Becoming a Resilient Leader within the Pressures and Stress of Veterinary Medicine
When you transition from veterinary school to professional practice, you soon realize your professors failed to mention some important things about being a Veterinarian and a leader within a clinical environment.
They forgot to warn you to expect to get hit by incredibly stressful events, repeatedly, every day.
They forgot to tell you how out of control your day can feel and how fast it can happen.
And to be fair, there are some things you can only experience in professional practice . . .
What it’s like when a patient's owner lets loose on you.
What it’s like when a patient gets aggressive with you.
What it’s like when a hospital manager or owner tears into you.
What it’s like when someone you’re working with makes a mistake in the exam room - or worse, when the mistake is yours.
All of this stuff is coming your way, every day, while you're expected to be a leader to the rest of the staff. You've probably been hit by your share of freight trains already.
If you're like most early-career veterinarians I meet, the struggle is probably harder than you'd like to admit. Time and time again, as the owner of a veterinary hospital, I saw young veterinarians struggle with the reality of practice and cope in unhealthy ways.
I'm here to tell you that there are ways to stay present and in the moment. It is possible to face these daily obstacles and still emerge as a resilient leader and a steady presence for both your patients and your staff.
You need to know you aren't alone or abnormal in your reactions to the crucible of veterinary medicine, and you definitely need tools that they don't teach in veterinary school to make it through the day, so let's begin.
Start Paying Attention to How You Respond to Stressful Events in Veterinary Practice.
It’s not easy being the new kid on the block.
In the earliest years of your career, especially when you start a new job, it’s easy to wonder if your colleagues respect or trust you. Imposter syndrome is hard to manage when you’re trying to prove yourself in a new setting.
So, when you make a mistake, adrenaline kicks in and distorts your thoughts. You start painting a negative picture in your mind about what is going to happen and think things like, “I can't do this! I’m going to make things worse. I am going to fail.”
Worse yet, it’s easy to turn inward and decide that the people you work with no longer respect you or think less of you. This is magnified when younger veterinarians work with older, more experienced staff.
Likewise, when your patient’s owner is much older than you, it’s easy to think they’re judging you for your age and doubting your capabilities.
Nothing good comes of this.
You don’t know what people are thinking, and assuming they think less of you only cuts you off from the people who need you most. If you are lost in your own negative thoughts and your mind is full of “static,” it’s impossible to be fully-engaged with owners and patients who are looking to you for support. How can you reach across the exam table to be present with an owner? How can you guide owners with empathy through the pain of euthanizing their pet?
Furthermore, assuming other staff members are judging you only cuts you off from people who can help you grow in your career. You’re likely to miss powerful opportunities like being mentored by more experienced staff.
I know this is easier said than done, but start by paying attention. Try and catch yourself “making up stories” about what other people think.
Awareness is a start, but you need - and deserve - more. You need a technique that helps you move past your own internal roadblocks like this.
Learn a Technique for Navigating the Stress of Veterinary Practice
When you’re faced with stressful events, there’s a three-step process that takes place.
Events are stressful, often unpredictable situations caused by owners, animals, staff, and personal error or oversight.
Triggers represent our subconscious wiring as to whether we are predisposed to react to a particular event.
Reactions are more powerful than you might realize. The Amygdala fires, and adrenaline kicks in, *instantaneously* setting off physical and cerebral reactions that are So fast, your cortex hasn’t had a chance to catch up to what’s happening. Your body gets tense and your mind starts to race, causing a loss of your original thoughts. Negative thoughts are soon to follow, like “Everyone thinks I don’t know what I’m doing,” or “I am going to fail,” making it impossible to do your job, much less stepping up as a leader in the workplace. And very often, those thoughts cause us to behave poorly to those around us.
This process keeps repeating itself throughout the day, and the constant cycle leaves you exhausted by the end of it. This is why so many early career veterinarians burn out, because they don’t have a technique in place to manage these physical, mental, and emotional reactions to stress.
This is why we call our technique for managing the stress of veterinary practice The Power of Pacing®. It’s a technique I spent ten years researching and developing to help fellow veterinarians take control of their day and pace their way through it.
The Power of Pacing® technique teaches you to . . .
Recognize when something is happening to you physically, emotionally, and mentally - and why.
Redirect your reaction into a controlled response.
Replace the mental script running in your mind with one that restores calm.
Repair the physical effects of the event you just experienced.
Refocus on the task ahead of you, or the next exam room on the schedule, with a clear mind.
All of this gives you the ability to hit the pause button on the reaction your amygdala sparked, which gives you the opportunity to take back control. Then, instead of carrying the emotion and stress of this moment with you all day long, you can move on.
