In Episode 220 of the Joyful DVM podcast, Dr. Cari Wise addresses a universal yet often emotionally charged topic in the veterinary profession: leaving a job. She explores why it’s perfectly okay to move on; and how to do it with integrity, clarity, and grace. Whether you’re running toward a new opportunity or running away from a challenging environment, this episode provides practical wisdom and encouragement for navigating professional transitions without burning bridges.
Key Takeaways:
- You Don’t Need Permission to Leave: Your desire to move on is valid, even if others don’t understand it. The most important thing is that you like your reason for leaving.
- Clarity is Power: Understanding why you want to leave — whether you’re running from discomfort or running toward opportunity — is crucial. The latter tends to lead to more fulfilling results.
- Avoid the “Same Situation, Different Clinic” Trap: If you’re only trying to escape a bad experience without fully understanding the root cause, you may end up recreating that experience in your next role.
- Small Profession, Big Connections: The veterinary world is tightly knit. Leaving with grace preserves relationships that might benefit you in the future.
- Preserve Your Peace: Departing from a job should be an act of empowerment, not destruction. You owe it to yourself to walk away in a way that maintains your integrity and peace of mind.
Resources & Links:
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- Facebook: www.facebook.com/JoyfulDVM/
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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. Hi friends, welcome back to the Joyful DVM podcast. Here in episode 220, we’re going to be talking about leaving our jobs and moving on to other things.
It’s an episode that I titled Leaving Gracefully. And it’s something that we all encounter is this changing of jobs, or at least most of us do. So let’s face it, most of us in the veterinary profession don’t get hired into a job and stay there for our entire careers. Now I’m not saying that that doesn’t happen for some people, but, but for the vast majority of us, that is not the experience that we have when it comes to leaving a job.
I get a lot of questions over here at Joyful dvm, so I wanted to run through some of my tips and tricks for navigating these changes of position with grace so that you not only have a good experience for yourself, but that you also don’t burn any bridges along the way. The veterinary profession is pretty small. It may seem like there’s just tons of us and that we will never encounter each other again, but odds are we will come across each other in the future, or at least come across people who know other people that we know.
You know, it’s that whole nine degrees of separation, but it’s much, much smaller in the veterinary world. And so with that in mind, I think it’s important for us to consider the way that we leave our jobs so that we can kind of preserve all of the relationships that we have, because you never know when those relationships are going to come back around and be useful for you in the future.
To start off, we have to ask ourselves, why do we want to leave? Whenever we’re looking for a new position, there’s something that is driving that action. So why is it that we want to leave? And I want to start off and just say, you can want to leave simply because you want to. You don’t have to have a great big reason that everybody is going to agree with.
You don’t have to justify your decision to anybody. But I do think it is very important that you alone like your reason and more so that you understand it. So knowing that you want to leave is great. That’s clarity that many of us need to come to. But let’s get a little bit more curious and dig a little bit deeper to understand what is motivating us to make this change.
It really comes down to one of two things. We’re either running away from something or we’re running toward something different. Now, no surprise here. It’s always going to be in your best interest to be running toward something that you want as opposed to running away from something that you don’t. The reason is because if we are just making a change to get away from a circumstance, then we are likely to repeat those same experiences in the new position.
So understanding the difference is really critical. Let’s take a look at the idea of running away from a job as a motivator to change to start with. Now, the number one time that I think running away is 100% fine is when you bounce up against your deal breakers. For me, there are three deal breakers. Those deal breakers are anything within a current position that violates my own personal morals, ethics, or values.
Now I know what those boundaries are for me. So what would be a moral, ethical or values disconnect? And so for you, you’re going to have to decide that for yourself. For me, when I’m in any job, I don’t care how much I like it. I don’t care how much I get paid. I don’t care how much I enjoy the staff or the clients or the schedule or anything else.
If I am being forced to compromise or being expected, I should say to compromise my own personal morals, ethics or values as part of my employment. For me, that’s a deal breaker. And so I will run away from that. Meaning I will choose to terminate employment with that organization if there is an expectation of me violating my own personal morals, ethics and values. That’s really the only time that I encourage running away as your motivator.
And it kind of sounds a little bit harsh to consider that to be a running away. And the reason I put it in that category is because oftentimes when we come up against something in the position that is such an overt violation of our morals, ethics or values, we often don’t see it coming or we become aware of it in such a short period of time that we don’t necessarily have a plan for for what we’re going to do next.
