When you take a bunch of smart people, enroll them in a professional program, and then tell them that their chosen career puts them at an increased risk for suicide… they believe you.
It’s a dangerous perspective to share, it offers no solutions, and it’s not actually true.
In this episode I share why the way we talk about historical data points and statistics actually perpetuates the experiences we’re trying to eliminate.
I also share how modern veterinary culture continues to add fuel to this fire, and what we can do individually to break this life-threatening cycle for ourselves and those around us in the process.
Resources mentioned in this episode can be found at https://joyfuldvm.com
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is auto-generated and may contain typos. Hi there. I'm Dr. Cari Wise, veterinarian, certified life coach and certified quantum human design specialist. If you're a veterinary professional looking to uplevel your life and your career, or maybe looking to go in an entirely new direction, then what I talk about here on the Joyful D V M podcast is absolutely for you. Let's get started. Hello my friends. Welcome back to another episode of the joyful D V M podcast. Today we're gonna be talking about how BET school sets us up to fail and why we keep repeating the pattern. This is a topic that I've talked about on and off a few times over the years, but probably not to the extent that I'm gonna talk about it today. It's a topic that is near and dear to my heart. It's something I feel very passionate about. And so I don't know if this episode is gonna be a short episode or a long episode. We're gonna just kinda see where this takes us. What's most important to me as I begin to share my perspective on this topic is to be really clear and thorough about what's happening. I believe the information empowers all of us, and there are vital pieces of information when it comes to success in veterinary medicine, and more importantly, being able to create and maintain emotional wellbeing. There's critical information that we're missing and it starts with what happens in our professional programs. So whether you're listening to this as a veterinarian or a veterinary technician, a practice manager, or anybody related to the veterinary industry at all, I want you to listen up because what I'm gonna be sharing here does apply to you. It's not limited to limited to just what happens in veterinary schools, it's really how we talk about our profession as a whole. For me, it absolutely started in veterinary school and what really brought this to the forefront recently was when I was working with a one-on-one client coaching client, and she said to me that vet school taught her to be afraid of her career. I dropped my head when she said that I don't think I could even breathe for about 15 seconds because you see, for years, this is exactly what I have been afraid of. This is what I have known has been going on. And to hear somebody, a new graduate, somebody who's just not quite even been out a whole year say that to me was heartbreaking. I knew it was happening, but dang, to hear somebody say it without even bringing it up as a point of consideration just really knocked the wind out of me. So how did it happen? We start out and we decide we wanna go into veterinary medicine. Some of us decide to pursue a degree in as a veterinarian, to become a doctor. Others of us decide to, we wanna become veterinary technicians. Maybe we wanna become assistants, or we wanna work in one of the other associated fields, and we do this. Why? Well, you guys know we don't. Most of us don't do this to go out and make a bunch of money, right? We do this because we have a passion for animals. We have a passion for animal welfare. We have a passion for helping people. This is a people kind of profession after all. And so there is a passion, a true passion coupled with compassion that drives us to go into these careers. We want to help, we wanna be able to interact with people, we want to spend time with animals. We wanna make a difference. And so those are the main drivers of people who end up in careers in veterinary medicine. Now, getting into veterinary medicine from an academic perspective is not an easy road. There are a lot of courses that we all have to take and, and when you're going the doctor route, you know you have all these undergrad courses that you take and you have to get these certain GPAs and test scores and all of this and apply, and then hopefully you get into veterinary school. And then as you go through all of your academics within veterinary school itself, then eventually you graduate and then you take at another test to get your license. On the veterinary technician side, there's a lot of different ways that you can become a credentialed technician. You can become a credentialed technician with an associate's degree or with a bachelor's degree, and they are slightly different as far as what those credentials are. And then again, there's a big test at the end to get those credentials officially. But there are things that happen all along the way during those academic years that actually have a massive impact on what will become the quality of life of the veterinary professionals themselves. It's something that we are not talking about, at least not in the way that we should be, and it's creating and perpetuating an ongoing