Having a great day in vet med does not require smooth sailing.
It doesn’t require clients to be nice, or coworkers to be productive. It doesn’t even require you to get your lunch, or leave on time.
What keeps most of us from experiencing a great day is the focus we keep giving to the circumstances that are less than ideal…
Entitled clients
Managers who don’t care
Lunches missed
And then we compound the negative impact by believing those things must change before having a great day is possible.
The truth is, focusing on the negative creates very real, and detrimental, results:
- It erodes relationships
- It destroys our emotional wellbeing
- It blocks possibility and potential
Thankfully, the solution is completely within your control… allowing you to flip a pattern of bad days into a new habit of great ones all on your own.
In this episode, I explain exactly how to do it, and why you must begin if you want to create a higher quality life experience for yourself.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is auto-generated and may contain typos. How to stack the odds in your favor and have a great day in VetMed. That's what we're talking about in episode 97. I'm Dr. Cari Wise, and this is the Joyful DVM Podcast. Hello my friends. Welcome to episode 97. Today we're gonna be talking about how to have a great day in VetMed, and this is part of our countdown to episode 100 where everything changes. But before we get to episode 100, today, we are gonna talk about having a great day in VetMed and how you can actually create that for yourself. Maybe most importantly, we're gonna look at what's happening that's keeping you from having that experience already. So when we consider our days in veterinary medicine, we want to think about where our focus is. How do we talk about our days? What are we obsessing about, if you will, when we're there? And a lot of the times, we are reinforcing some underlying belief systems that we share. These are very commonly shared across veterinary professionals and beliefs and ideas and opinions that you've probably picked up from each other and reinforced in each other as well. So let me give you some examples of what I'm talking about. Let's start out and look at clients. Many of us believe that it's the clients that really make having a good day in VetMed Impossible. It's what they do that ruins our day, if you will. So with that, we tend to draw conclusions as a whole about clients. Things like clients are ungrateful, clients just don't understand. Clients blame me for the prices. Clients expect me to be available 24 7, and clients are entitled. Do any of those sound familiar? If you've been in VetMed for any period of time, I guarantee that at least one of those thoughts has come across your mind and probably out of your mouth at some point along the way. It's really common. These are conclusions that we all draw, and I'm not even here to argue with you that you're wrong. Let me say that again. I'm not gonna argue with you that you're wrong. I absolutely believe that there are situations where when we draw the conclusion that they are ungrateful or they don't understand, or they are entitled, or that they blame us for pricing and they expect us to be available 24 7, there are situations where that's factual. That's the experience. They may say those exact things. And so changing your day doesn't mean that we have to dismiss the belief in those things. You're not wrong about what you're experiencing, but what creates whether or not you have a good day is simply where you put your focus. So we have to consider what's taking our attention. Having a good day is the result of being in a net emotional state that's on the higher level of the spectrum, a higher frequency that keeps you in emotions like calm, peaceful, happy, excited, motivated, determined service, those kinds of things. Helpful, those types of emotions as opposed to feeling resentful, angry, anxious, overwhelmed, exhausted, disadvantaged, disrespected. When we are in that kind of spectrum, emotional emotionally throughout the entire day, that pulls our entire net emotional state down. And what our net emotional state is low as a whole than the actions that we take in our lives and the outcomes that we produce for ourselves. Don't move us forward at all. That's why so many of us feel stuck. We're stuck not because of what's happening, but because of the emotional state that we've landed in. Now, the good news is you get to change that for yourself. But before we get to that, I'm getting a little ahead of myself. Let's go back now and look again at some of the other common conclusions that we draw and that we focus on day in and day out within our profession. We've already been through the clients, but what about the coworkers and the bosses and the leadership? What comes up for us there? Well, a lot of us are spinning and thoughts like our coworkers are lazy. So it's a very normal human thing to compare yourself against other people. And when you draw the conclusion that I have to do everything, I'm the only one working, that doesn't make you feel very good, right? It also creates a lot of resentment toward the other people who are there. And again, I'm not even saying that you're wrong about that. It would be very easy for us to gather some data to evaluate which person is producing more work. You know, creating more income or getting more tasks done. Like we could gather that data. So that's not what I'm disputing. I'm not trying to change the data. I just wanna bring some awareness to what your focus is, how much of your focus is on some of these different points. So my coworkers are lazy or I have to do everything. How