In this episode, Dr. Cari Wise, discusses five common negative aspects in veterinary careers and offers strategies to mitigate their impact on wellbeing.
These aspects include:
- Client Behavior
- Unexpected Patient Outcomes
- Unanticipated Schedule Changes
- Out-of-Stock Items
- Broken Equipment
Dr. Cari Wise emphasizes that these aspects are neutral until a negative narrative is assigned to them. By adopting a mindset of observation rather than judgment, veterinary professionals can maintain their peace and joy.
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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. In today’s episode, we are going to be exploring five negative aspects of every veterinary career and how to neutralize them.
Now, veterinary medicine just comes with some things that happen that we experience day in and day out that is somewhat different than a lot of other professions. And it’s important that we recognize and really honor these not so fun parts of our job, because if. If we don’t honor that these things exist, then we will just continue to fight against them and believe that they shouldn’t. And that’s kind of the spoiler of the entire episode.
So let’s go through these five different negative aspects, talk through them, and then I’m going to talk about and share how you can start to neutralize them so that they stop having such a negative impact on your day and on your wellbeing overall. So, number one is client behavior. Let’s face it, sometimes the humans just behave badly. Now, of course, that would be a judgment, right? The way that a human behaves, if we label that as bad behavior, that is our opinion, and we are all entitled to our opinions.
But what we want to notice is that when a client behaves in a way other than what we think they should be doing, that it’s very easy for us to drop into judgment and to become frustrated or offended by their behavior. We will never control their behavior. When we personalize it, that’s when it really starts to impact us individually in a negative way. So the thing to keep in mind when it comes to client behavior, and in particular ugly or bad client behavior, is to realize that you are not responsible for the way that a client behaves.
If you can’t control it, you can’t be responsible for it. So you can do everything within your power to give somebody a great experience at your veterinary hospital, and they can still behave in a way that is disrespectful or is rude or is just ugly. That’s not on you. That’s on them. As veterinary hospitals and organizations, we do have the opportunity to create a client code of conduct where we’re very clear with the type of expect or the type of behavior and interaction that we expect with our clients, and we can communicate that, we can make them aware of that, and then we can use that as a boundary to say that when you behave in a way that is not respectful or is aggressive, or is demeaning or rude or mean or yelling or cursing or whatever you want to put in there, that that kind of behavior is not acceptable and that it’s not going to be possible to continue in a client patient doctor relationship if the human behaves that way.
You can fire people from your practice for bad behavior. So don’t be afraid to set a client code of conduct. If this is something that you experience on a regular basis, and even having an individual conversation with a client about their behavior, something that you can absolutely do, and you can set an expectation, and then if they continue to behave in a bad way, in a way that does not align with the way that you want that interaction to go, then you can dismiss them from your practice.
Where this becomes problematic for us is when we really get bought into the way that they behave. So we really start to evaluate our own days and really determine, like, if we’ve had a good day or a bad day based on the behaviors of the clients who we see that day. This is the part that becomes that slippery slope. So, my friends, we will encounter people probably every single day that behave badly.
Whether or not you personalize that and make that, then ruin your own day, that part’s optional. So the clients are going to be the clients. They’re going to behave however they’re going to behave. But when you internalize that and then make your well being dependent on people behaving in a certain way, just notice that you’re giving your power over to them, and you’re never going to win in that situation.
The way to neutralize this is to remember that the clients and their behavior actually create zero emotion for you outside of the story that you’re telling yourself about them. So if you can step out of judgment, if you can just watch their behavior without personalizing it and becoming offended by it or believing it should be different than it is, then your emotional experience of it will stay neutral.
As soon as we start believing they should be behaving differently, we are going to feel frustrated. Because anytime there’s a gap between expectation and reality, frustration is something that’s going to pop up. If you notice that you’re feeling offended, then again, you’re believing what they’re saying. So if they’re saying something about you that is something that’s untrue and you feel offended by it. It’s because you’re believing what they’re saying and you’re not letting it be neutral.
