Episode 194 | Taking Charge: How to Have A Good Day Every Day


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In this episode, Dr. Cari Wise addresses how to handle a busy, stressful day in a veterinary clinic. Dr. Wise emphasizes the importance of deciding in advance what kind of day you want to have and not letting external circumstances dictate your mood. 

She explains that our perspectives and the stories we tell ourselves about situations determine our emotional state and behavior. She advises staying aware of negative thinking patterns and choosing a positive, empowered outlook. 

Dr. Wise highlights the impact of client interactions and the need to not take things personally. She share that reflecting on the day and journaling can help release negative thoughts; and stresses the importance of letting go of work-related worries when at home and focusing on the present moment. 

Dr. Wise reminds us that developing skills to control one’s perspective and emotions leads to increased job satisfaction and overall wellbeing.

Key Takeaways:

1. Create Your Day: Decide in advance what kind of day you want to have, rather than letting external circumstances dictate your mood.

2. Perspective Matters: Your perspective and the stories you tell yourself about situations determine your emotional state and behavior.

3. Stay Aware of Negative Thinking: Be aware of negative thinking patterns and choose a positive, empowered outlook.

4. Client Interactions: Client interactions can impact your mood, but it’s important not to take things personally.

5. Reflect and Journal: Reflecting on your day and journaling can help release negative thoughts.

6. Address Ethical Concerns: Recognize situations that compromise your morals, ethics, or values and have high-value conversations to address them.

7. Work-Life Balance: Let go of work-related worries when at home and focus on the present moment.

8. Emotional Control: Develop skills to control your perspective and emotions to increase job satisfaction and overall wellbeing.

9. Resource for Skill Development: Vet Life Academy is recommended as a resource for further developing these skills.  www.joyfuldvm.com/vetlifeacademy

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

Website: https://joyfuldvm.com

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

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

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

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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 Doctor Cari Wise, veterinarian, certified life coach and certified quantum human design specialist. If you’re a veterinary professional looking to up level 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. Today’s episode is a little special because I’m going to be addressing a question that came in from one of our listeners.

Our listener wrote, I’d love for you to do a podcast episode walking us through how to deal with an extremely busy, stressful day in the clinic, how to deal in the moment, and how to decompress afterwards. I love this question. It really, at the heart of it is how do we implement all of the things that I share and teach here at Joyful DVM through the podcast and through our programs like Vetlife Academy or our membership, the Vetmed Joy Club.

And so I want to take a few minutes here to share with you how you can start to actually utilize the things that I offer you in a way that is going to make a real difference. Moment by moment, day by day. Now, it all begins with the beginning of the day. How are you starting your day? You have to decide in advance what kind of day you’re going to have.

Many of us are in the habit of deciding what kind of day we have on the back end. So we reflect on the day and we say, this was a good day or this was a bad day. And the criteria that we use to determine whether or not we have a good or bad day all comes down to just the circumstances. So maybe how many appointments we saw, how many no shows there were, how many emergencies there were, how many walk ins there were, what our staff was like, did people call off or were people there, were people engaged?

Were people distracted? How much money did we make that day? Did the patients that we saw, did they get better? Were the clients friendly, or was everybody in a kind of a cranky mood? We’re using all of these external things, the things that I call circumstances, to determine whether or not our day was good or bad. And here’s the rub with that. Those circumstances, they’re neutral until we tell a story about them.

Those circumstances have no ability to create a good or bad day for us, aside from the story and the power that we give it through that story itself. So this is why it’s so important at the beginning of the day to decide what kind of day are you going to have? Are you going to have a good day? Are you going to have an empowered day? Are you going to have a mediocre day?

I mean, you get to decide when you start to think about what kind of day am I going to have. We’re not going to pick to have a bad day, right? We’re not going to intentionally choose that. But what’s interesting is that by not deciding to have a great day, we are kind of unintentionally deciding to have a crummy one because we’re letting our day be determined by what happens.

