In this episode, Dr. Cari Wise reflects on her previous belief that emotions signify weakness, particularly in a profession that prioritizes logic and scientific reasoning. She recognizes that many veterinary professionals share this perspective, often placing greater importance on data and statistics than on emotional awareness. However, she stresses that emotions are a fundamental aspect of the human experience and are essential for overall happiness and wellbeing.
The podcast addresses the prevalent emotional challenges faced by veterinary professionals, especially those dealing with burnout, stress, and anxiety.
Dr. Wise emphasizes that emotions are not generated by external situations but are instead shaped by one’s thoughts about those situations. She encourages listeners to consider that their emotional responses are influenced by their beliefs and perspectives.
The podcast underscores that while negative emotions are a natural part of life, individuals must learn to manage their emotional states intentionally. Dr. Wise encourages listeners to examine their beliefs about their circumstances and actively choose perspectives that foster emotional wellbeing. By doing so, they can cultivate a more positive emotional state, which subsequently influences their behaviors and interactions with others.
Key takeaways include:
- Veterinary professionals often prioritize logic over emotions, but both are vital for overall wellbeing.
- Emotions arise from personal thoughts and beliefs, not external circumstances.
- Job changes may offer temporary relief, but unresolved thought patterns can lead to recurring negative emotions.
- Managing emotions is essential for a positive mindset and better relationships.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is auto-generated and may contain typos.
Hi there, I’m Dr. Cari Wise, veterinarian, certified life coach and certified quantum human design specialist. If you’re a veterinary professional looking to up level your life and your career, or maybe looking to go in an entirely new direction, then what I talk about here on the Joyful DVM podcast is absolutely for you. Let’s get started. Hello my friends. Welcome back to the Joyful DVM podcast. It is so good to be back after a multiple week hiatus.
That was completely unexpected. I’m sure many of you out there have been going through what we’ve been going through in my household, which is this really nasty respiratory virus that makes it impossible to talk without coughing and oftentimes without any voice at all. So completely unexpected to take. Take a few weeks off here right at the end of the year, especially when we have so many things to talk about as we wrap up 2024.
But I’m so glad to be back and I’m going to finish this year strong with a three part episode on the Keys to Happiness in Vet Med. So hang on for the ride for the next few weeks here because what I’m going to be sharing here on the podcast is going to make all the difference in the world in your veterinary career, not only next year year, but every year after and in your whole entire life.
Today’s episode is the Keys to Happiness in Vet Med Part one. Own your emotion, my friends. Our emotion is everything. Now admitting that is quite funny to me at this point in my life because for years I absolutely believed that emotion was weakness. That if we show too much emotion that we weren’t being professional, that if we let the emotion get into in the way of our decision making, that we were being foolish and that in general being too emotive was just a weakness.
It was foolish, it was a waste of time. I was a very logical person, very much developed in my left sided brain, which many of you are as well as veterinary professionals. We like our science, we like our logic, we like our statistics. So give us some data and let us make decisions based on that. That seems like the most responsible way to live and that is what our culture tends to reinforce, especially at this time in the world.
However, that’s only half the story. There’s the left side and the right side of our brains. We have both the analytical and the emotional aspects and truth be told, emotion is everything. Now with that being said, the emotion also can kind of take off in its own direction and can cloud the truth of what’s happening. And that’s really what I want to share with you today is what the emotion is telling you, and more importantly, how you can create emotion intentionally and why learning how to do that absolutely is your key to happiness, not only in this career, but in your whole entire life.
Now, how many times do you get done at the end of a day and you’re thinking about your day and you’re just like, man, that was a tough day. That was a bad day. That was a sad day. And maybe you have those days like, that was an amazing day. That was awesome. We have all these opinions about what kind of day that we have. And if we think back over any given day, you can recognize how you were feeling emotionally during that day.
Now, if you’re at the point of burnout, if you are heavily stressed and consumed by anxiety, like many of us are, your main emotion that you recognize is probably stress or anxiety itself. You probably feel a lot of pressure all day long. You probably feel a lot of inner turmoil. This kind of anxiety and this angst to just get through it. It’s just you want to be done with the day so that you can then relax.
Maybe as you look at the cases that are scheduled on your appointment book and you see something like vomiting and diarrhea, or you see something like trouble urinating in a cat, maybe as soon as you see those things, you automatically get consumed with fear over what it might be, or a fear of not being able to figure it out. All of these emotions that come up during the day.
