Time for a gut check…
Do you have the life you want?
Are you totally satisfied with your life and career?
If not… why not?
List the reasons.
Then, notice what you blamed…
We are taught to believe our external circumstances create satisfaction…
That it’s cause and effect….
Ideal circumstances cause the experience of satisfaction, peace, joy, etc (effect).
So we keep chasing the circumstances…
Better job…
Better co-workers…
Better hours…
Better salary…
Less debt…
Nicer clients…
Fewer euthanasias…
Yet, WE NEVER GET THERE.
Here’s why: As long as we continue to blame external circumstances for the state of our personal wellbeing, we make those circumstances responsible for our experience.
This takes all of our power away.
Blaming may justify what we are experiencing… but it does nothing to move us away from it.
It keeps us right where we are energetically, which causes us to keep recreating the same unfulfilling experiences over and over.
In this week’s episode I explain why blaming is one of the most life-sucking habits we have, and what we can do to break the habit so we can improve our lives and careers from the only place of true power: from the inside out.
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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 are 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 DVM podcast is absolutely for you. Let's get started. Hello my friends. Welcome back to another episode of the joyful DVM podcast today. If you're anything but completely satisfied with your life and your career, then I've got an episode for you and a question to start us off. Who do you blame? What do you blame? That's the question we're gonna be exploring in this episode. To get started, blame is defined as assigning responsibility for a fault or a wrong. And so with that in mind, if you think about the state of your life your entire life, not only your career but your entire life, are you completely satisfied with it? Or are there areas of your life and your career that you wish were different than they are? If that's the case, which is the case for most of us, then the next question that we have to ask ourselves is what do we blame? How do we justify the way that it is? What is it that we believe needs to be different? Many of us blame the places that we work, so who we work for, and we believe that if they were different or better, that our career satisfaction would be greater, that we would be happier in our jobs. Or maybe it's the people that we work with. We blame them for the reason that we're not happy and we don't have great work days. Maybe it's the hours that we work or the amount of debt that we have. Those things are what we blame for, why we can't be happy in our lives, why we aren't fulfilled in our careers. Perhaps it's our salaries or our hourly wage or even the clients that we serve. Many of these things are what get blamed for veterinary medicine being such a hard job, and even the job itself gets blamed. You know, things like cases that don't get better or animals that are really aggressive or euthanasia. All those things that you use to justify why veterinary medicine is hard, that's what gets blamed for the state of your life. And in addition to all of those things that we can tie back to this career field, many of us are also blaming things or people, I should say, the people in our lives who just don't understand. Maybe that's a parent, maybe it's a partner, maybe as a friend, maybe it's all of those. But when we put them all together, we come up with a whole list of people and things that we blame for the way that our life is the way that it is. And I didn't even touch on things like the government or the towns that we live in, maybe the places that we live, the the homes, the the neighborhoods, the culture in the world. I didn't even go into any of those things. And as you could see, we can make a really long list of all the things that hold us back. It's important for us to notice. And as you go through this week, I want you to pay attention to what you say out loud and what you think to yourself in regard to what you're blaming for the way that your life is. Because when we blame, when we put off responsibility to something outside of ourselves for our lives, then we will always be trapped in a cycle of dependence on those things. It's required for those things to change in order for us to be happy or joyful or peaceful or fulfilled. Do you see how this gets to be quite a spiraling trap? Because all of those things we will never control. And as long as we allow those things to control us, which is exactly what we do, when we get trapped in the blame game, then we will just continue to give our power away that will continue to feed a narrative that we don't have choices, that we don't have abilities and capabilities to make changes for ourselves. And more so just continues to really foster this belief system that this is just the way it is now, there is some, some truth in and some power in letting it be what it is. So it is what it is, if you will, but not to the extent that we use that phrase to lock ourselves in and to make us victims. There's a difference in saying it is what it is and letting it be neutral versus this is just the way it is, which leads us and leaves us as victims. Do you see the difference? The truth is that when it comes to your life and your career, you are the only one who can make changes to move you in the direction that you wanna go. And there is no perfect ending here. The life that you want, the career that you want, the dreams that you have for the future, those are yours and yours alone, and you are the only one who can take the steps to make progress to bringing that into your reality. But as long as you make excuses by blaming the things around you, the place that you work, the people you work with, the hours