Do you know that you can predict your future? You’ve been doing it, even if you haven’t been aware. This is actually good news, because when you learn how it works, you can begin leveraging your ability to create what you want.
There are three things that block your ability to maximize your future-creating superpower. In this episode I share what those blockers are, and what you can do to move beyond them so you can take control of your life.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is auto-generated and may contain typos. Predicting the future, how you have the ability to do this for yourself. That's what we're talking about in episode 93. I'm Dr. Cari Wise, and this is the Joyful DVM Podcast. Hello my friends. Welcome to episode 93. Today's episode is a little bit different because I'm sharing the audio version of a Facebook Live that I did last week. In this episode, I talked about predicting the future, both your ability and mine. So take a listen and I'll see you on the other side since I hope you're having a fabulous Friday. It is bright and sunny here in central Missouri. The leaves are changing. It's beautiful outside, and this morning I felt really inspired to jump on it here and to talk to you a little bit about the future. I know right now in the state of the world that we're in, that there's a lot of opportunity to dread the future, to be afraid of what's coming, and there's a lot of conversation around that. But I want you to know that we don't have to give in to the doom and gloom. There's so much more available for each and every one of us. So today, I wanna predict your future a little bit, and if you'll just stick with me, I want you to see how it doesn't have to be more of the same. I know last few years have been a real challenge. I know that we've all been faced with things that we never anticipated we'd be dealing with, but here we are now, the beautiful thing about all of this is that you and I are both supposed to be living at this time in the world. We were made for all of this. We could even say that we intentionally chose to come here. But whatever you believe in regard to all of that, the truth is that we are here now. And that that means that you and I have exactly what it takes to navigate what we're up against, what we're facing, and what's coming in the future. We also have the power to create much of it for ourselves. And that's what I wanna talk about today. So when we think about the future, what I want you to ask yourself is, first of all, how does it feel for you? When you think about next week, next month, next year, what does the emotional feeling experience come with for you? Like what does that feel like? Do you feel dread? Do you feel fear? Do you feel anxiety? Do you feel a combination of all of that? Or do you feel excitement? Are you feeling anticipation? I know for a lot of us, it's more anxiety. It's the unknown, and that's a very natural experience. So let's just start there and own that, that that anxiety that a lot of us feel is not anything to feel shame about, to to believe that you shouldn't feel. Because this is uncertainty and our minds like predictability. It likes the status quo. The last few years have been anything but status quo. So as we look forward to the future then, and we don't know what's coming, or we look toward the future and we only see a repeating cycle of what has been most recently, it's very common for us to feel dread, to feel anxiety, to feel hopeless, quite honestly. And we add to that the career fields that we are in, where there's a lot of external pressure, there's a lot of expectations from the clients. There's life and death situations in our hospitals that just adds extra pressure. So it makes what was already challenging even more difficult. But it doesn't have to be. See, when we think about what's keeping us from being happy, what's keeping us from experiencing our lives in the way that we want to, it's very easy for us in veterinary medicine to start to list off a whole bunch of things. We can identify all the things that are keeping us from being happy in our jobs, can't we? That's pretty simple. So things like clients who are unhappy, patients that don't respond to treatment the way that we expect them to, all the unanticipated events, the emergencies that come in, the schedules that like, what's the point of a schedule sometimes, right? We have all the appointments there, but then it just, the wheels fall off. So those kinds of things have, are just part of the nature of our career field. So it's not anything necessarily different than it has always been. It just feels like it's amplified because of everything else that's going on the world. And quite honestly, it is a little bit amplified because the emotional experience for everybody is amplified right now because of this element of uncertainty that has been injected into our society across the globe. It's just front and center how little control we have. So if we think about then going back to what we were exploring, what is keeping us from being happy in our jobs is very easy for us to identify those things. We also identify things like the hours that we're working, the pay that we're making, maybe even the leadership of the organizations where we're working and our coworkers. So we can list all of those things. And so when we think about how can we be happy in our jobs, how can we be happy in our career fields, our mind automatically goes to those things to trying to figure out how to change those things. And if you've been on that path for a while, you realize that it doesn't really do any good. That you can try and try and try, but you can't change other people. You can't change what happens with a patient in front of you. You can't change how a client reacts and all of those things together, then that's what starts to stack up and create a lot of hopelessness for us because we feel stuck because we don't think we have any choices because we start to buy into the belief system that is so integrated in veterinary medicine that this is just the way that it is. But what I wanna offer you today is the question, is it? Is that true? Now, I started this out saying that I could predict your future and I can, I absolutely can predict the future for each and every one of us. And it is simply this. If we don't do anything different, then our future's not gonna look any different than our present. See what we created today, what we're experiencing today is the result of our reactions and behaviors and decisions before today. So all of our actions, our decisions, our behaviors, our beliefs before this moment created this moment. And if we want our future to be different, then we have to start acting, behaving and deciding differently today. Your future depends on what you do today. Your future does not depend on what happened before. This is a really powerful concept because so many of us wanna predict a future from the evidence of the past. And that just keeps us in a cycle of repeating the same things over and