It’s very easy to conclude, and many of us do, that it is the job itself that creates these emotional situations. We conclude that it is the interactions with the clients that make us feel angry or make us feel frustrated or offended or insecure. We conclude that it is the outcomes of the cases that make us feel proud or make us feel inadequate, make us feel uncertain or make us feel excited.
And it’s not any of those things. The emotion that we feel in any given situation is never created by the situation itself. It is so important that we understand this, because if we don’t understand that our situations and circumstances do not create our emotional state, then we keep working really hard to try to change our circumstances as a means of feeling better. The more that we try to do this, the harder we work toward controlling the circumstances and creating the circumstances that are perfect.
Then we recognize that even with our efforts and our perfection, that we still don’t feel happy, we don’t feel peaceful. Then we start to conclude two things. Number one, that there’s Something wrong with us individually and number two, that we have gone into the wrong career field. That there is no way for us to be peaceful or joyful as long as we stay in veterinary medicine. Now the good news is that that’s completely false.
That is not how this emotion thing works at all. But you, like me, were not taught anything about the origin of emotion and how emotion plays a role in a veterinary career. That is not part of our curriculum in veterinary school or veterinary technician school. Thankfully for you, that is why we exist over here@joyful.dvm is to explain this part of the human experience and how it relates to a career in veterinary medicine.
Emotion, if we look at it from a scientific perspective, a neuroscientific perspective, emotion is created only by one thing and that is what you’re thinking about. Emotion is never created by circumstances. Now take a second to consider that. What if I’m right about this? What if emotion actually isn’t created by that nasty thing the client said in the room? Or by that case that didn’t turn out the way that you wanted to?
Or by those four no shows on your schedule? Or the five walk ins that happened? Or the person that called off work? Or the nasty thing that your co worker said or did? Or by the change in staffing at your hospital. What if none of those things actually create emotion for you at all? Then what if we don’t have those things to try to control and perfect, Then how can we be happy?
Well the good news is that it’s so much easier than any of that. You don’t need to be perfect, you don’t need to control everything. Those are two very normal human tendencies to try to control things and to try to be perfect. And when I say they are normal human tendencies, that does not mean that they are natural to you as a human. What it means is that it is normal or typical that humans try to do these things.
So everybody’s trying to do it or everybody is doing it. That’s what makes something normal. But that doesn’t mean that it’s natural. We can all be spinning our wheels trying the same thing and it still not be part of our aligned natural state of being. And that’s exactly what trying to control all external things and trying to be perfect fall into. These are normal behaviors, but they are not natural behaviors and so therefore they are not necessary behaviors.
We try to control all the things because we think if we can predict what’s going to happen then there’s less opportunity for us to feel anxious or fearful or angry or stressed out. We believe that if we are perfect, then there are less opportunities for people to be angry with us, for cases not to get turn out the way that we want them to, and for mistakes to happen.
And none of those things are true. You can’t do it right enough to guarantee that every case gets better and every client is happy and there’s never a mistake. You can’t control all the things either. There’s not enough hours in the day for you to control every aspect of everything that you interact with. It’s an unattainable expectation. Both of them are. Perfection is also unattainable. You will never know when you’ve achieved it because you will always find one more thing to improve upon.
Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t try to improve in our lives. Absolutely. Every opportunity that we go through, every struggle, every challenge is an opportunity for us to learn something that we can apply later. But as long as we continue to tie our emotional well being to all of these things that I’ve talked about, we will lose 100% of the time. Instead, what we have to understand is the origin of the emotion itself.
Emotion is created by what we’re thinking about. If you want to get super nerdy about the whole thing, what happens on a very basic level is that when we think about things, there’s this photon storm or this light storm in our brain that then releases neurotransmitters. And then those neurotransmitters create different emotional experiences. And when we change what we focus on, when we change what we’re thinking about or what we believe, then we change the caliber of that photon storm, which then in turn changes the neurotransmitters that get released.
And then we have a different emotional experience. So we get to change our emotional experiences by changing what we focus on, by changing our perspective, by changing what we’re thinking about, by changing what we believe we don’t have to. We don’t change our emotional experience by changing our circumstances. So now why is it then that if we do change our circumstances that we do recognize sometimes we feel better?
Well, the reason that that happens isn’t because of the circumstance change. It’s because you’re thinking about different things in that new circumstance. So for example, if you change jobs as soon as you know you’re leaving a job that you don’t like and you’re heading toward this new job, which you’ve taken because you do believe you are going to like it, or else you wouldn’t have taken it. Then you’re automatically thinking about different things.