decades long problem within our profession. Many of us are aware that veterinary professionals appear to be at a higher risk of suicide, and I say appear to be for a very specific reason. We base that conclusion on historical data information with gained over what has happened over time, looking back at the past, doing calculations, coming up with percentages, and then comparing those numbers to other professions that that data leads us to draw the conclusion that veterinary professionals are at a higher risk of suicide. But what I want you to see, and what I want us all to hear is that historical information does not predict the future. This is where we're missing the boat in our effort to decrease our suicide rate, in our effort to stop losing our colleagues to suicide. We have started to talk about it more, and we should thank goodness we should because we need to have solutions to help our veterinary professionals when they are in crisis, when they are considering that permanent decision for a situation, for an experience that they're having in the moment, we do need to talk about it. So please don't get me wrong. And I am eternally grateful and thankful for all the resources that we actually have at our disposal today, resources that we didn't have when I started veterinary school way back in 1995. And so I need to take you back to that moment in time because there was something that happened at, in that very first week, the veterinary school that forever changed the way that I looked at my career, and it happened to me back in 1995, and it's happening to our colleagues today, all these years later. I remember sitting there in, in veterinary school, and it was during our, the, the introduction week. All the VM one s were on campus and you know, people were coming in, the dean and all this, doing all these talks and telling us what to expect. And our dean had stood up there and he'd given us our big welcome and you know, a bit of a pep talk, inspirational talk. And he'd wrapped up and then he like, as he kind of started to walk away from the pony, he kind of stopped and he kind of came back and he said, and oh, by the way, in case you aren't aware of it, veterinary professionals tend to be at a really high risk for suicide. So you're gonna wanna be aware of that as you go through your career. And that was it. That was the extent of the conversation about it. And then he walked off the platform. Now I'm sitting there with my jaw hanging open. I imagine if there had been a camera, because I had never heard that, I had no idea that veterinary professionals were at a higher risk for suicide. And this is important because my dad was a veterinarian. So I literally grew up in veterinary medicine and I had never heard that. It's not anything that I'd ever heard talked about. It was nothing that had ever been introduced to me until that day. And in that day, my perspective of this career field changed and I became aware and started watching for evidence to prove that statement true. Now, warning people of a danger without equipping them with the skills they need to protect themselves is a really crappy thing to do. I'll just be frank. And that's exactly what we keep doing in veterinary medicine. When we started to recognize through her our historical data that veterinary professionals appear to be at a higher risk for suicide than other professions, we started talking about it. We started making more and more of us aware of it, but we did not equip ourselves with what we needed to be able to change that outcome. Instead, over time, we have continued to create crisis level solutions and thank goodness that we have because we are saving lives. So again, please do not misunderstand that I am grateful and thankful for the progress in crisis mode solutions that we have. I am grateful for those and it, it has made a big difference, but I want us to get to a place that we don't need the crisis level solutions because we're never ending in crisis and without the skills that we need to navigate this career field, it's gonna be really difficult to get there if the only way we continue to talk about emotional wellbeing and being stressed out, burnout, anxiety, depression, high rate of suicide is through the reference of it being an in an inevitable consequence, telling a population of people that they are at risk for anything automatically scares them. They also automatically believe you when you are an authority figure, but the question that I have is where's the proof? Yes, there's a historical, there's lots of historical data. We can pull up all kinds of historical data and analyze it and draw conclusions, but nowhere can we predict the future. None of us can. That's the part we're forgetting to talk about. Just because it always has been does not mean that it always will be. But instead, we have these young veterinary professionals, veterinary want tobes who are here in veterinary medicine at vet school, in veterinary technician school, or just coming into the pro profession even as an on-the-job trained support staff. And we are announcing to these people that they are at risk for suicide because they joined veterinary medicine and then we're leaving them with no resources, with no alternative perspective, and it scares them. I know that it scared me, but beyond being scared, we need to understand what's happening neuroscientifically, because