You’re believing that they should know the truth, and maybe they do, and they’re just not sharing it. Who knows? But you’re never going to be able to control their perception. So you cannot control the perception of you that those people have. So when they elect to share that perception, that is likely going to be not true about you and your efforts to make it true. You just want to see that that is an effort to try to control their behavior.
If they knew the truth, then they wouldn’t say bad things about you. That’s not true. That’s just not. We can’t prove that that’s the way that that would go down. So we just want to notice that. And instead we neutralize client behavior by being the witness of it, but not becoming actively engaged or attached to it. Absolutely. We can set our expectations for behavior. We can have client code of conduct.
We can dismiss people from our practice for the way that they treat us and our staff. Absolutely, 100%. I think we need to do more of that in order to create these safe working environments. But most of the clients aren’t going to require us to fire them. They’re just going to say things and do things and have body language that maybe we don’t enjoy interacting with, but we don’t have to let that impact our well being at all.
If we can step into the role of the watcher and just notice how they behave without personalizing it or becoming offended by it or believing it should be different. So that’s number one. Number two, unexpected patient outcomes. They’re just a negative aspect of every veterinary career. Sometimes the patients just aren’t going to respond the way that we expect them to. Sometimes something’s going to go sideways in surgery.
Sometimes a patient just isn’t going to respond to the treatment that we recommended and the clients decided to pursue, that’s just part of the deal. And when we get really tied up and start to internalize and personalize patients that don’t get better, so outcomes that are not anticipated, we just want to see that we are using patient outcomes as an external validator. As soon as the patient doesn’t respond the way that we expect that it will, we are believing that somehow that is our fault and that if we had been better, that the patient would have gotten better.
And my friends, that’s just never true. Patient outcomes are not something you can control. You may influence patient outcomes a little bit with your recommendations, but ultimately you do not control physiology, which means you cannot control the outcomes. So if the unexpected patient outcomes are really sending you into a tailspin, you just need to neutralize this by reminding yourself that you don’t control patient outcomes because you don’t control their physiology.
And more so remind yourself that this is the practice of veterinary medicine. And so by definition, there is a component of this that is always going to be unknown. It’s when you set an internal expectation that your patients are always going to get better and you’re evaluating your worth and value and success in this field through that expectation that you’re really going to start to diminish your own wellbeing.
So a negative aspect are going to be cases that sometimes just don’t turn out the way that we want them to. That’s just part of the deal that we signed up for. That’s just part of what vet med is. If you personalize it, if you become hyper responsible for it, that’s going to really destroy your well being. Number three, unanticipated schedule changes. Alright friends, be honest. How many of you are getting frustrated when all of a sudden something gets added to your schedule or somebody is a no show or all of a sudden you are double booked?
These things oftentimes many of us feel frustrated, but the question has to become why? What are we believing about the schedule and the change of the schedule and how that’s going to impact us personally? There’s something that we’re believing, so we want to take a look at that and notice the only way to not have a negative experience of this is to somehow make the schedule, excuse me, to somehow make the schedule be unchanging.
So the only way to not experience negativity around unanticipated schedule changes is for the clients to show up on time, to show up for their scheduled appointments, to make sure reception never double books anybody, make sure nobody ever walks in. Notice how much of this is based in control. And so the need to control the schedule is simply anchored in a belief that if we can control what’s happening, if we know in advance what’s going to happen, that we will then have better outcomes, that we will then assure that clients are happy, that we will then get out of work on time, we will then get our lunch.
And my friends, just notice we are drawing this cause and effect around things that actually are not direct and solitary cause and effect situations. The truth is that schedule changes are just part of the deal when it comes to veterinary medicine. They can be negative, they can be positive, or they can be neutral. Let’s let them be neutral. The schedule is what the schedule is at any moment in time.
It is what it is. What it is at 08:00 a.m. may be very different than what it is at 10:00 a.m. it is still the schedule. That is the schedule. So we always have the opportunity to make our own adjustments. If there are things that we need to move around, we can make those requests. But at the end of the day, you can only do what you can do.
You can only see the patients that you can see. And there are going to be some days in our profession that are busier, that are crazier. You have probably noticed around the time of a full moon that things get a little squirrely. This is not a coincidence, by the way. This is true across the entire world, that the seasons, as seasons change and as the lunar cycle shifts, that we do see these things change.
