In this episode, Dr. Cari Wise reflects on her 50th birthday, and encourages self-reflection. She poses the question, “What are you committed to?” and shares her own experiences of realizing commitments that did not align with her goals and dreams.
She emphasize the importance of self-awareness and intentional decision-making, and shares the origin of the Vet Life Academy program, which focuses on self-awareness and creating a different life.
Dr. Wise highlights the tendency for people to be committed to busyness and negative emotions, and encourages listeners to shift their focus and take action towards creating the life they truly want.
She concludes with a reminder that being aware of commitments and making intentional choices can help individuals create a life that aligns with their goals and dreams.
Resources: Vet Life Academy
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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.
As I record this episode, I’m aware that it’s going to be published on February 14th, and for most of you, you’ll think about that day and you’ll recognize that it’s Valentine’s Day, and yes, that’s true. Absolutely. The day that this is being published is Valentine’s Day of 2024. But what you might not know is that it’s also my birthday and not any birthday,
my 50th birthday. How on the world did that happen? I have no idea. And so with that in mind, it’s a great time for reflection. And the PO purpose of this podcast today is to ask you, what are you committed to? As I look back over my life so far, the last five decades, somehow I’m able to see what I have and have not been committed to.
And it’s a little bit of a sting to see that the things I’ve been committed to a lot of the time aren’t actually the things that I want for myself. And I’m sure that the same is true for you. So I thought today that I would explore this question with you to give you an opportunity to recognize where you are committed to things that don’t actually move you forward in the direction that you wanna go,
committed to things that don’t help you to expand your dreams and to create the vision that you have for your life. This may be a little bit uncomfortable as you start to recognize these commitments that don’t serve you, but I promise you that as you become aware of them, shifting your commitment to what actually matters becomes a lot easier. So let me give you a few tangible examples.
Over my lifetime, I have been on an up and down weight loss rollercoaster. Many of us have been. And so it starts out when we’re younger, a lot of us have pretty fast metabolisms. And as we go into life and into veterinary medicine, we often use food and drink as buffering mechanisms. And so we might be saying that we’re committed to our physical fitness,
but if we are making the choice to run through Starbucks every single day on the way to work and to stop at a fast food restaurant on the way home, those actions do not support the commitment of fitness. We’re actually committed to Starbucks and fast food. See, I said this was gonna get a little bit uncomfortable. Now maybe you’re believing that you’re committed to utilizing and creating free time for yourself,
committed to a certain hobby, committed to learning a new skill. Then your actions actually show you staying in busy work, scrolling on social media, standing around, commiserating and complaining when you could be doing something different that doesn’t actually show commitment to creating more free time or to learning a new skill or developing a new hobby that shows that you’re committed to social media,
committed to spending time scrolling, committed to complaining about your life. It stings a little, doesn’t it? And it’s meant to because without this kind of very blunt awareness, we just skip over it. We just keep telling ourselves that we’re committed to change, but our actions actually show no change at all. The more that we can find these areas that we’re committed to,
that we actually don’t want to keep perpetuating, the more quickly we’ll be able to change those habits. So what are you committed to? Are you committed to Starbucks and fast food? Are you committed to spending hours scrolling on social media, media each night as a way to cope with your life? Are you committed to over drinking or overeating? Maybe you’re committed to complaining and blaming and drama.
Are you committed to judging clients for their decisions? Are you committed to shaming yourself when things don’t turn out the way that you wanted them to? Are you committed to believing you are not good enough and that you can’t have what other people have? Any belief system that we hang on to? Any thought pattern that has become a habit that’s there in the background over and over and over can reveal something that we’re committed to that probably doesn’t serve us?
And so today, I want you to consider in your life where you spend your time, where you put your focus, what you actually want instead, and start to notice the discrepancy between the two. When we start to recognize that we have actually been committed to the very things we want to change, there’s some kind of magic in that. It’s like this little boost or this little catalyst that has us deciding intentionally to engage in a different way.
Now, you all know that we have the Vet Life Academy program over here at Joyful DVM, and we’ve been running it for years, going on seven years since we started this organization. And in that, I think one of the greatest gifts is simply self-awareness. We learn to discover why it is that we are where we are, and more importantly what we can do to create something different from ourselves.
