In this episode, Dr. Cari Wise, discusses the impact of beliefs on life and career, using daylight saving time changes as an analogy to illustrate how external factors can challenge beliefs. Dr. Wise emphasizes that beliefs shape actions and outcomes and encourages listeners to reflect on their initial beliefs in the veterinary field and challenge negative narratives.
She highlights how veterinary professionals can adopt limiting beliefs over time, such as feeling trapped by debt or toxic work environments, and argues that these beliefs are learned, not truths. Dr. Wise advocates for reshaping these beliefs to create a more positive career experience. She discusses self-fulfilling prophecies and shared beliefs within the veterinary community, urging listeners to challenge conventional wisdom and consider alternative perspectives.
Dr. Wise offers a new masterclass on identifying and shifting core beliefs, providing tools to reframe mindsets and regain control over career and life choices. She calls on veterinary professionals to reassess their beliefs, break free from limiting narratives, and cultivate a mindset that promotes joy, fulfillment, and resilience in their field.
Key takeaways:
- Impact of Beliefs: Dr. Cari Wise emphasizes that beliefs significantly impact life and career, shaping actions and outcomes.
- Challenging Negative Narratives: Veterinary professionals often adopt limiting beliefs over time, such as feeling trapped by debt or toxic work environments. Dr. Wise argues these beliefs are learned and can be reshaped for a more positive career experience.
- Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: The episode discusses how shared beliefs in the veterinary community can become self-fulfilling prophecies, reinforcing negative outcomes.
- Intentional Belief Changes: Dr. Wise encourages intentional changes in beliefs to create a joyful and fulfilling life.
- Masterclass on Beliefs: She offers a new masterclass on identifying and shifting core beliefs, providing tools to reframe mindsets and regain control over career and life choices.
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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 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. Today’s episode is a very important one, especially if you are struggling in any way in your life.
So if you are having challenges within your veterinary career, if you are suffering from career regret, frustration, anxiety, if you’re wondering if you went into the wrong profession, if you should have done something different in your life, if you’re feeling trapped by the choices that you’ve made, if you’re feeling like your student loan debt is keeping you from experiencing the life that you want to live, any of those types of things, and this also could be just something personal.
Maybe it’s not your veterinary career at all. It doesn’t matter where that struggle is, wherever that weight is in your life, that pressure. This episode is one that you must listen to. And I’ve titled it belief, influence. So before we dig into the nitty gritty of this episode, I want to start out and just kind of paint a scenario, something that you’ve probably experienced yourself if you live in an area of the world that practices daylight saving time.
So daylight saving time requires the clocks to be either pushed forward or pushed backwards twice a year. So in the spring, in the northern hemisphere, we spring forward. So when it was 07:00 a.m. yesterday, it is 08:00 a.m. today. And then in the fall, we fall back. So when it was 07:00 a.m. yesterday, it is 06:00 a.m. today. This happens two times a year. So we spring forward in the spring, we fall backward in the fall.
And as a result, we need to be aware when this is going to happen. Because imagine what if you’re not aware. Now, this has happened to many of us. Typically, this happens on a Saturday night going into a Sunday morning. And how many times have you yourself or interacted with somebody who just missed it so didn’t realize that this was the weekend when the time was going to change?
Maybe there was some place you needed to be, like going to a religious service or watching a television program, and you either showed up an hour early or an hour late. You went to find that program on tv and it was already over. Or the program that comes on before was just getting started in that moment. It’s really confusing. What the heck is going on? Well, what’s going on is that during that day, up until that moment, where something jumped in front of you and pointed out in kind of a glaring way that what you believed was wrong, you believed that you were doing it all right.
You believed it was the time that it said on your clock, everything around you told you that it was a specific time. And it wasn’t until there was some other external thing that made you question whether or not the time was right that you even considered that it might not be. So that moment where you showed up for some meeting or some service and it was already over, you only could then step back and recognize, wait a minute, the time was wrong.
