In this episode, Dr. Cari Wise addresses the common scenario where acquaintances ask veterinary professionals for pet advice outside of a clinical setting, often leading to feelings of annoyance and frustration.
She emphasizes the importance of setting and maintaining boundaries, and explains that these requests often stem from trust and concern for pets, reflecting a level of comfort with the veterinary professional that may not exist with their regular providers.
She encourages veterinary professionals to reconsider their initial reactions and understand the relational dynamics at play. She also discusses the broader implications of client interactions, noting that many veterinary professionals feel overwhelmed by client behavior, which can lead to burnout and stress.
She critiques the tendency to link personal wellbeing to client behavior and advocates for veterinary professionals to take ownership of their wellbeing. She highlights the importance of effective communication in veterinary practice, suggesting that many negative client experiences result from clients feeling unheard or judged. By engaging in high-value conversations and approaching interactions with compassion, veterinary professionals can build trust and improve client relationships.
Key takeaways:
- Setting Boundaries: Veterinary professionals often face inquiries about pets from friends, family, or acquaintances outside of work. Dr. Cari Wise emphasizes the importance of setting and maintaining clear boundaries to avoid compromising their personal time and well being.
- Understanding Motivations: People who seek veterinary advice outside of a professional context often do so out of trust and concern for their pets. This trust may stem from discomfort or negative experiences with their regular veterinary providers.
- Emotional Drivers: Every action, including seeking advice, is driven by emotion. Recognizing this can help veterinary professionals understand the relational dynamics at play and respond with empathy rather than annoyance.
- Communication is Key: Ineffective communication can lead to negative client experiences. Engaging in “high-value conversations” that address concerns and clarify misunderstandings can build trust and improve relationships.
- Personal Responsibility: Veterinary Professionals should take ownership of their wellbeing rather than attributing their stress to client behavior. This mindset shift can help reduce burnout and improve mental health.
- Compassion and Curiosity: Approaching difficult discussions with compassion and curiosity can help clients feel heard and understood, enhancing the overall experience for both parties.
- Agency in Shaping Experiences: Veterinary professionals have the power to choose how they feel and react to client interactions. By focusing on their own wellbeing and letting go of the need to control external factors, they can navigate their profession more effectively.
- Impact of Client Behavior: Linking personal wellbeing to client behavior can be harmful. Wise critiques this tendency and encourages veterinary professionals to focus on their own responses and beliefs.
- Burnout and Stress: High rates of burnout and suicide in the veterinary profession are often connected to externalizing responsibility. Wise advocates for a shift in perspective to improve mental health outcomes.
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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. Before we jump into today’s episode, I feel like I need to share a disclaimer that there’s likely to be a bit of a Cari rant as we get into the content today.
So if you are ready to hear a little bit of my very strong opinion about the topic of clients, then you’re going to want to stick around for this episode. The title of this episode is the real reason people ask you about their pets outside of the hospital. So we’re going to spend a few minutes talking about this situation that happens to all of us. So first off, what people am I talking about?
I’m talking about people that you know as friends, family, or acquaintances. In most cases, people that you meet in a social setting or interact with in a social or non work setting outside of your hospital. When those people find out that you are a veterinary professional, it’s not uncommon for them to ask you questions about their pets. Many of us go instantly into a bit of a defensive or annoyed mode when this happens.
Now, there are opportunities for us to set boundaries if we really don’t want to interact with people in regard to their pets outside of the hospital. And that is a completely an individual preference. If you want to set that boundary, there’s ways to do that that communicate that you are thankful or grateful, or even that you appreciate that they trust you with their pet related medical questions, but that you don’t answer questions outside of the hospital.
And so if they would like to have that conversation, they should give you a call when you’re at work. So that’s how you would set that boundary. It could be a sentence as simple as that. But here’s the deal. If they then continue to ask questions of you, what do you do? Do you answer those questions? Because if you answer those questions, once you have set that boundary, which is you don’t answer pet related medical questions outside of the hospital.
