In this episode, Dr. Cari Wise wraps up a three-part series focused on the Keys of Happiness in Veterinary Medicine.
The third key to happiness, discussed in episode 212, revolves around self-empowerment. Dr. Wise underscores that individuals have the capacity to transform their lives and experiences without waiting for external validation or changes. Empowerment involves making choices that prioritize personal needs and desires, which may include changing jobs, seeking new relationships, establishing personal Boundaries, and having High Value Conversations.
Dr. Wise encourages listeners to confront the fear of rejection that often accompanies High Value Conversations. Many individuals shy away from these discussions, fearing negative responses or judgment. However, she emphasizes that the worst possible outcome is simply receiving a “no,” which clarifies what is achievable. Engaging in these conversations is vital for personal empowerment and can lead to unexpected positive results.
Dr. Wise also encourages listeners to reframe their narratives regarding past choices and experiences. The past should be perceived as a series of lessons contributing to personal growth rather than a source of shame or regret. By recognizing that past struggles have fostered resilience, individuals can move forward with a sense of empowerment and purpose.
Key Takeways:
- Empowerment includes prioritizing personal needs, setting boundaries, and engaging in challenging yet valuable conversations.
- High Value Conversations foster clarity and opportunities, while avoidance can hinder growth.
- Self-acceptance, self-confidence, and self-love are essential for happiness and must come from within, not external validation.
- The past should be seen as a valuable part of one’s journey, with struggles providing lessons for growth.
- Keys to happiness in veterinary medicine: owning emotions, rejecting victim identity, and embracing self empowerment.
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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 DVN podcast is absolutely for you. Let’s get started. Hello my friends. Welcome back to the Joyful DVM podcast. Here in episode 212, we’re going to be wrapping up a three part series on the Keys of Happiness in Vet Med.
In part one we explored owning your emotion. And it’s very important for us to understand that emotion is something that we can control. Even though most of us have been taught something completely contrary to that, our emotion is actually important. It’s something that we need to be aware of. And as we start to recognize different emotional patterns, we can also then utilize that awareness to create different emotional experiences for ourselves.
When it all boils down to it, emotion comes from what we’re thinking about. It’s all about what we believe. Our thoughts, our opinions, our beliefs and our conclusions. Those sentences, those focuses, those perspectives are what create the emotion that we have in any experience. And that’s why we have the ability to change it if we want to. In any given situation, we are not required to hang on to whatever initial emotion comes flooding in for feeling frustrated or angry.
We have the opportunity to shift our perspective of the situation, to create a different emotional experience for ourselves. And when we do that, we step into our power. I talked all about that in part one, which was in episode 210. In episode 211 we did part two of the Keys to Happiness in Vet Med where I spent a lot of time talking about the victim identity that so many of us in veterinary medicine hang on to.
This comes from an underlying belief that we keep fostering and passing on to veterinary generation after generation. That it’s things like clients and co workers and bosses and caseloads and schedules and case outcomes that are responsible for the low emotional state that we experience. We believe that because those things happen, we are automatically at risk and that we are put in a situation where a challenge in our well being and our emotional state is inevitable because we chose this career field.
And in part two I explained that that is just not true. That all of those things, the clients, our co workers, our bosses, our caseloads, our case outcomes, our schedules, the ways that things happen every single day, that all of that is just the neutral aspects of veterinary medicine. And that because we have the opportunity to start to really interact with those things as neutral, we get to create our own experiences of them.
As long as we continue to believe that we must figure out a way to control the way that clients behave, or the way that the schedules roll out, or whether or not we have all the right equipment, or everything that’s functioning, or the cases that turn out good, if we keep thinking that we can control that or that we should be able to control it, then we will remain frustrated and more so as we continue to work really hard to control all of those external variables and we fail because we will, because they’re not within our control, then if we don’t realize we were never meant to control them in the first place, then there’s no place for us to go other than to be a victim of those things.
And so in part two, I unpacked all of that to show you how we have collectively as a profession, adopted this victim identity and how that victim identity is something that we are passing on to each other. And it’s doing nothing to empower us. If anything, it’s just stacking on disempowerment and continuing to perpetuate really harmful belief systems and even statistics that we would be so much better off leaving behind.