You go to watch that television program, and it hasn’t even gotten started. It’s like another hour away. It’s very unsettling when that happens, isn’t it? Because you went your whole day, your whole morning, thinking that everything was exactly as it appeared to be, that it was the time that the clock said that it was. And it wasn’t until you were kind of forced, with some external evidence, that you questioned whether or not what you believed about the time was true.
Now, why am I talking about this? I wanted to have an example for you to consider as we go through the rest of what I’m going to be sharing today. Because, my friends, just like functioning within a day when you have the time all wrong. This is exactly what’s happening in our lives. We are functioning every single day through a set of beliefs, a set of beliefs that we have not even considered that we might need to question.
And it’s not until something external says, hey, maybe that’s not true that we even start to consider the possibility. Our beliefs are what drive all of the actions that we take in our lives. And then those actions, as they combine over time, create the outcomes. So what we are experiencing in our lives in this moment is simply the result of what we’ve believed and what we’ve done before today.
And what we’re going to experience tomorrow and in the years to follow will be the result of what we believe and what we do today, tomorrow, and going forward. If we never question what we believe about our lives and about what is possible, we will just keep repeating the same things over and over. And you’ve heard the definition of insanity, repeating the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
The point of all of this is for us to start to consider that in order to have a different life experience, in order to be happier, in order to improve our well being, in order to become more fulfilled in our careers, we don’t need to do more. We need to be different. And to be different, it starts with our belief. Now, if you go back to the beginning of your veterinary career, I want you to think about that for a moment.
What did you believe at the very beginning of your vet med journey? Take a few seconds and just consider that. What did you believe in those early days when you were just getting ready to start on your academic journey to go forward in whatever direction you went, veterinarian, veterinary technician, as you got ready to go on that journey, what were you believing at that point in time? As you went through that journey?
What were you believing all along the way? And when you finally graduated, what did you believe at that point? And then, how has that changed as you’ve been out in practice? It’s so subtle that we don’t even realize how much what we believed has actually changed. Instead, we get a few years into this profession and we start to believe things like somebody should have told us that Vetmed was going to suck the life out of us.
We start to wonder why we made decisions that got us trapped in these professions that are so stressful and so hard, and yet we are so trapped by our student loans and that these student loan debt that this is going to limit what’s possible in our lives until we get it paid off. We wonder why we chose a career that is so toxic dealing with people who are so ungrateful.
Does any of this sound familiar? Well, if you think about it and you think about this common narrative that we share with each other, which is very much like what I just shared with you, we have to think about what kind of life that’s creating for us as we share it. It’s not creating a life of joy and peace and fulfillment and excitement about the future. There’s no way to get to those things if all we’re focusing on is this negative perspective.
But what I want you to see is that that negative perspective was learned. That’s not what you believed at the beginning. And, my friends, if it wasn’t what you believed at the beginning, how can you be sure that it’s true? What we’ve been doing is drawing conclusions about our own experiences and our own lives in veterinary medicine. And then we’ve been sharing those perspectives with each other year after year.
And now at this point, generation after generation, sharing it with the new people who are in veterinary medicine with us. And because we share it as if it’s fact, it is received as if it’s fact. And so then we start to live our lives through this fact pattern that does not help us move forward. We add on to that, this pressure that we put on ourselves to be responsible for patient outcomes.
We really hang on to what we’re taught in school about the gold standard, and we start to believe that it’s gold standard or nothing. And then we kind of hang on to our experiences. All those moments where we were told we weren’t good enough and that we needed to be better. And we take all of those things together, and it draws a really ugly picture of what is possible for us in this career.
Left unquestioned, we will continue to see burnout rates in veterinary medicine skyrocket. We will continue to see ourselves on that terrible top ten list. We will continue to spend tons of time talking about toxic work environments and mental health risk. And we’ll do it all through this broad conclusion that that’s just the way it is in vet Meddenne. What I want you to consider is that maybe we’re wrong.