You’re thinking about how great it’s going to be to leave this job that you don’t like. And you’re thinking about how wonderful it’s going to be to be in this new job that offers you all these different opportunities. And because you’re thinking about your work in general in a more positive way, you feel better. What you’ve been focusing on shifts because before you have made that kind of change, before you’ve made that decision to leave this job and go to this new job, what led you to make that decision was probably a whole bunch of negative thoughts around the job that you are currently in, whether that be your hours, your pay, your coworkers, the caseload, the staffing, whatever it might be.
And when you were so focused on all of that negativity, you felt terrible, you felt stressed, you felt anxious, you might have felt victimized, frustrated. As soon as you gave yourself something different to focus on, then you started to feel better. Now what happens when you get to the new job? There’s usually a honeymoon phase. Everything’s great for a while, but if you’ve never done the work to clean up and to learn how to control what you’re thinking about, so to control and purposely craft your perspective in any situation, if you haven’t learned how to do that yet, then the new job will eventually end up in the same type of experience for you as the old job was.
Because you are so conditioned at looking for these negative aspects of your job, of your career field, that you will find those things in your new job once the newness wears off. And so this becomes this cycle of job hopping. And it’s how many, many, many of us make it through our veterinary careers every three to five years, maybe more frequently, we leave the job that we’re in to get a new, better in air quotes job, and we keep making this jump.
And so it’s like we stay somewhere until it becomes emotionally intolerable and then we make a change and then we feel better for a while, and then that slowly builds up to another point of emotional intolerance, and then we make another change. You do that enough times, then you might start looking at careers outside of clinical practice, you might start looking for jobs outside of veterinary medicine completely.
And as you start to make those kinds of leaps outside of clinical practice, and then maybe out of the career completely, you’re also drawing conclusions that going into vet med was a bad decision that you’ve tried all These jobs and you’ve never figured out how to be happy here. So therefore, pursuing a career in veterinary medicine was a bad idea. And my friends, that’s just never true. You always made the best decisions that you could with the information and resources you had available at the time.
Your choice to pursue a veterinary medical career initially was absolutely 100% the exact right choice for you. I believe that 100%. There’s no reason and no upside to believing anything different. And just like every other human on this planet, as you go through your life experiences and as you walk in your life journey, you will have the opportunity to learn things about yourself and about the way that the world works and the way other people work.
And it is that journey of learning, of continued exploration, of really starting to understand who you are that provides the opportunity and the gateway to creating expansive well being. But if you keep avoiding that opportunity, if you will that need to understand yourself, to control your own emotion on purpose, to learn how to do that, if you keep avoiding that and you just keep changing your circumstances, then you’re going to keep having the same emotional circumstances or emotional reactions over and over and over and over and over again.
That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. It’s just that you’re human. And a human experience that does not understand that you and you alone have the power to control your emotional well being in any situation. Now that doesn’t mean that there aren’t crappy things that happen in the world and that there aren’t going to be times that we feel frustrated or angry or stressed out. Because of course there will be.
And when we feel those emotions, we should lean into those emotions and allow ourselves to experience them. But then we should also decide how long are we going to stay there. Because the thing about emotion is that it calibrates your entire wellbeing. The way that you’re feeling day in and day out, that is your mood, right? And your mood shifts. It’s what I call your net emotional state.
You’re going to have ups and downs every single day. And if you have more ups than downs, then we usually call that a good day. If you have more downs than ups, then we usually call that a bad day. And then you string all those days together. If you have more bad days than good days, then you’re just kind of in a funk. And when we look at the way that emotion then impacts everything else, not only is emotion created by what we’re thinking about, but that it is our emotional state that drives our behaviors.
And this is key to creating what we want in our lives. It is the way that we are feeling emotionally that calibrates how we interact with other people, the things that we say, the things that we do, the decisions that we make. And if we aren’t in a good emotional state, then we are not going to show up as our best selves. We are not going to have positive interactions with other people.
Now, we may become very good at putting on a mask when we are at work just to get through the day. But I want to tell you one thing. If you are living in a state of constant anxiety and stress and frustration and anger, you are not doing a good job at covering that up when you interact with other people. And I say this from firsthand experience. I remember years ago when I owned my own practice and I was at my extreme, extreme end of burnout before I understood any of this to the detail that I do now.