At least that has been my experience. In my experience, when I’ve bumped up against this, and it’s become so clear to me that there is an expectation of Violating my own personal morals, ethics or values. It is important for me to disconnect from that job quickly. And so when this has happened in the past, and thankfully in 25 plus years, it hasn’t happened very many times, maybe two or three times.
But when it has happened for me, it has been important that I end that relationship immediately in every situation. I didn’t have another job lined up. I did, however, trust that I would be able to find different employment. And I always was able to. And I think even in this day and age, that’s even more likely. There are so many opportunities for veterinary professionals to find work. So if you’re up against something that is requiring you to violate your own morals, ethics or values, then that might be a time when you make a change kind of swiftly or somewhat spur the moment before you have your next thing lined up.
It’s not ideal, it’s not for everybody. Many of us can’t deal with the stress and the uncertainty of not having a job. And there’s nothing wrong with that. In that case, if you do notice that you are in a position that’s requiring you to violate your own personal morals, ethics or values, then just start looking right now for something different. And remember that whatever the next job is doesn’t have to be the job forever.
You don’t have to wait until you find a perfect job, especially in this kind of situation, before you make a change. You might just be finding a job to fill the gap while you look for something that’s going to be more long term. So deal breakers being present. For me, that would be morals, ethics and values. For you, whatever your deal breakers are, that would be what I would consider kind of the more acceptable reason to run away as your motive for changing jobs.
Another reason that we often run away from a job is because of the stress and unhappiness that we feel. So we are very unhappy in our own jobs. We feel very stressed a lot of the time, we feel a lot of anxiety, and we have then decided that it is the job itself that is creating that emotional experience and that pull downward on our well being. And so we run away from those circumstances as a method of trying to feel better.
This really gets tied into job hopping. It’s something that many, many of us have used to cope with our veterinary careers. It’s the way that many of us have managed to keep going is by changing jobs on a regular basis. Now, here’s the thing about job hopping. It actually kind of works, at least in the short term. I know for Me, it’s something that I didn’t realize I was doing until I looked back at this pattern over several years, and I realized that every two to three years I would change jobs.
And when I really got curious about why I was doing that, it was because I was running away from stress and anxiety. And I was really believing that a different situation, so a different job, a different organization, a different role, would create a scenario in which I didn’t feel stressed and overwhelmed and unhappy. Now, that didn’t end up being true. And the reason is because it’s never our circumstances that create the emotional experiences themselves.
The circumstances are always neutral. So the people we work with, the hours that we work, how much we get paid, how many appointments that we see in a day, then other people who work there, the types of clients that we see, all of those circumstances. So the facts of what happens day in and day out, none of that actually creates emotion. It’s what we believe about it that creates emotion.
Now, that doesn’t mean that we should just, like, change our mind and decide that everything is happy and wonderful. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m not trying to say let’s make a positive story out of what we really do believe is a negative situation. What I’m recommending is that we analyze the situation for ourselves and determine, is there something here that doesn’t fit for me? Is, is there some kind of job misalignment that a circumstance change would be in my best interest because I want different circumstances, not because I’m blaming the current circumstances for creating my unhappy situation?
Those are very different things. And the world teaches us that it is our circumstances that create our emotional experiences. So if somebody says, why are you stressed out? It’s very likely that we’re going to say, because I euthanized a dog today, or because Mrs. Smith was really rude in the room, or because I worked four hours over my shift again for the third shift in a row. Those are all actually just circumstances.
And none of those things actually can create stress or unhappiness. It’s everything else that we believe about that. And when we get caught in believing that the circumstances themselves are responsible for our emotional experiences, then we keep trying to change and fix our circumstances as a path to feeling better. Here, here’s the spoiler on this one. Once you finally find or land or create the perfect job, and then you notice that you’re still unhappy or stressed, then you’re going to run out of places to run to.
And the good news is that you don’t have to wait until you have the perfect circumstances for you before you can start to be happy day in and day out and start to feel less stressed. This comes back to things that I’ve talked about many, many times before in prior episodes and things that we, we work with in the joyful DVM programs, which is really understanding that the way that we feel day in and day out is something that we get to control, that we don’t have to be a victim of our circumstances.