So if they have a question they need to ask you at the hospital, if you then go ahead outside of the hospital and answer their questions, the boundary has been violated not because they asked the question, but because you answered it. See, a boundary is all about making a request for behavior change in somebody and then the consequence of what you will do if they continue in that behavior.
So if the request is don’t ask me pet related medical questions outside of the hospital, because I won’t respond, the I won’t respond part is the consequence, and then they ask anyway, because the humans are going to be the humans, and you’re never going to control what they actually do. If you then respond to their pet related medical question, then you have violated your boundary, because your boundary included what you would do if they asked, which was that you wouldn’t reply or you wouldn’t respond.
That you would, though, if they ask you inside of the hospital. Now, I digress a little bit, because the whole point of this topic today is the reason why they ask you these questions in the first place. So why is it that people are coming to you with their pet related medical questions outside of the hospital? A lot of the times, the people who are coming to you with those questions aren’t actually your clients.
Maybe they don’t even live in your area. Maybe they’re friends and family that live in different locations and have different veterinarians that they go to. So why are they asking you questions? Well, we have to recognize that every action is driven by emotion. And so if somebody’s asking you specifically a question about their pet, then that is going to be driven usually from some sort of emotion of trust, and that coupled with concern.
So they trust you and they’re concerned about their pet, so they feel comfortable with you, which is why they are asking you. This is important for us to realize, because when we jump right to annoyance over this or we’ve jumped to frustration or feeling offended, then we miss the entire relationship behind those questions. Now, what I’m not saying is that you’re obligated to answer, but I think that it’s important for us to consider the motives and the drivers behind the start of these interactions, because in veterinary medicine, we tend to just jump right to being offended or annoyed or frustrated, believing that they shouldn’t ask us those questions in the first place.
And this is where we really, as a collective, are getting a big component of this human interaction piece wrong. And I’m going to talk a little bit more about that in a minute. So the real reason that the people ask you about their pets outside of the hospital is because they feel comfortable with you. They know you, maybe in some other capacity, even if it’s like you’re so and so’s daughter, you’re so and so’s son.
And they trust that person somehow. They feel this connection to you. And because they do also feel a strong connection to their pets. And they’re worried about them. They have a concern. They have a question. It’s normal for us to go to people that we feel a connection with or a person that we trust. We want to recognize this, that they’re coming to you with those questions. Because they feel comfortable with you and they trust you.
So then what does that say about their regular veterinary providers? For many clients, for many people, what that’s telling us is that they don’t feel comfortable with their regular veterinarian. That they don’t trust what that veterinary hospital provides or what they say. And many of these people have a prior bad experience. Now, if we were to pick apart those situations. Where a client or an acquaintance. I think it’s probably better to talk about this in the lens of an acquaintance.
An acquaintance had a bad veterinary experience, do we believe them? With what they say? They’ve probably got a big story about whatever happened. And that story in most cases, is going to be very much slanted. Toward the veterinary professionals, the veterinary hospital, the veterinary team, doing something wrong or being bad or mean or money grubbing or insert whatever little phrase you want to into that. So there’s going to be some very strong negative opinion.
That those people have about their veterinary experience. The question becomes, do we believe them? It’s optional to believe them or not. You can also just let it be neutral. Because their story is neutral. Until you decide to tell your own story about it. So have your own interpretation of their story. But I think it’s easy to consider that if we were to grab those medical records. And dig through everything that happened.
And talk to all the people. That what actually happened and what the client perceived happened are going to be two different things. I think most of us can agree that veterinary professionals were not in it for the money. And we’re not in it to hurt animals. That our motives are actually good. That we want to do what we can to help the clients and to treat the pets.
