Episode 181 | The Positive (& Negative) Impacts of Community

In this episode, Dr. Cari Wise discusses the positive and negative impacts of community on the lives and careers of veterinary professionals. 

Dr. Wise defines community as the people we spend the most time with, including colleagues, friends, family, and social or religious groups. 

She shares that being part of a community creates a sense of belonging and security, allows for knowledge and resource sharing, and provides a support system of people who understand the challenges and joys of working in veterinary medicine. 

However, there are also negative impacts of community, such as the spreading of victim-based perspectives, repeated exposure to negative conversations, and intentional isolation. 

Dr. Wise explains that to create a healthy community, it is important to question assumptions, seek empowering perspectives, set boundaries, and not tolerate bullying or disrespectful interactions. 

She invites listeners to join the Vet Life Academy, a positive and supportive community for veterinary professionals.

Key Takeaways:

1. Being part of a community creates a sense of belonging and security.

2. Communities provide opportunities for knowledge and resource sharing.

3. Collaborating with others and learning from their experiences helps us develop our own style of practicing veterinary medicine.

4. Having a community of veterinary professionals who can empathize and offer guidance is essential for maintaining our wellbeing and feeling understood.

5. Unchecked spreading of victim-based perspectives can be detrimental to our wellbeing and hinder our personal and professional growth.

6. Repeated exposure to negative conversations can lower our overall emotional state and contribute to feelings of anxiety and frustration.

7. Intentional isolation can prevent us from seeking support and lead to feelings of loneliness and disconnection.

8. Strategies for creating a healthy community include questioning assumptions, seeking empowering perspectives, setting boundaries, and not tolerating bullying or disrespectful interactions.

9. Joining positive and supportive communities can help veterinary professionals create the life and career they desire.

10. We have the power to shape our own experiences and choose the communities that uplift and support us.


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RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

Website: https://joyfuldvm.com

VetMed; JOY CLUB

https://joyfuldvm.com/joyclub

Get The Alternative Career Guide for Veterinary Professionals: Create A Career Tailored to You! 

https://joyfuldvm.com/jobguide

Join VetMed;JOY CLUB: Elevate Your Life & Veterinary Career Experience

https://joyfuldvm.com/joyclub

Listen to The Joyful DVM Podcast: Be Inspired by Empowering Perspectives on Navigating Life as A Veterinary Professional

https://joyfuldvm.com/podcast

Join VET LIFE ACADEMY: Transform Your Veterinary Life & Career from the inside out

https://joyfuldvm.com/vetlifeacademy

Learn How to Support Your Organization and Enhance Employee Wellbeing

https://joyfuldvm.com/organizations

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 back to the Joyful DVM podcast.

Did you know that there are actually some very negative impacts to having a community? I know this may sound a little bit strange, but what many of us don’t realize is that there are real negative impacts to the communities that we spend time with. And I wanted to spend a little bit of time today talking not only about the positive impact of community and why it’s so important to have it in our lives,

but also the potential negative impact and how if we’re not aware of these potential negatives, they can be having a great influence on us in ways that we don’t even realize. So first off, what do I mean when I say community? The simplest way to look at that is to consider who do you spend most of your time with? Those people are your community,

even if you didn’t choose them intentionally. So an unintentional community would be the people who you work with because you spend a lot of time with those people throughout a week. And whether or not you realize it, the interactions with the people that you work with actually are having an impact on your life. And it’s quite possible it’s having a negative impact even if you don’t realize it.

Other types of community that we have are communities within our friendship. So we have social communities, we might have religious communities, we have our family communities. And so overall, whatever groups that you’re part of, those are different communities that are influencing you. The things that I’m gonna share here over the next few minutes actually apply to all types of community,

not just veterinary community. And so as you continue to go forward throughout the days and weeks ahead, I want you to pay attention to these positive and negative components or aspects of the communities to start to see whether or not they are influencing you. At the end of the day, I want you to be empowered in your own life. I want you to be able to decide for you,

and I want the experiences that you have to be the ones that you create for yourselves, not the ones that just happen to you because you don’t know any better. And the truth of it is that most of us don’t realize that we have choices, especially when it comes to the way that communities impact us because we just accept the experience that we have.