Job hopping is a little indicator that we’re still believing that our circumstances are responsible for our well being. And if you keep hopping enough to job after job after job, you will draw a conclusion that you’re not cut out for this profession, that you never should have done this in the first place, that going into vet med was the worst decision ever. That’s a very common path for veterinary professionals to go down when they have tried many jobs and they just keep being unhappy and stressed and anxious.
Now, my friends, hear me when I say it’s not the responsibility of the job to make you happy. You’re way more powerful than any circumstance of your job. You have the ability within yourself to navigate all of this and to create well being for yourself. No matter what happens at work, things are going to happen in veterinary medicine that have been happening for as long as veterinary medicine has existed.
You’re going to have clients who are jerks. You’re going to have euthanasias, you’re going to have patients that die unexpectedly. You’re going to have complaints and bad reviews and all kinds of crazy workplace drama. Those things are just part of the job. And none of them can ruin your well being without your permission. That’s the piece that nobody ever taught us. We were never taught that we actually control our own emotional well being.
No matter what happens at work, that’s the most important thing that you can learn. So as you’re starting to look for another position, I want you to be curious and ask yourself, am I running away from stress and unhappiness? Am I believing that another place will make me happy? Because even though you will feel better for a while, the old habit of stress and anxiety and whatever the things were that were bothering you in the last job are likely going to pop up again.
And that’s not because it’s everywhere. It’s because of the way that the brain identifies what’s important to it. And so if we have not worked through and truly understood what is creating our initial experiences and we’re Believing if we just change our circumstances, those experiences won’t happen again, then we likely are just going to end up creating the same experience for ourselves. I know that sounds really strange, but believe me, if you’ve hopped jobs enough times to draw a conclusion that Vet Med is just all screwed up and all places are toxic and Vet Med was the worst decision ever, then that is simply your indicator that you’re still believing that your circumstances are responsible for your emotional well being.
And that’s full of opportunity then for you to learn how to leverage your circumstances and your perspective to create a different experience for yourself, which puts you right back into your own power. So running Away we justify running away from jobs by identifying circumstances that we don’t like. And I’m not saying we need to agree with those circumstances, but what I am saying is that even bad circumstances don’t have the ability to ruin your day without your permission.
Learning how to leverage your perspective to create that for yourself, a concept that I call leveraging the space that is critical not only in creating a sustainable career experience in veterinary medicine, but also in your whole entire life. Now, the other part that we talked about when it comes to leaving your job is running toward something different. And that is always in your best interest. So rather than running away, so remember there’s the acceptable running away, which is you’re just getting away from a situation that’s expecting you to violate your own personal morals, ethics and values versus the other kind of running away, which is that coping mechanism of job hopping to try to outrun your stress and anxiety.
The better motivator to change jobs is to be running toward something different that you want. Now let me give you some examples of this Running towards something that you want. Perhaps you want to live somewhere different geographically, a different town, a different state, a different country. Then leaving a job to pursue living in a different location would be running towards something that you want. There’s no shame or guilt or frustration that needs to come along with that at all.
We really like our reason. We want to live somewhere different. So we’re going to leave this job to go toward a job in the location where we want to live. Another example of running towards something would be running toward a new role. So maybe you’re changing jobs because you’re going to accept some kind of promotion. Maybe you’re going to step into leadership. That would be an example of leaving a job, running toward something that you want.
Another example would be because you want to pursue a different discipline. So maybe you’ve been in general Practice, and now you want to try in home euthanasia, or maybe you want to start providing relief work services, or maybe you want to change to emergency work, that would be running towards something different that you want. Another example would be changing altogether. So leaving practice, maybe what you want to do is you actually now are ready to pursue a job in industry or a job in teaching or even something like high volume spay neuter.
Those would all be examples of running toward something as your motivator to leave your current job. Another example of this would be running toward new circumstances. Now, I know I just said we don’t want to run away from circumstances when I was talking earlier, and this is true. We don’t want to run away from circumstances, from the belief that the circumstances are going to make us feel better.
We can, however, run towards circumstances that are different or better than what we have. So if we want to run toward perhaps a job that has better pay, or run toward a job that has a better schedule, and when I say better, you know what that means is going to be different from each and every, for each and every one of us, right? So what is better than what we have is going to be very subjective and it’s going to be very individualized.
