In this episode, Dr. Cari Wise explores the critical theme of maintaining personal power during chaotic times, a subject that resonates deeply with her own life experiences and those of her fellow veterinary professionals.
Dr. Wise emphasizes that chaos is an inherent aspect of life, and individuals often mistakenly believe that their ability to thrive is dependent on the absence of chaos. She encourages her listeners to recognize their intrinsic worth and sense of safety, regardless of external circumstances. Accepting chaos as a universal experience can alleviate the pressure to resolve it before moving forward in life.
Dr. Wise argues that fighting against circumstances only serves to diminish personal power and overall wellbeing. Acceptance enables individuals to make informed decisions that can lead to positive outcomes, even in challenging situations.
Dr. Wise emphasizes that while uncomfortable emotional states are valid, individuals can choose how long they remain in those emotional states. By recognizing the narratives that contribute to feelings of defeat or hopelessness, individuals can reclaim their power and move forward. She encourages listeners to cultivate curiosity about their beliefs and to challenge the limiting narratives that hinder their potential.
Key Takeways:
- Chaos is presented as a natural part of life that does not hinder one’s ability to thrive or find happiness.
- It is possible to maintain personal power during chaotic times and recognize one’s strength amidst turmoil.
- The narratives we create about our circumstances shape our emotional responses and future possibilities.
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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, welcome back to the Joyful DVM podcast. In today’s episode, I wanted to spend some time talking about maintaining our power even in times of chaos, because I think that we could all use a little reminder about how powerful we are and how to navigate periods of our lives that feel really out of control.
As I look around at the world right now and I think about what I’ve been going through, what my friends have been going through, just all of the different things that have been happening, it’s quite astounding when I start to make a list of the chaos that is present everywhere. And so that’s really what encouraged me to land on this topic for this week. So it’s as much for me as it is for all of you now within my own life.
Some of the chaos has included some of the things many of you are going through, like having periods of time in your practices where you’re really short staffed, figuring out how to navigate it, surviving the holidays, which are always a little chaotic in my world. So the unexpected things that happen, getting sick last fall, so some of you may already know, some of you may not, that I just could not seem to be well in the last quarter of 2024.
And for me that was very chaotic because I’m not somebody who gets sick very often now. Nothing was necessarily life threatening, but I did end up with COVID which I had never had before. And then I ended up with that nasty bronchitis that’s been around, which lasted for about six weeks. And then I ended up with the stomach flu. And all of this happened just one right after another.
And whenever those things are happening in the moment, it’s just like, why? Why, why? That’s the question we always ask ourselves, right? Why? Why is this happening? And there’s always lessons to be learned in addition to those kinds of things. As far as chaos goes, as I look around and I think about what I’ve been experiencing, what my friends have been experiencing, I know there are many of you that have been impacted by things that you cannot control when it comes to Mother Nature herself.
So I have friends, like many of you do in California, who have been very much impacted by the devastating fires that have been experienced out there. I take a look at the other side of the country, and people are getting snow in areas that just. It doesn’t snow. The hurricanes have been more devastating recently than it seems like they typically are. And these types of things just keep happening.
In addition to all that, many of you are probably struggling with medical conditions of your own pets. I know that that is something that we are experiencing in my household right now. Our older dog, who will be 12 here in a couple of months, has a bone tumor, and he went through an amputation last week and then subsequently ended up septic. And it has been a roller coaster of chaos since then.
Thankfully, at this point, I can say today that he seems to be on the mend. And of course, we’re waiting for his final diagnosis. But you guys are veterinary professionals. You know, the odds are not great that this is anything other than osteosarcoma, meaning we have limited time. And so yet we add that to our list of chaos as we plunge here in the Midwest to temperatures that are in the negatives, Something that we don’t tend to stay in in very long, which kind of causes its own level of chaos on how to navigate day to day, also then impacts our veterinary schedules.