So with that being said, let’s take a look now at the positive impacts of community and then we’re gonna flip it and look at the negative. So what are the positive impacts of community? Well, number one, they are shared interests. So being in a community of people who share the same interests that you share naturally creates this bond between, you See,

we are naturally drawn to the people who care about the same things that we care about. And when we find those people, there is a natural sense of belonging that comes along with it. That is one of the most basic human needs to feel like you belong. And when we feel like we belong, when we have found the people who share the interests and the things that we are interested in,

there is a bit of security that comes with that. Probably not even a bit a good deal of security that comes with this. That’s why our social groups and even our occupational groups are so important. The community that we build there, even though we don’t always have great days in our jobs, the vast majority of people who are working in the industry that we work in,

we share those common interests. And so with that, there creates a common bond and that is a positive impact of the community. Finding a place where you belong because the people there kind of get what you’re going through. A second positive impact of community is just that opportunity to share knowledge and resources in veterinary medicine, those informal collaborations are everything. There is an ever changing endless stream of information and data available to us as veterinary professionals.

And it is really challenging, if not impossible to keep up with all the newest information out there. As we continue to learn and to grow in our careers, being able to rely on each other, being able to communicate with each other and to collaborate on how we manage our cases actually is a really positive aspect of this profession. As we learn how to practice veterinary medicine.

And what I mean by that is we develop our own style, which can take three to five years once you get outta school, really getting the experiences, sharing the experiences with other people, what they’ve been through, how they’ve done it, learning what, how they approach cases, tapping into their knowledge, really learning about the kinds of resources they lean on.

That really makes a big difference in developing your own style. And it is those informal collaborations that can have a really positive impact on the practice of veterinary medicine itself. It kind of helps stop some of that endless guessing, if you will, and it can go the other way. We can become too dependent on it where we’re afraid to make decisions. And that’s not really the scope of this episode,

but aside from getting to the point that we are really just fearful to live on our own, just the opportunity to be able to collaborate with other people in this profession is a definite win in this day and age with technology and the ability to reach each other virtually in all kinds of different platforms, that has never been easier to share the knowledge and resources within veterinary medicine.

And so we build a lot of communities in a virtual kind of way, which is beautiful and such a blessing for those of us who practice in this day and age. We have to keep in mind as we do that again, that we want to be able to share also. So it’s not only taking knowledge and resources, but also sharing knowledge and resources too.

And this two-way stream of information flowing back and forth, this two-way support, if you will, really can create a stronger community for all of us and really help lift us up in our jobs as well. A third positive impact of community and veterinary medicine includes our shared experiences. This comes down to being with people who can relate firsthand to what it’s like to work in veterinary medicine and to be a veterinary professional.

This one is really important because it fills the gap where our family and our friends really just can’t relate. Most of us did not grow up in families of veterinarians or veterinary professionals. Most of us don’t have a friend base that is all veterinary in nature. And as we have pursued these careers and we have become a little bit more foreign to the people who used to be the closest to us,

it can start to feel really isolating and lonely. That’s why it is so important to have a community of veterinary professionals who you can depend on who you trust, who has your back, if you will, because there are things that you experience as a veterinary professional that you really need the opportunity to discuss with somebody who actually understands. Without this, what tends to happen is our family,

they tend to kind of dismiss the things that we share, especially if they are challenging or hard things, they kind of dismiss those. They offer you solutions that will never actually solve the problems that they face, or they kind of belittle you in a way and and none of this is intentional. So I wanna take a minute and just make sure I call this out.