And if we just know that a unpredictable schedule is part of the deal, then we can start to let that be normal. Rather than being frustrated every single time it changes, the schedule is going to change. We can accept that. And in our acceptance of it, we can let it be neutral. We can also then set some boundaries around how long after we’re going to stay, or how, when it is that we’re going to ask people to reschedule their appointments if they’re late or what’s going to happen if they no show.
So many different times. So there are ways that we can help to try to mitigate this, to try to kind of promote a particular type of behavior within our clients. But most of our veterinary practices aren’t willing to do that. We’re not willing to set these boundaries that says, okay, if you are more than five minutes late, you must reschedule. If you no show three times, then you’re going to be required to pay a deposit in advance before you can actually schedule appointment.
Many of us are so afraid of how the client is going to react in that, that we just keep letting them get away with this stuff over and over and over again. And my friends, we teach people how to treat us. So if we want the clients to interact with us in a different way when it comes to their scheduled appointments, we have to set those parameters, and then we have to follow through on our own side of it.
In the meantime, in the interim, we have to just keep in mind that part of this practice of veterinary medicine means there are going to be unexpected things that pop onto our schedule and off of our schedule throughout any given day. Whether or not we get frustrated every time the schedule change, that part’s optional. That frustration comes from believing that the schedule should never change once it’s in place.
And we just have to laugh a little bit when we look at that, because that’s just not the practice of medicine, veterinary or otherwise. The schedule is going to be somewhat of a fluid situation. So if we can just accept that the way the schedule looks in the morning may not be the way the day shakes out, and that it’s all fine. No matter what. We can only see the people in front of us, and that’s always true.
No matter how they look on the schedule. You can only see the client and patient in front of you at any given time. Then you can approach that change with more ease and with less fear over the changes themselves. We neutralize it by just realizing that scheduling change, the changing schedules are just part of this job. And by not allowing ourselves to be frustrated when that change occurs.
Number four, out of stock items. I know this has happened to you. You go to get something off the shelf, you go to grab a particular medication, and it’s out, it’s empty, it’s gone. How do you feel? Are you getting overly frustrated? Are you getting angry at somebody? Are you blaming somebody because it hasn’t been stalked, it isn’t there. Do you then kind of obsess about that? Getting more and more angry throughout the day, more and more frustrated?
Do you start to tie together the multiple incidences of this happening over time, and then start to really personalize that and blame a particular individual or a particular department for this happening? Just notice that all of that energy goes to the arguing with reality. Again, the reality is that the item that you want isn’t available right now, in this moment. Now we can get curious, we can learn from this.
We can try to understand how that happened. Was there something crazy that happened? And you managed to sell out ten bottles of an ear medication in a two day period where typically ten bottles will last you for three weeks? That can happen, and that does happen. Is it a situation where maybe something’s been ordered for weeks, but it’s on back order and it’s just not in stock yet and available for purchase?
That also happens, especially in this day, where we have supply chain issues. So we just want to notice that there is always a reason why something might not be where you want it to be, but then focusing on the fact that it’s missing in that moment. Actually doesn’t do you any good at all. Obsessing about how it should be there and being angry that it isn’t does nothing to help the client and patient in front of you who needed that item.
You need to learn how to drop that quickly and shift into, okay, what am I going to do next? What are the other options? What are the other opportunities here? How can I help this patient and this client in front of me with what they need? Don’t just give up and give in to that anchor and frustration that is absolutely going to ruin your day. Instead, let’s neutralize it by noticing.
Yep, sometimes things are going to be out of stock. And when they’re out of stock, at some point we can take a moment and try to understand why that happened. But in the moment when you have a client and patient waiting on you, that’s not the time to go searching into how this happened. It’s not the time to spend any time getting angry or frustrated about it because you’re going to take that anger and frustration right back into your client.