Right. Because this is a seasonal job, as much as we think that it wouldn’t be. There’s often a lot of no shows or cancellations whenever the weather is bad. And I know I’m not alone in experiencing any of these things. So this is what led me today to talk about the chaos and to remind us all that we still have a path to our own power. Even when the chaos exists, where the chaos and all the different events that we would loop into lump into this idea of chaos.
Where the chaos wins is when we believe our ability to thrive is dependent on the chaos being absent. And I promise you, my friends, that is never true. So, no, whatever, no matter whatever it is that you might be going through in your own life, whatever thing is challenging you right now, whatever set of circumstances have popped up out of nowhere and maybe seem like they just won’t go away, whatever those things are, I want you to take a nice, big deep breath and remind yourself that even though these things are happening to you and around you, that you are still safe, that you are still valuable, that you are still worthy, that your journey still matters.
Because all of that is true. These things that are happening that we are labeling as chaos in our lives, they only happen because we are alive. And if we can normalize these things A little bit. I’m not saying condone, those are completely different things. But if we can just normalize it by recognizing that experiencing these things is part of our human experience and also an intentional part of our individual journeys, then the pressure to solve for these things lessens.
We don’t need to fix the chaos in our lives before we move forward and thrive in our lives themselves. This is such an important thing to remember, especially in a world where we are taught from a very early age that happily ever after is dependent on perfectly aligned circumstances. The world is just so much messier than that. And at this time in history, there’s a lot of messiness all around us.
There’s a lot of injustice, there’s a lot of just completely unexpected tragedy that is not likely going to change. That’s just kind of built in to the human existence. What we can do, however, is make individual choices that move us in the direction that we individually want to go. We can really resist buying into any belief that says that because X number of circumstances exist, then Y outcome is not possible.
We can go through periods of personal illness and frustration, our own pets getting sick, family members having their own illnesses, natural disasters, and so on and so forth. We can go through all of that still looking forward with optimism. That doesn’t mean that we are painting a picture different than what the reality is. It just means that we accept the reality for what it is without making that reality mean that what comes next is negatively impacted by it.
This is a really important concept for us to understand because so often in our lives we believe that what is possible in the future is dependent on what is happening in the present. We believe that things that happened in the past limit what comes next. And that also is just not true. What might be true is what’s happening now is something that’s unexpected, something that you didn’t plan for, something you didn’t anticipate, maybe even something that you don’t want to be happening.
But if it is happening, don’t waste your energy fighting it. The quicker we accept the things that are happening truth, the more quickly we can step back into our own power. The longer that we fight what is happening as something that shouldn’t be. So we focus on an injustice, we focus on that this shouldn’t, this isn’t the way that it should be. And yet we don’t have power individually to change it, then we give all of our power away because our well being becomes dependent on the circumstances being different.
Sure, I would like it if my pet, my dog Doc did not have cancer. Of course that’s what I want. But I also accept that he does. Because when I accept that he does, then I’m able to make decisions that can move both of us forward. I can make the decisions in this moment that I think are the best decisions for him and for us as a family.
I can look at the weather and I can wish that it was 50 degrees and that it was already spring, but it’s not. So if I can accept that right now it is cold here in the Midwest, that the temperatures are going to be sub zero, then I can decide what I’m going to do next. How am I going to interact with the circumstances that are in front of me?
When we argue with the reality of what is, we give our power away. Because arguing with what is, is evidence that we are making our well being become dependent on those circumstances being different. And this is one of the most important things that we can all learn as part of this human experience, which is that your well being is never dependent on your circumstances. I’m going to say that again.
Your well being is never dependent on your circumstances. Life is messy, my friends. There are going to be things that happen in our lives that we don’t expect, that we don’t enjoy, and that we don’t anticipate. There are going to be circumstances in our lives that result in grieving and frustration and anger. But remember that no matter what emotion that we experience, it is never, ever created by the circumstance itself.