So that’s step number one, decide in advance what kind of day you’re going to have. Step number two is to remember it’s all neutral until you give it power to be otherwise. So the power that we give external circumstances is only given through the stories that we create. And the problem is that we don’t even realize most of the time how much power we’re giving away. We are believing that things like cranky clients and overbooked schedules and short staff like those things have the power to create a bad day for us.

But the good news is they actually don’t. They’re just things that happen in the world. Just things simply like the day of the week or the time of the day or whether or not it’s raining or snowing outside. None of those things do you actually have control over. So this is a really good test for any situation that you’re in. Can you control it? That’s the question you want to ask yourself.

Can you control it? Because if you can’t control it, it does not have power to create a bad day for you. If you can’t control it, it does not have power to create a bad day for you. If you can’t control it, it’s neutral until you tell a negative or positive story about it. That’s the heart of it. If you can’t control it, its power over you, its influence on you is simply linked to the story that you tell.

Now, we are all in a habit of telling a negative story, and thats not to be a Debbie downer. Thats just the way the brain works. The brain is always looking for the negative because at this very lower basic instinct, primal, primitive perspective of the brain, the lower brain, its always looking for things that can harm you. And so if its always looking for the negative, it thinks that it can get in front of that and protect you in some way.

The problem with that is that when we continue to look at the world through a negative lens, we will just find more negativity, and we actually end up feeling victimized more than if we would look at the world through a lens of more neutrality. I’m not even saying go all the way to the positive. Of course, you know, I love an optimistic outlook. That’s my. I think the most powerful place to be is optimistic.

Not toxically positive, not like putting lipstick on a pig. That’s not what I’m saying. But being optimistic, I think, is the best place to be. However, most of us, our default is negativity. And it’s not that there’s anything wrong with you. This is not judgmental. This is. We just want to notice that our brain is wired to look for the negative. And our culture reinforces that by showing us negative things all the time.

And our profession reinforces that through the commiseration, complaining and blaming that we do and how we just kind of continue to stack on more of that negative circumstance as kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. Now, that is kind of a topic for a whole other episode. And to get back to how is it that you make it through day by day, moment by moment, in a very busy veterinary clinic?

That’s really the heart of what I’m sharing today. And it starts with, what kind of day do you want to have? So that’s number one. What kind of day do you want to have? You decide that before you ever walk out the door. And then you spend your day protecting that, no matter what circumstances jump up in front of you, offering you the opportunity to let go of your good day and to pick a bad day instead.

This is so important because, my friends, the way that we interact in our lives is driven by the way that we are feeling emotionally, our emotions. So our net emotional state or our overall mood, all the same thing. That is what is going to drive all of our own personal actions and behaviors. So if we are focusing on having a bad day, then we are going to be feeling emotionally lower.

We’re going to be in a lower net emotional state or a crummy mood, if you will. And when we are in that type of mood or that type of lower net emotional state, then the way that we interact during our day at the job is going to be much less quality and way less fun than if we had a better mood. The type of mood we have, again, is ours to decide, because our emotional experience at any moment is only created by what we are believing in that moment.

And you get to decide what you believe about anything you can walk in and see that two of your four staff members have called off and you can decide in that moment when you see that neutral data .2 out of four staff members are gone today. That’s neutral. You get to tell a story about that. So if you tell yourself a story, oh, great, I’m screwed now. We’re going to be behind all day.

There’s not going to be enough people. I can’t believe that we are expected to work short staff like this. This is going to be a horrible day. If that’s the story that runs in your mind, then you are going to have a terrible day. There really isn’t any way around that. Even the good things that happen are going to be clouded by this perspective that this is a bad day because you’re down two staff members.

Equally available to you is the opportunity to be like, we’re down to staff members. We’re going to have a great day. We’re going to rock and roll. We’re going to get this stuff done. We’re going to be able to serve clients and treat patients and have a good time. Even though we are down two people today, we are going to let this get us down. And if we look at it through that perspective, we’re going to have a better day.

Another way you can do that is be like, I’m glad I’m not down three people. So I’m so happy to have two people. Two people is better than no people. So really you have to look for and intentionally grab all those positives that are available to you in every single situation. When you decide in advance what kind of experience you want to have, then that’s the kind of experience you will create for yourself.