This isn’t therapy. It’s a simple, repeatable technique, and I’ve made the requirements for learning it a manageable investment of both time and money for busy, early-career veterinarians.
Veterinary Leaders Don’t React. They Respond.
The world of veterinary medicine is uniquely, intensely stressful. You aren’t imagining anything, and you aren’t the only one who struggles. You haven’t failed. You just need further training to navigate your environment, and while you can’t control every stressful event that’s headed your way, you can control your response.
In fact, you can learn to cultivate calm, steadiness, and a resilient spirit in the midst of the stress. You can even reclaim your joy in the work and your love for what you do.
Having a technique in place takes you out of reaction mode, where you are bound to let your emotions take over and say or do things you regret. Instead, this is a technique that allows you to choose how to respond to stressful events. You’ll learn how to reset and even walk away from stressful events and gain perspective before you respond.
The Power of Pacing® technique gives you a process you can use over and over throughout the day to do this. It gives you the confidence that comes from having a set of tools you can pull down from your mental shelf that can diffuse the event you're experiencing. It is a repeatable technique you can rely on.
Better yet, as a repeatable process, it can be practiced. Just like a golf shot or a baseball swing, you can develop a strong, consistent technique over time. The process is always the same, and all you need to do when things go wrong is ask, “Did I do the process? What did I miss?” That is a very different dialogue from the negative thoughts that might otherwise flood your mind and, ultimately, leave you physically exhausted at the end of a day.
And just like baseball and golf, it is impossible to hit a perfect shot or make a perfect swing every time. When you start learning The Power of Pacing®, we start by working with one common, stressful event that comes up frequently in your life. At first, you might do well with 3 out of 10 times up to bat.
However, as you continue to practice the technique, your batting average will improve. Maybe now it's 5 out of 10, or 7 out of 10. Eventually, you will find it much easier to face this stressful event. Instead of being hard on yourself about your reaction or inability to cope in the moment, you will reach the point where you can say to yourself, ”I'm ok. I've got this.”
Then, you can apply this process to all of the other events you face from day to day! It becomes much easier to manage your thoughts and emotions both at work and at home.
The Helpful Question to Ask After Processing a Stressful Event
Once you learn a repeatable technique like The Power of Pacing®, the door opens to some very helpful steps you can take to learn from stressful events and grow as a veterinarian.
Think about those stressful events we've discussed above: angry owners, angry patients, irate management, dangerous or embarrassing mistakes made in treatment, surgery, or the exam room.
It’s common to turn on yourself when these moments happen, to blame yourself and assume it must be something you did.
But once you have repaired the physical and mental effects of a stressful event and refocused yourself, you can finally take a breath. As you get some distance from the event, later in the day or maybe the next day, you’ll be ready to ask a very helpful question.
Could I have done something differently - or better?
If it truly was an obvious mistake you made, in a way that’s good news. That’s something you can control. You can correct your mistakes and prevent them from happening in the future.
But most of the time, chances are that it often had nothing to do with you. It was probably something completely out of your control.
So, let’s talk about that. This is the big secret you can finally understand once your thoughts are clear and your body is free of the negative effects of adrenaline and stress . . .
Learn This Secret About the Stressful Events People Cause in Your Veterinary Hospital
Here’s the secret every young veterinarian should know about the stressful, emotional events your patients’ owners, your managers, and your fellow staff members provoke throughout the day.
Very often, it has nothing to do with you.
In fact, most of the time, it has nothing to do with you.
And you shouldn’t take it personally.
You simply don’t know what happened to your manager or your hospital’s owner this morning. They might have been in a fight with their spouse or nearly avoided an accident in the car. You don’t know how long the patient’s owner has been worried about their pet or how guilty they feel for not bringing their pet in for their problem sooner. You don’t know how worried they are about being able to afford the treatments needed to save their pet’s life. You don’t know whether a fellow staff member who snapped at you is already processing their own hit from an emotional freight train in another exam room.
At the end of the day, you can’t control people’s emotional reactions or the circumstances that provoked them.
The only person you can control is You!
Taking back control over your day is a big part of how you become a true leader among your staff and in your profession. It’s how you maintain a long and fulfilling career in the profession.
Schedule a brief, introductory call with me to ask any questions you have and learn more about how this works.
I’ll be here when you are ready.
“Dr. R”
William Rogatz DVM, DABVP - Canine & Feline Specialty
Lead Performance Consultant - The Power of Pacing®
(If you are the owner or manager of a veterinary hospital, this technique is an excellent, if not essential, addition to a mentoring program for early career veterinarians. You can use the same link above to schedule a time to discuss the opportunity further.)