over and over again. Now when we look to creating something different for ourselves, it can feel a little bit daunting. Where do we even start? How can we break the cycle? Especially when you're in a career field like ours that has such a negative underlying narrative that everybody seems to buy into. Now, I say everybody with a little bit of hesitancy because I promise you it's not everybody. It feels like it's everybody. It seems like all the conversations are the same about being stuck about not being able to get ahead about never being able to be financially stable, about being stuck under student loan debt, about being a victim of the public. It seems like that's the reality of our career field, but my friends, it is not. It is the reality for many of us. But it is not the absolute, It is not the definite experience that we will all have. And I promise that none of us went into this career field hoping for that kind of experience. We didn't even believe that that kind of experience was what we were going to have when we started on this journey. I want you to remember that because that's important. It's important. If you didn't believe that the experience that you're having right now is the experience that you would have when you started on this path, don't so quickly dismiss what, dismiss what you believe you were going to have. Instead, start to recognize that you've just simply been taught to accept something different and that something different that you are accepting as the status quo. It is below the bar of what I would set for your life and what I hope that you would set for your life as well. You can change it. Your future depends on it. If you want something different, then you're gonna have to make a different approach. You can't keep repeating the same thing over and over again. But I also know that there are really three things that keep us stuck in this pattern. And I wanna show those to you here because if I show them to you, then you can become aware of them and how influential they are as you move forward. You also then can take that awareness and start to shift it around to leverage it to create something different. The number one thing that keeps us from creating something different for our future is simply overwhelmed. We are just so overwhelmed in the day in and day out of our current experience. We're exhausted, we're tired, we are reacting all day long to stimulus from all kinds of different positions. So whether it's at work and it's, you know, whatever the next case is or whatever your coworker needs or your boss needs, or you come home, it's what your family needs or it's your household chores or your needs of your pets, or if it's what's happening in the world, it's somebody's calling you up on the phone. You know, social media, all those things, all these inputs all the time create a lot of overwhelm. And when we're in a constant state of overwhelm, which tends to come along with a constant state of exhaustion, it's difficult to find any time and any space to even think about creating something different. So that's the first thing that we need to become aware of. How can we create a little more space, even just a fraction of time for ourselves so that we can really consider our current experience and decide what we want different? This is an actually, it's a gift that the human species is the only one that has that ability from the prefrontal cortex to be able to analyze your own situation. And so with that, being able to decide for yourself to think about what's happening, you can make some new changes, but if the overwhelm is keeping you from even being able to mentally get to a space where you consider, just trust me that if you can find just a little bit of time, even just 15 minutes, a quiet, you've got more ability to change this and to know what you want than you even realize. The second thing that really keeps us from changing and from creating something different for ourselves in the future is something I've already touched on. And that is simply the influence of the collective. So the collective, the main people who you are around. So the collective is kind of like everybody, right? And if I think about the collective of veterinary medicine, it's the majority, the the most outspoken in a, in a lot of ways. If we're thinking about influence of the collective, we're thinking, what we wanna look at here is what is the collective belief system? The collective belief system in veterinary medicine is this is just the way it is. That's the collective, that's the overall, that's the common belief system. This is just the way that it is. And it is that belief system that we pass on from generation to generation to generation of veterinary professionals. I don't care what your actual job title is in veterinary ordinary medicine, you, if you're in the environment long enough in in an environment that believes this, which unfortunately at this point tends to be the vast majority, not the all but just the vast majority, cuz we're still in that transition of shifting to something different. But if that is the culture that you're in, just recognize you are being taught to believe that this is just the way it is. It's not that it is the way that it is, It's not factual, but that's what you're being taught to believe. And so if you are believing that this is just the way that it is, the veterinary medicine is going to come with stress and anxiety and an expectation to give up your life work balance, the need to give up your, your vacations and your time off, and the expectation of answering calls when you're away from work and all the things. I mean, you insert all the little pieces into your own experience. And then I want you to recognize that your belief that that is just part of this job is just simply because somebody taught you that that was true. That doesn't mean that it's true. It's absolutely not factual. And the reason that we know it's not factual is because it's not the experience of every other veterinary professional on this planet. If it truly was factual, if this really was just the way that it is, then every single one of us would experience the exact same thing. And we don't. And there's an entire population, which is growing every single day of veterinary professionals who are having an amazing experience, who have created life work balance, who are growing their families and being present with them as they do it, who are making changes in their careers to spend more time focusing on the disciplines, the areas of interest that really light them up. It's learning how to say no, learning how to set boundaries. Those people exist and that population is growing. You can be part of that population. And the first piece of that, the first step is to just start to gain awareness around the idea that this is just the way that it is, is simply something you were taught, but not something that you have to believe and that you can choose something different. If you learned it, you can unlearn it. And so just gaining awareness