And then you protect that perspective even when the circumstances around you continue to change. We work in a profession where the unexpected is so deeply integrated into everything that we do. And truth be told, the unexpected is kind of the whole world we live in. But when we look at our profession in particular, where we have medical situations, where we sometimes have life or death situations, where we work with a client base that is overall highly emotive because we are working with their pets and they can’t communicate.

They can’t communicate to us. The pets can’t. The pets can’t communicate to the owners. So the owners come into us with a combination of great concern and great love for their pets that together, concern and love can create quite an emotional storm. So it’s very expected that our clients will be highly emotive overall. If we think that they shouldn’t be. If we think that that’s a problem or that that’s bad or wrong, we are automatically shooting ourselves in the foot because this just comes along with the category, with the territory.

When we’re dealing with animals that can’t speak and we’re dealing with their owners who love them and are concerned about them, then there is going to be some emotion involved. That’s not a problem unless you decide it’s a problem. So we have to remember, in veterinary medicine, we are going to be dealing with people who are kind of highly emotional, who might be a little bit stressed out, who could be a little bit snippy, and that’s okay.

Like, it’s not about you. And you can set your own boundaries. You can have your own policies and procedures for client behavior, which I absolutely think that you should. But outside of the extremes in general, our clients are going to be in a little bit heightened emotional state than maybe they are at the grocery store or at a restaurant. So we just want to honor that right out of the bat, right out of the gate.

We just have to notice that that is just part of the way that it is. Then, as we interact with those people, if we start to come in contact with somebody who is then displaying their high emotional experience of the situation at hand, we want to just remind ourselves moment by moment, this is neutral until I tell myself a story about it. So what do I want to believe about Misses Smith, who seems to be frustrated with how her pet is doing?

Do I want to believe she’s mad at us? Do I want her to believe she’s mad at me? Do I want to believe that she doesn’t value what we are offering? Or maybe do I want to believe that she cares about her pet and she’s just concerned? And this is how it’s coming out. Because, my friends, it’s not going to do any of us any good to take everything so personally.

So that’s kind of tip number two is as you interact with the unexpected throughout the day, work really hard not to take it personally. Because as soon as you get personally offended by what’s happening around you, you’ve given your power to what’s happening around you. You are no longer in control again of yourself and of your own emotional experience of the day at hand. So just to recap, tip number one, decide in advance what kind of day you’re going to have and protect that.

And when I say protect that, I mean that. Protect that with your perspective. Your brain’s going to offer you a million ways that this is turning into a bad day. Don’t even entertain that. Go, nope, I’m having a great day today. What’s going right today? Number two, when you encounter things that are unexpected, particularly I’m talking about client interactions and interactions with your coworkers. Don’t take their words and their actions personally.

It’s not about you. Just like I shared, the way that you interact in your day is going to be driven by your net emotional state. So if you’re in a crummy mood, you’re going to be behaving in a crummy way. But if you’re in a great mood, you’re going to be behaving in a great way. That exact same thing is happening with every one of your coworkers and every one of your clients.

So if they’re being ugly in their behaviors, if they’re using sharp words, that’s not about you. That’s by whatever story they’re telling in their mind, which is creating an emotional state that’s driving these actions and behaviors. We don’t need to take that personally, and we sure as heck don’t need to fix it, because it’s not our responsibility to fix. This is when we just stay in our lane.

We stay in the story that we want to tell that we are here to help clients. We are here to treat patients. We are here to be part of a team that is working toward a common goal to help clients and treat patients. And if we can stay focused on those little statements, those truths, and keep bringing ourselves back to that, when our brain wants to offer us all these opportunities to get offended, to be disgruntled, to be angry and frustrated, if we will come back to those truths instead, then we will have a much better day.

So we have to just know moment by moment. In veterinary medicine, there are going to be opportunities for us to see negativity. Let’s just stay aware, and that’s skill number three. Stay aware of what’s happening around you, and more importantly, what your brain is offering you. As far as the story about what’s happening around you. Go back to what I said before. Everything is neutral until you tell a story about it.