Every circumstance has a story that goes with it. There’s going to be an automatic story that our minds offer us about any set of circumstances. And that automatic story, if it doesn’t empower us, if it doesn’t help us to foster hope and belief and possibility and optimism, then there’s an opportunity for us to change that story. Just because we have an automatic negative story, and one that is often an automatic negative that is shared across populations of people, does not mean we are required to keep it.
So if we think about the circumstances in our lives right now that we aren’t enjoying, telling a different story isn’t necessarily going to make us enjoy them. I don’t really have any interest in enjoying my dog’s cancer journey, but I absolutely do have a commitment to not becoming defeated by it. So how do we do that? Pick whatever circumstance that you have in your life that is most challenging right now, the one that is holding you down, holding you back, having you feeling hopeless or defeated, think about that circumstance.
How would you rather feel instead? Because however we feel about the circumstances in our lives right now is simply created by the story we’re telling ourselves about it. And that story, my friends, that story was probably not a story that you chose for yourself. It was a story that somebody offered you. You’re not required to hang on to that story. Even if everybody around you has a really strong story about your circumstances.
No matter what’s happening in your life, you are not required to believe that this is the end, that this is the thing that keeps you from having the life that you want, that this is the event that limits your future. You’re not required to ever believe that. There’s always another option for something to believe. And it may seem bold to believe something completely different than everybody else around you, and especially those of us with a scientific background very much based in facts and logic.
You might even feel a little bit foolish to consider believing something that isn’t obviously and logically true. But with that in mind, I would ask you to question the thing that you believe right now. Are you sure that that is true as well? There are so many things in this life. So few things in this life, I should say there are so few things in this life that are actually fact.
The quality of our lives is determined by the quality of our thinking. And our stories that we carry with us throughout our lifetime depend or create our well being. The stories that we carry with us throughout our lifetime create our well being. Those stories are not stories that we create initially with intention. They are stories that we adopt. And so we have been taught as part of this human experience to live by these rules that we never chose for ourselves.
We have been taught that certain circumstances will result in certain emotional experiences, and that is just never true. We are not required to have and hold on to a particular emotional experience around any set of circumstances. Now, I’m not saying that negative emotion doesn’t have its place, because of course it does. But what I am trying to point out to all of us here and remind all of us about is that how long we stay there is always optional.
We can look at the circumstances of our lives and we can feel overwhelmed or frustrated or defeated or afraid. That is completely normal. But we can also decide how long we stay in that emotion. Because as long as we continue to spiral in a thought pattern. So in a story that creates those types of emotions, we will not move forward. We will then become trapped by the circumstances themselves.
And we will believe that the only way to move forward is to fix the circumstances. My friends, it’s so much easier Than that just because you’re offered by your mind an automatic negative story that results in a whole bucket load of negative emotion does not mean that’s the only option for you. You get to decide what you believe about everything that’s happening to you and around you in your life.
So when that automatic negative pops up and you initially feel overwhelmed, frustrated, angry, defeated, scared, that’s okay. There’s a story that you’re telling yourself that’s creating that for you. And you can acknowledge that story and then still ask yourself what next? That’s where optimism comes in. That’s not trying to paint over the factual reality of what is. Because there are factual circumstances in our lives, but you are not required to believe the negative opinion about those circumstances.
This can really release you from a lot of overwhelm and a lot of just defeatist perspective. If you will allow yourself to consider this. Take for example, let’s come back to my dog who has a bone tumor. I can look at that situation from a very logical veterinary perspective and feel pretty certain that that is going to come back as osteosarcoma. And because I have a veterinary degree and I understand what historically the prognosis is for a dog with osteosarcoma, I can then consider how much time he might have left.
And I can spend that time feeling sad and overwhelmed and defeated and hopeless. I could go into a story that I’m a veterinary professional and I’m not going to be able to save my dog. But how does that help me live my life? And how does that help me enjoy the time that I do have right now and what’s real in this moment? Because in this moment, that pet is still alive.