But if we never do this work, if we never take a moment to reflect on our lives, if we never slow down enough to consider how we’re spending our time, then we will never create anything different. And so many of us are committed to the busyness of this world. We are committed to the hamster wheel of activity, the Groundhog Day of doing the same thing day in and day out,
and staying frustrated because we never create any different results. We are committed to feeling stressed out and overworked and overwhelmed. We are committed to feeling discouraged and defeated. We are committed to believing that we are a victim of the profession that we chose. These are not worthy commitments, my friends. This is not how you want to live your life. I know that it’s not.
But unless you decide for yourself to shift your focus and to put your actions into something that will create something different, nothing is ever going to change. You remember the definition of insanity, right? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. That’s what happens to so many of us in this world, inside of VE Med and outside of it,
it’s the entire world. A world where we stay so busy and so trapped in belief patterns that have us believing there are things that we have to do to keep moving forward and to stay alive, that we completely miss the entire point of why we are here in the first place. As I look back over my life so far, I believe a few things.
I believe number one, that I’m just getting started. I may, I may be 50 years old, but my friends, I plan to be here another 50 years. So I am getting a good start on what I’m here to do. And I know that today I feel much more confident in myself and in my purpose than I ever have before. But it took me getting to that breaking point of realizing that what I was doing day in and day out was not going to get me to where I wanted to go.
And in order for me to move forward, I had to make some different decisions in order to make some different decisions. I had to tackle old beliefs that kept me deciding the same thing over and over again. I had to make new commitments. And as I have returned to those new commitments time and time again, I’ve started to make progress in lots of areas.
I’ve made massive progress in a lot of areas of my life. But it wasn’t because one day I woke up and everything was different. It was because one day I decided to look at what I was truly committed to, and I asked myself, does this serve me and the life that I wanna live? When the answer was no, I started to make small choices in a different direction,
and tiny choices compounded over time create massive results. I know that this can be overwhelming to consider, especially when you start to look at what you’ve been committed to that you didn’t even realize you’d been committed to. I know that that has the potential of creating a lot of frustration and a lot of shame and guilt and embarrassment, and that is not my intention here at all.
My intention is just to make you aware of how the choices you make are creating the life that you live. And if you have the awareness that what you’re experiencing in your life right now is not what you want to keep experiencing for the next few months or years, or decades, then I want you to know that you and you alone have the power to make a new choice.
I know that it’s scary to step outside of what is familiar, but what is familiar won’t help you move forward. My friends, you are powerful. You have the ability to create whatever it is that you wanna experience in this life. You have a purpose. There is intention behind every single challenge that you’ve ever been up against. And there’s one thing that so many of us forget,
which is we only have evidence of surviving the greatest challenges we’ve ever been up against in our lives. We’re still here. And so there’s no reason to believe that you don’t have what it takes to move through the new challenges, to put your intention in a different direction, to commit, to create, creating something more. And I’m here to help you every single step of the way.
So whether you’re already a Vet Life Academy for Life member, and you just have been out of the loop for a while and are ready to dive in, or if you’ve never been part of our programs over here at Joyful DVM and you’re just not sure where to start, but you’re looking and thinking maybe you could use a new perspective and some support, I hope you’ll consider joining us in our Vet Life Academy program.
If you jump over to joyful dvm.com/vet Life Academy, you can sign up to get updates when we open again. And the odds are there’s also gonna be some opportunities for you to get support even before those doors open next time. We have all kinds of resources over here, and as I look forward to this next year of my life, I want to bring to you the things that have helped me the most,
things that I didn’t have early in my career when I was frustrated and burned out and feeling completely disconnected and unsupported. That’s why we do what we do over here at Joyful DVM My friends. You are never alone, and it is never too late to make the changes that will move your life in a direction that you want to go. You’re the only one who has the ability to do that.
And over here at Joyful DVM, we create programs and resources to help you every single step of the way. So as I get ready to dive in to the next 50 years, I hope you’ll consider joining me on this journey. And I hope that you’ve enjoyed listening to the podcast being part of our community. And if it has made a difference in your life,
I do hope that you’ll share it with a friend. All right, my friends, remember what you’re committed to creates your experience, and your experience creates the value in your life. Have a wonderful week, and I’ll see you soon. Bye for now.