about this one? Bosses and management don't care about us. I hear that one all the time. Management doesn't care. Leadership doesn't care. Ownership doesn't care. They don't care about us. Now, can we prove that maybe we might be able to find an actual manager and owner who says, I don't care about my staff, but it's not necessary for the point of this and trying to shift around your good day, your day into a good day from a bad day. We're not trying to change the circumstances to do that. We're gonna look at the focus instead. And so I'm not saying you're even wrong about the things that you believe about your coworkers, about your workload, about your bosses and management, but we wanna notice how much to focus on that impacts you in a negative way. And then how about this one, that younger generation of veterinary professionals, they don't have any work ethic. Now I know some of you listening have said that or thought that or heard somebody else say that it creates a divide. We could do a whole podcast episode on all of that. But again, the point of this is to recognize where your focus is. What are the words coming out of your mouth when you're talking about your coworkers, about your leaders, about management, about your colleagues? What are the thoughts that are spinning in regard to them? Odds are there's a comparison, and that you are judging something in their behavior, something in the way that they are showing up, in the way that they exist. I'm not even saying that you're wrong about your judgment, I just want you to recognize if you're doing it, that's our point today. And then finally, we cannot talk about our VetMed experience without considering what the belief patterns are. The habit thoughts are about the opinion of the experience on ourselves. So things like, I don't get paid enough, or I don't get enough time off, or I always miss my lunches. I always get out late. Once again, I'm not disputing that these might not be factual. I just want you to know for yourself, where does your mind go? When you think about your experience with the veterinary profession? Is it jumping to all the wonderful things that you get to experience as part of it? Or is it going to the negative, the automatic negatives. Now, friends, all the things that I've listed out so far are negative focus. And this is what is a collective where we put our attention. We need to be aware of that. We also don't necessarily need to punch ourselves in the face over it because there is a whole automatic negative thought process that's just built into being a human. There's that part of us that's automatically looking for the negative because it thinks it's being protective, it's looking for threats that might kill us. But in veterinary medicine, day in and day out, in your job, in your life, you're not in life threatening danger. Now, of course, there are those periodic times where you have a dog that lunges at your face, or you have a bull that wants to run through a fence or something like that. So yeah, are there dangerous components of this job? Of course there are. I'm not disputing that, but to the level that your brain alerts you of life threatening danger, is there, does it exist in that kind of ratio? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. It's misfiring 99.9% of the time. That's fine. That's the human brain. That's what it does. But again, how do we turn this then into a good day when we know that the brain is doing this? The first part is that awareness. What are you focusing on? So when you think about clients, what are the first things that come to mind? Are they sentences like clients are ungrateful, they don't understand. They blame me for prices. They're entitled, they expect me to be available 24 7. What are the first things that come to mind when you think about your coworkers and your leadership in your hospital? Are they things like, my coworkers are lazy, I have to do all the work. My and management don't care about me. This younger generation, they have no work ethic. Is that where your mind goes? And then about your own personal experience. What's the story that you tell yourself about your job? Is it one of lack and disadvantage? I don't get paid enough. I don't get enough time off. I always miss my lunches. I always get out late. The reason that I'm really kind of reiterating this is I want you to really be able to focus and to identify for yourself where those automatic thought patterns are. And then we're gonna walk our way through understanding what results we're creating by putting our focus there. So just one more time, we're not, I'm not arguing with any of this being true, our experiences, there's a lot of truth in our experiences. There's a lot of truth in our opinions. But what I want you to see now is what the results are that you're creating for yourself when you keep your focus on those opinions. That's the heart of all of this. So there's really three pieces to the results that we create for ourselves. Number one, we erode relationships. So if we think back to all those automatic negatives that are coming up around clients, if we are believing those things about clients, there's no way that we are going to be able to foster a trustworthy and expansive relationship with those clients. When you're in your head, living under a common narrative of them being ungrateful and that not understanding and being on the the offense getting or defense, getting ready to get blamed for pricing, feeling that you need to be defensive or be able to justify why you're not available 24 7, and really believing that they're entitled, think about the way that you show up with people you can't