this is where it really gets important that we change the way that we talk about this. You see, within our brains, there is the reticular activating system. It is the part of your brain that programs your conscious awareness. It's not possible for us consciously to interact with every input that we have throughout a day. Our brain is amazing. It's an amazing computer, but it's not that good. It cannot process every little bit of information. And so there's this built-in system, the reticular activating system that grabs onto what we focus on and programs our consciousness. With that, simply put what we pay attention to, we see more of what we focus on, we create. Now, you might be wondering like how does this actually play into the discussion of suicide? But let's, before we jump into that, let's just talk about how real this particular activating system function is. If any of you have ever spent any amount of time researching something that you were going to purchase, maybe it was an automobile, maybe it was a pair of shoes, maybe it was a handbag, or maybe it was even, you know, a new place to live. Maybe you spent some time researching or came across like a new word or a new phrase that you hadn't ever heard before, and you had a conversation with somebody about it and you really like put some focus on that, that phrase or that or that topic, and then all of a sudden you start hearing it and seeing it everywhere. So the new car, all of a sudden you start seeing that model of car everywhere or that color of car everywhere or those tennis shoes, those, those ha, that handbag, that new pair of shoes, you start seeing people wearing them and then carrying them everywhere around you. It just seems like it's a big coincidence that all of a sudden, these things that you just recently started being interested in and paying attention to are now apparently everywhere. It just seems like a coincidence, but friends, it's not a coincidence. It's not even that they weren't always there. It's that you never told your brain that it mattered to you. And so your reticular activating system didn't bring it into your conscious awareness. It simply filtered it out and let it float on by. As soon as you've put some attention to it, as soon as you've thought about it, as soon as you, you've pondered on it, now your particular activating system is like, Hey, she keeps paying attention to that. She must be interested in that. Let me show her more of that. And so it does, this concept is why we have to change the way that we talk about the suicide rate in veterinary medicine because when we introduce our young veterinary professionals to a statistic, a historical data point, without any alternative perspective, to offer them that they don't have to be part of that statistic going forward, and that there are resources out there to help them change their experience and that they are actually way more powerful than they think they are. If we don't ever give them that information, we are sending them out into our profession afraid. We are sending them out into the profession programmed to watch for opportunities for that statistic to be true. We're setting ourselves up to fail in our effort to help each other. We're actually making it worse. So we have to change the way that we talk about this. It's not enough for us to say, Hey, veterinary professionals are at a higher risk for suicide. We need to qualify that. Where did that information come from? We need to point out we cannot predict the future just because this is the way that it's always been. That does not mean for you individually that it has to be true. Everybody still has individual choice. Everybody's still living individual experience. The next thing that we have to do is equip veterinary professionals with how to deal with the lifestyle and practice of veterinary medicine, telling them that they're going to be stressed out all the time, telling them that they're gonna be at high risk for suicide, telling them that clients are gonna be awful to work with, and that there's toxicity in our workplaces warning them of all of those things without giving them any alternative perspectives or skills to navigate those things. When they do happen, sets them up to fail. And as we've continued to do this year after year after year in veterinary medicine, it is no wonder that we have a crisis on our hands. It is no wonder that we hit a pandemic. And when there was an opportunity for people to step away from this profession, many of them did, and they are not coming back. The profession is broken when it comes to this. What we've done so far to kinda mitigate this is not enough. Yes, crisis mode solutions, we need those, but we cannot rely on crisis mode solutions if we want to change the future of this profession. My friends, our wellbeing is completely within our own individual control. And at the end of the day, we are the only ones who can control it. We cannot wait for somebody else to get their act together before we learn how to not take it all. So personally, we can't wait for everybody to agree with our decisions before. We believe in our own. We have a trust in our own selves that we believe in our own abilities, and this again, is a place that the veterinary education system is failing the students. We go through our veterinary education in fear. So not only now, you know, have we added on this