Not even maybe, but that we are wrong. That this isn’t the inevitable consequence of the career that we chose. That simply what it is is the self fulfilling prophecy that results from the beliefs that we keep passing to each other and that we never even question. The truth is that if one person has a different experience, then that truth you’re believing can’t be absolute. It’s just an opinion.
And you’re not required to believe the opinions of other people. Just because the masses believe certain things about what’s possible for us in veterinary medicine and what results as being part of this profession doesn’t mean that you’re required to believe that. You get to decide for you. And I encourage you to go back and consider what did you believe at the beginning of your journey? Because that is the closest thing to truth that you will ever have.
My friends, we don’t work in a profession that limits our lives. We don’t work in a profession that destroys our well being. We don’t work in a profession that puts us at risk. We do that to ourselves. We do that to ourselves by passing on limiting beliefs and perspectives and living into those as if they are fact, as if they are true. And we don’t even know we’re doing it.
That is the point of this episode today. We don’t even know. It’s the influence of belief that has become so deeply woven into our truth that we can’t see the difference between opinion and fact. And we can’t even see that we have bought into an entire belief system that will keep us from having the lives that we actually deserve to have. Now that I’m telling you this, today is good news.
This is not an opportunity for you to get frustrated and angry and to feel defeated over this realization that you’ve bought into the lie like so many of us have. This is not the point of this. The point of this is to wake you up, like that event on a day of daylight savings time change. When you recognize that you’ve just been functioning in alternate reality. It’s not a problem unless you choose to stay there.
Now that you know the difference, the greatest gift you can give yourself is to decide intentionally what you believe. And part of deciding what you believe and living into what you believe requires you to understand what you don’t even know that you’re accepting as truth. It seems very factual that your student loan balance has an inhibiting effect on your livelihood. It doesn’t. It seems very factual that toxic work environments destroy your well being, but they don’t.
It seems very factual that we are predisposed to having a high suicide rate, but we aren’t. I know me saying these things in this episode can be really upsetting and triggering and frustrating for some of you. I know that. And my. My purpose in this is not to upset anybody. Please believe me. It is not. It is for me to show you that you are not required to believe any of those things.
And that historical data points are never a prediction of future outcomes. That’s the most important thing, especially when it comes to that terrible statistic about our profession. If we accept that statistic as fact in our current reality, then we will just continue to live into it, recreating that statistic over and over and over again. The other option is to look at that statistic as a moment of time in the past and to choose differently for ourselves.
Today. We can look at our environments and recognize the opportunities that are there to make them better. And we can realize that nothing can give us a bad day except ourselves. We just simply have a day. How we label it is up to us. The way that other people behave around you, they can’t actually cause your emotions. It’s the stories that we tell about what’s happening that creates that for us.
Has anybody ever told you that you have that power? That you get to decide for you how you. What you believe and how you feel in any given moment? Did you even know that that concept existed. I didn’t. Not until somebody taught it to me. And it’s a shame, because the key to managing to living, to thriving in a career like veterinary medicine, a career that is defined by practice.
Which means you cannot do it well enough to get it perfect. You can’t do it right enough to guarantee that your patients get better and your clients are happy. And that the people that you work with aren’t jerks sometimes. But if nobody ever told you that it wasn’t those circumstances that were going to decide for you whether or not you had a good or bad day, whether or not you had a good or bad quality of life, but that it was the story that you told yourself about those things that created that for you, then you’re going to do what so many of us do, is you’re just going to keep trying harder, working longer to change the circumstances, to control the outcomes.
Because that’s the only path that, you know, forward. I just want you to see that you’re not on the right path. There wasn’t ever actually anything wrong with you to begin with. You were always good enough to do this job. The problem is that along the way, you are introduced to an idea, a set of beliefs that had you then accepting that your life is limited because you chose this profession.
That your life was somehow compromised, that you were trapped, that you were at risk because you chose veterinary medicine, my friend. What if that’s not true? I want you to think about your life right now. Think about what it is that’s keeping you from having the life that you want to experience. Make a list. Just go through that list quickly. What’s keeping you from having the life that you want to experience?