And it’s a bummer when those patients don’t respond to treatment. And it’s frustrating when clients seem to not hear what we’re saying. Or they become defensive and angry. And they start the blame game toward us because of how that patient’s case turned out. That’s all just part of the human experience. And that is also all just part of what happens in veterinary medicine. Where we really get this wrong is when we have these challenging or uncomfortable situations with clients, and then we don’t communicate back so many times a client that has a really bad experience isn’t going to just go aWol.
They are likely going to make a phone call back to the clinic. Maybe they’re going to write an online review, even if it’s not a positive one. Maybe they’re going to send an email. Maybe they’re going to say something in a future exam. But if we just avoid those conversations when those opportunities come up, then we don’t do anything to help the communication and the relationship with the client itself.
Now, our avoidance of uncomfortable conversations is pretty darn normal in the entire human race. We talk about this avoidance of confrontation. So why do we do that? We avoid confrontation because having these conversations that we are deeming and labeling as confrontational, those conversations feel uncomfortable. Now, I call these conversations high value conversations because I think there’s a lot of value to be had in these conversations, not only from the perspective of the information that you’re going to share and receive back and forth, but also from what it requires of you from a personal growth perspective to have those conversations in the first place.
You’re going to be nervous. You’re going to feel scared. That’s okay. Have the conversation anyway, because the conversation needs to be had. But when we are in fear mode, when we retract, when we are unwilling to talk to a client about their concerns, we’re not doing anything to dissipate those concerns. We are just letting the clients then continue to build their own story about our motives and about our skills and about what actually happened in that exam.
Now, the point isn’t to make one person right and one person wrong. There’s no reason to do that. Because the truth of it is, this is veterinary medicine, and the truth is always going to be somewhere in the middle. But the reason that clients tend to go to people outside of their typical, their normal, their regular veterinary care team for, for advice and for even for treatment isn’t because that we did a bad job with their pet.
Most of the time. It’s because they feel like we didn’t hear them. They feel like we didn’t see them. Now, I’m not saying it is your responsibility to take on the emotional experience of a client, so please don’t misunderstand. I’m absolutely not saying that at all. What I am saying is that if you get stuck in your own fear, in your own discomfort, and you start to feel very offended by clients, and then you retreat as your kind of protective measure.
You refuse to talk to them. You just clam up and you just tell them to go somewhere else, or you just avoid them altogether. You make sure they get scheduled with somebody else. You don’t return their phone calls. You delegate all the conversations that are uncomfortable, that you are uncomfortable having. I should put, if you do that, then that is not doing anything to actually protect you. It’s actually just reinforcing this idea that you must be protected from the clients.
And in most cases, if we’re talking about just conversations that are uncomfortable, I don’t really think that’s something that we need to be protected from. I’d actually take it a step further and encourage you to have those conversations that feel really uncomfortable. Because you’ll start to realize that once you start to talk to the clients, that this big thing that’s so uncomfortable in the middle is just usually a misunderstanding or a lack of communication.
Something they just don’t understand because they don’t see this stuff every day that we do like we do. And once we take the time to have those conversations, most clients actually settle down. It’s when they feel like they don’t have choices. It’s when they feel like they are. The information is being kept from them, which is the way that their brain is going to conclude. It’s what they’re going to conclude about a situation.
If we’re not communicating with them, especially if they’re coming to us with questions or concerns, then a normal conclusion of the human brain is that we’re trying to hide something, and we’re actually not. It’s just that perhaps a case didn’t go the way that we had hoped it would, and we are going to hide from that reality. If we are taking responsibility internally for that outcome. We forget in those situations that patient outcomes are never something that we can control.
All we can do as veterinary professionals is to do a physical exam, ask questions to get a medical history. Then we can make some recommendations about diagnostic testing and treatment. But then ultimately, what is chosen to do is for the client to decide. Once the client decides, then we implement those wishes, whether it’s testing or treatment. And then we all have to stand back and wait to see how the animal responds.