In this moment, we don’t have anything to grieve yet. This is where we get our power back. So I can look at it and I can make different decisions. I can make decisions on how I can help him to feel more comfortable. And those are the kinds of decisions that we made. And then I can navigate whatever happens next. So a decision to amputate his leg was I felt very good about that decision, not because I anticipated a cure, but because I anticipated improved, well being.
Once he got through his surgery, what I didn’t anticipate was a really bad post op infection, but that’s what we got. And so in that moment, I definitely felt a little bit overwhelmed and frustrated. And I spent a minute feeling guilty for putting him through the surgery. And then I came back to the truth, which is it’s not useful for me or for him to stay there. What can I do in this moment?
What choices are still available to me? So I made some new choices. We sought some treatment. And now today we have to wait, right? So we always just have to wait to see how the circumstances unfold. But in that moment when I was making some new decisions, when I was realizing we still had choices, whether or not, you know, I could have chose euthanasia at that point, I could have chosen treatment of some sort.
I could have chosen super aggressive treatment, put him in the hospital, put them on IV fluids and all the things. Or I could have chosen something in the middle of the road which was, let’s try some antibiotics and drain it and see if it gets better. That’s the route that we went, because that’s the route that I chose. None of those decisions would have been wrong. Let me point this out.
None of those decisions, euthanasia, aggressive hospitalization, or outpatient treatment, none of those would have been wrong choices. They were all just simply the next choice I could make. But if I had stayed in this place of believing that it was a bad idea to put him through surgery and gotten stuck on this idea that if I’d never gone to surgery, then he never would have been in this situation, that doesn’t help anybody.
It certainly doesn’t help him. And it absolutely does nothing for my well being or putting me into my power. Instead, it gives all my power away to a past decision that’s already over. The decisions of the past can really limit our future only to the extent that we continue to carry around a negative story about those decisions. There’s never an upside to carrying forward a negative story about anything that’s already done.
Hear me when I say that there is never an upside to carrying forward a negative story about anything that is already done. And so whether you’re talking about something like an ill pet or you’re talking about something different, right, Some other circumstance in your life, something you’re going through within your family, a personal diagnosis, something that’s happening in the world, something that’s happening to a friend of yours and that’s weather related, that’s ended up being devastated for masses, large numbers of people.
No matter what it is in our lives that’s going on that is creating chaos, the story you tell yourself about it is going to determine how you move forward through it. My friends, time will keep passing no matter what we decide. So we get to decide for ourselves. Are we going to choose a perspective that empowers us as we navigate the chaos or Are we going to curl up and accept defeat believing the lies that the circumstances creating the chaos itself have more power than we do as individual humans?
I hope you won’t choose that, because what I know to be true is that you are more powerful than any circumstance that comes your way. Any circumstance. You are more powerful than any circumstance. That power doesn’t mean that you’re going to be able to change the circumstances, and nor does it mean that those circumstances need to be different before you can feel better. That’s not necessary at all.
And this is what we really have to learn as we keep being offered chaotic circumstances, which we will continue to be offered as we go through our lives. Every chaotic circumstance is not an invitation for you to try harder to control things. Every chaotic circumstance is not an opportunity for you to work more to create a different circumstance. Every chaotic circumstance is not evidence that you did something wrong and brought this on yourself.
Never believe those lies. Your mind will offer you those stories, but it’s just not true. It all relies on a faulty story that we are told generationally, which ties your circumstances to your emotions. Circumstances never create emotions, only story does. That’s one of the very first things we have to keep reminding ourselves of, that whatever’s happening around us or to us is just circumstance. And therefore, because it’s just circumstance, it really is neutral.
Now, that doesn’t mean that we won’t experience emotion and I would even say associated with the circumstance. But to come back to tell you just one more time, it’s not the circumstance that creates the emotion. It is whatever the story is that we tell ourselves and the stories that we carry forward in our lives. Especially when you notice something happens and then you feel a certain way immediately, that story is so deeply integrated into your thought processes that you don’t even recognize the story itself.
