In this episode, Dr. Cari Wise emphasizes the importance of shedding the victim identity, a mindset that many professionals may not consciously recognize they embody.
Veterinary medicine is inherently chaotic and unpredictable, which can lead to significant frustration when attempts to exert control over daily events fail. Professionals often find themselves overwhelmed by factors beyond their control, including client behavior, patient responses, and equipment malfunctions. This struggle for control can cultivate a victim mentality, where individuals believe their happiness is dependent on external circumstances. Dr. Wise stresses that while individuals have the power to create their own wellbeing, they cannot dictate the actions of others or the situations they encounter.
The tendency to vent frustrations among colleagues is a coping mechanism that can perpetuate a victim mentality. While sharing negative experiences may offer temporary relief, it ultimately reinforces a cycle of blame and frustration. This collective commiseration distracts from personal empowerment and the potential for positive change within the profession. Dr. Wise argues that as long as veterinary professionals attribute their happiness to external circumstances, they will remain disempowered.
Key Takeaways:
- Many professionals adopt a victim mentality due to the chaotic work environment.
- Frustration stems from the disparity between expectations and reality, leading to feelings of victimization.
- External factors, such as client behavior and unexpected patient outcomes, contribute to frustration and powerlessness.
- Believing happiness depends on external circumstances reinforces the victim mindset.
- Venting among colleagues offers temporary relief but perpetuates negativity and disempowerment.
- New veterinarians should avoid comparing themselves to experienced colleagues and allow time for personal growth.
- Listeners are urged to identify external blame for unhappiness and recognize their choice in adopting a victim identity.
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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 friend. Welcome back to the Joyful DVM podcast. In today’s episode, we’re going to continue our discussion of the keys to happiness in Vet Med.
Here in part two, we are going to be talking about how to drop the victim identity. And if you’re thinking I don’t have a victim identity, listen up, because I’m going to guess that you probably do and you don’t even realize it. When we look at our days in veterinary medicine, there are all kinds of things that happen. It’s a very chaotic environment most of the time. And one of the most frustrating aspects of our career can be this attempt to control what happens during the day and our failure to do so.
So we get frustrated when we try really, really hard to control all the things and then things happen unexpectedly that we have an expectation of. Control is really where we’re starting to create this problem for ourselves. Because our job is dependent on things that we will never control, especially when it comes to clients and the patients that we treat. No matter how hard you try, you will never create or you will never control the way that another person behaves.
You will never control whether or not they show up on time for their appointment. You will never control whether or not they agree to your treatment plan. And also, no matter how hard you try, you will never be able to control whether or not a patient responds to the treatment that you recommend. An institute. You’re just not that powerful. Now you are super powerful as a human being in your own right.
Please do not misunderstand. You have an amazing power to create your own well being and to create your own experiences. But what you can’t control are the circumstances around you. And it is this attempt to control those, coupled with the belief that your circumstances are creating the way that you feel, that leads you to conclude that you are a victim, even if you don’t realize that’s what you’re doing.
So let me give you some examples of this. We look at our day and we deem that we’ve had a bad day and we say, okay, why did you have such a bad day? Well, it’s a terrible day because every client showed up 10 or 15 or 15 minutes late. This one case just crashed and burned during the day. We were out of stock in all of these different things.
The X ray machine broke down and three people called off work. And then we had all these walk ins. It was a terrible day. Now, notice that we have defined our day by the circumstances of the day. And so, because the circumstances were not what we wanted them to be, so we wanted people to show up on time. We wanted cases to turn out all right. We wanted all the equipment to be functional.
We wanted no walk ins to come in. We didn’t want anybody to call off work. And because that’s not what we experienced, we felt frustrated. Anytime there’s a gap between what we are expecting to happen and what actually happens, frustration results. Another way of looking at this, anytime there is a gap between expectation and reality, we feel frustration. And that frustration comes from a belief that it should be different than it is.
They should have been on time. The X ray machine should not be broken. People should not call off from work. Cases should get better. And because they aren’t, those things are not happening. We feel frustrated. If you feel frustrated enough throughout the whole entire day, you’re going to conclude then that you’ve had a bad day. And then you have that happen over and over and over again. You’re going to start to hate your job.
Just to put it quite bluntly, this all leads us to being a victim. We feel like, or we believe. Let me put this a better way. We believe we are victims of what clients do. We believe we are victims of our schedules, of our pay, of our coworkers. We believe we are victims of all of these things because. And the reason that I say that we believe we are victims of these things is because we’re believing if those things didn’t occur, that we would be happy.
So anytime we start to believe that our happiness is contingent on something outside of ourselves and that something, then is it going the way that we want it to go? We conclude that it’s inevitable, that we feel bad. So let’s just give it a really specific example of this. Let’s say that you’re in an exam room with a client and the client is being kind of like grouchy and snarky.
