Category Archives for "Self Judgement"
The World Needs You, Vet Med
Way too many veterinary professionals are suffering from
➤ career regret
➤ feelings of inadequacy
➤ feelings of incompetence
➤ lack of confidence
➤ generalized anxiety
➤ compassion fatigue
➤ financial concerns
➤ mood swings
➤ self-loathing
➤ over-eating
➤ over-drinking
➤ over-spending
The shame that results is crushing. 😔
The belief it will never get better is overwhelming. 😩
The result:
We hold on to the top of that Terrible Top 10 list. 😢
🤔 But there’s something most of us don’t know…
⭐️I𝐭 𝐝𝐨𝐞𝐬𝐧’𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐰𝐚𝐲!🌟
𝘞𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘥 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘴 𝘢 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘦𝘲𝘶𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘰𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢 𝘤𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘳 𝘪𝘯 𝘷𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘮𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘯𝘦!
How it is right now, is not how it has to stay!
The truth is, you already have everything you need to create a career you enjoy and a life you love, you just don’t know how to tap into it.
You don’t believe it is possible.
(I Promise, It Is!)
We CAN get off the top ten list, and it starts by proving false what we’ve been taught to believe about what is possible for us in this profession, and in our lives as veterinary professionals.
We create the lives we want one decision at a time.
Curious? Check out my Free Webinar.
The world needs what only you can provide to the veterinary profession.
- in Anxiety , Self Judgement , Work-Life Balance by Cari Wise
Why Happiness Is The Wrong Goal
Have you ever wondered, “Why can’t I just be happy?”
We ask ourselves this a lot, don’t we.
The bigger question, why is happiness the goal at all?
What do we believe about achieving happiness?
What is happiness anyway?
What creates it?
How do we measure it?
Here’s a better question: What if being unhappy wasn’t a problem… but just a normal part of the human experience?
Life is 50/50… homeostasis drives our physiology. Our medical education taught us that.
If we take the time to look around, we’ll find the power and pull of homeostasis present in every aspect of the world.
Balance is king!
We actively seek it…. how often have you said you really want work-life balance?
Our emotions are no different!
We experience 50% positive and 50% negative emotions by design.
100% positive was never the goal!
In absence of tangible means of measuring the success of our lives, our minds will latch onto anything to determine if we are doing it right.
In school it was test results and degrees earned that reassured us. We were happy when we got good grades and graduated.
In practice it’s often patient outcomes and happy clients… and when either goes bad the only available conclusion is that we are doing it all wrong.
We aren’t cut out for this.
We are unhappy.
We are messing up our lives.
But happiness, just like patient outcomes, is not a true measures of our abilities, value and worth.
Happiness is not created by the events around us, and the absence of it is not a problem.
The negative emotions are not a problem.
Negative emotions are not evidence that something is going wrong.
They don’t need to be solved for.
They are intentionally part of the human experience.
50/50 positive/negative means everything is going right.
The key is learning to Allow and Process the negative, rather than resisting it, reacting to it, and avoiding it.
When we learn how to do this, everything becomes available.
What would you do if you weren’t afraid?
We miss out on so much of our lives simply because we are unwilling to feel negative emotions.
It comes down to basic neuroscience.
Curious? I explain it all in my free webinar.
Check it out: https://joyfuldvm.com/webinar
- in Anxiety , Self Care , Self Judgement by Cari Wise
The Solution for Vet Med Anxiety
One of the things we do really well in VetMed is diagnostics.
I mean, we kind of have to, because our patients can’t talk, right?
We intentionally gather information about a particular problem in order to make decisions and create a plan for addressing the problem.
In order to fix any problem, we have to first identify the cause.
Once we’ve identified the cause, only then can we consider potential solutions.
But I’m left wondering, why don’t we offer ourselves the same level of care?
I’m not talking about the human healthcare system… don’t even get me started on that…
I’m talking about our personal approach to our own mental health.
Specifically, I’m talking about the anxiety-stress-worry cycle we experience.
Why are we so quick to avoid it (changing jobs) and cover it up (ice cream in my case) instead of taking the time to understand what is causing it, and consider possible solutions?
Maybe it’s simply because we don’t know how.