to how what you believe is limiting your potential, that is step number two. Step number three then is simply or or component number three of what's keeping you from being able to create a different future. It's just simply lack of clarity, lack of clarity. If we don't know where we wanna go, we're never gonna get there. So we have to create the vision. Now, you've done this before, This isn't a brand new skill. You've done this before because when you first decided to pursue a career in veterinary medicine, whether you are a veterinarian, a veterinary technician or receptionist, whatever role that you hold in veterinary medicine, when you decided to pursue that, it was first an idea, it was a belief, it was something that you wanted it, you had clarity around that. And that clarity then drove your actions. You made decisions from that. You believed that you would get there, you did the work. And as you did that over time, it paid off actions over time, create results. And so if you want a different result for the future, then you have to start to to take different actions in this present moment. And so that's why I'm looking at predicting your future. If you stay on the hamster wheel, if you keep repeating the si, the cycles and the patterns that you're believing or keeping you unhappy, and I'm not even saying you're wrong about that, but if you just keep repeating it, you just keep accepting it, then you're not gonna create anything different. Your future's gonna look exactly like it looks today. And as human beings who are here to grow and evolve and to change, there's really nothing worse in my opinion than just maintaining status quo. The good news is status quo is just kind of a mental construct. We maintain status quo only when we choose to believe there isn't a different alternative. Only when we choose to believe that there isn't anything else possible for us. And then we back it up with all of this quote unquote evidence, which isn't actually factual when we dig into it and we analyze it. So those three things, again, that are keeping you from creating the future that you want are simply overwhelmed. You just haven't had enough space in your day in your life to even consider how you might change it. Number two, the influence of the collective. The people who you hang around with who have the most influence on your thoughts and on your beliefs are going to be the ones that keep influencing what you create. So as long as we keep believing there isn't anything different that's possible than there won't be. And then number three, lack of clarity. Just not knowing what it is. It's that answer to the question, what do you want? Which is quite honestly one of the hardest questions is adults that we will ever answer. It's much easier when you're a child before the world has had its hands on you and you've learned all this stuff about the world, then you've created all these belief systems. What? What do you want? Kids are real clear on that. They're pretty sharp. They are a able to answer that. Adults, what is it that you want? We freeze. Well, I don't know because it's not just what do you want? It gets complicated by what should you do? What do you have to do? What do I need to do? None of that actually matters, by the way, when you go to answer the actual question. But it sure feels like it does. So if you can get some assistance in those three areas, your future's different. If you can take some time to set aside to overcome the overwhelm, if you can set aside the influence of the collective and tap into what you have, you know for you, what's real for you. And if you can also gain that clarity, which actually comes as you do the other two pieces, then you will be equipped to make the decisions and take the actions that will create a different future for you. Remember, your future isn't created by what happened in the past. Your future's created by what happens today and moving forward. And that is something that you get to decide. I know this process can be a little bit daunting. Absolutely. And over the last few years, what I've done is I've actually created a couple of workshops that have helped in this regard. I've done the strategic job analysis workshop and I've done the strategic life analysis workshop. But this year, this fall coming up in November, what we're gonna be doing is putting 'em together because one isn't absolute right? There's not one that is absolutely independent of the other. And so it's important for us to look at this all together. So this, in the Strategic Life and job analysis workshop, what we're gonna do is we're going to set aside the overwhelm for a concrete period of time. It's a four hour workshop, so you're gonna dedicate four hours and I'm gonna be there, it's gonna be a live workshop. And together we're gonna work through all the components of our lives and our jobs. We are going to set aside the influence of the collective, and we're gonna get clarity. We're gonna tap into that question, what do I want? But we're gonna do it in a very strategic and logical way that our left-sided brain, that scientific side of us really loves. We're gonna use that part of us that loves facts, that loves science to understand even more how we create something different for the future. The strategic life and job analysis workshop. That's what we're gonna do it. And if you can't make it live, you're gonna even get the replay for a couple of weeks afterwards. So if you can't make it live on the date that we have at schedule, it's not a problem. Go ahead and get signed up so you can get that replay the next year. 2023 is going to be an amazing year. There's so much changing in the world and this is a good thing. All of this change is a very good thing. I promise you it is going to make everything better. And we're in the muddy middle where it's challenging and it's uncertain and it's a little bit scary. And in these times, it's so easy to just like turn in and believe that it can't be different. But my friends, I promise you, your opportunity to make a different future has not changed it. If anything, it's more enhanced than it ever has been because of what we have available to us in the world. Let me show you how to get there. You're gonna have to do the work. I can't do that for you. But what I can do is create a space where you can set aside the overwhelm, where you can set aside the narrative, the of the collective, and you can gain the clarity you need so that you can see the path that you once again, know where you are headed. And when you do that, you take back your power, You decide for you and your future no longer becomes the simple result of the same thing that's been happening over and over. Instead, it becomes the intentional result of something that you decide for yourself. All right, my friends, that's a wrap for episode 93. If you'd like to learn more about the Strategic Life and Job Analysis workshop, just jump over to joyful dvm.com/life job workshop to learn more. I hope to see you there. Have a great week. Bye for now.