that you work, I don't have enough time. I don't have enough money. Nobody understands me. Clients are rude. This job just sucks the life outta me. As long as that's the narrative that we continue to live in, then we will never create anything different for ourselves. This is such an important point for all of us to understand what we focus on, we create. We will only be able to continue functioning and creating from where we are within our own wellbeing. It's where we put all of our time and attention. We cannot solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it. And when that, what that saying means is that whatever mindset, whatever focus and attention that you give to the things in your life right now, that is what has created what you have right now. And as long as you don't intentionally start to shift that towards something different for yourself, then you will never create something different. You can't just be stuck in a spiral of negativity and expect that one day you're gonna wake up positive and happy and fulfilled. That's just not how this works. Believe me, if it worked, we'd all be happy and joyful and fulfilled by now, but we aren't. And somehow we've all bought into this myth that if we just work harder, if we are just better, if the people we work for are just kinder or more equitable, that somehow that's gonna make it all be okay. We're waiting for something outside of ourselves or some fundamental shift in our beings to make all the difference. And when we look at how that's gonna happen, we start to feel discouraged. We realize we've been waiting a really long time and that we may end up waiting forever, but I promise you there's a better way. There's a much better way which is simply taking control of your own life. I don't know where it happened to all of us, that somehow we believe that we weren't in control of our own destinies, but my friends, we absolutely are. And through our culture of fear in the world that we live in, we have just managed to pass on from generation to generation to generation, more things to be afraid of, more things to blame for the way that our lives are not only our individual lives, but our lives as a whole on this planet. With that in mind, we have to remember where our power comes from. Our power comes from what we focus on. Our power comes from the wellbeing that we create within ourselves because the actions that we take in our lives will always be driven by the level of wellbeing we are experiencing. It's not the other way around. We don't wait to feel better, to be happy until we achieve some things. Now, believe me, in veterinary medicine, that has been a coping mechanism for a very long time. You've heard me talk about this before. We have been very good students in our lifetimes academically. That's how we got to where we are with these credentials behind our names. We've learned how to play the game of being good at things and getting accolades and all along the way and all the areas where maybe our self-confidence was a little bit shaky. Those external variables, those external measures of success have been tangible evidence that we're okay, we're good enough. But as soon as that cycle and that pattern of external accolades stopped, meaning when you graduated and there were no longer any classes to pass, grades to earn, degrees to gain that, all of a sudden there's nothing outside of you to convince you that you're good enough to convince you that you're on the right track to justify the hard times that you've gone through. There's not anything on the other side that you're working toward, but my friend, the truth is, you're always working towards something. Always, even if you haven't set a goal, even if you haven't allowed yourself to create a dream, you're still working towards something. And if what you have in your life right now is not what you want to have a year from now or 10 years from now, then the only thing that's gonna make a difference between continuing to experience exactly what you're experiencing right now and experiencing something completely different and more fulfilling and more expansive and joyful is where you put your focus. What do you pay attention to? Who are you making responsible for your life and your future? As long as you continue to believe the lie that your quality of life is created by the police, places you work, the people you work with, the hours you work, the money you make, the people you serve, the job itself. As long as you continue to believe your quality of life is determined by those things, you'll continue to work very hard to control all of those things which are uncontrollable things. Your time is much better spent working on yourself, working on breaking down all the rules that you've adopted over your lifetime. You haven't done anything wrong. You're just a human and a human experience. But all along the way, you've simply adopted the perspectives that other people have offered you. You simply decided to blame the things that other people are blaming. And it all feels really justified when there's a whole group of us doing the exact same thing. But you know what that doesn't accomplish? It doesn't accomplish any kind of positive change. It doesn't make any of us happier. Quite the contrary, it just continues to seed this idea of victimization and veterinary medicine and in our whole entire lives. And believe me, this is not vet men specific. You could take a look around it at the people in your lives who aren't happy, the people in your lives who you would identify as negative people and just listen to it. Listen to them. What are they blaming? Are they blaming the government? Are they blaming their own financial situation? Are they blaming certain people in their lives and maybe their parents for the way their life is right now? At some point in our lives, we