You know, sometimes they’re belligerent. Sometimes they’re just talking over you and you’re trying to explain something, or you give them your treatment plan. Then they go on this whole rant about the prices and about veterinary medicine in general and how the prices are outrageous. And if you really cared about the animals, then you would do it for free. And so you leave that exam room and you feel angry.
You may walk out of that exam room and your team members are there, and they could see a look on your face, and they could say, what’s wrong? And you’re like, I’m angry. Why are you angry? You say, I’m angry. I’m mad because Mrs. Smith just totally went off on me about our prices and about veterinary medicine in general. And they have no idea. They don’t understand our profession.
They don’t understand what things cost. They don’t realize we’re not human health care. And she was just completely rude. And I’m just so frustrated. I’m so mad. In that moment, those words identify that we feeling like we’ve been victimized by her. In that moment, we’re saying that that other person’s behavior, Mrs. Smith’s behavior and her words created our anger, and we feel justified in that anger. But the truth is that all Those words that Mrs.
Smith said, her body language, her tone, all of that created zero emotion for you. It’s that you believe that she shouldn’t have behaved that way, that created that. That’s where your frustration comes from. She shouldn’t behave that way, but she did. And so you feel frustrated. You also believe that she shouldn’t have dumped all that stuff on you, that it’s not your place, right? That you’re not the one who controls the prices, you’re not the one who decides any of those things.
And so why should you get yelled at when you don’t have control over the things she’s mad about? And so you feel victimized by it. I get it. Believe me, I get it. And so we do this huge tap dance to try to create a situation where clients never say those kinds of things to us. But the truth is, part of veterinary medicine is going to include clients that are super emotional and who say things like this to us.
It’s not unique to veterinary medicine. Making sideways negative comments about money and about prices. That’s something that humans do in all kinds of different situations. Not only veterinary hospitals, they do it at dentists, they do it at the grocery store, they do it at the gas station, everywhere. And those comments have nothing to do with the services being provided by any of these types of establishments. Those comments are driven by the emotions of the individual people, which are created by what they believe about money and their ability to have and spend money.
It has nothing to do with you. As soon as we personalize it, though, as soon as we believe that those humans should behave differently than they are, then we become victims of their behavior. Because what we’re actually believing is that we don’t have the ability to be happy, to be joyful, to be peaceful or calm when somebody around us is losing their shit. And that’s just absolutely not true.
You’re so much more powerful than that. Unfortunately, in our profession, one of the ways that we tend to try to let off steam, with a big emphasis on try to let off steam, is by venting to each other. We stand around, we commiserate, we complain, we blame, and when we do that, we feel better for a while. So if we stand around together and we complain about Mrs.
Smith’s behavior, we’re going to feel better for a while. And why is that? It’s because if we look at the emotional spectrum, anger is up higher than feeling frustrated or feeling defeated. And so if we can feel angry, then we feel more powerful. And that feels better than feeling defeated or feeling shame or guilt. Because many of us still carry guilt and shame around pricing, even though we don’t control it.
If we can stand around together and commiserate and complain and blame together, we feel powerful. We might feel angry, but we feel empowered in our anger. We feel justified in our anger. But what we don’t realize is that as we continue to share these negative perspectives and we continue to flame this fire of frustration in our profession, it doesn’t lead us anywhere good. Because what it does do is it keeps us then behaving and interacting and deciding things that actually don’t move us forward.
As a profession, we have given all of our power away to the circumstances around us. We’re reinforcing the idea that the circumstances must change before we can experience balance and well being in veterinary medicine. And my friends, that is never true. It is this tendency of us as a group to keep passing on these negative perspectives, to keep fueling the fire on this commiseration and this complaining and this blaming about all of these things that we will never control things about, like how clients behave, our student loan debt, the amount of money that we make, the hours that we work, the number of people that are in our establishments, whether or not equipment is there, whether or not items are out of stock, the pricing structure, wherever we work, all of these different things which we do not control.
As long as we believe that those circumstances are the path to happiness, we will lose 100% of the time. And it completely takes us out of our power to make decisions that are better for us. Individually and then together collectively as a profession. Instead, we just keep passing on this whole line of BS that we are really limited in our ability to thrive because of these circumstances of veterinary medicine.
And I hate to break it to you, and I know that I’m sounding really harsh here, but I want you to know that these circumstances in veterinary medicine are no different today than they were 50 years ago. There were always going to be people who complained about money. There was always going to be a certain amount of death that came along with this profession. That there was always going to be a variation in pay.
There was always going to be changes in schedules. There are always going to be these aspects of veterinary medicine as part of our career. But we get to decide. If you don’t like your pay, find a job that pays better. Stop looking at your student loan debt as if you are saddled with something that you never wanted because you chose to come into this profession. And here’s what I believe about your student loan debt.
I believe that it’s evidence of success at the hardest thing that you’ve ever done in your life. And it’s something that only a fraction of the population even attempts. See how it’s no fun to have debt. But let’s not let that debt then control your future. You’re letting yourself be victimized by this debt. You don’t need to. It’s just money. It’s man made. It is not tied to your safety.