Because if you can just experience what’s happening throughout the day without telling a negative story about it, then you will not feel defeated and frustrated and overwhelmed. You can just let it all be neutral. You can let the ten appointments in a five appointment block be neutral and be like, okay, how am I going to deal with this today? What am I going to do? Because if we get all caught up in our story about how that shouldn’t be happening and how this is a terrible thing and how we are being victimized by this overbooked schedule, then what’s going to happen is that we’re not going to be able to help the clients and treat the patients that are actually here in front of us in this moment.

And I’m not saying that that overbooking or that short staffing aren’t things that need to be addressed. Of course they do. But do they need to be addressed at the expense of helping the people in front of you in this moment? Because in this moment, it is what it is. Right? Five appointments or ten appointments in a five appointment block. It is what it is in this moment.

So what we do with it in this moment is ours to decide. We can file away. Yes, this needs to be discussed. This is an opportunity for improvement with scheduling. We definitely need to go back and revisit and figure out how this happens so we can avoid this happening in the future. Beautiful. Let’s do that. But let’s set that in a box and set that aside until we get through what we’re faced with today.

Then we can interact with whoever we need to talk to about making some changes so some of these things don’t happen again, or at least not as frequently in the future. The reason to come back and have a conversation about some of these things that really are problems as far as workflow and experience in the workplace is because they do impact customer service. And so the way that I look at these things is if things are happening during the day that I do believe are truly negatively impacting our ability to help our clients and treat our patients, then that’s something that I want to take to leadership.

I want to have a conversation with leadership about that. But I also know that I’m going to have a much more effective conversation about those things if I am calm when I have it. And so if I’m in the moment where I walk in and I see that I am triple booked in a situation where I don’t want to be triple booked, if I let my lower brain drive the bus, what I call my lower brain avatar, Gertrude drive the bus, in that moment, I’m going to be nasty.

I’m going to be angry. I’m going to be ranting. I might even shoot off some mean emails or make some phone calls or walk into somebody’s office and, like, blow up. That’s not how I want to show up and when I do that, my message is going to be completely lost in my emotion. It’s the same thing that we experience with clients when they’re so emotional. Oftentimes we miss what they’re trying to communicate to us.

So instead, I can take a step back and take a breath and say, okay, this is not ideal. So I’m going to own that. This is not ideal. This is not what I would have chosen if I had been able to control all these things. But I don’t control all of these things. And so this is what it is today. How can I still make this a great day?

How can I leverage what I have available around me to make it through all of these appointments and to help those clients and to treat those pets without anybody realizing that this is a shit show of a day. Right. And I want to be careful of how I label that. I’m going to give myself about 20 seconds to be like, yep, this is a disaster. And then I’m going to be okay.

I’m done with that. I’m going to set that aside and say, I’m going to have a good day. This does not have to say a disaster. There are opportunities here, and I can still do my best. I can always do my best with the information and resources I have available at the time. My best. That doesn’t mean perfection, my friends. That means in this moment, how can I do my best with the information and resources I have available at the time.

And those resources do include things like the number of staff members that I have available and the amount of time that I have in the day. So don’t underestimate the impact of those things, but also don’t let them be so limiting that you don’t give it your personal best. Perfection isn’t a play here. There is no perfect way to do veterinary medicine because this is not the perfection of veterinary medicine.

It is the practice of veterinary medicine. It is a fluid and mobile environment. We are going to have to adjust and shift on the fly. That’s just part of what we do here. But when we start to get super frustrated and overwhelmed and offended by what’s happening, then we lose our ability to actually do the job that we are there to do in the first place. So staying aware, but then also choosing your perspective moment by moment is what’s going to make the difference.

So in a nutshell, it all comes down to perspective. It really does. It doesn’t come down to controlling things that are happening around you because you never will be able to do that if you are in a position of leadership or management. You can reflect on what happened during a day, and you can do kind of a pros and cons. This worked well. This didn’t work well. What can we do differently next time so that we can continue to refine our processes?