This is where we have to be curious. This is where we have to be compassionate with ourselves. First, we have to remember that there’s always a story we carry about everything. That story is a thought. It’s a thought, it’s an opinion, it’s a belief, it’s a conclusion that we’re drawing. Some version of those things is creating the story that we hold about whatever the chaotic circumstances are right now.
And that story, if it has us feeling defeated and overwhelmed and hopeless, if that’s the story that we hold on to, we will have a hard time moving forward. So use these moments of chaos to recognize how you’re feeling emotionally. And when you recognize that you’re feeling emotionally bad, be curious Ask yourself, what am I believing about this? How am I believing that this limits what happens next?
How am I believing that this is somehow ruining my future? And then remind yourself that nothing gets to ruin your future without your permission, that there is no circumstance big enough to devalue you as a human in this world. Remind yourself that no matter what happens to you and around you, you are infinitely worthy and valuable simply because you exist. And even go one step further and consider that maybe everything that happens to you and around you is intentional and is for your good, ultimately, because I absolutely believe that it is.
I’ve lived long enough and been through enough seasons of chaos to be able to confidently say that there is never a waste in the challenges that we come up against. There are certainly seasons of life that really just feel like getting beat up over and over and over again. But what I can promise you is that those seasons are teaching you things. They’re helping you to gain awareness about yourself and clarity about what you want for the future.
Sometimes we have to come face to face with what we don’t want in order to gain clarity about what we do want. And it’s not until we start focusing on what we do want that we can create it. The chaos can’t keep you from thriving in the future. I promise you that. I promise you there is no wasted challenge. So if you are stuck in a season of chaos right now, just know it’s not permanent.
And just understand that how long you stay there is something that you have a lot of control over. When you choose to step into your power, when you choose the perspective of the chaos that you want for yourself. I know it can feel scary. I know often we are faced with making decisions that are decisions we never thought we would have to make. We might be faced with making a choice that people around us wouldn’t agree with, but you never needed their validation to make the decisions for you.
You don’t need anybody outside of you telling you what to do next, because you already know if you will give yourself the time and the space to consider independently what it is that you want for yourself. The most important thing that any of us can do in this lifetime is be exactly who we are. And in these moments of chaos, there’s opportunity for us to examine ourselves, to watch what we do, and to recognize what we believe.
I think it’s quite fascinating as we go through these things, especially if we will do it with compassion and curiosity. I think it’s quite fascinating how these periods and these seasons of chaos can really be fundamental in crafting who we are. It’s not that you’re not already that person, I should say. It’s that we are so taught to be a certain way by the world around us. And it’s not until we get into these moments of chaos where it seems like everything gets stripped away, that we are reminded who we always were to begin with.
My friend, you were always powerful, you were always worthy, you always mattered. Your well being has never been dependent on your achievements. It has never been in danger from your circumstances. You are so much more powerful than that. And when you really understand that your power is unshakable, then the circumstances become something that we no longer fear. The chaos can be something that we observe without making it mean that what comes next is limited or scary.
As you go through the next few weeks and the next few months, especially if you are finding yourself in a season of chaos right now, I want you to just consider that who you are and what is possible for you is not dependent on the chaos at all. The chaos does not have to be resolved before you get to move forward. We can watch it spin all around us and still make decisions for ourselves.
And as we continue, and as we really start to gain momentum as a collective in making decisions individually that are right for us, then the chaos for all of us will start to settle. The chaos doesn’t mean that something’s going wrong, my friends. It doesn’t mean that there’s something we have to fix before we can thrive. Seasons of chaos are just part of the human experience. They are opportunities to get to know ourselves more thoroughly.
And they are opportunities to practice reminding ourselves that no matter what, we are infinitely valuable and worthy simply because we exist. All right, my friends, Use these periods of chaos to remind yourself of your power. Go forward with anticipation of good things ahead and optimism about your future. I’ll see you soon. Bye for now.