You can’t do it right enough to guarantee that the animal is going to respond a certain way. That’s the problem or the truth, I would say not even the problem. The truth of veterinary medicine. It is the practice of veterinary medicine. And because we are working with animals that have their own individual physiology, which we will never control, then there’s no way we can control the outcomes. If you start believing that the outcomes are your responsibility.
Then it’s going to be a very normal thing for you to retreat. When a case doesn’t turn out the way that you expect it to. If you then add to that a belief that the client is angry because the pet didn’t get better. Then you’re going to take on that responsibility. You’re going to believe that they are angry at you. That’s going to make you feel scared. It’s going to make you feel uncomfortable.
You are then naturally going to avoid them. Because the lower part of your brain is interpreting all of this as a life threatening situation. All of this to say that when you’re on the other side of this. As the one who is receiving these questions from your acquaintances, from family, from friends about their pets that maybe aren’t even your clients. And they’re doing it outside of the veterinary hospital.
There’s opportunity to not jump to being offended. There’s opportunity to just consider, oh, this may be somebody that had a bad veterinary experience. Now, I’m not judging veterinary professionals. That’s not what I’m doing here. But I think it’s important for us to consider. Why do clients do the things that they do? And the reason this is so important. And here comes the rant part of this episode. The reason this is so important.
Is because there is a tendency in veterinary medicine. To label the responsibility of our well being on the clients themselves. So we look at the things that we believe cause our low state of well being in veterinary medicine. So the things that cause a lot of stress. That have contributed to the high degree of burnout that we have. That have contributed to the suicide rate that we have seen.
And the suicide rate is just a data point in time, right? It is. When we look at any rate, it is simply historical data has been collected. And then a conclusion has been drawn about that. That historical data is not a predictor of the future ever. It is a historical data point. But we take that number and that percentage and that experience as a collective. And we want to figure out why the why to that gets the finger pointed at things like our burnout rate, our clients, our schedules, our pay, all these things.
But a lot of the time, we put the burden of that on the client behavior itself. And so then what do we do as a group? A lot of us tend to put these public service announcements out. Like alerting the world that we are this high risk of suicide. And that the clients should be nicer. And what I want you to realize in that is that every time we continue to put out these public service announcements, basically demanding that clients be nice to us, we are reinforcing the idea that they are responsible for our well being.
And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want anybody other than me being responsible for my well being. And the truth of it is, I know that I’m the only one that is responsible for myself. When we put the responsibility for our well being, when we blame the public for things like our suicide rate, where does that leave us? It leaves us at the mercy of the public.
It leaves us at the mercy of all of those things that we can’t control. Because, my friends, I don’t care how hard you try, you are never going to control client behavior. And clients who are cranky, clients who are complaining about money, clients who want to throw a fit because they can’t get a refill because their animal hasn’t been seen for 18 months. These things are not new.
They are not unique to this time in veterinary medicine. This is just part of the deal. It has always been part of the deal, but that we’re now drawing these conclusions that their behavior is causing our poor choices is really a dangerous place to go because it’s making all of our well being contingent on other humans behaving differently. What I want you to see is that you always have choice.
Now, there are lots of opportunities when you end up with those clients that are just really difficult to deal with. There is opportunity to fire those clients so you don’t have to deal with them. And I think there’s a lot of situations that we just keep trying to people please our way out of these situations. But what you’re going to find is that if you keep compromising yourself to try to make these unhappy clients happy, that that’s going to really suck the life out of you because you can’t do it right enough to turn somebody’s attitude around that’s coming in that negative.
You’re also not required to keep them as a client. But many of us are so afraid to fire them because we’re afraid of what they’re going to do, that we keep being at the mercy of them all the time. So one of the things that we can do is to separate ourselves from them instead of continuing to try to manage the situation to keep them happy. How much time do you spend on those clients that make up 90% of your headaches?