whole, like you're at risk for suicide fear, but then there's also this bullying and this pressure and this culture of shaming and berating students that is somewhat universal. Now, I'm not gonna say every instructor in every school does this. I'm not saying that, but I'm saying that the experience when you talk to veterinary students who are graduating, the experience is still there. And for instance, this is not isolated to veterinary medicine. Let's be honest. This is something that's also happening in medical schools and nursing schools, and quite honestly, probably all kinds of professional schools. This is an ego problem. This is not an academic problem. And what this is, is that humans who are afraid humans are I who are insecure humans who don't wanna be judged negatively, take their fear, take their insecurities, and take their shame out on everybody else. This is human nature. This is what happens. Our emotions drive our actions. This is every human on the planet. Emotions drive actions, and those emotions don't come from what happens around happen around us. Our emotions come from what we believe about what's happening around us. It comes from what we believe about ourselves, and they come from what is happening, what other people say, what other people do, case outcomes, all of that. Those are just circumstances, but each and every one of us has an internal dialogue about those circumstances. And when those internal dialogues are creating, fear, are creating insecurity, are creating shame, are creating guilt, are creating victimization. People who are hurting hurt other people. They lash out, they blame, they point fingers, they judge, they berate. It's all a fear-based system. There's no place for compassion. There's no place for understanding or patience or encouragement when the person and the people doing the teaching are so trapped in their own fear-based ego. Now, I'm not trying to judge the, the veterinary professionals, the academicians who are in some of the highest positions and having the greatest influence on students. I'm not judging, I'm pointing out what's happening. I've been one of those people, my friends, I worked in academia for a long time, and I want you to know that as soon as any one of us, if we're in academia or if we're in practice, as soon as we start to have our own confidence in ourselves, as soon as we learn not to be afraid of other people and case outcomes, as soon as we learn that our own individual self-value and self-worth will never be defined or dependent on what other people say and do and how case turn out, then we don't have to be so mean to each other just to get through the day. We're real quick to point fingers at clients for making this profession so difficult. But my friends, it starts with us. The client interactions with us are simply a reflection of our own internal state of wellbeing, and as a profession, we are not in a great place. I'll take that one step further and say, as a global community, we are not in a great place, but this is our opportunity to change it for ourselves. As soon as we start to understand that our own personal emotional wellbeing is completely within our control, that we get to decide what we believe every single moment of every single day, and that when we decide intentionally what we believe, that we then create an emotional experience of for ourselves that is on the higher level of the spectrum, we will then begin interacting with each other and with our clients with much more compassion and understanding. We also stop taking things so personally, and when we get to that place of compassion and understanding for each other and for ourselves, because this is primarily begins as an internal battle, as we have that self-acceptance growing within inside us, and we are confident in our own abilities and we realize that we are valuable and we are worthy simply because we exist, and that our performance will never take that away. When we are anchored in that, then suicide just no longer stays an option. There's nothing to get away from. There's nothing to solve. There's nothing to be afraid of. The humans are always gonna be the humans. None of us in this profession are ever gonna do it right enough to guarantee that the people that we interact with are gonna be nice. We aren't ever gonna do it right enough to guarantee that our coworkers are friendly or that our patients get better. We're not that powerful. No matter how hard we try, we will never be able to control the actions of other people, and we will never be able to control the outcomes of our patients because we're not in charge of their physiology. But we take these two things as really good students that we are. We take these two things as the indicators of how well we're doing our job, and so when we get out into the real world and cases don't turn out the way we wanted them to, and clients are ugly and coworkers are mean, we start to take it personally. We start to believe that if we were better, that those things wouldn't have happened. And it is that dangerous belief system that leads us in a downward spiral into anxiety and depression, and that contributes to our high rate of suicide because those are the actions that those emotions tend to bring out. Does that put us at a higher risk of suicide than other professions? I don't think so, because I think what's happening is just simply the