I think that’s a very important part of being in a leadership position, is being able to reflect on, okay, what happened today, and what are our opportunities to do a better job serving clients, treating patients, and supporting our entire team. I think those are questions that strong leaders should be asking all the time. In the moment, though, when you’re in the trenches, the kind of day that you have, the way that you manage your stress is going to be not by controlling the events, but by controlling the story that your mind offers you about those events.

Because in the heat of it, my friends, it is what it is. And the extent to which we are stressed out and frustrated and angry and bitter and jaded is compounded by the perspective that we carry. And when we have a negative perspective and then we share it with our colleagues and they buy into that same negative perspective, the day spirals downward in a hurry. This is one of the greatest problems in veterinary medicine as far as when it comes to culture and it comes to environment, and it comes with two with overall job satisfaction.

It is this sharing of a defeatist, negative perspective between colleagues that has just continued to perpetuate problems and perpetuate this false idea that what happens creates whether or not we have a good or bad day. So the quality of our day is created and determined by the events of that day, my friends, that is never, ever true. The quality of your day is decided simply by you. The quality of your day is determined by what you decide to believe, by what story you buy into that day.

And you have power, moment by moment, to choose a positive and powerful, impactful, optimistic story, even if everybody around you is choosing the alternative. So moment by moment, how you get through it is you stay in control of your own perspective, which means you stay in control of your own well being. You stay in your power, and you let all the other things around you be neutral. Even your coworker who’s over there complaining or pouting or doing whatever, you let her be neutral.

She doesn’t have any impact on you until you let her. That client who decides to say some nasty things to you in the room. You can either be offended by her, you can be curious about her, or you can be entertained by her. I check one of the later two. I would rather be curious or entertained than offended? Because if I’m offended now, I’ve given my power to her.

If I’m curious now, I’m tapping into compassion. Hmm. I wonder why she’s acting that way. And if I’m entertained, I’m just like, letting the humans be the humans. Sometimes people are just a mess, and that’s totally fine, because sometimes I’m a mess, too. But that doesn’t mean I’m a terrible person, and that doesn’t mean that they’re a terrible person either. So we just give them that grace, and we continue to do what we’re there to do to help them and to treat their patients.

If they decline our services, that’s not on us. That is on them. If we take it personally, we’re again letting external circumstances decide how we feel. And we don’t want that either. At the end of the day, then how do you decompress? Well, I think sometimes there’s a need to just get it all out of your head. So if you find that you get home and you’re looping and looping and looping on something that happened during the day, I find the most effective way to release that is simply to write it down.

I really like journaling. Or audio journaling, either one. And I will just either talk out what happened during the day, like just into a voice recorder that will put it into a note, or. I like to write. Me personally, I think that it’s very cathartic to write things out. So I will just write it all out. And when I just write it all out, I might write it all out as a rant.

I might just write it all out as events. Then it’s on paper. It’s not in my head anymore. And I can go back and I can look at it. I can be curious again. I’m always going to be a curious student of myself. I want to understand the experiences that I’m having because I know that I’m the only one in charge of my experiences. I know that I’m the only one who can improve the experiences that I’m having day in and day out.

So if I’m having a string of bad days, even though our world teaches us, it’s probably because you have a bad job and you work with bad people and you serve bad clients. I know at this point in my life that that is never true. If I’m having a bad day, it’s self created. So where is the story that I’m telling myself? I want to find that in my reflection, and I want to then ask myself, what’s a different story I could have told myself today?

It’s only when I get honest with myself, and only when you get honest with yourself about the stories that you’re telling do you then step into your power to create a different story. If you’re waiting for your circumstances to change before you allow yourself to tell a more empowered story, you’re going to be waiting forever. And you’re going to constantly be in a situation where your circumstances dictate your quality of life.

