like we have such an intense protective instinct that it's easy to miss how many things that we're doing from the need to self protect things that we don't even realize. And that is exactly the clarity that I got here over the last few weeks as I was trying to navigate how we were doing these final pieces of the rebrand. In doing that, what I did, and some of you may have seen this, is I kind of threw out into the wild a whole nother brand. So not even Carrie Wise, but one called the Lion Living Institute. And I threw it out into the wild on my birthday on in February 14th. And it was out there for, you know, a little bit and I just didn't sit well with me and it was just like this, like blinders were pulled off and I literally laughed out loud, like I could laugh as I'm recording this episode for you because what I did is I found another way to hide. And I think this is so, so fascinating when it comes to considering how the human brain works. I had done all of this work right to, to put myself to detective, to rebrand under my personal name and all the, and when I say all this work, most of it was behind the scenes and we were gonna change joyful DVM and over and all that stuff. And then when it, when it finally came to those last little pieces and it was times like jump out there as Carrie Wise, what did I do? I gave it a different name, the the Aligned Living Institute, which I do like and and I like, I like the concept of, but it's not necessary. It's just another layer of insulation, it's a layer of protection, it's a way to hide. And that's really the clarity that I had was that look at this, you're doing it again. You are afraid to step out there and say what you believe. You're afraid to step out there and do the things that you wanna do. You're afraid you're gonna be judged, you're afraid you're gonna get hate emails, you're afraid you're gonna get negative social media. And so you're creating this front that you can hide behind just like you did with Joyful dvm. And I was kind of blown away and that sounded kind of judgy the way that I said it. But quite honestly it was fascinating. I was clarity and it was true. That's exactly what I had done even though I didn't even realize I was doing it. So don't underestimate the power of your own mind to protect you or to think it needs to protect you from things and just pay attention to whether or not you need to be protected. Because what I know is I don't need to be protected. I don't need to avoid hate mail or ugly social media comments. Like those things don't actually matter. And that's what's so nice about this time around when I say this time around like launching something new this time around, is that I have that, that history of having survived those things and I know that it's all just part of it and I also don't take any of it personally. And that's what was so fascinating for me was to see the links to which when I get very busy, I get very disconnected with where the emotion is, what the emotion is that's driving the action. So remember friends emotion always drives action. And so when you're very, very busy, it's useful to take a minute and ask yourself what emotion is driving this? And what I didn't recognize because I had so many things going on at the same time, was that much of the emotion that was driving actions as I was doing this rebranding, those emotions were anxiety, those emotions were fear, those emotions were uncertainty. And those emotions drove the decisions to come up with with another name. It was a different front other than my personal name and all of that kind of stuff. And it wasn't until I took a minute, like I put it out there and I just kinda sat with it cuz it was done and I took, I was just, it just didn't feel right. And I'm like, what is happening? That I then had that clarity, oh look what you did. Isn't this fascinating? Isn't this fascinating? Look, you just totally created another shield for yourself. You don't need another shield. And I think today, more than ever in our world, we need people to stop hiding who they are. We need people to show up in their lives as themselves, to be unafraid, to say what they believe, to be unafraid, to let it be messy, let it be messy. We don't need social media full of people who are looking perfect all the time and doing perfect things and only showing the the upside of their lives. No, let's just let it be what it is. Let it let it be messy and, and it's so important that for me it was so important to share this because I don't want you to do what I have done over my life and it is put off making decisions or, or I've even made the decisions, put off acting on decisions because of fear. It's what we do, it's part of the way that our, our minds are wired. And so I don't want you to beat yourself up, but I want you to at least give yourself permission to just jump in. Just jump in. It's never as bad as you think it's gonna be. The anticipation is always worse than the actual result. And if you do jump in and you end up getting judged, who cares? Because at the end of the day, the only one who needs to like your decisions is you. You're the only one. And if you don't have somebody in your life who's supporting the decisions that you wanna make for yourself and you need to find somebody in your life to do that. And you can always reach out to me because I will always believe in you and I will believe in your vision and I will believe in where you believe you need to go. I'm not gonna tell you you need to stay in some job that's sucking the life outta you. I'm not gonna tell you that you have to make sure you've paid off every single bit of debt until you before you go and do something fun. No, I don't believe that kind of stuff at all. But I know what it's like to feel completely trapped by those kinds of rules. And I've helped so many clients work through those exact things, living through these manuals and these expectations that they never chose for themselves. And obviously I've had to be working through my own as well. And I also have to keep my eye out because the fear will still hold me back. And that's the only thing that makes the difference between people who have a huge impact in this world and those who have really good lives, but don't make a huge difference. The only difference is that the ones who have a really big impact are just willing to be afraid more, are willing to try stuff and to fall flat on their face and to have to change their mind and pivot. They're willing to jump in quickly so that they can get the clarity that they need to keep moving forward. They spend more of their time in action than in planning. That's what makes the difference. And then so if we wanna, any of us wanna move any of our lives forward in any way, whether it is just our own personal lives or if you have a bigger vision for some other, you know, bigger, more global impact. And I don't think one is better than the other. So let me be very clear on this. I think living in a life that's aligned for you, the kind of life that you are meant to live is your only job here. But even in doing that, many of us, there are things that are holding us back. It's fear. The emotion is fear that is holding, holding us back from doing that. And I think the quicker that we take those steps and step right into what we're afraid of, then we get clarity on what we need to do next to keep moving forward. If we keep waiting until we don't feel afraid to take the first step, we will never go anywhere. If we keep waiting until we don't feel afraid to take the first step, then we will never go anywhere. And then many times when you take the first step, you're gonna realize, wait a minute, I just took three steps down path B and I need to be over on path A. And so that requires us to take three steps backwards and go, you know, forward again on path A. That is not a problem, that is not a problem. It only becomes a problem if you judge yourself for it. And then you use that judgment as a reason not to keep going, my friends, it's only just emotion. It doesn't matter, none of it matters. It's all about the clarity. So the more quickly we can act the mo more quickly, we will gain the clarity on the direction that we're going and we will adjust our journey or adjust our track or we won't, we won't even know if we need to until we take those first few steps. Let it be messy. Let yourself figure it out as you go along. Don't spend any more of your time just wishing that it was the right time to get started in whatever it is that's on your mind to pursue right now because there isn't a better time than now. You have one life and when it comes to time, we use it or we lose it one life. So let it be messy. Let me be your example of how messy it can be and how you can still keep moving forward in your life. And don't hesitate ever to reach out. You can always send me an email, you can hit me in direct message on Facebook, on Instagram. I would love to hear from you. If you need a little bit of a pep talk, please do not ever hesitate to ask. All right, my friends, that's gonna wrap it up for this. Let it be messy episode of the Joyful DVM podcast and I'll see you next week. Bye for now.