human experience. I think that there are similar levels of stress and anxiety and even depression and suicide in other career fields. Do we statistically track all of it? No, but I guarantee you that we're not alone when we sit around and worry about what might be happening with our patients because of the decisions that we made. We know that nurses and human doctors do the same things. Heck, we know that auto mechanics do the same things. Did they, did they mess up? Did they forget to tighten some bolts? Is there gonna be a family on the highway? They're gonna have an automobile accident and they're all gonna die because they forgot to do one thing on that car. Friends, were not alone in these worries, but these worries aren't reality. Everything we worry about is either in the future or something that's already happened in the past, and none of it's happening in the moment that we're in right now. But as long as we let our minds continue to wander to those places, which will then, because remember thought creates emotion, those thought patterns will create stacking negative emotion. We will then act out with each other from that place and also with ourselves. That is what is creating this vicious cycle that we are experiencing. This is what has drawn us to those conclusions that we're at a higher rate for suicide without questioning why, why it happened, or more importantly, why it matters. A historical data point will never predict the future, not for you and not for me, but as long as we continue to interact with each other as if this is absolute fact, then it will continue to be so. Make no, no mistake about that. What we focus on, we create instead. We will be served so much better if we would just start to work at getting in front of the problem. Yeah, let's make people aware that historically veterinary professionals have been at a higher rate of suicide than most other professions historically. Let's put adequate emphasis on historically, and then let's show them how they're gonna be different. Let's encourage them as they go through school. Let's help them to realize what they're responsible for and what they're not responsible for. And make no mistake, you are never responsible for the emotional reaction of your clients. You are never solely responsible for the outcomes of your patients. You are not that powerful, and there are a lot of leaders in veterinary education and in veterinary medicine as a whole who will tell you that it is your responsibility to make sure that your clients are always happy, that they're always comfortable. Let's face it, friends, most people who come to a veterinary hospital are freaked out. They love their pets. We love their pets too, by the way. They love their pets. They don't know what's going on with them, and even if they're just coming in for a wellness exam, they're gonna need to spend some money. I, I would, you know, say that 95% of the population has drama around money. That's a whole other podcast. It's like a whole other course we could talk about on our own ties or the ties between safety and money that we have created as a species. And so if we just think about that for a second, and even if that animal's completely, you know, well, it's just a well visit coming in for annual vaccines, that client still comes in with some anxiety because they're afraid they don't know what's gonna happen. They don't know if you're gonna find something. They don't know how much it's gonna cost. It's not our fault if the price of our services are outside of the budget that they have. We don't have to take it personally, and even when they decide to react from their emotion of disappointment or shame or frustration, whatever emotion's coming up for them, if they see a price tag that's not within their budget, remember, think, feel, act, however they're feeling is because of what they're believing about their money situation. The way they're behaving from us comes from that emotion, and so if they're feeling frustrated or if they're feeling, you know, shame or guilt because they don't have the resources right now to do the things that we're recommending, and so they lash out at us and they blame because that's what hurting people do. They blame others, they deflect If they do that, and then we take responsibility for it, yeah, it's my fault that that pet can't get any help because my prices are too high. If we take on responsibility for that, we're taking on responsibility for the world, and I know many of us do exactly this. It's our job simply to communicate information, to allow pet owners to make their decisions, and then for us to move forward together in whatever plan has been created. But as soon as we take on responsibility for their decisions and for the outcomes overall, that just becomes more and more evidence of us not being good enough at this job, because underneath all of that is a faulty conclusion that if you're doing this job right, that clients are happy and patients get better, and that is not what this job is about. This is a belief system that, again, we have just passed on from generation to generation inside of veterinary medicine. We've started to miss the whole entire point, and as we've been able to do more and more things to help animals over time, as veterinary medicine has evolved and with that, there's been more and more opportunities for clients to say no for a variety