I don’t want that for you any more than I want that for me, because I know that that’s not where quality of life actually comes from. I know the way that to be happy in veterinary medicine has nothing to do with the way that clients behave during the day or the way that cases turn out or the number of appointments on the schedule. I know that it has to do with being aligned with who I am, which means being truthful with myself about what I believe in, the experience I’m creating for myself in this world.

And I know that you have the power to do that, too. In Vetlife Academy, this is what we call leveraging the space where you learn how to choose those different perspectives in the moment, and you dig in to understand what are the perspectives that you are currently grabbing onto, and why is it that you’re having a hard time letting those go. There’s a lot of layers that come into the perspectives that we gravitate toward automatically.

Our automatic negative thinking is the way that I talk about it, and part of our ability to leverage the space efficiently and effectively really does require us to understand why we keep going toward the negative. Now, I’ve given you a lot of the neuroscience basis here in this episode of why we do that by default. But then, on top of that, we’ve all had our own experiences in our lifetimes that have conditioned us to respond a particular way in specific situations.

That does not mean that it is inevitable that you always respond that way. It does not mean that you will always feel offended or that you will always feel down and negative. It doesn’t mean that at all. It just means that in your certain situation, you’ve had experiences in your lifetime that have taught you things about yourself and about the world that are probably not true. But if you don’t even know what beliefs you’re holding about yourself and about the world and about how other people should behave, what I call manuals, then you will continue to live your life through these rules and hold other people accountable to them as well.

And those rules will play into your perspective in a way that will not lift you up. It will continue to pull you down. It’s this gift of teaching yourself how to let things and people and situations be neutral that really sets you on this journey. So at the end of the day, when you do your reflection, write it all out and just take a look at the stories.

Recognize where you have an opportunity to tell a better story tomorrow. Recognize where you’re trying to control circumstances, where you’re believing circumstances should be different. And my friends, sometimes you are definitely going to come up to situations that require some adjustment in circumstance. So I think without talking about this, I would be remiss in closing here. So I do want to come back to point out one thing about circumstances, and about it is what it is, kind of things in any situation in your life, whether it’s work or otherwise.

For me, there are situations, circumstances that I would consider to be deal breakers. And these circumstances are circumstances in which I’m being asked to compromise my own personal morals, ethics, or values. And I can’t answer the question what that looks like for you. I know what that looks like for me, and you’re going to know when you come across it. And so when you do your reflections, I want you to look at was there any place today that I was truly asked to compromise my morals, ethics, or values?

Now, I’m not asking, did you compromise those on your own? That’s a different question. Because sometimes we’ll do that and then we’ll be so frustrated with ourselves about it, and we might even tell ourselves a story that we were being forced to do that. But most of the time, we’re going to find that we’re not. We’re looking for situations where, in whatever position that we’re in, we have been flat out asked to compromise morals, ethics and values.

To give you a very black and white example would be, I worked at an animal hospital one time where the expectation was, if somebody scheduled a euthanasia, that you perform that euthanasia with no questions asked. That was a big fat no. For me, that is a massive compromise of my own personal morals, ethics, and values. I believe in euthanasia. I also believe in having a conversation with the client first understanding the reason why, and then also feeling personally okay with their decision.

That is my take on it. That does not mean my take is the right take for everybody. But this is one of those things that I do have my own moral compass and I have to sleep at night like, there’s a kind of a cutoff, I would say, like, convenience, euthanasia. I’m moving. I don’t want this cat anymore. I just euthanize it. That’s a no for me. But I worked at a practice.

That that was the expectation. Now, did I ever go through with it? So even though my boss said I had to, did I? And for me, no. But I’m a very strong personality. And so for me, in that moment, I was willing to be like, if this. If my job is dependent on me euthanizing this animal, then I will go find another job. Now, in that case, it turned out okay.

I didn’t have to go find another job. But that may not have been the case, right? That it could have been fireable. And for me, that was okay, like, morals, ethics, and values. Or if it had been very clear, yes, you do this or you leave, then maybe I would have resigned. So I want us to look at our reflections and see, like, are there things that are compromising our morals, ethics, and values?