And I was in an internal emotional war every single day, just doing what I could. I was completely burned out. I was very unhappy, very stressed. And I was getting up and I was going to work. And I thought I was doing a really good job at keeping my shit together. I thought I was doing a really good job at being kind to everybody, at being helpful and being professional.
And with my clients, I was doing a pretty good job, from what I understand. As I got feedback about this later, but with my staff, I wasn’t. And I didn’t even realize it. And it wasn’t until one of my veterinary technicians asked to have a meeting with me, and I am so proud of her to this day that she took it upon herself to do this. Because this is what I would call a high value conversation.
That’s what I teach in Vet Life Academy, are these high value conversations, these conversations that scare the crap out of you but need to be had. And she asked to meet with me and we had this conversation and she just. We were sitting there and she said, you know, she said she was concerned about me, that I kind of seemed to be a little bit all over the place.
And she wondered if maybe I was bipolar. And I was really stunned. Now, I have absolutely no negative beliefs or opinions at all about mental health diagnoses. And so this is not to put any kind of shame or judgment against anybody that does have a true mental health diagnosis like that at all, because these things do exist and there are treatments for them. And the point of me telling you the story is to show you that I was not aware of my extreme ups and downs that I was experiencing.
I was aware of them internally, let me say that I was aware of them internally, but I was not aware that I was then behaving in a way that my team, who I spent the most time with, was experiencing it as well. And it took one brave person to come to me and say, hey, I don’t know if you know this or I’m concerned about you. Do you think this could be going on?
That it was kind of a wake up call for me. It was like, dang, like, I thought I was doing okay. I mean, I knew I was unhappy. I knew I was stressed and anxious. I knew internally I was up and down at the drop of a pin. But I didn’t realize that I wasn’t doing a good job at hiding that from everybody else. And that one person who was brave enough to say that to me helped me to get the help that I needed to get through that time in my life.
And so, yes, for some of us, we are going to get to that point that we are so burned out and we are so emotionally volatile that we need a true mental health professional to help us. Maybe we need medication. And that was the case for me. Like, I absolutely needed something to take the edge off for several years as I learned how to navigate my life. And then eventually I was able to come off of that and have stayed off of that.
And that doesn’t necessarily have to be the goal. That was just my own experience. But if it hadn’t taken somebody brave enough to point out to me just how bad I was, if you will, and I don’t mean that in like a mean way, but just, you know, how not okay I was, maybe that’s a better way to put it, that I wouldn’t have taken that step to get the help because in my mind, I.
I was doing fine. You know, I wasn’t bad enough yet that I needed outside help with this. And I certainly didn’t have any access to what we have now as far as the opportunity for coaching and learning online, because it just didn’t exist back then like it does now. And that part of my story is very much what led me to create Joyful DVM in the first place, because I did get to the point that I was so extremely burned out and there was a lot of shame that I carried about this idea of going to get some mental health help from a professional level, you know, this fear of it getting put in my medical records and all these things.
I’m sure that many of you have struggled with as well. And I can just figure this out myself. I’m a medical professional. Like, I should be able to do this. I should be able to handle this. I’ve handled all these other things in my life. Why can’t I figure this out? Well, it’s because I didn’t have the tools. And you may not have the tools either. And I know I’ve kind of been on a rambling tangent here, but all this comes back to the emotion and how important it is for us to understand our own emotions, for us to recognize when we’re up and when we’re down, and for us to understand that how we feel in any given situation is not created by the situation itself.
It’s created by what we believe about the situation itself. And as we learn how to calibrate that, to choose our perspectives intentionally, to step out of the stories that have us being victims of everything that’s happening, that’s how we raise our emotional well being. That’s how we maintain and protect our peace and our joy. And when we are able to do that, when we stay more often in a state of happiness, of acceptance, of neutrality, of calm, of peace, of joy, when we stay in those areas of emotion, then the way that we behave, the actions that we take, the decisions that we make, the way that we interact with others are more positive.
And those actions and behaviors then create more positive outcomes for us personally in our lives. Everything that we want for our lives, my friends, lives in a higher spectrum of emotion than where we are right now. That’s why we want them. We want to experience things and attain things that already live in this higher energetic field. And we cannot get there from a low net emotional state. You cannot white knuckle your way into happiness.
It doesn’t work that way. And this is such a shame because our culture teaches us that if you just power through that, eventually you’ll have victory. And the only place that that actually works, I think, is in a gym if you’re trying to build muscle. Because yes, you cannot, you know, bench press 100 pounds until you first learned how to bench press 10 pounds and then 15 pounds and 20 pounds.
