This transcript is autogenerated and may contain typos.

Hi there. I'm Dr. Cari Wise, veterinarian, certified life coach and certified quantum human design specialist. If you are a veterinary professional looking to uplevel your life and your career or maybe looking to go in an entirely new direction, then what I talk about here on the Joyful DVM podcast is absolutely for you. Let's get started. Hello my friends. Welcome back to another reflection Friday here at Joyful DVM.

Today is December 15th, 2023 and I wanted to jump in here and spend a few minutes talking about building confidence. So as I've gone through the last week in clinical practice, I've been paying attention to not only my own level of confidence, but also the level of confidence that has been displayed by the people that I work with. And in case you aren't aware, what I did a few months ago,

it's actually we just hit our five month anniversaries. I agreed to go and help start up a brand new veterinary hospital. And so what that means is that we have this team that was brought together to run this hospital and none of us knew each other before we came together. And we've had five months of working together, learning more and more about each other,

and all of us trying to find comfort in the roles that we play. This is very similar to what each of you have experienced as you started new jobs and moved into new positions. And so what I noticed this week when we had a little bit of downtime was just how confident I was, not only in myself in the role, but in my staff as well.

And this is a really big deal because I had been out of veterinary practice clinical, like a regular ongoing clinical practice for years. So I had been doing relief work for quite a few years before the pandemic. And then once the pandemic hit, I really had just stopped and had been been all joyful DVM stuff. And then as I was interested in figuring out what's it like out there in the veterinary world post pandemic,

'cause I really wanted, I knew that I would be able to support the veterinary professionals through joyful DVM even better if I had that firsthand experience of what it's like. And I quite honestly just wanted to be around people. Again, I elected to go ahead and take on this opportunity back in the summer of 2023. So here we are now five months later,

and as we were getting ready to start that journey, I will have to admit that I was nervous. It had been a while since I had been in full-time clinical practice. And it's easy to believe what your brain offers you as far as the negative narrative about your own skills and about your abilities. And we need to pay attention to that. And that is part of what really was reflected this week was the difference between the what ifs.

So the scary what ifs, what if I don't remember how to do this? What if I don't know enough? What if I am not good enough? What if I can't talk to people anymore? What if I can't remember how to do a dog space? Like just name it all the silly what ifs that pop up? And I say silly because they are just this lower part of our brain trying to keep us safe.

And it was scary going into something new. It's always going to be scary coming into something new. That is a huge key point for us all to realize. It doesn't matter what it is that you're getting ready to do, even when it's something that you really, really want to do, there's still going to be some fear and some anxiety around that.

That's very normal because our brains will always protect us from uncertainty. Now, that in and of itself is problematic because everything is uncertain. This certainty that we have in this lifetime is self-created certainty. And so what I mean by self-created certainty is that we create it with the stories that we tell ourselves about our lives and the things that are happening. The truth is that nothing is certain that we never know what's gonna happen in the next minute or the next hour or the next week or the next month.

We make our plans based on what we believe is going to happen, but we can't prove it in the moment that we make those plans. And so whenever you start a new adventure, it's very normal for you to feel afraid. And I had that exact same experience. I was terrified on some levels of going back and doing this even though I really,

really wanted to do it. And what was a great awareness this week for me was that the fear of the opportunity was gone. And to notice that, that the fear of this opportunity was gone, that I really did feel confident in my ability to do what they have hired me to do. That was quite relieving and reassuring. And as I looked around and I considered that,

I realized that it's probably true for everybody that I'm working with because I know that we all came in with a certain degree of nervousness and just fear because we didn't know each other, we didn't know how we would get along with each other. We didn't know if we would be liked. I mean these very human, basic human needs and desires, right?

To be accepted, to be good enough, to be worthy. And so those things were showing up, I believe for each and every one of us on this team. And now that we have been together for five months and that team has even grown a little bit in that five months, I do believe that there is a level of confidence there that was not present on day one.