This is not intentional. They’re not intentionally trying to hurt you with these kinds of actions. It’s just simply they cannot relate. They don’t know what you’re going through because they have never gone through it. They don’t know what you experienced because they have never experienced it. And even though you can explain it to ’em because they don’t have any context that they can reflect on to then relate to you,

their instinct is to just dismiss it or to move away from the conversation quickly or to offer a whole bunch of solutions that you probably recognize actually won’t solve anything at all. If we then become frustrated with our friends and family because they don’t hear us, because they don’t listen to us, because they just keep trying to fix us, then what we wanna recognize here is that we’ve actually ended up in this situation because we are relying on them to fill a role that they actually aren’t equipped to fill.

So having a community within the veterinary profession that can actually support you, where you can share your experiences with the people who can relate firsthand to what you were going through because they have gone through it themselves. This is a very, very powerful and necessary component of having a thriving life as a veterinary professional. This actually at this point is what I, where I wanna shift over though and start to talk about the negative impacts of community because it is this very thing,

these shared experiences when handled the wrong way, that can make the impact of community very detrimental to our wellbeing. We often in veterinary medicine stand around and commiserate and complain and blame. And if you’ve been listening to the podcast for any period of time, you’ve probably heard me talk about this. This all comes down to a simple idea that anger feels more powerful than defeat.

So if we are feeling angry, if we are feeling frustrated and we share those stories with our colleagues, just the sharing of it actually makes us feel a whole lot better then maybe the disappointment or the hurt or the shame that we felt in the moment. Because as we become angry about it and as we feel frustrated, those emotions on the spectrum of emotion are higher vibration emotions than defeat and hopelessness.

And it is this kind of habit of commiseration that actually starts compounding the victim mentality within veterinary medicine. If we leave unchecked these spreadings of victim based perspective and we continue to share these perspectives as if they are fact, we then adopt those beliefs as if they’re true. And so this is so important because especially when you are newer in the veterinary profession and you go into a group,

a community where there is a lot of commiseration or victim based perspective being shared around, it’s easy to just accept what they’re saying as true because these are people that have been in the field longer than you have and you haven’t even considered maybe that there’s another perspective to consider. You don’t know what you don’t know. This is absolutely what happened to me. And it was quite fascinating because I personally,

you know, my dad was a vet and he was a happy vet and he, all of this negativity and frustration and anxiety and just hopelessness associated with veterinary medicine was not something that he experienced at, at least if it was, it was not something that was shared. It was not something that was ever noticed whenever I was working with him in his hospital before I decided to go to veterinary school.

And so I was quite surprised when I went into my first jobs and I experienced this, but then I just started to see it repeated over and over and over again. And as the people around me, veterinary professionals who had been in the profession for years, people in leadership positions, people even at like continuing education conferences as as they continued to share these perspectives that really painted us as a victim of our clients and our schedules and our pay,

I believed what they told me, they were people of authority. They presented these things as if they were facts and they got adopted as if they were truths. And this is where I think we have to be very careful to consider what the impact of community is in any given situation is what you are adopting from that community lifting you up or pulling you down.

Because this is one of the negative impacts of community that is very deeply seeded within the veterinary profession itself. This unchecked spreading a victim based perspective, spreading it as fact, and then the un unintentional adoption of these beliefs as truth. And then we just continue to spread more of the same. That is probably the most negative impact of community. Another negative impact of community is simply the negative impact on our wellbeing from the repeated exposure to unfiltered,

ranting and catastrophizing. So standing around of those commiseration complaint and blame groups, it’s a a coping mechanism if you will. Like I said, anger and frustration feel way more powerful than defeat and hopelessness. But as we continue to use that as an outlet to deal with our stress, what we do not realize is that the repeated exposure to that unfiltered ranting and catastrophizing is actually pulling our wellbeing down.

Those emotions that we’re experiencing. Even when we get on board and we’re frustrated with our colleagues and we’re feeling anxious or angry with our colleagues over what has been experienced, that those emotions are still negative emotions, my friends. And so if we keep stacking on anger and frustration over and over and over again, our entire net emotional state comes down, there’s just no way around it.