Maybe it’s because somewhere along the way we bought into a belief that there is no solution for the causes of VetMed anxiety… that it’s inevitable.
Do you believe that?
I hope not.
You have more power than that… like WAY MORE POWER.
Curious?
I shared my thoughts on this in a Joyful DVM Facebook Live. To watch, CLICK HERE.
- in Buffering , Self Judgement by Cari Wise
Vet Med and Weight Gain
You know those people who are super-careful not to talk about potentially uncomfortable subjects just to keep the peace?
Well, that’s not me.
In a Joyful DVM Facebook Live I dove straight into a subject most people just don’t talk about… VetMed and weight gain.
It’s a thing.
For many, many of us, the extra pounds we carry directly correlate to the years we’ve been in the profession.
What’s worse, many of us know we are packing around extra weight… and many of us have tried a variety of diet and exercise plans just to watch the weight come back (and then some).
That was me. I’m “some of us”.
The thing is, even as I tried all the diets and tried to exercise… I knew it just didn’t feel right. Even in my temporary success, I knew it wasn’t sustainable. I wasn’t going to eat all that weird sh*t forever.
And as much as I knew that, I also knew that my entire “weight problem” was just visible evidence of the stuff going on in my head. I don’t know why I knew that, and I certainly didn’t know how to fix it, but I knew it was true.
I was right.
So in a Joyful DVM Facebook Live, I talked about what I did, and shared how much weight I dropped in the last year…
Awkward? A little. Worth it? TOTALLY, especially if it helps you turn it all around more quickly and with less struggle than I did.
🎬 You can watch the replay HERE.
- in Self Judgement by Cari Wise
The Gratitude Trap
Sometimes gratitude can hurt you.
I know, I know… that sounds ridiculous. So let me explain.
Many of us have been told from childhood to be thankful for the things we have in our lives. Things like warm beds, food, and shoes.
As adults, many of us carry with us the belief that we should be thankful for everything. On the surface this sounds like a good thing. But in typical human form, we tend to mess it up.
Some of us intentionally practice gratitude. We say “Thank You” before meals, and when people do nice things for us, like holding open doors. We might also start or end our days writing lists of everything in our lives we are thankful for.
These are all wonderful activities because they create genuine, positive emotions within us. Those emotions, and the intentional thoughts about what is great in our lives, really help us to gain perspective when some of the not-so-great things pop up.
But sadly, many of us are using the practice as gratitude in a very negative way that actually makes us feel worse.
Here’s what I mean…
Let’s say you are driving to work on a very hot day and your air conditioner quits in your car. You mutter to yourself, “I hate this car” and feel angry, which would be a pretty typical response from most of us.
But for some of us, it doesn’t end there. Some of us follow “I hate this car” with “I should be thankful to have a car”. It seems sooo innocent… a little gratitude to balance out the negative. But it has the opposite effect because of two little words, “should be“.
See, any time you stick “should” onto a sentence, you are essentially punching yourself in the face. You are judging yourself so harshly that even an attempt at gratitude like “I should be thankful to have a car at all” creates an emotion of shame.
What you don’t see is that you are shaming yourself for saying you hate your car. You are telling yourself you don’t have any right to hate your car because you should just be thankful to have one at all. It’s pretty hard to tap into positive emotions of gratitude when you are beating yourself up.
The good news is that it’s pretty easy to fix, but if you’ve been doing it a long time, it will take some practice. You’ve just got to ditch the “should monster”.
Here’s the above example, modified to leave out the should…
“I hate my car” emotion = anger or frustration
“I am thankful to have a car to drive” emotion = gratitude
See how that’s different than “I should be thankful I have a car to drive” which creates an emotion of shame and compounds the negative?
And obviously, this doesn’t apply just to cars.. lol.
On a recent Facebook Live I talked about this at length, and shared a VetMed related example that may just hit home. To watch the FB Live, CLICK HERE.
The Key Take Home is this: any time you hear yourself say “should”, recognize that as an indicator that you might be beating yourself up.. and then figure out why. We give the “shoulds” in our lives a lot of undeserved power. Let’s stop doing that.
Give it a try. And if you get stuck in a certain “should” thought loop that you can’t stop, shoot me an email and I’ll try to help you untangle it!