And so that brings us now to part three, here in episode 212, which is the third key to happiness in Vet Med. And it’s all about empowering yourself, my friends. When it all comes down to it, you’re the only one who can do anything to change your life and to change your own experience. You don’t have to wait for anybody to get in line or to do things the right way before you have the ability to be happy, you can always make a new choice for you.
So whether or not that choice is about whether to stay in the current job you’re in, or to go to a new one, to stay or to pursue a different relationship, to pursue a new hobby or an interest, or the most empowered one, the most powerful one, the most influential one, which is just an empowered decision to decide for yourself what you believe in every single situation. That is the way that you move forward.
When you empower yourself, you take back responsibility for your life from things outside of you. You stop blaming those things we talked about in episode two, those things like the clients and the caseload, the schedules, the pay. You stop blaming all of those things for the reason why you can’t be happy in your life and in your career. You stop looking at your student loan debt or whatever other debt or financial situation you’re in as the barrier to your own happiness.
Because I promise you that it never is. Instead, it is what you believe about all of those things that keeps you stuck. So as long as you continue to believe that they are your barriers, then they will continue to be so. Instead, consider that everything is possible. Consider that everything that has happened in your life up until this point has been an intentional part of your journey. And that you needed all of those experiences to make the choices that you will make next to move forward.
My friends, there are no wasted struggles. Every single thing that’s ever happened was ultimately for your good, even when it didn’t seem so at the time. You’re just going to have to trust me on this. Especially if you’re in a season where it seems like everything is going wrong. I promise you, you are going to make your way to the other side of this. And at some point you will be able to look back at this moment and the decisions that you made at this time, and you will see how they led you to exactly where you you needed to go.
I know how hard it is to see that in the moment. So please just trust me on this. Your only job is to keep going, to keep moving forward, to keep making the next right decision for you. As you continue to empower yourself, you want to really consider what is it that you want in your life? What kind of dreams and hopes for the future do you have?
And from that place, then become courageous. Start to do things like set boundaries for yourself in situations where you’ve been afraid to say no, or to put up your own desires and wants and needs ahead of somebody else’s. I’m not asking you to be selfish. I’m asking you to prioritize you. Because until you prioritize yourself and what you want and what’s important to you, then you will never have the life that you are meant to have.
Part of empowering yourself also includes having high value conversations. Now, a high value conversation is a conversation that you have about something that probably quite frankly, makes you uncomfortable to speak about. It might be a conversation with a family member or a friend. It might be a conversation with a boss. Something as simple as asking for a raise or asking for a change in your schedule. Any of those conversations where you probably make a request or you give some information, you make a recommendation, I guess, in regard to the way that things work in a workplace or the way that things are going on in a family.
Any of those conversations where you don’t know what kind of feedback you’re going to get as a result, make us feel uncomfortable. It’s the uncertainty. Anything uncertain has discomfort that comes with it. That’s not surprising. It’s to be expected, and it’s absolutely never a reason not to have the conversation in the first place. But those high value conversations, those ones that make you want to puke on your shoes, that’s the way that I like to look at it.
Those are the conversations that have the most impact to help you move forward in your life. And not only you. Because when you have those conversations and you make those requests and you make those recommendations, the information that you receive is pivotal in the next steps of your own journey. And that conversation also plays a very important part in the lives of the people that you’re speaking with.
So even if it doesn’t seem like you get what you wanted in these conversations, please do not underestimate the ultimate impact of those conversations, not only in your journey, but in the journey of those around you as well. Those high value conversations are the ones that we avoid. Many of us who would deem ourselves non confrontational, we avoid these conversations like the plague. We just keep waiting for somebody to recognize us and to give us the raises or give us the accolades or give us the changes that we want.
We just expect that the things that we want for our lives to just drop into our laps without any effort on our part to make it happen. And my friends, so many things that you want for your life and for your career and for your future are going to require you to take some action. And that action may just be to have a conversation to ask for what you need.