We have to be aware of that. How much time are we gonna spend in those situations exposing ourselves repeatedly to these unfiltered rants and catastrophizing situations because it’s having a negative impact, whether or not you know it. The third negative impact of community actually is one of intentional isolation. And so what do I mean by this? I mean that having experienced the negative impacts of community,

either through this kind of un unintentional negative impact that we’ve talked about, like the the listening and accepting of victim based perspective, the repeated exposure to ranting and catastrophizing, we have also, many of us have been in a situation where we have felt judged, we have felt attacked, we have felt not supported by the veterinary community itself. And as that happens or as we see it happen to other people,

we intentionally start to isolate ourselves from the communities. So intentional isolation is a means of avoiding the potential judgment and backlash from our colleagues over simple questions and discussions is what I’m talking about, being afraid to ask a question because you have seen how a simple question has turned into attack from colleagues being afraid to offer an opinion because you have seen how the judgment of an opinion,

and again, the attack and the criticism has been what follows as opposed to a healthy conversation. So just as I have shared how important it is to be part of a positive community, it is equally, if not more important to assure that you are not part of a negative community, to keep your eyes open, to keep your ears open. And if you notice that within your community you feel uncomfortable that interacting with the community makes you feel bad about yourself or about the profession or about your future,

if it leads you to isolate yourself from them, then I want you to consider the community that you’re spending time with. Because at the end of the day, my friends, you do always get to decide. Now I know that where we work and the people who work there with us is not something that most of us can control, right? We always have the opportunity to make a new decision.

So I always wanna make sure that we remember that. And if we are in leadership or management or ownership, then we have an opportunity to create and and foster the culture that we want within our organizations. It’s actually our duty to create a culture of inclusivity and support and wellbeing within these communities to really not tolerate negativity and bullying and just ongoing drama, if you will.

But if we are not in one of those positions to have a, any kind of control or massive influence over the community as a whole, there are still many things that we can do to offset the negative impact of community. It all starts with number one, like looking at those negative aspects. So number one, the unchecked spreading of victim based perspective as fact and adoption of those beliefs is truth.

What can you do to offset that? Well, when you hear somebody’s perspective, that’s introduced to you as this is just the way that it is in VetMed. ’cause that’s kind of how it always has that little caveat to it. This is just the way that it is question that question everything. It might be how it is for that particular person, but I promise you that that is not the way that it is for everybody.

So just remember there are no absolutes as far as the way that veterinary medicine is experienced. We all have individual experiences, but if we then decide that we are all are going to have the same experience and that that experience is negative, then we will be more likely to have it. So just really question any broad sweeping assumptions about what you have the opportunity to experience in veterinary medicine.

And if it’s not something that’s uplifting, that’s empowering, question that and choose something different for yourself. Also, I want you to question and really watch for the way that this repeated exposure to that unfiltered ranting and catastrophizing is impacting you. This one, there’s a couple of different places that I really want you to watch. Number one, within your own organizations standing around in clusters,

people complaining and, and blaming and dramatizing and rehashing things that happened in a negative way, that is not a good use of your time and it’s absolutely not helping your wellbeing. So pay attention if you’re getting drawn into that. Most of us will get drawn into that, my friends, it’s not, we don’t need to beat ourselves up or be judgy that we are drawn into the drama,

into the gossip. Because remember this, there’s a part of our brain that is very much always looking for the negative because it’s trying to protect you. And so if you can hear more about the negative, it thinks that it’s protecting you from it, but the exact opposite is happening because just by being exposed to somebody else’s negative experiences over and over and over again,

it’s actually going to pull you down. So watch for that within your organizations and then watch for this on in our social media groups, this is probably the most dangerous aspect of social media, this and the next one. These two things together are just very dangerous for us overall as humans. So in our social media groups where we just keep reading catastrophe after catastrophe after catastrophe,

terrible story after a horrible experience over and over and over again. And then just stacking on this commiseration and this complaining and this blaming and this victim mentality, if you go into those groups, any group, I don’t care what group it is, you go into a group and if you read a couple of posts and you’re not feeling your energy lifting up in a positive way,

but instead you feel yourself sinking down and be becoming more hopeless, get the heck out of those groups. At least unfollow them. Don’t go into them unintentionally. Don’t let that stuff just keep following, showing up on your feed because my friends, just your eyeballs, going through those stories, reading those stories that you will naturally be drawn to because this is part of a survival instinct and it’s a habit based pattern that we can break if we just keep mindlessly ending up reading this crap.

