#142 (Human) Death in VetMed [TRIGGER WARNING]

The Joyful DVM Podcast: Empowering Veterinary Professionals

Trigger Warning... this week on the podcast I tackled some very sensitive topics.

There are some hard truths in veterinary medicine about what we are doing as veterinary professionals that keeps us creating terrible experiences for ourselves.

When those terrible experiences compound, terrible things often happen.

I'm talking about end points like relentless anxiety, depression, burnout, suicide, homicide...

We must become aware of our role in our reality.

We must become the creator of our own experiences.

This week I didn't hold anything back.

Here are a few points from this episode:

Shit rolls downhill. If you are a practice owner, or on-site medical leader or chief of staff in your practice, the state of the workplace culture is on you... and it starts with you and your personal behavior. When you start to see disrespectful, aggressive, condescending, and bullying type interactions between the people who work for you, then it's on you to foster change in that environment. Do not deflect it, do not delegate it. You are the top of the top. This is your practice. So even if you have an office manager, even if you have a practice manager, even if you have a lead technician or a lead doctor in your hospital, it's still on you.

As long as we can continue to stay in jobs that do not include a safe and supportive work environment, we will continue to foster the existence of unsafe and unsupportive work environments.

Many of us share a misguided belief system that we must stay at our jobs because if we leave, we're abandoning the people we work with and we're abandoning our clients and we're abandoning our patients. This is untrue.

The reason that we stay in positions that we actually don't feel aligned with anymore is from fear. Fear of judgment, fear of of isolation, fear of not being accepted, fear of somehow that means failure. We can't create better life and career experiences from fear.

You are perfect exactly the way you are. You have opportunity for growth and expansion and and experiencing things well beyond what you experienced in this current moment, %100. You have the right to goals and dreams and bigger things in the future, 100%. And you have the capability of creating all of it.

The bottom line is this... if we don't take personal responsibility for the role we play in creating our own life experiences and veterinary career experiences, then we will continue to experience our lives and careers in exactly the form they are in today every day in the future.

https://joyfuldvm.com/joyclub
Music Credit: Music by Lesfm from Pixabay