And even worse, you might go in there and you might say, well, we’re out of stock. And that’s because so and so did so and so and start to complain and blame or blame your organization or blame your office manager or whatever. And that’s just going to deteriorate the trust between the client and the entire practice. So that might make you feel a little bit better because you’re deflecting that responsibility because you’re afraid the client’s going to be mad that they don’t.
That you don’t have what they need. But ultimately, you’re not helping that client patient relationship, client veterinary patient relationship at all. When you’re kind of throwing somebody under the bus and bus in your organization. Instead shift into solutions mode that’s not available. Okay. What can you do instead of much more important to look at it from that perspective? So that negative aspect number four is a reminder, is just out of stock items.
It’s going to happen. It’s part of what we do here. It just is part of the nature of any business that sometimes things are out of stock when we need them. Okay, notice it’s out of stock. Then. Do not let your brain take you to a situation where you are spending all this time being frustrated and angry about it. Because being frustrated and angry about it isn’t going to bring it magically back into stock.
But. But it absolutely is going to impact the rest of your day the way you interact with your coworkers and the way that you interact with your clients as well. And negative aspect number five, broken equipment. Once again, how frustrating is it to be like in the middle of a dental and the dental machine stops working? For example, you can be in the middle taking radiographs and the computer goes down.
There’s a million things that can happen. But the thing of it is, at the end of the day, shit breaks. It just happens. It’s all just equipment. So, yes. Does it tend to break at an opportune moment when it really would have zero impact? No. Most of the time it’s going to break when you’re using it. So what are we going to do about it? Are we going to get mad?
Are we going to be frustrated? Are we going to go out on some rant about how we should have done x, y or z to prevent this thing breaking at this moment in time? It’s exactly what a lot of us do. And again, we’re trying to be perfect. We’re believing that if we’d done everything perfectly, if we had been ahead of this, that this piece of equipment wouldn’t broke, wouldn’t have broken.
But the truth is, we can’t guarantee that, can we? So this negative aspect of broken equipment, again, just part of the deal. Whenever you work with any kind of equipment in any business, sometimes pieces of equipment go down. And as I say that out loud, I just kind of laugh to myself because I think about how many times have I gone through McDonald’s and their shake machine is broken?
I mean, it seems like all the time they’re a shake machine. And I don’t go to McDonald’s very often at all these days. But I just think, you think back over the years, it seems like that thing’s broken more than it’s working. So, yeah, it happens. Like pieces of equipment that are part of what we use every day to practice veterinary medicine, those pieces of equipment are going to break.
Sometimes whether or not that ruins your day is optional. If we can just step back into it and be like, that’s broken and let it be neutral, then we can be again in that mindset of, what are we going to do now? How are we going to shift from here? Because there’s always going to be another direction you can go now. There are going to be situations where you’re going to have to abort whatever you’re doing because you simply don’t have the equipment to complete it.
So if your dental machine breaks and you need your dental drill to do an extraction, odds are you’re not going to be able to do that extraction if you really needed the dental drill to do it. Most of us get all freaked out by that. We get all. We jump all the way to the port part where the client is mad because we weren’t able to complete the dental.
And being in fear of that is really going to pull us down into a negative spiral, not going to be useful at all. So let’s neutralize it. We’re doing a dental. We anticipated that the dental machine would work for the entire procedure. And in this moment, in this situation, that was not true. It worked for a while and then it broke. And we need that piece of equipment to be able to do what needs to happen next.
Without that piece of equipment, we are unable to do what happens next. So what do we do? We abort the procedure. We stop. We wake the animal up. We call the owner, we say, bummer. Here’s what happened today. So we’re being honest, right? Let’s be honest. A piece of equipment broke in the middle of a procedure for reasons that we don’t quite understand, but it was not in the best interest of your pet for us to try to continue on without this piece of equipment because it’s vitally important for what we’re doing.
So we’re going to need to finish this at a later date. And then it’s up to you. Do you want to compensate them in some way? Do you want to discount the procedure the next time? This, maybe you don’t charge them for the anesthesia next time. There’s a million ways that you can approach this in a way that ends up being a win win, but it is a win.