It is having a very significant negative impact on your wellbeing and you are the only one who can be the gatekeeper for that. So just watch for that and really try to break that habit. And like I said, get that stuff outta your feed. Unfollow. It doesn’t mean you have to leave those groups. There may be some very useful things in there for you,

but you don’t need to be in there in order to protect yourself. And what I would offer is that this actually is doing the exact opposite for you when it’s just unwillingly and unintentionally showing up in your feet as part of the platform, but isn’t actually lifting you up in a positive way. The third thing that I want you to watch for is intentional isolation.

So are you withdrawing? Are you afraid to speak your truth because you are afraid of being judged? Are you afraid to ask your question because you’re afraid to have some backlash from colleagues over simple things that you would just like to discuss? Do you feel like you don’t have a safety net, a place where you can go to have your questions answered, A place that you can go to have a conversation about hard things that happen?

And this is another thing that I find a lot in our social media groups, is that somebody goes in with the best of intention just to have a conversation and then the masses jump on them in an attack and judgment and with just spite in a lot of ways, in a way, ways that are not kind. And this is not useful. These are not useful communities.

This, this is the heart of the negative impact of community that I’m talking about. So I want you to really pay attention to the communities that you’re in. Do you feel like you can ask a question? Do you feel safe to do so? And if you don’t ask yourself, why are you still in that community? And what can you do to at least step out of it in a way that you don’t need to feel a,

the fear of being judged by the very people who share this profession with you. So what are the signs then of a healthy community? What can you look for when you’re trying to find this community that can actually help add to your life and that you can add to the community to add to the life of somebody else? Well, there are five things that I think really help to define a healthy community.

Number one, a healthy community creates a safe place for you to share and be heard, which is free from judgment and free from attack. It’s important for us to be able to share. It is important for us to be able to discuss what we’ve been through and we need a safe place to do that. And like I said, that safe place is not likely going to be our friends and family because they can’t relate.

But there are communities out there that can create a safe place for you to share and be heard as a veterinary professional and a place where you don’t have to be afraid of judgment and attack. And I absolutely recommend that you find one of those places. Number two, a healthy community offers empowering perspectives and even the most challenging of scenarios. So there are some very challenging things that happen as part of a veterinary career.

You know, things like unexpected patient death and board complaints and really nasty clients. Those things are going to happen as part of a veterinary profession that they happen is not a problem. But how can you navigate those in a way that keeps you in your power? Well, having a community with experience of ex of having those exact same scenarios coming through those with an empowered perspective really makes a big difference.

Because if you don’t have somebody who can show you an empowered perspective of even the hardest things that you go through, but instead defaults to victim mentality and complain and blame every time, then you’re just going to be fighting the experience of veterinary medicine. These things are just part of veterinary medicine, right? Patients are gonna die, clients are gonna be crabby.

Sometimes you’re never gonna control those things, but how can you keep your power? And more importantly, how can you support your own wellbeing despite the fact that those aspects are just part of this job? A healthy community helps you to find that empowered perspective even in the most challenging of those scenarios. And it kind of keeps you from sliding into that downward spiral and stacking on more and more of the negative.

A healthy community also is for number three, gently guides you back to truth and away from drama. So this was, this is something that is so important that we can do for each other because we are just naturally going to fall in our, into our drama. We are naturally not going to be able to slow it all down initially to look at what’s real and what’s created.

