Our experience in veterinary medicine is determined by our thoughts about it.
Habit thoughts…
Thoughts we’ve been imprinted with from those around us (parents, teachers, colleagues, clients, media, etc.)…
Thoughts we haven’t intentionally chosen for ourselves…
So WHY?
Why are some of us greatly influenced by others, and some of us are not?
Why are some of us able to quickly embrace and implement the skill of intentional thinking, and others of us struggle?
Why do some of us have seemingly endless energy, and others of us are just done after a few hours?
Why do some of us thrive in veterinary practice, and others of us totally burn out?
Many of us seek to answer these questions through personality assessments… and we do find part of the answer there…. sometimes.
But it never explains all of it… all of the differentiation between us…
And where we recognize we are different makes many of us question our value, our worth, our decisions…
We feel “less than” when we don’t measure up to the ones who we believe are doing it right…
For myself, I’ve just known in my soul that what makes us different is intentional…
that being different isn’t a problem…
that being like everyone else isn’t the solution…
But, our society doesn’t embrace our differences.
Modern culture finds safety and order in everyone being the same.
It doesn’t work because it goes against the unique nature of who we are…
In this episode, I introduce the science of Human Design… the science that explains our differentiation.
Through Human Design we can find the answers to WHY our experiences are soooo different…
why those differences result in different experiences…
and how we can use the unique blueprint of our human design as a tool to navigate our lives, and the role that veterinary medicine plays in it.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
What does your birthdate have to do with your experience in veterinary medicine? That's what we're talking about in Episode 47. Welcome to the Joyful DVM Podcast. I'm your host, Veterinarian, and Certified Life Coach, Cari Wise. Whether you're dealing with the challenges in Vet Med, struggling with self-confidence, or you're just trying to figure out how to create a life and a career that you actually enjoy, you'll find encouragement, education, and empowering concepts, you can apply right away. Let's get started. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Episode 47. Today, we're going to talk about the link between your experience in veterinary medicine and your unique human design. As we get started, I've identified, there are basically two populations of people in vet med careers. There are those who enjoy their careers and really never want to do anything else. Those are called the lifers, and then there's everybody else called the others. Everybody else or the others tend to have a varied level of career regret. There's usually a lot of stress, anxiety, and maybe even some resentment experienced by the others. Many of the others feel trapped in their careers; trapped by their choices. They feel a little bit helpless and they may feel pretty better overall. I don't know about you, but when I was in full-time veterinary practice, I fell into the category of the others. When it comes to veterinary medicine, stress just comes with the job. The lifers have likely figured out how to manage that stress in a predominantly healthy fashion. The others, not so much. To cope with stress, the others often are blaming other people and they're feeling very angry. This makes a lot of sense because anger feels powerful and so anger becomes a coping mechanism for stress and anxiety. There's also probably a lot of buffering going on to cope with the stress for the others. Buffering is when you take an external activity or substance, and you use that to cover up the way that you feel. So like eating, alcohol, drugs, shopping, sex, things like that. It never leads to a long-term desired outcome. But at the moment, the buffering activity feels better than the other emotions that we're experiencing. Then there's self-judgment. Self-judgment, decreasing our confidence, decreasing our self-esteem, hopelessness, these all become an actual buffer for stress. We focus instead of on the stressful events on ourselves. We turn inward and so judgment and decreasing self-confidence, decreasing self-esteem and the result in hopelessness kind of concluding I've failed at life, I failed in my career, become a buffering and coping mechanism of their own. Now, the problem with understanding stress is that it's a bucket emotion. It's an emotion that is a catchall for many different types of uncomfortable feelings. The ability to learn to manage stress depends then on what that bucket actually contains. Just trying to deal with stress is never going to create the result that we want. We've got to understand what's in the bucket. What ends up in the bucket is determined by lots of factors and only a few of them are actually related to veterinary medicine itself. In general, lifers differ from the others in two areas: slightly better skills at handling stress and fewer items in their stress buckets. But why? There are really two reasons. Number one, at some point, the lifers have learned either through intentional study or through their experience, that the way we feel is controlled by the way we think. They keep their head in the game. They stay focused on what's important to them individually, and they don't allow the things that they can't control to pull them down. Number two, their unique human design was created for this kind of work. This is their purpose and part of their individual life mission. So what about the rest of us? What about the others? Are we screwed up? Did we mess up our lives by going into veterinary medicine? Do we need to just give it up altogether? No! Not at all. The others are full of potential and possibility. There are actually lifers hiding among the others. For these guys, learning about the true origin of emotion and taking back sole responsibility for their emotional well-being is usually enough to get them headed back in the right direction of their life purpose. Now I'm not saying it's easy, but it's relatively simple and exactly the work we do, teach, practice, and support inside of VetLlife Academy. This cognitive behavior anchored concepts are applicable to every human, in every aspect of life, even those who don't turn out to be dormant lifers. But if you do this work and you find you're not a dormant lifer, then what? Well, there's another piece to this life puzzle. As we clean up our thinking and take ownership of our emotions, many of us recognize we are restless. That something is off or missing. That it's not just stressed that's keeping us from leaving our jobs. We realize we are