And now that you’ve got that list, I want you to consider what if nothing on that list is true? What if it’s not real? What if those things that you identified aren’t actually the problem at all? What changes then? What if whatever you’re believing about your own potential is just one version of a story and you can choose another? What if what you’re believing about your own abilities is just one version of the story and you can choose something different?
What if the number of dollars in your bank account and the level of your debt doesn’t actually directly correlate to your quality of life or your well being? Then what? My friends, we put way too much time and energy and focus on things that actually don’t make a difference. The only thing that does is what you believe about yourself, about your life and about what’s possible for you.
Now, some of you are going to try to jump in there and say, but, Cari, believing those things isn’t practical. And I just want you to try to define what practical is in the first place. What is practical? Is it more practical to believe negative things so that you’re ready if negative things happen? No, not at all. Because focusing on negative things, all that does is pull your well being down in this moment.
In this moment where those things don’t even exist. You’re already living into the negative as if they do. And because you choose to do that, you draw that negative to you. This isn’t judgment. This isn’t chastising. This is showing you and helping to explain why it is that we keep recreating some of the most uncomfortable and frustrating situations and circumstances in this career field. It’s because we keep focusing on them, my friends.
What we focus on, we create. We keep handing each other these belief systems that are negative, that are restrictive, that keep us at a disadvantage. And why we think we’re warning each other off from what veterinary medicine is. What veterinary medicine is. There were always going to be patients that didn’t get better. There were always going to be clients who were jerks. There were always going to be situations where people couldn’t pay for service.
And somewhere along the way, we personalized it. We started to get offended by it. We took responsibility for it. And we concluded that it was those things that ruined our quality of life, that kept us from our joy, that limited our potential, that stopped us from experiencing everything that is possible. So it’s no wonder we have such a high burnout rate if we’re going to continue to believe those things.
What I want you to consider today is that you’ve just simply been operating in an alternate reality. I mean, we all are just kind of operating in the reality that we choose. I mean, that’s the truth of it. Our reality is simply based on what we believe. And if you’re unhappy in your current reality, the place you start to change that for yourself is to question the belief system that brought you there and then decide for yourself.
Does that belief system support where you want to go? Because if it doesn’t, step one, to believe something new. Now, I know that that can be kind of a big task to do. It requires doing a bit of an inventory to understand what is it that you actually believe in the first place. Because until we stop and slow down and consider what we believe, we just keep functioning through what feels like fact and what’s more interesting about that is we accept that everybody around us believes the same things, too.
And the darnedest thing is that when it comes to vet med and it comes to all this garbage, most of us do believe the same things, because we’ve been passing these same limiting beliefs around to each other for decades. It’s not getting better, but what makes it better is when you stop, you take yourself out of the vortex and you ask, okay, what do I want to believe?
And you start to see the contrast and realize that you didn’t believe any of this junk at the beginning of your journey. If you didn’t believe it at the beginning, then what makes you believe that it’s true? Now I know. We come back to, why didn’t anybody tell me that vet med was going to suck the life out of me? Because it wasn’t an absolute fact. It wasn’t inevitable.
And today, in your struggles, you’re believing that if you had made a different choice, you wouldn’t be struggling today. And what I want you to see is that struggling today is greatly dependent upon what you believe about your opportunities and your experience today. And my guess is, what you believe about your experience today is something that was offered to you by somebody else. It wasn’t a belief that you chose for yourself.
This is where we have to be hyper aware of what we’re accepting as truth. If you can find just one person that’s enjoying their life as a veterinary professional, one person that works the same schedule that you work, that deals with the same kinds of cases, the same kinds of staff shortages, and same types of cranky clients, one person that experiences that and seems to have joy, that’s all you need to know, that what you might be believing right now is not fact.