Statistics show. Here’s some stats again but statistics show that 10% of your clients make up 90% of your headaches. So what if you just got rid of that 10%? Eventually, when we are more courageous as a group to stand up to these types of situations, then behavior will change, and we can make those changes happen. We can facilitate that. We can encourage that change in behavior from clients through our policies and procedures.
But throwing out there these blanket social media posts that then point fingers at veterinary clients and saying, hey, look, you should be nice to us because this is our suicide rate, this is our burnout rate. Do you know what happens with that? We just continue to prove those things true. The way that your brain works, the reticular activating system is going to take what it sees in your external reality.
It’s going to take the things that you pay attention to, and it’s going to show you more of that. So if we keep throwing out there this proclamation that we are at risk for suicide because we are veterinary professionals, then that is exactly what we are going to continue to produce as a result. Instead, we have to start looking at this and realizing that these historical statistics are tragic, that they are sad, that it is.
These are humans that we have lost. These are souls that we have lost from their choices. And they got to these places of hopelessness, that they made these decisions. And that is tragic, and that is terrible. And we don’t want that for people moving forward. And we also need to realize that every single one of us still continues to have individual choice, that nobody can make that terrible decision other than us.
And if we instead look at ourselves and believe that because we chose this profession, that we are at risk for that. Just think about the way that our interactions are different. Every single day, every single time we bump up against something in veterinary medicine that is hard, that is innately part of this job. Like clients who are sometimes rude to us and make comments about money, and patients that don’t turn out the way that they want to, and accidents, you know, surgical mistakes and all kinds of things that just go with the practice of medicine, instead, we’re going to look at all of these things that are normal components of our field.
And we are going to start to say, that’s the reason why my life is at risk. And I want you to understand that that is not the reason why. The only reason why any of our lives are at risk in this profession is if we believe that they are at risk. If we instead say, nope, my life’s not at risk. Yeah, veterinary medicine comes with all of these things.
As part of the deal. But how I interact with those things, how I respond to those things, now, that’s something I get to decide. And you might be wondering, well, Cari, how does this rant actually tie back into the reason, the real reason, why people ask you about their pets outside of the hospital? And the reason this ties back to that is because when we look at these, quote unquote, bad interactions with clients, and we blame the clients for those bad interactions, the clients are also blaming us, which is fine.
We get to have our opinions, and they get to have theirs, then they’re still seeking care. And so when those people go to people that they trust, so they come to us, like, as our acquaintances, with their pet related medical questions or concerns. What we’re missing here is that all along the way, we had something in common with those people. And what I mean by that is obviously, like, if you’re an acquaintance, you’ve got something in common outside of veterinary medicine.
But I’m talking about the people, veterinary professionals, that they left or that they didn’t ask the questions to. So the regular vet, if they don’t feel comfortable with them, if they have had a bad prior experience with them, then they’re going to avoid going back to them. And a lot of times, the reason they avoid coming back to them is because they feel judged. They feel shamed. Perhaps we have been disrespectful toward them.
We have judged their choices and forgetting that whatever they decide wasn’t ours. Right. That was part of their veterinary care cycle. The decisions were always theirs to make. It was never our place to judge the decisions that they make. But if they feel like we judge their decisions, if they believe that we blame them for the outcomes, then they’re likely to feel uncomfortable coming back to us. And they are going to ask other people, people who they trust, people who they are acquainted with in the veterinary field, follow up questions about their pet.
And this is sad, because what we’ve missed in that situation, that what I’m going to call that challenging situation with a client when we are their actual provider, is that we’ve missed the thing that we have in common, which is that we both care about their pet. And what’s gotten in the way is not our care for their pet. So, not that I care about their pet, and not that they care about their pet.
What’s gotten in the way is the ego. It’s believing that they should follow our advice because we’re the medical professionals. It’s believing that if they had followed our advice, that the pet would have gotten better. And when that pet doesn’t get better or when they don’t do the things that we say, then we judge them. And they pick up on that. So why do we judge them? We judge them because we’re still very tied to the outcomes.