of reasons. Our own shame over that has begun to really rise. We're taking their nose personally. We're believing that we're creating the emotion that they're displaying when they interact with us. This part of veterinary medicine is challenging, but it's not just veterinary medicine that this happens in these kinds of challenging, highly emotive client interactions happen in literally every single type of business. You've seen people lose it in the grocery store. You've probably seen people get frustrated standing in line at a Walmart or a Best Buy or someplace like that. You've seen people get ugly with servers and restaurants. You've probably seen people complaining in a waiting room of a human doctor's office or a dentist office. This kind of stuff is not isolated to veterinary medicine, but the way that we talk about it is, is as if it is, it's as if it's worse for us than it is the other professions. Why are we arguing for that kind of badge of honor? No, it's just humans being humans, and this is the environment in which we interact with humans and when we've got humans who are freaked out and scared about their pets, coupled with veterinary professionals who are hyper responsible and taking on way more responsibility for than what they are actually responsible for and trying to be perfect in order to avoid those negative client interactions and those bad case outcomes, you put those two things together stacked with a thought that if I don't do it right, if this gets too hard, I'm gonna kill myself. Where do we go from there? We've created a compounding effect of just disastrous data points that have no context as they've been offered. We have to change the way that we talk about this and we have to change the skills that we teach, or I should say the skills that we're not even teaching. We need to help each other understand that the how we feel is not created by what happens during the day is created by what we believe that we and we alone have the power to change and control and improve our emotional wellbeing no matter what happens at work or in the world, that we are not destined for anxiety, depression at a high rate of suicide just because we chose this career field. The cases that turn out terrible, you know the ones that accidentally just go down the hill, the the, the surgical accidents that end up in patient death, because that happens sometimes we're humid, the medical cases otherwise that we feel like they're gonna do fine, like everything seems like they should be okay, and then they just crash and burn. If we take every one of those situations as a personal failure, that erodes our own sense of self-worth, that creates hopelessness. It allows us to entertain a really faulty conclusion, which is, if I were good enough, this wouldn't have happened my friends. It was never your responsibility to take on all of that. That's not what you signed up for. And the thing is, that's not what you thought you signed up for. You weren't afraid of any of this until we taught you to be afraid of it. You were excited to go into veterinary medicine. You were passionate about medicine, about animals, about being able to help. You weren't stupid. You knew that it was gonna be hard. You know that academically it was gonna be rigorous. You knew there were gonna be stressful moments, but you didn't know that it was gonna be life-threatening until we told you it was, and then we left you to fend for yourselves and then we wonder why it's not getting better. Who's to blame for that? We are every one of us in veterinary medicine, every one of us in academia, every one of us who shows our staff members and our associates that it's okay to talk badly about our clients and about each other when they're not in the room. Every one of us who stands around and commiserates about how hard it is to be in veterinary medicine and how we're victims of this profession, every one of us who continue to embrace that perspective are perpetuating the problem, my friends, you're more powerful than that. I promise you, you are more powerful That, and that is the foundation that we have created this entire organization, A joyful DVM based on is your power. You don't need everybody in your hospital organization to believe what I'm saying. You just need to believe it for yourself. You just need to decide that enough is enough that you refuse to be a statistic, that you refuse to let historical information predict your future, that you refuse to let clients who are angry in cases that don't turn out the way that you wanted them to be, the judgment of your value as a human and the possibilities for your future. You just have to decide that you are not going to go down that road and if you're halfway down that road, you decide to turn around and come back because you're not so far down that road that you can't create an entirely different way of interacting with your profession and with your life, because I promise you that you can. These are the exact kinds of things that we do in all of our programs over here at Joyful D V M, and I hope that if this message today has resonated with you, even if it's pissed you off to hear me talking about it this way, I hope that you'll reach out and tell me that you'll reach out and you'll look to see what we have to offer over here to support you. Because I would, I would venture to say that there isn't an organization that