not dormant lifers. Over the years, I've done a lot of digging, researching, and soul searching to try to understand what makes this vet med experience so different for some. Here's what I know for sure. It's not that we aren't strong enough. It's not that we're not smart enough. It's not that we're not skilled enough. And it's not that we aren't dedicated enough. Though this is what many of us start to believe, it's just not true. The difference is that we are intentionally designed to experience vet med in a non-traditional way. For some, that means an alternative career path within the veterinary umbrella. For others, it means vet med was always intended to only be a piece of your journey, not the ultimate purpose-filled destination. So how do we know? This is a question human beings have been considering and seeking answers to for centuries. Why do I exist? What is my purpose? Eastern and Western astrology, Chinese teaching, the Kabbalah, the Hindu chakra system, and even quantum physics have been created and utilized to try to answer these questions. Alone, each provides fascinating information and realizations. Together, the life blueprint they create is magical. Human design sometimes called the science of differentiation is the result of the synthesis of those modalities. It takes into consideration our unique genetic code, the influence of planetary positioning and movement, subatomic particles and the atomic particles that make up matter that creates the physical representation of who we are. It considers energy and how we are influenced by it at a cellular level. It synthesizes all of this into a blueprint, unique to each of us, based on the moment of our birth. The blueprint itself is complex and multilayered, but within it are truths, wisdom, and explanations for many of our greatest questions of why. At the most basic level, human design describes five designs of humans called types. I've begun gathering the data to support the conclusions I've made about the relationship between human design type and veterinary medicine career experience. What separates the lifers from the others is their unique human design. That data collection will be ongoing, and in the meantime, there is so much to learn and share. There is an unprecedented opportunity for you to really understand and embrace that you are not an accident. You are not a mistake. You are perfectly and uniquely you on purpose at this moment in time. Your journey was intentional. The confusion you have felt, the stress you have experienced, the hopelessness that may have come from believing you were broken or less than everyone else, human design explains it all. We were never supposed to be the same. We are designed intentionally to be different. The human design shows us how perfectly and beautifully and intentionally different we really are. I know this is a lot to take in. I know you've got questions. I know you're skeptical. You should be. I was too. So first, if you're wondering what human design does to all we've learned about cognitive and the Think-Feel-Act cycles, bottom line, it proves it. It all comes down to science. Light is made of photons which are particles of energy. Thoughts create a photon storm in our brains. That photon storm, that light, that energy creates matter. Specifically, it creates neurotransmitters and that's what creates our emotional experience. Thoughts create feelings. Light creates matter. It all comes back to science. Human design helps us understand the influence of the energy or of the light, and it shows us how to interact with it in a healthy way to be who we were designed to be. For all the rest of the questions, don't you worry. I've created the Human Design Basics Bootcamp. The first run of this level one Human Design Basics Bootcamp will be kicking off really soon. Vet Life Academy members listen up. You're getting the level one Bootcamp for free. I've decided to include it with your Vet Life Academy membership and for everybody else, if you want to learn more about the Human Design Basics Bootcamp, just jump over to joyfuldvm.com/humandesign to learn all about it. We'd love to have you join us. Inside the Bootcamp, we're going to learn all about the five human design types. Within those types, we're going to learn about the strategy for decision-making associated with each one. You're going to run your own individual human design chart so that we can take look at it and start to see how the different components of your chart have influenced the experience that you've had in the world and what you can do to adjust your experience based on what's best for your type. Those adjustments, friends, much easier to make than you would ever imagine. Many people, when they first see their human design blueprint, they get choked up. They get overwhelmed with emotion. That was absolutely my case. I'm going to tell you, I had no idea what that colorful little chart meant. Like I said, lots of layers here in the human design chart. But when you see it, you'll connect with it in a way that you really can't describe. It's fascinating. I really want you to experience that for yourself. So if this is interesting to you, if you've been drawn to personality assessments to try to understand yourself better, this is the best way to go. It's not subjective. Your chart is what it is based on your birthdate, location, and time. Once you have that snapshot, the blueprint of who you are, you can then begin to understand how you've interacted with the world, why you've had more energy or less energy, why your decision-making may have been simple or difficult, and how to use all of your charts to your advantage, to live into exactly what it is that you were designed to be and do in the first place. It's all there. In the Basics Bootcamp, as I said, we're going to look at the profiles. We're going to look at the five different types. We're going to get to know our individual strategies. We're going to understand our individual authorities. That is the heart of human design and you're going to live there understanding yourself at a level you didn't even think was possible. Alright, my friends, I know I've left you with a lot to consider, and I think I've left you with enough to ponder for now. So let's wrap it here for this week and I'll see you next time. Thank you for listening to the Joyful DVM Podcast. If you'd like to learn more about the concepts and ideas discussed here, and how to apply them to your own life to create confidence and empowerment for yourself, you'll love Vet Life Academy. To check it out and learn more, visit joyfuldvm.com/vetlifeacademy. And if you're loving this podcast, I'd appreciate it, if you'd share it with your friends and leave us a review on iTunes. We can change what's possible in Vet Med together.