And that’s going to be a struggle and that’s going to be an effort and it’s going to hurt a little bit. But the more you keep showing up and you keep putting yourself through that, then eventually you will reach that goal. But that is probably the only area of your life. Physical fitness in that way, strength training, I think, is the only area of your life where that is true.
Not in any other area is that true. Not even if you think about weight loss and white knuckling your way into just not eating certain things and not. And exercising more like causing more calories to be burned and fewer calories going in can be a very uncomfortable, miserable experience. And it may, if you’re just like fighting yourself and pray, pressuring yourself to do that, it may create the results initially.
But here’s what I know about this, is that if you create those results from this lower net emotional state, the state of anxiety and frustration and self judgment and self loathing, that you will not be able to maintain those outcomes once you let off the pressure. There’s a much better way to do that. And that’s why if we raise our net emotional state first, if we learn how to create peace and joy no matter what happens at work or at home or in the world, then whatever actions we take from that place create outcomes that become sustainable outcomes.
That’s the way that you create the things that you want and the dreams for your future. You have to control the emotion first. So we have to own it. We have to recognize when we are frustrated, when we are angry, when we are stressed, we have to be curious, what am I believing about this current situation that has me spiraling in frustration and anger and anxiety? What else could I believe instead is the question we want to ask ourselves next.
Because if we continue to stay in the story that keeps recreating the stress and the anxiety and the frustration, then there is no other way to experience that set of circumstances. Changing the circumstances isn’t going to create a long term solution. It might create a solution today because you aren’t faced with that circumstance today, but likely you are going to be faced with that circumstance or a circumstance similar to it at some point in the future.
And if you have not learned how to intentionally choose your perspective and your focus in any situation, then your emotional well being will stay as a consequence of what happens around you. It will. You will always be living at the effect of your circumstances. You will not have any control over your well being and therefore your life. I don’t want that for you. That is a very passive way of living.
That is a way that we have been taught to be reactive to what’s happening around us. It keeps us from being responsible for ourselves, responsible, the ability to respond intentionally. If we aren’t interacting with our lives and our careers with intentions, then we are on an emotional rollercoaster that we do not control. And I don’t want that for you, that is not what you are about. You are so much more powerful than that.
If you want to be happy in veterinary medicine, if you want to be happy in your career, in your life, you have to start by owning your emotion. Stop giving away your power to these things outside of you. Stop blaming other things for why you feel the way you do. Stop trying to work your way into happiness. It’s never going to happen. That’s not how this works. Take a step back and just realize that all the power to create your emotion is already within you.
It just takes practice at learning how to control your perspective, how to choose it with intention. And when you learn that, then you become untouchable. That it doesn’t matter if you have three walk ins and five no shows. It doesn’t matter when that case doesn’t turn out the way that you want it to, or when Mrs. Smith says something ugly to you in the room, or when three people call off from work.
None of that stuff has the ability to shake your own personal foundation of well being. I’m not going to say you’re going to jump up and down and be happy about the negative things that happened during the day. Of course you’re not, but they’re not going to derail you. You’re going to accept them for what they are, which is just things that happen, things that you can’t control and they no longer then hold the key to your wellbeing.
My friends inside of Vet Life Academy, this is the exact kind of things that we teach. And on January 5, 2025, I’m holding VetLife Academy live. It is a half day event where I’m going to be teaching all of this kind of as a crash course for our Vet Life Academy members. VetLife Academy for 2025 is open right now and this is the only time we’re opening it for the entire year.
We’re doing things completely differently. We’re making, we’re making some changes in 2025. So if you want to dive in with us in 2025, you need to jump over to joyfuldvm.com vetlifeacademy and get enrolled right away. Because once we get to January 5th, the doors close and they’re going to be closed for the entire year and you’re going to miss out the opportunity to learn how to take control of your own emotional wellbeing and how to start creating a life and the career that you love on purpose.
You’re going to have support for an entire year inside there of Academy with us if you elect to join us, and I sure hope that you do. And when you join us, then you are more than welcome to attend the Valley of Academy live on January 5th, and also have access to the replays once that event is over. So, my friends, the keys to happiness in Vet Med Part one Own your emotion.
It’s the key to everything else. I hope this episode has been helpful. If it has, please share it with a friend and I will see you next week for Part two. Bye for now.