are no longer children, we are no longer dependent. And when we identify, when we recognize that we have actually stepped into a phase of our lives where we are in control of ourselves and we take accountability for the experience that we're having, then we get all of our power back. We can change all of this for ourselves. We're the only ones who can, and I promise you that none of these things are career dependent. Now, some of us may as we get our power back elect to pursue different careers. I think that's completely fine. You've heard me say a million times before that I do not believe that vet med is a lifetime choice for everybody, and especially at the age that we make that choice. When we are very, very young, it's very normal. As we become more of who we are, we become braver and more confident, and we become really more in touch with who we're what we are and who we're about, who we are and what we're about. That we recognize that staying in this career field isn't what we want long term. That's okay. That doesn't mean you made a wrong choice. That doesn't mean your life has gone off track. That doesn't mean you've made a decision that you have to stick with and continue to work through for the rest of your life. Everything happens exactly the way that it's supposed to. Even listening to this podcast, whenever it is that you may be hearing it, you're hearing it at exact, the exact moment in your life that you need to hear what I have to say, my friend, everything is possible for your life. But as long as you continue to blame something outside of you for why you can't move forward, why you can't have the life you have, why you can't enjoy your career, then you will continue to not move forward, to not have the life you want to have and to never enjoy your career. It's a self-feeding system. What we focus on, we create, and when we focus on the negative, when we blame external variables for why we can't move forward, we are simply creating a reality where we will never move forward. This is critical for us to understand because happiness is an inside job. Learning how to enjoy this life and this career or any career is an inside job being fulfilled in your relationships, creating the futures that you want. It's an inside job. The only real thing you need to do in this life is to learn how to be who you are. And in order to be who you are, you've got to learn to let go of what everybody else thinks about you. It doesn't matter. Their opinions don't matter. Your parents don't know better than you do of what's good for you in your life. Your friends and family don't know better what's good for you for your life. You're the only one who knows what's best for you. That wisdom is inside of you. You were never meant to be like everybody else. That's one of the biggest lies and biggest traps in our culture today. Don't stand out. Don't be different. It's scary out there. You might be shunned. People may say negative things about you, my friends. It doesn't matter. It's simply a system that keeps everybody just following the leader, not creating anything bigger in their lives. And the very few who are brave enough to step away to do something different. They are both kind of revered for what they do, but also criticized. Notice people who live big lives, people who seem really happy, it's very easy to find something wrong with them because we're looking for it. They can't possibly be doing life the right way if they're that happy. Life's supposed to be hard. You have to work really hard. You have to be exhausted all the time, or you're not working hard enough, you're not being enough. And then maybe someday when you get to the end of whatever career you've chosen, then maybe, maybe you get to retire and you could finally have some time off. But heaven forbid that you actually live your life in that way. When you're younger, you must be doing something wrong. You must be bucking the system. You must be cheating somehow. It's such nonsense, all of it. And as long as we continue to blame external things for why we have to keep living that way, then we will continue to live that way. So like I said, as you go through this next week, I want you to pay attention to what you think and what you say in regard to what you are blaming in your life. What is it that you're complaining about? That's another way that you can identify the blame. What are you complaining about? What are you frustrated about? There are always opportunities for improvement. Please don't misunderstand. I'm not saying that at all. There's always opportunity for improvement, but what I'm saying is that your wellbeing, your happiness, your joy, your future, your hopes, your dreams are not dependent on those things changing. The only thing that has to change is you. You have to learn a better way to live your life. You have to learn to depend on yourself. You have to learn to stop giving your joy away to all of these things that you will never control. When you learn that, when you learn that you are the only one who knows what's best for you, when you learn that happiness and joy is an inside game, when you learn that you are untouchable by everything that happens in the world, unless you give permission for it to touch you, everything gets better. You really can let things be what they are. It is what it is, but in a neutral way, not in a victim way, not in a way that has you less than or or limited, but in a way that keeps you free, that keeps your options open, that keeps you in The reality of every choice in your life is yours and yours alone to make. And when you take responsibility for making those choices for yourself, then the impact of the external world on your wellbeing completely diminishes. So something to ponder this week as you go through. I hope you have a beautiful week, and I'll see you soon. Bye for now.