We’re so afraid of hearing the word no that we decide the answer will be no before we ever even ask it. So why do we do that? We do that because we believe along with the no is going to come a whole bunch of judgment that we’re going to be shamed or penalized for even asking for what we want. We’re so afraid of what the person we’re asking the request from is going to think about us, that we won’t even stand up and ask for things for ourselves.
And I want to encourage you to break that habit this year. If there is something that you want in your life, go after it, ask for it. If you want a raise, ask for it. If you want a different schedule, ask for it. The very worst thing that can happen is that you get told no. But at least if you get told no, you have new information, you know then whether or not what you Want is possible where you are.
If we don’t have the conversation, then we’re living our lives based on assumptions. And those assumptions are will never move you forward. What’s even more alarming about this whole thing, about our fear of these non of these high value conversations are the opportunities that we miss out on. So many times over the years, as I’ve spoken to members of our joyful DVM community within VetLife Academy, there have been situations where people have been afraid to have the high value conversation.
They’re just going to quit their job and find another one rather than ask for a raise or ask for a schedule change. So many times I’ve encouraged them just have the conversation anyway. And the number of times that that has turned out for their good are far more than I can even count. Now. That’s not a guarantee that that’s going to happen for you, but what I will guarantee for you is that in whatever situation that you have, that you have a high value conversation and you make a request for something that is important for you, you are either going to get what you want, which is a win, or you are going to get clarity that what you want isn’t possible in your current situation.
That is a win as well. It is when we stay in the gray of the, I don’t know, being frozen in fear to pursue what it is that we want that our dreams die. Because my friends, we cannot light the shine the light underneath our dreams if we don’t fan any fire toward it. We have to be an active participant in creating what we want. And so many times that is going to involve a high value conversation.
Now I know setting boundaries and having high value conversations are scary. I get that. And this is something that inside of VetLife Academy I teach you, I show you how to do this. We have a blueprint for setting boundaries the right way because so often we set these the wrong way. We make other people responsible for upholding our boundaries, which is never actually ever their role. And in high value Conversations, I have an entire high value conversation starter workbook so that you can plan out in advance exactly what it is that you want to say so you can go in in control of that conversation so that when your nerves show up and they will, you can still say what you want to say, request what you want to request and leave there with the information that you need.
These are the kinds of things that are not just intuitive to all of us to know how to do. These are skills that are taught and unfortunately skills that have been missing in our veterinary educations. That is exactly why we’ve included them in VetLife Academy. Another aspect of empowering yourself is really prioritizing you. You have got to understand for yourself, what do you prioritize, what are your priorities and what do you value?
Any relationship, whether it is professional or personal, will have a very hard time being sustainable if there is a true values mismatch. The only way you will get to that is if you first know for yourself what is important to you. So it’s something to consider as you’re growing into this empowered version of you. What do you value? What are your priorities? What are your non negotiables is another way to look at that.
These are all aspects of living your most authentic life. And so often we stay so busy that we just keep bouncing around, maybe trying on the priorities and the values of other people without any real concrete decisions about what’s important individually to each of us. Until we know that, we will just continue to bounce around living in a reactive kind of life instead of intentionally creating the life that we want and the life that we were born to live.
In addition to those things, maybe the most important aspects of self empowerment require us to develop self acceptance, self confidence, and self love. As long as you continue to be your harshest critic, you will not be happy. Now I’m not saying that to be all doom and gloom, quite the contrary. I want you to know that the only thing standing between you and self acceptance, the only thing standing between you and self confidence, and the only thing standing between you and self love is a decision to give those things to yourself.
You cannot work your way into self acceptance, self confidence and self love. You cannot achieve your way into those things. There’s not enough external validation in the world to create those things for you. And the good news is you don’t need external validation. All you need is the decision to make it. So somewhere along the way, if you’re struggling with self acceptance, if you’re struggling with self confidence, if you’re struggling with self love, somewhere along the way you were taught that you weren’t good enough exactly as you are.
And I’m here to remind you that that is just not true, my friend. You are infinitely valuable and worthy simply because you exist. You don’t need to be different than you are to be accepted by yourself. You don’t have to be different than you are to be confident in who you are. And you don’t need to be different than you are to be loved. You are already infinitely valuable and worthy and lovable simply because you exist.