cares about veterinary prof, medical professionals, to the extent that we do here, that holds the belief that you are worthy, that you are valuable, that you are capable, that you are even destined to be in this profession because it's what you chose and we need you here. Now, I'm not gonna tell you I have to stay in veterinary medicine forever. Heaven knows I've been in and outta veterinary medicine for decades as far as from a clinical perspective, but what I am gonna tell you is that none of what you've experienced so far has been an accident that you didn't make a wrong choice by pursuing this career field, and you never did think that you did until you got into it, and the rest of us taught you that you needed to be afraid of it until somebody said, you should never have done it. You heard somebody else say, vet med ruined my life. You heard somebody else say, vet med, suck the life outta me. Does the, the, the student loan debt is gonna ruin my future? You weren't thinking of any of that until somebody offered you that perspective and now you're believing it as if it's true, my friends, it's not true. If you can find one person, one person having a different experience, then it's not fact and there's not enough people talking about what's true in veterinary medicine about the upside of veterinary medicine, about how amazing this career field is and how much power you have to actually influence people in a positive way and how intentional your journey is as a human to be involved in this profession. Nobody's talking about that to the extent that it needs to be talked about in order for us to change the collective perspective, not yet, but the numbers of us who are looking at it from this perspective, who are engaging in our lives and our profession from this perspective, we're on the rise. We are no longer willing to just accept statistics as a prediction of the future, and I encourage you to do the same. I encourage you, if you don't know where to start, if you recognize that you are, have been trapped in a negative perspective, hopelessness, despair, anxiety, dread, all of those things, if you're stuck in a really deep belief system, then going into VetMed was the worst decision ever and that you've ruined your life because of what you've decided to pursue as a young person, please reach out. Jump over to our website, joyful dvm.com, take a look at the resources that we have available for you. Start allowing yourself to experience the alternative perspective because my friends, what you focus on, you create, it is so important that you begin to intentionally offer yourself the other side of this dark story because otherwise, the story just stays dark. This is exactly why we actually very recently created the VetMed Joy Club, is so that you have a way to get an alternative perspective and inspiration and hope multiple times a week. Very easy for you to join. It's open all the time, so jump over to joyful dvm.com. Check out VetMed Joy Club. It is the easiest place to start, and we put it at a price that everybody can afford so that you can start to experience another perspective around this career field and you can get your life back because it is changing your perspective and taking control of your own emotional wellbeing that will, that will actually create the experience that you're going to have in the future. If you want something different than what you have right now, you have to become an active participant in what happens next, and you have the complete ability to do it. You don't need to wait around for everybody in your hospital to get their act together. You don't have to wait around for clients to be happy and for patients to start getting better all the time. You don't even have to wait until the rest of us get our act together and stop talking in such a negative way. You get to do that for yourself, and there's a massive ripple effect that occurs when one person begins. That ripple effect reaches so much further than you'll ever even realize. All you need is to believe in yourself, even if you don't know how, even if you don't understand exactly everything I'm talking about, if simply me talking about this today for you, sparked something in you, gave you a little bit of hope, maybe made you a little bit angry, as I pointed out how we've done this to ourselves, you're on the right track. You're already in forward movement. You're already beginning to make change. You're opening the door to new possibility. That's the first step. So my friends, we are here to help you. Jump over to joyful dvm.com. Check out the resources we have available, and I would love to hear your thoughts on this episode. Feel free to shoot me an email or jump into our social media. Let me know what you think about this. Help me spread the word. If this message has resonated with you, please, please, please share it. As we rally behind these ideas, as we take control of our own personal wellbeing, then we change the culture of veterinary medicine. It's one intentional decision at a time and the ripple effect of those decisions that will change the culture of veterinary medicine for future generations. The historical data is irrelevant. What we do today is what's deciding tomorrow, and we always get to decide for ourselves. All right, my friends, that's gonna wrap it up for this week. Sending you much love and light. See you soon. Bye for now.