It does not create or withdraw your well being. It’s just this thing that we exchange in order to buy goods and services. Our culture ties money to safety. And so you look at that debt as if it is bad, as if it is limiting and it is not. You have so many opportunities to do whatever you want with it. Pay it off over a lifetime. If you want to take advantage of some programs that are out there, don’t get freaked out about what may or may not still exist.
As far as payoff, there’s no reason to go into the what ifs. All of your fears about the future haven’t happened yet. Decide for you. If you really believe that it needs to be gone, then make a plan to make it go away. I know somebody who paid off over $300,000 worth of debt in under five years decide for you. I’m not saying you have to do that, but I’m saying if that’s what you want to do, don’t believe that you’ll never have the ability to do it because you can.
But all this to say that if you’re looking at that, and this is just one example. But if you’re looking at your student loan debt as the reason that you can’t be happy, I want you to notice that you are choosing to identify yourself as a victim of your student loan debt. If you look at your client interactions and the negative ones, the clients who are ugly, that leave bad reviews, that are make nasty comments in the exam room, if you’re looking at those clients and you’re deciding that you can’t ever be happy in vet med because people are jerks, then just recognize you’re choosing the identity of being a victim of other people’s behavior.
The list goes on and on and on. Anytime, any area of your life where you have concluded that you cannot be happy because of some external thing, I want you to notice that you’re choosing the identity of a victim of that thing. That identity is optional and it will never help you. Another area that’s a little more subtle, where we grab onto a victim identity is through comparison.
We compare ourselves to other people in our profession. And for you younger veterinarians, you’re going to be looking at people who’ve been in the profession a little bit longer than you, and you’re going to be looking at the way that they interact with clients and the way that they handle cases. You’re going to notice that they’re going to be a little bit smoother in their interactions. You’re going to notice that they’re going to be a little bit swifter in their decision making over different cases, that they’re going to come to clarity and maybe a diagnosis a little more quickly than you do.
And if you notice that and then you conclude that they are better and you are worse, that you are less than and that they are more than than, you are going to become a victim of your own self identity, like your own self. Conclusion because you’re missing the point here. You’re comparing yourself to somebody who’s been doing this much longer. This is that practice part of veterinary medicine.
There’s no reason to hold an expectation that you will perform at a level of somebody who’s been out 5, 10, 15, 20 years when you’re only 1, 2 or 3 years out. That is an unrealistic expectation. You are qualified to do this job, but you have yet to build the hours of the practice of veterinary medicine. And it is the repetition, it is the practice that helps to build your own style of practice.
But if you don’t let yourself have that time to learn in the actual environment, of veterinary medicine. And instead you set yourself an expectation of perfectionism and through that you compare yourself to everybody else, how they’re faster, better, quicker, smarter, whatever terms you use, then you are becoming a victim of your own expectations. It’s a terrible thing to do to yourself. It’s this piece where we don’t realize that just because you have graduated and you have the degree and you are qualified, because you absolutely are qualified, that you still have learning to do over the first five years for sure.
And it’s actually a lifelong learning kind of career. Right? Things change all the time, but it takes three to five years to get your groove and how you like to approach cases and how you want to talk about things. Your style is going to be different than everybody else’s style. That’s okay. That’s part of the art of the practice of veterinary medicine. We don’t all do it the same and we don’t need to, we’re not supposed to.
But if you come out holding yourself to an expectation that you’re going to be as fast and as good, whatever that means, as somebody else that you work with, then you are never going to measure up because you’re never going to be them. You were never supposed to be them, you’re only supposed to be you. But if you do that long enough, you are really going to start to add on and build this belief system that you are bad, that you are not good enough, that you are less than, that you are an imposter, that you are not worthy, that you should be in this career field, that it was a mistake, that you joined it, that it was an accident that you ever got in.
My friend, that negative self talk is never true. So what I want you to be aware of as you go through the next few weeks is I want you to pay attention to what you’re blaming for your life circumstances and for your own well being. What’s keeping you from that? Whatever you’re identifying externally as the reason why you can’t be happy and joyful and fulfilled. That is where you are choosing a victim identity.
And if you can start to just consider that maybe none of that is true, you’re going to start to protect your wellbeing and enhance your joy along the way. Now, my friends, we dig into this in VetLife Academy and as you know, the Vet Life Academy doors are open through January 5th. On January 5th, we’re going to be hosting VetLife Academy live for all of our Vet Life Academy members.
This is the only time we’re going to be open for 2025, so jump over to joyful dvm.com vetlife academy to learn all about what we’re going to be doing in 2025 as we make some big changes to our Vet Life Academy program. My friends, this is the only time we’re going to be open, and so what I talk about here on the podcast really resonates. I do hope that you’ll consider joining us for 2025, and if this episode has helped, please share it with a friend.
That’s going to wrap it up for this week and I’ll see you soon. Bye for now.