And if it’s not fact, that makes it optional. And if it makes it optional, then you have another choice, a better choice, that doesn’t mean you’re going to turn the best, the worst job situations into the best ones. Not at all. But what it is going to do is it’s going to give you the freedom to analyze it and to decide, is this actually where I want to be?
Does this align with the way that I want to practice medicine and the way I want to experience my life? Now we’re getting somewhere. Now we’re asking the questions that are actually going to make a difference and move us forward. But if we don’t start asking those critical questions, if we don’t start digging in to identify what is the belief pattern through which I am living my life, then we will just continue to spin our wheels, working harder, being angry about all the things that we can’t change, the things that we can’t control, and they were never arsed to control in the first place.
The most important thing to remember here is all those external variables that you’re blaming for the way your life is right now. My friends, they’re not responsible for your life right now. They may be components of your life, but they’re not creating your quality of life. They’re not creating the quality of your mental health and your well being. You are so much more powerful than that. And you just didn’t know.
You just didn’t realize that. You simply got stuck in a belief pattern that was keeping you right where you are, keeping you, repeating the same types of behaviors and decisions over and over and over again and not getting you anywhere different. The path forward isn’t to work harder. The path forward isn’t to be a different person than you are. The path forward is to simply take control of what you believe, take control of your own focus.
Stop letting other people influence you with their beliefs and their negativity and their limited view of the world. You aren’t required to believe any of that. What I believe is that everything is possible. What I believe is that you are perfectly equipped for the journey that you are on. What I believe is that you haven’t lost any time, that everything that you want is still in front of you.
That the life that you are meant to live exists, and that you might be at a crossroads. Are you going to stand up for you or are you going to just keep rolling with the punches and stay where you are? You’re powerful, my friend. You have the ability to make a different decision for yourself. It is your right to say, you know what? No more. I refuse to believe that I am limited because of the career field that I chose.
I refuse to believe that I am a statistic. I refuse to believe that my work environment gets to decide my level of well being or that my student loan balance gets to decide my quality of life. I refuse to believe that. I refuse to believe that I have to be better in order to be happy. You get to decide that right now for yourself. And as soon as you start deciding that for you, as soon as you start to really understand that you’re exactly the way that you’re supposed to be, that you’re in the place in your life that you’re supposed to be, that what happens next is yours to decide, that you don’t need permission from anybody else to live the life that you want to live.
As soon as you start to embrace that as truth, all the doors are going to start to open. As long as we keep though buying into these negative belief patterns and being influenced by these beliefs that we didn’t even choose for ourselves, then we will just keep repeating the same experiences over and over again. You can’t change jobs enough to outrun this, my friends. It’s not the job.
It’s the belief. It’s the perspective. It’s the story. The beautiful news is that you don’t have to change jobs to change your story. And as soon as you start to change the story that you’re telling yourself about your life, then the clarity around your current position will come into shape and you might then decide to make some different decisions about the type of work you do or where you do it, or where you live, or all kinds of things.
Relationships, you name it. But don’t buy into this other common belief, which is that once you find the right job, the right relationship, the right schedule, the right hours, the right pay, the right staffing, that then you’ll be happy. That’s what we tend to chase. Once I’m better at surgery, then I’ll be happy. Once I don’t have to do surgery anymore, then I’ll be happy. Once I get my student loans paid off, then I can finally relax.
Once I get out of vet Med, then I’ll get my life back. Does any of this sound familiar? These are the stories we tell ourselves. And these are just simply the second chapters of the first story. That all starts with this broad spread belief, widely accepted belief that our lives are limited because of the career field that we chose. And I will come back to what I’ve already said multiple times in this episode, is that this is not what you believed in the beginning.
If it’s not what you believed in the beginning, it’s not because you were naive. It is not because you were clueless. It’s not because you were young and stupid. It’s because you believed what was true. You believed in possibility. You believed in the good you could do in the world. You believed in following your passion into this profession. You believed in who you could help, the animals. You could help the experience that you could have.