For our own sense of personal wealth or worth, we’re putting our self worth at the mercy of the patient outcomes. So do you see how this gets all tangled up in a hurry? And why it’s very easy to conclude that vet med can suck the life out of you? Because if we are blaming the clients for the way that they treat us, and then we are also blaming ourselves for the outcome.
But because we don’t want to blame ourselves, we turn again and blame the clients for the outcomes of the patients were missing that. None of that, those things, the client behavior or the patient outcome, had any ability to impact us emotionally at all. The only way that ever impacts us emotionally is if we tell ourselves a story that creates frustration or hopelessness or self doubt, self judgment, shame, those kinds of things.
Guilt. And when we continue to believe that if the client had followed our advice or if the client had been nice, then we would have had a different outcome. And that’s just never true. What is always true is that clients and veterinary professionals alike are just humans in a human experience that every single day, all of us bump up again against unexpected things. We bump up against disappointing situations.
We bump up against things that cause fear or stress. And when we then interact with each other from those places of fear or stress or anxiety or frustration, our behaviors toward each other are not going to be positive and supportive. We see this all the time in a veterinary exam. When you have a client who is feeling stressed, who is feeling afraid, who is feeling worried about their pets, and we know they don’t have to tell us.
We know that any client that comes in the room is likely to feel a combination of those emotions. They’re feeling a little stressed and a little bit worried because they don’t know how much it’s going to cost, and they don’t know what’s wrong with their pet. They’re feeling concerned because they do love their pet and they want it to be okay. And many, many, many of those clients are coming into the room also feeling fear of the way that we as the veterinary professionals are going to interact with them.
They are afraid of our judgment. They are afraid of our wrath, of us disapproving of their choices. And that’s a very sad, sad reality. But it’s a very true reality. And if we can just consider that those clients that come in may be terrified of the entire situation, then we don’t have to get all caught up in getting offended by whatever decisions they make or the way that they communicate with us.
Instead, we can just have that compassion. We can just be curious. We can just remember why we’re there in the first place, which is to help them wherever they’re at and to help their pet. And the only way that we can help either one of them is by giving them options. But then from there, they get to decide. If they say no to everything that we recommend, does that mean that we didn’t help?
Are you making that mean that you wasted your time? Are you believing that they don’t care about their animal? All of those things would be conclusions that you could draw, but they’re all just opinion. None of those are fact. So what do you want to believe? What’s always available for you to believe is that you did the best that you could with the information and resources you had.
So the information is whatever information that you gained through your physical exam, through the history that you took and the resources available to you, that’s going to be on the client, right? So whatever they decided to spend their money on to help gather information about their pet, and if they decided to spend no money, that’s not on you. What happens next with that pet is not on you.
But many of us take it personally because we are still believing that if the client would have done the tests and done the treatments, that the patient would have gotten better. But, my friends, you can’t predict the future. You don’t know that either. And the more that you hang on to those outcomes as a way to measure your value in this career, the more you will suffer, the more you will feel frustrated, the more you will feel defeated.
And as we continue that over a period of time, start trying to use those external variables as these measures of our success. And those external variables keep being out of our control because they have always been out of our control, then the more we turn to self judgment and this really dangerous belief that if we were better, that those patients would have gotten better, those clients would have been happy.
You’re never going to control any of that. So the next time a person comes to you and asks you questions about their pets, I want to offer you the opportunity to just be compassionate. Now, I’m not saying that you have to answer them, but don’t jump right to being offended. Instead, just consider, hey, this is a person that does not feel comfortable asking these questions of their regular veterinary professionals.
So how can I help them today? Or how can I help point them in the right direction? That doesn’t mean, like I said, that doesn’t mean that you have to answer their questions. Especially if you have your own boundary set about who you will and won’t answer questions for and when you will and won’t do that, but that they ask you the question can’t ruin your day. What ruins our days in these situations is if we act out of integrity with what we want to do in those situations.