What my awareness was around it is that it always takes time to build confidence. So confidence, many of us wait until we feel confident before we move forward in anything. We don't give ourselves the time to build the confidence. And remember confidence, if you're looking at building anything, you have to give it time to be created. Building anything isn't, you know,

snap of a finger. And then there it exists. It is something that takes time and intentional effort to do. And in order to build confidence, we just have to keep showing up. Even in those moments when we feel afraid, even when we feel uncertain or we feel a little bit anxious, even if our brain wants to offer us all these things to be worried about,

we can notice all of those things. But to give ourselves the full chance of the experience, we must just show up anyway. And when we do, then we have real data to evaluate our experience against. Without the experience itself, without giving ourselves the opportunity to step into these things that really feel scary, we will then draw conclusions. If we never step into 'em,

we will draw conclusions that we aren't cut out for it, that we're not good enough for it, that we're not, that we just can't hack it, that it's too hard, that it's too scary, it's too uncertain. A million excuses that your mind will offer you. And the truth is that we don't know any of those things to be true.

But because they feel so crummy on the front edge of it, the anxiety, the anticipation of it feels so scary. Many of us don't move forward even in the things that we want to do. And somewhere along the way, we've picked up this idea that if it feels good, we should pursue it, but if it feels bad, we should not.

And that is really unfortunate because the only way that we re we can feel good about a lot of things in our lives is to experience them and to build the confidence through the experience of them to show ourselves, Hey look, this is not a life-threatening situation. Hey look, I actually can do this and still exist. This isn't as scary as I thought it was going to be.

I do actually like these people. We do get along. We do have the same mission. I do know how to be a veterinarian. They do know how to be veterinary assistants, like all the things, right? The only way that you can ever contradict the scary what ifs is to dive into it and see what is. So the only way you can contradict the what ifs is to dive into it and see what is,

because what is is your data point? That's what's real. The what if is always fabricated. And if you live your life trying to avoid the what ifs, then you will live very small. You'll only experience a fraction of what you are here to experience. And that was front and center in my awareness this week as we went through this week. This week was actually fun.

And I'm not saying I haven't had some fun in the last five months because I actually have, I've had a lot of fun in the last five months. It's been, it's been a blast. But there's also been a lot of anxiety. There's been a lot of unknown, there's been a lot of even frustration for all of us as we're all trying to learn new systems and new new ways of doing things,

new organizational structure, new role responsibilities. So we've, the whole team has been going through that together and also trying to get to know each other. So that does take time. But if you give it enough time, it all does settle out and the confidence then just starts to grow exponentially as the confidence grows exponentially. It is easier to have fun in those situations that start out a little bit scary.

It doesn't mean that the day in and day out things that come with veterinary medicine don't still exist, right? There's still gonna be cases that don't turn out the way that we wanted to. There's still gonna be situations with clients where they don't take the recommendations that we give, and we don't wanna get too attached to that because we're never gonna control what a client does there.

But there's still gonna be those cases they kinda weigh on you a little bit. But when you have a team that you support and that they support you and that you feel confident together in what you're trying to do in your organization, those little aspects of this job that we've chosen don't have to be the make or break moments on whether or not you enjoy your days.

And I think a lot of this really comes back to being anchored in confidence. Have you given yourself the time and the permission to become confident in your role? Whatever your role is in veterinary medicine, and if you're believing that you should already feel confident because you have a credential or because you have experience in a similar job in a different organization, just realize that's a lie that your brain is telling you that confidence is something that you will build.

And unless you give yourself the time to build it, it's not going to just show up one day. I think this is so important for my new veterinarians and my newer veterinary assistants and credential veterinary technicians, and this is so important for you to know, to understand that the confidence in yourself is something that you will build over time. And until you get in the game and you give it a try,

you will never have the confidence to to grow from there. And so many of us give up before we've even given ourselves a chance to build that confidence. So my hope for you this week is you get ready to go through. The next one is to pay attention to your level of confidence and to give yourself the opportunity to look back and see how many things you no longer worry about today that maybe you were worrying about six months ago or 12 months ago,

or even three weeks ago. It's only through that repetition of trial and, and I don't wanna say error, but there's always lessons, right? There's as we get in there and we just keep surviving even the hard days, we show ourselves that we can actually re be resilient and that through that resilience, our confidence grows, we build our confidence and the enjoyment then quickly follows.

All right, my friends. Just something to consider this week. I hope you found it helpful, and I will see you next week. Bye for now.