possibly show up as the best version of yourself with them. If you're thinking the worst things about them, I'm not saying you're wrong about those things, but if that's the way that you focus on them, when you go to interact, when that's the, the dominant narrative, if you will, then the way that you show up to serve them is going to be compromised. The same thing with your coworkers and your bosses and your leadership and the organization itself. If you have an overall negative opinion about all of that, then the way that you show up in your job is going to be compromised. You're not gonna show up as the best version of you. You're not gonna serve to your highest capacity. You're not gonna work as efficiently as possible. You're going to continue to compound a lot of the effects that you have. Again, I'm not asking you to change your opinion of, of your bosses, of your leadership, of your coworkers. I'm asking you to consider what holding onto those opinions is costing you. And so it's going to erode those relationships with those people if you constantly view them through the lens of the way that they are impacting you negatively. And then finally, those other statements about yourself, your own experience, right? I don't get paid enough. I don't get enough time off. I miss my lunches. I'm always getting out late. That's actually eroding a relationship with yourself. Staying focused on that erodes a relationship on yourself because the compounding effect of this builds into a whole bunch of other sprouting thought and belief patterns around you not being good enough. You're not being fast enough, you're not being smart enough, you're not being valued enough. And so we just continue then to build this belief, this atmosphere of disadvantage. And we don't take any action from that. So result number one, from having all of these beliefs be our focus, our primary focus, our dominant focus is that it's eroding those relationships, the relationships with the clients, the relationships with the people we work with, and the relationships with ourselves. Result number two, we've kind of touched on this one, this is a big one. So it needs to be reiterated, is that it draws down your net emotional state, net emotional state. It's kind of a fancy way of saying your mood. If we think about the whole spectrum of emotion, if we were gonna label ourselves in a good mood, we're probably experiencing positively labeled emotions, happiness, excitement, gratitude, peace, joy, love, that kinda stuff. A bad mood. We're probably experiencing anger, frustration, overwhelm, those types of emotions. And so when we look at this whole spectrum of emotion, the net emotional state is where is the emotion that you experience the majority of the time? So if even 51% of the time you're experiencing negative emotion, then your net emotional state is gonna be lower on the the other side of that. If 51% of the time you're experiencing positive emotion, then your net emotional state is gonna be higher. Why does this matter? It matters because your emotional state drives the actions that you take in your life, the way that you care for yourself, the decisions that you make, the behaviors that you express, the habits that you allow to continue, or new ones that you build, the outcomes that you create for your future, your meeting, your goals, your hopes, your dreams, your net emotional state is the primary influencer on creating all of that. And so when our net emotional state is in the lower side of that and the bottom half, we don't tend to do much of anything at all. So we have to be very aware of what, how we, how what we focus on. The percentage of time that we focus on it can draw us down when those things we focus on are negative. Now, the third result that we create for ourselves is that we block possibility and potential. This all plays together if you're starting to notice. So what we believe is possible for our future is often kind of boxed in by what we've seen in the past. So if we've seen it, then we believe it's possible for us. If we haven't seen it, a lot of us don't even consider there's possibility or potential there. We haven't seen somebody else do it or achieve it or create it. We're way more creative than that. We are way more expansive than that. We have way more power than any of that. So that's number one that you need to know. But in regards to this, in looking at how we're creating our good and bad days, when our focus is on the negative of all of these things, clients, people in our organization, coworkers, and then ultimately the impact on ourselves, our net emotional state gets pulled down, and then we don't do anything. And then that we don't do anything that includes, we don't dream, we don't set new goals, we don't try to create anything different in the future. We tread water, we just survive. So that possibility and potential, which is truly unlimited, you have unlimited possibility. Everything is possible. If you can dream it, you can create it. I 100% believe that. But when we're in this state, that low, low net emotional state, we don't do any of those things. So now at this point, it all sounds a little dismal, right? It sounds like, okay, well this kind of sucks. How exactly are you gonna help me have a a good day? That's kinda the title of this podcast is How to Have a Great Day in VetMed. So here's how you do it. Solution number one, you ask yourself a question, how do I wanna feel about whatever it is? So let's go back to our clients. We already know how you think, how you feel, what you believe about them, right? We can sit around together and we can commiserate about all the things that they do wrong, but