And so a healthy community can help gently guide you back to what is true in the situation and away from that drama, catastrophizing, ranting that the lower brain really wants you to engage in, especially, especially when you have developed a habit of doing so, like so many of us have. And that’s not judgment, that is just simply part of the human experience.

It’s not even veterinary specific telling the events of the day. If you think about how you talk about your days, most of us, we talk about our days through a lens of drama, right? There’s, there’s a performance that goes into it. Like all of these, oh my gosh, you’re not gonna believe what happened today, kind of things.

But that kind of conversation about our experiences actually pulls us down. A healthy community can help guide us back to what is true so that we can create an intentional perspective and an intentional narrative around our experiences for ourselves. A healthy community number four also does not tolerate bullying or disrespectful interactions at any level. This one is so important. There’s not any time that bullying or disrespectful interaction is tolerated.

It’s not okay. And in a healthy community that is put out there straight up as an expectation for the community itself. And what if bullying does occur? If disrespectful interactions do occur, then they are swiftly dealt with through conversations, perhaps through not having like, like a pause, if you will. So like not letting people to communicate, I’m thinking about our social media based communities,

there’s ways that you can actually pause people from being able to interact. So in those kinds of communities, putting a pause on how people who are being disrespectful or being bullies, really not allowing them to post in the group for a period of time in an actual real life kind of situation. In a in-person community, it would be having conversations, providing warnings in an organization,

a a business type organization within, you know, a, a hospital or other organization. This would be part of our employee manuals of what the expectations of behaviors are. And then we would have a, a formal means of feedback and perhaps warnings and you know, three strikes and you’re out or whatever your particular organization is. But there’s no reason why we should not have this.

These guidelines, these anti-bullying and respectful expectations, guidelines in every type of community that we create. Both our formal communities of businesses, of veterinary hospitals and other organizations, and also our more social communities through our things like Facebook groups or even social circles. It’s even the kind of things that even within a friend group, you can just set your boundaries and say,

I will not tolerate bullying or disrespectful interaction. And as you set those boundaries and you then model that behavior, it’s amazing how much this kind of behavior actually stops. If nobody’s modeling it and nobody’s putting out there very overtly that this is the expectation, then these things will continue to happen. They continue to happen because they feel powerful and because they are driven by anger.

But all of these things, my friends, just pull your net emotional state down. And so a healthy community just simply does not tolerate bullying and disrespectful interactions on any level. So that is another thing you should watch for. And number five of a healthy community is to help lift you up. So a healthy community helps lift you up, it encourages you to follow your own instincts and to trust your own intuition.

You don’t have to be like everybody else. This healthy community reminds you that you are ultimately the only one who knows what’s right for you. They, there is no gain in trying to get everybody to follow the leader. And only when leaders are insecure do they believe that everybody must do things the way that they do them. So in a healthy community,

that’s just not a thing. You are lifted up, you are encouraged to follow your own path, to follow your instincts, your intuition, to make your own choices because it is known and accepted and embraced that you are ultimately the only one who knows what’s right for you. So as I’ve gone over these things today, the positive impacts of community, the negative impacts of community,

and the criteria of a healthy community, I hope that this gives you a framework that you can really utilize to consider the time that the communities that you’re spending time with, not only your work community, but any online groups that you’re in, even your in-person, social and family and religious groups. And I’m not saying that if you identify lots of negative aspects that you have to leave them,

but hopefully what you can see is a way to start offsetting the negative impact with a more positive experience for yourself. My friends, this healthy community criteria is exactly what we use over here at Joyful DVM and inside of our Vet Life Academy. This Vet Life Academy community that we’ve created is a very safe place. There are no bullies, there is no drama,

there is no criticism or disrespectful behavior. We just don’t attract that kind of behavior and that kind of interaction at all. And maybe it’s because I’ve made it very, very clear that it just won’t be tolerated. It’s a very supportive community and my friends, if you are lacking community in your life, if you are really feeling that intentional isolation because you’ve had nothing but negative experiences in the veterinary communities that you’ve tried to be part of,

I invite you to join us inside of The Life Academy. Jump over to to joyful dvm.com/vet Life Academy. Get on that wait list so I can notify you as soon as we open the doors to New Vet Life Academy members. Because there is something about Vet Life Academy that you’re just not gonna find anywhere else. It’s positive perspective. It’s putting the power back in your hands.