And with this in mind, it’s completely fine to change jobs simply because you want a job where you make more money or you have a different schedule. No problem with that whatsoever. But I want to give you one little tip here before you make a change based on one of those two things. So better pay, better schedule, I would probably even throw in there better duty. So maybe you don’t want to do surgery anymore, and so you’re looking for a job where you don’t have to do surgery.
And so you’re running toward a job where you’re not required to be a surgeon in any of those types of situations. If you actually like where you work now, so the place that you’re looking to leave, you actually like the practice, you like the people that you work with, you like the types of clients that you see, you like the type of medicine that you are able to practice in general.
If you like the culture, if overall you actually like where you’re at, you just want better pay or better schedule or different duties. Then before you leave your job in search of a job that has those things, I highly encourage you to have a conversation with your current employer and ask for the things that you want. So if you want a different salary, have a conversation with your current employer and ask for a different salary.
If you want a different schedule, have a conversation with your current employer and ask for a different schedule. If you want different job duties, have a conversation with your current employer and ask for different job duties. I know that it is scary to have these kinds of conversations. These conversations are what I call high value conversations. Because you’re going to feel nervous having the conversation. It’s a puke on your shoes kind of moment.
But here’s what I also know. I also know that from a business perspective it is far better to keep a current employee than to hire and train a new one. And so if you actually do like where you work, you just want some different circumstances like an adjustment in pay or schedule or duties, then it is absolutely worth your time to go ahead and have that conversation. It’s the easy way out to just quit and find something different.
But if you really do actually like where you work, then go ahead and do the scary thing, have the nervous conversation. Because you may be stuck, stunned at what is actually available to you if you just make it clear what it is that you’re looking for. So before you just ditch and go somewhere else, leave a place where you really like the environment, the culture, the leadership, the people you work with, give yourself the chance to have that high value conversation.
And even if you have that conversation and the answer is no, it is still worth your time to have the conversation. Because you’re teaching yourself that you have the ability to have conversations that can be a little bit uncomfortable, but that are worth it because you’re standing up and you’re asking for what you need in your life. It actually helps to build your self confidence to have these conversations no matter what the outcome ends up being.
When you’re getting ready to change jobs, I also want you to not forget these other things to consider. So take a look at your contract. If you have a contract or you have some kind of employment agreement, before you make a change, it’s important that you remind yourself things like how much notice have you agreed to give before you move on? Do you have a non compete and is the place where you’re going within the boundaries or is it outside of those boundaries?
And then also is it likely that that non compete is even going to be an issue? There’s a lot of conversation about around whether or not non competes are even viable anymore. So if you’re up against a situation where you’re wanting to go to a place that’s inside of your non compete, it would be worth your time to get some legal counsel on that. If you’re afraid it’s going to be an issue and then something else to consider, especially if you haven’t been in your current position for very long, is to take a look at any kind of bonus repayment that you might have.
So if you did a sign on bonus, if they have some other kind of perk that’s tied to how long you’ve worked there, go back and remind yourself what the terms of that are. Some places, if you leave in a certain period of time, have, have a repayment clause in there. So you’re going to want to make sure that you remember that before you make a change. The bottom line is that it’s not a bad thing to leave your job.
It’s not a bad thing to change your veterinary position for something different. The key here is to make sure that you are running toward what you want whenever possible. That you’re doing it from a place of empowerment and not victimization. That you’re standing up for what it is that you want in your life and you’re pursuing what it is that you want to experience as opposed to running away and hiding from things that you don’t.
I know it seems like that ultimately you would get to the same place, right, a different job, but the way that you get there. So running toward it versus running away from something else really does have a big influence, not only in, in your overall well being, but also in the satisfaction of the next position. And if in some way, unfortunately, you find yourself currently in a job that is expecting you to violate your own personal morals, ethics, values or anything else that you identify as a deal breaker and you need to make a change swiftly, I want you to remember that there are lots of different jobs out there.
That whatever you do next doesn’t have to be the thing that you do forever. And that’s true for any job change. And that ultimately you can always change your job simply because you want to. And you don’t have to have some reason to justify your choice. Because the only one who has to like your reason is you. All right, my friends, that’s going to wrap it up for this week.
If this has been helpful, I hope you’ll share it with a friend. See you soon. Bye for now.