There isn’t any external achievement, there isn’t any behavior that makes one of us better than the other. And as soon as we really start to embody this truth, then the self acceptance and self confidence and self love just fall into place. You can just decide today that you’re done berating yourself, that you’re done holding a grudge against whatever things in the past that you might have done, that you’re carrying around shame and guilt from.
You can just decide to stop believing that some decision you made in the past has ruined your future. You can decide to stop comparing yourself to everybody else and believing that they are better than you, because none of that is true. We are all equally valuable and worthy and lovable simply because we exist. And it is only our own personal experiences in this world that have taught us otherwise.
And here’s the beautiful thing about things that were taught. If you were taught that you can be untaught, it as well you can teach yourself a different perspective of you. This is at the heart of self empowerment. The only person in this world that can make decisions on your behalf is you. You get to decide for yourself everything else moving forward. If the choices you’ve made in the past are not the choices that you want for the future, you get to make a new choice.
That doesn’t mean the choices of the past were the wrong choices. They were exactly the right perfect choices for you at that time. But just because you made a choice in the past does not mean that you can’t make a new one today. If you’re ready to take your life in a new direction, whether that’s a job, whether it’s a whole entire career field, whether or not that’s a relationship or a location, you can decide again and again and again and again.
Just like in veterinary medicine, we can only ever make the best decisions that we can with the information and resources we have available at the time. And so there is no reason whatsoever to look back at the decisions that you made a year ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and believe that you made a bad choice then and that that bad choice is going to ruin your future.
Think back to what we talked about in episode 210 when we talked about owning your emotion. If you’re looking back at the way you’ve lived your life so far and you’re believing that you’ve done nothing but make mistakes and make choices, that is going to ruin your future. How does that make you feel emotionally? That makes you feel hopeless. That makes you Feel defeated. And when we’re hopeless and defeated, what do we do?
What actions do we take from that type of emotion? Well, we certainly don’t make new choices. We certainly don’t make healthy choices to move us forward. We certainly don’t do anything to make change. And so we have to recognize how important it is to reframe whatever limiting perspectives that we hold about our lives and about our past experiences and our past choices and behaviors. Nothing from the past can harm you in the future unless you continue to carry forward with you a harmful, negative, shaming, guilting story about it.
That story is optional. You get to decide what you believe about everything in your past. One of my mentors said it the best. She said, the past is perfect because that’s the way it happened. I love that perspective. The past is perfect. It’s up to me to decide whether or not I want to give it any other type of story. And if I give it any story that’s limiting, then that limits what’s possible for me today because I will carry that limiting belief forward into the future.
There’s no downside to me looking at the past and saying, yep, the past is perfect because that’s the way it happened. That doesn’t mean that only perfect things happened in the past. Not at all. That means that the things that happen, even the most challenging times, and there have been many, were still ultimately for my good, that those challenges that I faced, those struggles, those periods of burnout and despair and depression, that all of those were a perfect part of my story and that it was the lessons that I learned along the way that kept me moving and that had me making new choices that led me to where I am now and where I will go next.
I wouldn’t take back any of my struggle. And I can say that now, as many of those struggles are far behind me. That doesn’t mean that I’m without struggle today, because I am. But the struggles today that I have carry very much less weight because I already have experience in struggle. Some of you who are still in your 20s and your 30s, you’re still in the midst of some of your first, most difficult struggles.
And so you don’t know yet that you will survive where you’re at. You don’t know yet that this is just but a moment in your lifetime, that it doesn’t define your future. You’re right in the middle of the storm. But I want you to know that you will make it through that storm, that that storm is just wind. It is just noise. It is just chaos and that you are so much stronger than any of that.
Your only job is to just keep going, keep looking forward, keep envisioning what it is that you want for your future. Your job is to not believe that this is the fate of the rest of your life, because I promise you that that is never going to be the case. Trust me on this one. You will look back at this time and you will be grateful for this challenge because of what it taught you about your own resilience and your own ability to have your own back, about your own strength, your own determination.