It is showing you where you have more choices than you believe that you do. It really helps us to foster this belief and live in the belief that anything is possible. And it helps to really squash all of those negative stories that have us believing things like going into veterinary medicine was the worst decision ever, or that we ruined our life because we have so much student loan debt that things in the possible aren’t future because now we are trapped.

If any of those things really feel true for you right now, that I just want you to be aware that those stories are very common in the veterinary profession. And it is those exact narratives that I’m talking about that can continue to be spread as truth unchecked through the conversations that we’re having in many of our veterinary communities. But my friends, those are not facts.

They are not facts at all. They are definitely experiences that people have, but they are not inevitable experiences. They’re all experiences that can be altered. I promise you that they can be altered. But the first step in being able to create a different experience for yourself is to start exposing yourself to different experiences. It’s very common for us to believe that things aren’t possible because we’ve never seen them before.

But if we just keep staying in our groups that are focusing on commiseration, complaining, blaming, victim based perspective, all of that, then we are not going to see what else is possible. And here’s what I know for sure and for certain that the people who are enjoying their lives as veterinary professionals, the people who are expanding what is possible for themselves,

who are reaching new heights, who are exploring new ideas, who are developing new businesses, who are even exploring new careers and different aspects of veterinary medicine, or just slightly addre touching veterinary medicine or maybe completely outside of veterinary medicine, those people who are happy are not spending their times in these groups where all that’s happening is commiseration complaining and blaming. They’re not spending their times in groups where people are being disrespectful to each other and attacking each other and bullying each other where people are afraid to,

to post because they’re afraid of the backlash. People who are thriving in their lives as veterinary professionals are not in those groups. So please do not buy into the idea that this is the inevitable consequence of veterinary medicine. It is not. It is a bias system. It is absolutely a bias system. And unless you intentionally seek out a healthy community to experience veterinary medicine and the life of veterinary as a veterinary professional,

through it will be very easy to believe the defeating story that you have been offered. This is the most negative of negative impacts of community here at Joyful DVM. That is not what we do. That is why I release these podcast episodes for you every single week. That is why I post what I post on social media. That is why I have created things like our Vet Med Joy Club membership to send you empowering,

intentional belief multiple times every single week. That is why I created Vet Life Academy to teach you how you can actually create your own reality. How you can release all the things that create anxiety and frustration and anger for you to step back into your power so that you can create the life that you want for yourself so that you can create the future that you want for you and your family,

and so that you no longer feel trapped and feel like a victim of the decision that you made to pursue this, this career. ’cause here’s what I know. I know that when it comes to your life, everything is possible. And just because you have not yet seen the thing that you dream of does not mean that it doesn’t exist. And I also know that because you have that dream,

because you have the things that you’re interested in because you have these goals for yourself in the future, that they are already possible for you. This is your journey. This is your path to take, to learn how to let go of what’s holding you back so that you can run forward into what is meant for you. What is waiting for you already in your future.

So my friends over here at Vet Life Academy, we would love to support you every single step of the way. And we have quite honestly, one of the most positive, impactful communities that are out there. There is no commiseration, there is no complaining, there is no blaming. There is love, there is support. There is belief in what is possible,

not only for you, but for all of us. All right, my friends, if you are interested in Vet Life Academy, jump over to joyful dvm.com/vet Life Academy. Get on that wait list so I can notify you the next time it’s open. And if this episode has been helpful, I do hope that you will share it with a friend, share it with a colleague,

and keep in mind, remember, everything is possible. You’re the only one who knows what’s right for you, and everything that you want for your future is yours to have. All right, my friends, have a beautiful week. I’ll see you soon. Bye for now.

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