I want you to ask yourself a different question. How do you want to feel about them? What do you want to believe? Because if you can answer the question, how do you wanna feel? You can get to what you wanna believe. So how do you wanna feel about 'em? I wanna feel appreciative. I wanna feel grateful that they, they trust us with their services. I wanna feel like we're in partnership in the care of their pets. Awesome. If you wanna feel those things, if you wanna believe those things, then you can just decide to, you don't have to change any of the other things that you've believed. You can just instead start to focus on what you wanna believe instead. Number two, ask yourself another question. Does this line of thinking make that possible? So what I mean by that is, if you wanna believe that clients are grateful for your services, if you wanna believe, if you wanna feel, if you wanna feel appreciative for them choosing your organization or choosing you as their veterinary professional, if that's what you wanna feel and what you wanna believe, then are the current things you're believing about them making that possible. The odds are no, they can't coexist, right? You can't simultaneously be holding onto the belief system of they are ungrateful while also believing clients are appreciative or that you're grateful for your clients. It's impossible. They're too dissonant. One of them is gonna win. So far, the one that's been winning is the one that's just simply gotten the most air time, but it doesn't have to. And so solution number three then is intentionally dropping the belief system. That doesn't help you if it doesn't serve you, if it doesn't create the experience that you want for yourself, if it doesn't add to your net emotional state, how about we just drop it and redirect? Notice, I'm not asking you to unbelief any of the things you believe. I'm not asking you. I'm not trying to convince you that clients are grateful. I'm not trying to convince you that they don't blame you for prices. I'm not trying to convince you that your, your managers and your leaders care about you. I'm not trying to convince you that the younger generation doesn't have a different kind of work ethic than the older generation. I'm not trying to convince you that you do get paid enough, or that it's okay that you miss your lunches. I'm not trying to convince you of any of those things. What I'm trying to show you is that keeping your focus on those things is ruining your days, and it's ruining your days by pulling down your net emotional state, which is ultimately creating for you a life that you don't want. It's why you feel stuck. It's not that you're wrong. It's that you put the focus on something that you can't control or change. And as a result, it creates an experience for you that's really uncomfortable. But you have the power to decide for yourself what you wanna believe. You have the power to decide for yourself what you want to focus on, and that's the point of this. Notice. Yep. My brain wants to go there. Notice, yep, I believe all these things. And then stand in your own power and authority and decide, I am not putting my focus on that. Not useful. Ask those questions. How do I wanna feel about this? Does this thought pattern focusing on it, make that possible? If not, let's intentionally drop it. Drop it like a hot potato. As soon as you notice that your focus is somewhere that's pulling down your emotion, drop the focus, redirect it, move it to something that's more empowering. Move it to something that you can have control of or interact with. That's how you're gonna change your day. The circumstances, my friends, will change gradually over ti over time. And the way that circumstances change is when we move ourselves into a better state of wellbeing. We can't wait for other people to get their shit together before we feel better. That's the way we've been trying to do it for years. It doesn't work because the only person in this world that you control is you. And as you learn how to control you, and you learn how to control your mind, what that human brain wants to focus on, then you can create a completely different human experience for yourself. Friends, the bad things in the world, the things that we disagree with, the things that frustrate us, those things are gonna continue to happen. Don't make your happiness contingent on everybody getting in line, in line and doing things the right way, the way that you think they should be done. Don't make your happiness contingent on the behaviors of others, because when you do that, you give all of your power away. You give your emotional wellbeing over to something that you will never control. And so you'll feel like you're on a yo-yo up and down, depending on everything else that's happening around you. But you're so much more powerful than that. And as you learn this skill of dropping what doesn't serve you, just letting it go, redirecting to where you do have power and control, the most amazing things happen. Your net emotional state increases, which means you become happier in all aspects of your life. And when your net emotional state increases, so does your imagination. So does your belief in what's possible. So does your potential. And from that place, you begin to take different actions in your life. Actions that could, you know, result in you actually getting your lunches or going home on time or making more money. You start creating the reality you want for yourself instead of accepting the reality that was created by others that you didn't even know you'd given away. All right, my friends, that's gonna wrap it up for this episode. I'll see you next time. Bye.