Now, I’m not saying that you should automatically quit. That’s what I’m saying at all. There’s going to be an opportunity for having what I call a high value conversation. This is something that I teach inside of Vetlife Academy, how to have a high value conversation. When you see that there are things that could be changed, could be improved to overall improve the mission of the workplace. So to help more clients, to treat more patients, to create a positive and supportive work environment, I think those are the three big missions of any veterinary hospital.

So if we are aware of things that are happening that are directly compromising those, I think that’s an opportunity to have a high value conversation. And sometimes we won’t even notice those things, those opportunities, until we’ve done some reflective journaling or activities for several days in a row and we start to notice a theme, you know, anything can go haywire once, but if we start to see something, that there’s a real opportunity to adjust happening over and over and over again now that needs to probably be brought to somebody’s attention through a high value conversation.

If we’re not taking time to reflect and start to notice those patterns, whether we are simply employees or we are in a management position, then we’re going to miss those opportunities to make adjustments in our environments that actually would have a massive positive impact not only on the people who work there, but also on the clients who we help. So reflection, I think, is a really big part of this.

Once you’ve done that reflection, then just let it go. And keep in mind, whenever your brain wants to go back to getting you sucked into the vortex of what happened at work today, I want to remind you that none of it matters when you’re at home. You can’t do anything to change any of it when you’re not there. There’s not a single patient in the world that you worrying about overnight is going to actually have an impact on how they do, how they heal.

There’s no. That is a complete waste of your focus. And this is a skill to be developed, my friends, because we are taught in this world that if you don’t worry, you don’t care. And because our brain is always wanting to look at the negative, and it is actually comfortable in a negative perspective, it’s going to. Feeling positive about the day feels very foreign and uncomfortable. So I know that sounds kind of circular, but our brain is most familiar with feeling negative.

And so if it doesn’t have something to be worried about, if it doesn’t have a negative perspective, to kind of lean into anything outside of that is unfamiliar territory, which is automatically scary for the brain. So it’s going to keep offering you the negative perspective, and it is a skill to be developed to keep redirecting your focus to something that’s real. Everything that you worry about isn’t real in the moment.

It’s not happening right now. It’s a what if in the future, or it’s a should have from the past. It’s nothing you can change in the moment. So when you are at home at night and your brain wants to keep pulling you into the story of what happened during the day, or spiraling over the negativity over how a case turned out, or how a client interacted, or jumping into the worry of what somebody might do or might say, just realize you have no power to control any of those things in this moment at home.

And so you’re much better off putting your focus on what is real, on what’s actually right in front of you, maybe it’s your family, maybe it’s your pets, maybe it’s a hobby. Whatever it is, that’s the only thing that’s real in this moment. And so learning how to redirect yourself, your brain, your focus back to what’s real when you’re outside of work plays a huge role in increasing job satisfaction when you are at work.

Because otherwise, if you keep trying to fix work as a means of quieting your mind at night, you are going to lose 100% of the time. Because remember, what happens at work, you have very little ability to control. It does not determine your well being anyway. It is not the creator of your quality of life. And if you keep trying to perfect work and your work experience in order for you to have a quiet mind and enjoy time when you’re not at work, you’re doing it completely backwards.

The way that you do this for yourself is you learn how to quiet your mind, rein in your focus, create a perspective intentionally when you’re not at work, you take that skill set into your work environment. The quality of life outside and inside both of work both improve and you are no longer left as a victim of anything that happens during the day, at work, in the world or at home.

All right, my friends, I know this is a lot of information in this episode. I hope that this has been helpful on how you can take the things that I’ve talked about and really implement them during the day to have a better experience day in and day out. If you want to dig even more into developing these skills, this is what Vetlife Academy is all about. Our VetLife Academy program teaches you how to leverage the space so you are no longer at the effect of the things that happen around you, those things that you can’t control, and that you can have a good day with less stress and less anxiety, no matter what happens at work, at home or in the world.

To learn more about Vetlife academy, just jump over to joyfuldvm.com vetlifeacademy. Alright, my friends, that’s going to wrap it up for this week. I’ll see you soon. Bye for now.

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