This is really, really important. It is a win. When you decide to abort midstream, a procedure that you don’t have the proper equipment to continue doing because that equipment broke, that’s in the best interest of the pet. So the client might be frustrated. It might be an inconvenience. Yes, both of those things are true. And we can just say, yeah, I know this is frustrating, and I know this is an inconvenience, and I’m sorry about that.
This piece of equipment broke. As soon as we get it fixed, we’re going to get fluffy rescheduled and we’ll get you back in. And here’s what we’re going to do to try to help ease some of this. Since this wasn’t what any of us anticipated, some clients are going to fly off the handle. We’re right back now to negative aspect number one. Some clients are going to get angry.
They’re going to yell. They’re going to say they’re never coming back. Let them, my friends, if that is their reaction, let them. Don’t personalize it. Don’t take on the responsibility for the way that they’re behaving. Own your part of it. Your part was always in the best interest of the animal. Your pet needs this procedure. We’re in the middle of doing the procedure. The piece of equipment broke.
You can’t control that. It is what it is. And so now you made the next best decision for the patient. You aborted the procedure. You contacted the clients. You let them know what happened. You have a plan for what you’re going to do next. As soon as this is fixed, we’re going to get you called, we’re going to get you back in, and we’re going to finish this up for fluffy.
Or, you know, maybe it’s going to be a long term thing. We’re going to refer you over to someplace else. We’re going to recommend that you go to this practice, or we’re going to borrow a piece of equipment, whatever it might be. You’re going to be able to come up with a solution. You’re going to communicate that solution that is not guaranteed that the client’s going to go for your solution.
But if they don’t, that’s not on you. You still did the best that you could. The client behavior is never going to be something you can control. You can’t do it right enough to guarantee that clients are always happy. So stop trying. It’s exhausting. Instead, just accept that sometimes, in a nutshell, shit’s going to happen. Sometimes clients are going to behave badly. Sometimes patients, they’re not going to turn out the way that you expected them to.
As far as their cases go, their outcomes are going to be unexpected. Sometimes your schedule is going to be all messed up, very different at the end of the day than what you thought it was going to be at the beginning of the day. Sometimes items are going to be out of stock. Sometimes equipment is going to be broken. My friends, all of those things are just neutral circumstances until you tell a story about them.
So what story are you going to tell yourself the next time you’re faced with one of those aspects? Are you going to tell yourself a story that’s defeating, that creates anxiety, that creates dread, that creates frustration, that creates anger, that fosters resentment? Or are you just going to let them be neutral? Are you going to be the watcher of the client behavior? Are you going to also be the watcher of the patient outcome and be curious as you look at how that patient responded and use that to inform future decisions?
Are you going to notice the schedule changes but then keep doing what you do every single day anyway? You help the client and patient in front of you because that’s all you ever could do in the first place? Are you going to notice those out of stock items and shift quickly into solution mode rather than dropping into frustration mode and arguing with what already is? And when you’ve got that piece of broken equipment, what are you going to do to help the patient in front of you?
What’s in the best interest of that patient? And are you going to courageously make those decisions and communicate those decisions to a client and let them react however they’re going to react? All of this is neutral, my friends, until you tell a negative story about it. So all these aspects of veterinary medicine, they just come with the job. We can stop trying to control them, and when we do stop trying to control them, we actually can start to enjoy our lives so much more because it is the pressure to control all of these things that starts to stretch the scope of what veterinary medicine is all about to something well beyond what we are actually capable of controlling.
When we stay in our lane and do what we can do and let the things that we can’t control just be uncontrollable and just deal with what’s in front of us, because that’s the only thing that’s real, then we have the opportunity to stay in our peace, to stay in our joy, to stay in our well being, and to stop living at the effect of all of these circumstances which we were never going to be able to control in the first place.
All right, my friends, I hope that this has been a helpful reminder for you, something that you’ll reflect on as you go through the week. If this episode has been helpful, I do hope that you will share it with a friend. And if you want to learn more about these types of things, remember the place to go is Vetlife Academy. Jump over to joyfuldvm.com vetlifeacademy to jump on that priority list and I will let you know the next time that the doors open.
I hope you have a great rest of the week and I’ll see you soon. Bye for now.