And I think every time that this happens for me, it’s getting easier and easier when I keep putting myself into the shoes of the client and consider that what I know about action, which is every action. So what is an action? An action is something as simple as asking a question of somebody. An action is body language, it’s verbal tone, all those things. Every single action that we take as humans is driven by emotion.
And if I’m just curious and wondering why are they asking me about this, then I can have more compassion for the emotional state that they’re in. When I have that compassion for the emotional state that they’re in, a couple of things happen for me. Number one, I’m reminded how much that our clients actually care about their pets, a fact that we tend to completely forget about when we’re too busy being offended by their behavior.
And then number two, it’s a reminder for me to slow down to make sure that my clients have their questions answered, even if that means that I’m going to need to get back to them with more information, or we’re going to need to set up another appointment so I have time to talk to them. Because taking that time to educate the clients to get their questions answered goes a really long way in building that trusting relationship.
And when it comes to things like board complaints and negative reviews, what really ignites those isn’t the patient outcome. It’s the lack of the veterinary professional to connect with the client to explain what’s going on, to help them to understand what has happened with their pet and what is happening with their pet instead. If we are so busy or we are so nervous and stressed out about talking to people that we’re very short in our interactions, we don’t provide them with information, we don’t answer their questions when they’re asked.
We don’t return their phone calls. We don’t give them the information that they need to feel comfortable with the decisions that they’re making. If we strong arm our recommendations, we shame them into making the decisions that we think that they should make, and then things don’t turn out right, then what happens is that because we have planted seeds of doubt all along the way, that it boils over, bubbles over when the patient doesn’t respond the way that we hoped it would and the client takes an action like a board complaint or a negative review.
On the more comfortable side of that, if you will, is the client goes to somebody else to ask those questions. So having compassion for those people and coming back to the thing that we all have in common, which is that we all care about the pet, I think that is the most important thing. And if you avoid those uncomfortable conversations, I encourage you to dive in and start having them.
I call those high value conversations. And actually, in Vetlife Academy, I teach how to have a high value conversation. So how to plan in advance and everything so that you can start becoming more familiar with feeling uncomfortable. It’s required so that you realize that these uncomfortable conversations aren’t going to kill you. But if you think that it’s going to be possible to get through a career in veterinary medicine without having uncomfortable conversations, my big opinion on that is that that’s an unrealistic expectation because there are uncomfortable conversations that are going to be had as part of this practice that we do.
We aren’t fortune tellers. We can’t guarantee outcomes. And it’s not up to us to try to force our clients to make all the decisions that we want them to make. Because whenever we’re trying to force people to do anything and shaming them for not doing it, that’s not about the well being of the pet, which is the story we’re going to tell. That’s about our ego. That’s about us trying to control the situation so we get the outcome that we want, forgetting that the decisions about the care of those animals was never our decision to make in the first place.
So, my friends, if this episode has resonated with you, I do hope that you’ll share it with a friend. And if you’re curious about some of the skills and the things that I talked about here in this episode, I definitely invite you to check out Vetlife Academy because we dig into this stuff. This is the stuff that we really teach inside of Vetlife Academy, that we practice inside of Vetlife Academy.
This all comes into this idea of leveraging the space, you deciding for you, what you’re going to believe and how you’re going to feel and what you’re going to do in any situation. And when we learn how to do that, then making those decisions that take us out of this profession, or even worse, out of this lifetime, we understand where those decisions come from, and it empowers us to make different decisions for ourselves.
Because no matter what the statistics say, no matter what has happened in the past, the truth is that you get to decide for you 100% of the time, and that your well being is actually never dependent on these external variables that you’ll never control. If you can release the pressure and the responsibility for the things outside of you, taking care of you, and instead you embrace the idea that you can actually control all of this for yourself, then this job and this life get a whole lot easier.
All right, my friends, that’s going to wrap it up for this time. I’ll see you soon. Bye for now.