All you need to do is keep putting one step in front of the other. Keep looking forward and keep envisioning what it is that you want for you. If you don’t decide what you want to create for yourself, you will be left with whatever falls into your lap. And that is not the way any of us were created to live. Empowering yourself means deciding for you in the good times and the bad times.
Even if your circumstances are such that you can’t make an instant change. That’s okay, because you recognize that feeling better doesn’t mean your circumstances have to change first. Feeling better is a choice as well. You can be optimistic, even among negative circumstances. Optimism is the heart of all of this. A belief that you are infinitely valuable and worthy and lovable simply because you exist. And if you can believe that, then you can also believe that your journey has purpose, that everything has meaning, and that you are made for so much more than whatever struggle you are currently going through.
And as you continue to tackle your struggles, my friends, I have to remind you that no matter how many challenges and how many struggles you have been up against in your lifetime, and you may able to go back and tick off a whole bunch, and you can look at all those struggles and you can say, man, bad shit just always happens to me. And you can take that perspective and you can continue to repeat that pattern, or you can look back at all those struggles and you can say, dang, look at me.
Look at how resilient I am. I only have evidence of surviving every challenging thing I’ve ever been through in the past. There’s no reason for me to believe that I won’t continue to survive every challenging thing that may ever come toward me in the future. Can you see how that slight change in perspective will make all the difference in the type of life you create for yourself? This is what empowerment is all about.
And you don’t need anybody’s permission to empower yourself. You just need a Reminder that that power is already within you, the light is already shining. And whatever stories you’re believing that is dimming that light, you have a hundred percent permission to leave those stories behind. Whether they are stories about your own abilities and value as a human that you have learned through your parents, teachers, friends, family, clergy, growing up.
Whether it is some story you’ve picked up along the way in your profession as you’ve compared yourself to others and gotten buried with imposter fatigue or imposter syndrome and compassion fatigue, or whether it is a story that you have adopted from our profession that has told you that your future is limited and your well being is always at risk because you chose a career in veterinary medicine. I am here to remind you that that is not true.
We will continue to create those experiences for ourselves. If we believe those stories and we move, we live into them as if they are fact. They are not fact. You always get to decide for you. The keys to happiness in Vet Med are the same to the keys to happiness in your whole entire life, my friends. Number one, own your own emotion. Don’t run away from it. Understand it.
Realize it’s just simply something that we create as part of our human experience, which is created from the focus that we have. Whatever we believe will create an emotion that goes with it. That emotion will drive our actions and will create our outcomes. If we want different outcomes, we must experience different emotion. And we can do that on our own by changing what we believe. Key number two is to drop the victim identity.
Stop believing all the negativity that everybody offers you about a career in veterinary medicine. Stop believing that clients who snark at you in the exam room and patients that crash and burn are ruining your days, because they are not. These things happen in veterinary medicine. Whether or not you use those, those as the indicators of a good or a bad day is your choice. Let them be neutral and decide what kind of day you’re going to have even when those things happen.
And number three, become empowered. Your own empowerment is the most important thing. I know over the last three episodes that I have offered you a lot to think about, a lot to shift as far as paradigm. If this is not where you already are in a belief system, but if you’ve made it through these last three episodes and you’re feeling some hope and you’re curious and you want to continue to learn how to embody the very things that I have talked about here, then the place where you need to start is VetLife Academy.
And right now we are in our last few days of enrollment in VetLife Academy 2025. If you want to join us, please jump over to joyfuldvm.com vetlifeacademy to learn how you can join us this year. And we’re going to be kicking off on Sunday, January 6th 5th. I’m sorry, Sunday, January 5th, 2025 with our first ever half day online event called VetLife Academy Live where I’m going to be introducing you to all of the key concepts that are going to make the difference and you becoming the empowered creator of your life and your career.
And I really hope that we will see you there. My friends, if these episodes have helped you, please share them with a friend and remember that no matter what happens, you are powerful. You are infinitely valuable and worthy because you exist. And when it comes to your life and it comes to your future, my friends, everything is possible. All right, my friends, I hope to see you soon.
Bye for now.