In this episode Dr. Wise emphasizes the importance of recognizing that every person involved in veterinary medicine, whether they are professionals or clients, has their own personal lives and experiences that can impact their interactions.
She explains that it is easy to become offended or frustrated by the choices and behaviors of others, but it is crucial to remember that their actions are a reflection of their own emotional state and circumstances.
Dr. Wise suggests that instead of judging or becoming frustrated with clients’ decisions, veterinary professionals should understand that everyone has their own challenges and focus on taking responsibility for their own wellbeing.
By not taking things personally and approaching interactions with intention, our days can become more enjoyable and fulfilling.
Key Points:
- The importance of recognizing that every person involved in veterinary medicine has their own personal lives and experiences that can impact their interactions.
- The need to avoid taking things personally and maintain a more outward-facing and compassionate approach.
- The holiday season in veterinary medicine and the challenges it brings.
- Taking responsibility for one’s own well-being and not attaching self-worth to the decisions and behaviors of others.
- Approaching interactions with intention and understanding that every human has a story.
Resources:
Website: https://joyfuldvm.com
VetMed; JOY CLUB: https://joyfuldvm.com/joyclub
Vet Life Academy: https://joyfuldvm.com/vetlifeacademy
Music Credit: Music by Lesfm from Pixabay
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Website: https://joyfuldvm.com
VetMed; JOY CLUB
Music Credit: Music by Lesfm from Pixabay
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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 to another episode of Our Reflection Fridays. Today is Friday, December 8th, 2023. And today what I wanna talk about and what I wanna share is something that I really noticed over the last week in practice that I think makes a big impact on the quality of the experience that all of us have as veterinary professionals. And it is just the reality that every single one of us, whether we are the those working in the veterinary profession, so the veterinarians, the veterinary technicians, assistants, receptionists, you know, kennel help, so on and so forth, or the clients that every single human that has anything to do with veterinary medicine, either on the provider side or on the service side, the receiving side still has all kinds of stuff going on in their lives. And I know that's may seem a little bit obvious, but I think it's something that we don't spend any time considering. And we get so busy seeing clients, you know, getting 'em in, doing what needs to be done, getting 'em out the door, keeping track of our schedule, trying to make sure that everything works the way that it's supposed to work, that we don't consider that every single appointment that we see has a lot of compu human components attached to it. So every single appointment that we see have a lot of human components attached to it. And all of those humans come with their own stories. They come with their own lives, they come with all of their own things that are going on in the background and that can interact, that can influence the way that they interact with us. They can, that can absolutely have an impact on the way that they show up for work, for example, or don't show up for work or the way they show up for an appointment, or don't show up for their appointment, the decisions that they make in their appointments. And I think it's important to remember this because it's easy for us to become offended by the choices that clients make, or even the way that our coworkers behave. But we have to remember, or at least it would do us very well, to remember that the way that anybody behaves is simply a reflection of whatever they're going through in that moment, emotionally. And I'm not saying that that is ours to fix because we absolutely cannot fix the emotional wellbeing of other people. That's an individual journey that each of us need to go through and really take responsibility for. But what I am saying is that in that same thread, that emotional responsibility of it being our own emotional respon, our responsibility for our own emotion is just ours to control whether or not we feel offended or disadvantaged or frustrated around the decisions and behaviors of the people that we work with, and also the clients who we interact with. That's on us, that's not on them. And if we take this that one step further and just humanize the entire experience, because as soon as we're offended, as soon as we're aggravated, we've made that whole situation about us. We're no longer outward facing, we're no longer there to help the clients or to treat the patients. We're no longer there to work together as a team. As soon as we're frustrated and angry and feeling offended or resentful, then we've taken the experience, we've completely internalized it and personalized it. And we have completely stopped considering that there are other humans with all of their own stuff in the same environment that we are. And they're probably just doing the best that they can do. This, I think would serve us well to remember, especially as we go into the holiday season, we're kind of already in the holiday season already. We know this is gonna continue here for the next several weeks as we finish out this year. And in veterinary medicine, there's a lot of of things that happen this time of year. There's a lot of patterns. We tend to see more euthanasia. We, everything that's medical seems to be a little bit more urgent. Now, I'm not trying to predict the future here, but if you've been in veterinary medicine long enough, you've seen some patterns around this and you've seen that some clients have waited to make some really hard decisions for their pets until this time of year. I mean, there's no reason for us to judge them for that. I mean, that's always their decision, right? But if we start to personalize it or feel frustrated by it, or really argue with the reality of what is, then we just keep giving our power away to the situations. And we're not taking responsibility for our own wellbeing all along the way. If instead we just remember, hey, you know, these are also humans. They have all their own stuff, because you have your own stuff too, right? You have all the things that are going on in your life outside of your job. You have your family, you have your friends, you have your own financial situation, like you have all your own stuff to be concerned about, but every other person you interact with through the day, whether or not they're your coworkers or they are just people that you serve, every one of those people have their own stuff too. And when we can just take a minute to realize that we're all just humans and a human experience trying to do the best that we can, we don't have to be so frustrated and angry with each other or feel offended or victimized by the decisions that other people make. When we do that, we literally hand our wellbeing over to them. And we believe that the events of the day and what the people say and do can ruin our days. Whether those people are people that we work with, or people that come in for our help. And the truth is that they can't. Nobody can ruin your day but you. And when we start to realize this, then we can decide how we wanna show up in our job, and we can show up with an understanding that everybody who shows up at that facility that day has their own story. And they may be so deep in their story and so deep in all the things that they're distracted by, the things that they have to worry about outside of that veterinary visit, that they aren't fully present in that moment. We don't have to be offended by it. We don't have to personalize that. And the more that we work to not take any of it personally and to remember that they're humans going through all of their own stuff, and we have no idea the extent to which external events are impacting what's happening in our hospital, the much easier our job can be and the much easier it is to show up from that place of service, from that place of enjoying our job and providing the opportunity to help. And we don't have to then determine for ourselves whether or not we've done a good job or had a good day based on the decisions that they make and how they interact with us during that visit. So something to think about as you go through these next few weeks that every human has a story. The people that we work with, and the people that we help who come in as clients, that story is going to influence the way that they interact with us. And we don't have to take it personally. We get to still decide how we are gonna interact with them intentionally. And when we put intention behind all of our interactions, our days actually get better. All right, my friends, that's gonna wrap it up for this week. I'll see you next week. Bye for now.