And it wasn’t until other people offered you the conclusions that they had drawn from their own negative experiences which were created from their own negative perspectives that you started to doubt your own belief. I’m encouraging you today to go back to your original belief. And let’s start to find all the places along the way that you lost sight of that. Let’s start questioning every one of those new beliefs that you were offered that you accepted as fact.
And let’s question all of those. Let’s drop the ones that don’t help you. Let’s drop the ones that keep you spinning where you are. And let’s pick something different that’s more empowering. So much of what we experience in the world is based in belief that we accept as fact but can never prove. If it doesn’t move you forward, it holds you back. You were not meant to suffer in this profession or in your life.
You were not meant to be faced with challenges and anxiety and dread every single day. Those are the experiences that many of us have, myself included. I’ve had those experiences myself. There is a way out of that, a way that moves you forward, back into your life, where you are engaged again, where you are happy, where you are joyful, and it doesn’t require you to work harder. It doesn’t require you to change jobs.
It doesn’t require you to leave vet Med. It doesn’t require you to pay off all your debt. It simply requires you to slow down enough to understand the belief pattern through which you’re living your life. And as you start to look at that, you can start to see the relationship between the negative belief patterns and the actions that you’re taking and not taking, and how those actions then together keep bringing you back to the experience that you’re having in this moment.
All we have to do is create a new habit. That’s it. We have to create a new perspective, a new habit belief system. And you can do that work. You can absolutely do that work. It’s not the fastest thing in the world, but you didn’t get where you are fast either. It’s taken time for you to adopt all these beliefs that don’t serve you. So it will take a little bit of time to disentangle what’s true from what’s not useful, from what you want to believe, from what is holding you back.
But as you do that, you get your freedom back in a hurry. You get your choices back, you get your future back. I mean, what work is more important than that? There are three beliefs. When it all comes down to it, there are three beliefs in veterinary medicine that really are the anchor beliefs for everything else that we experience, especially everything else that we experience from a negative perspective that we just keep influencing each other with.
And I shared about those three beliefs recently in a brand new Masterclass. I’m turning that brand new Masterclass into a secret podcast, if you will, a private podcast. And if you want to listen to that masterclass and those three beliefs, you absolutely can do that. All you have to do is jump over to joyfuldvm.com threebeliefs and you can sign up to get the audio that Masterclass broken up into a few different short episodes where you can learn about these three beliefs, and then you can start looking for evidence of how those three beliefs have influenced you as well.
In that masterclass, there are a lot of aha moments. There is going to be a bit of a paradigm shift for you, but that is my purpose, that is my hope for you. Because as you start to shift what you believe about your reality, then your reality starts to shift. Once you start to focus on something different, then your experience starts to change in a good way for you and you start to take your power back.
So I hope you’ll consider jumping over to joyfuldvm.com threebeliefs so you can spend a little bit of time listening to that masterclass and start to identify where those beliefs that we keep passing from generation to generation in veterinary medicine, where they have actually been integrated into your own experience. And as you do so, I want you to remember again what you believed at the beginning of your journey and start to see how these three beliefs are in direct contrast to your original belief.
And you can start to ask yourself the question, how would your life be different if you didn’t believe those things anymore? How would your life be different then? I want you to know that it can be all of those things. You get to decide what you believe every moment of the day. And even if you’ve spent decades believing some of these anchor beliefs that I share in that podcast, you can still make a decision today that will change the rest of your life.
Don’t be afraid to do that work, my friend. That is the heart of what we do over here at joyful DVM. It’s the heart of leveraging the space so you get to take back control of what comes next for you. You get to decide for you 100% of the time. And it starts out with understanding the belief patterns through which you see your life and then choosing new stories that will move you forward.
So again, jump over to joyfuldvm.com threebeliefs to get in on that secret podcast where I share those three beliefs and explain even more about how you can drop those beliefs and start moving forward toward the life that you were always meant to live. All right, my friends, that’s going to wrap it up for this week. I’ll see you soon. Bye for now.