Yesterday, I saw a client who informed me that she wouldn\u2019t follow any of my nutrition advice because of \u201cYou know, dog food kickbacks.\u201d Fortunately, she said, she had found the perfect dog food by sending a swab of her dog\u2019s saliva to a company on the internet. Also yesterday: I treated a cat who went full \u201ctiger ancestor\u201d on me, I had a hard talk about expensive medicine with a guy who had only $67 in his account until his next paycheck, and I spoke with a veterinary practice owner about how in the world our profession can find a way to pay better wages to our support staff. Then, I scrolled through the online comments on a post by a college student thinking about going to veterinary school. Hundreds of responses basically read, \u201cDon\u2019t do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
What a day.<\/p>\n
I suspect most of us wonder at some point in our careers (perhaps after too many days like yesterday) why anyone would want to do this job.<\/p>\n
Two years ago, I hit that wall and wanted to quit. I felt burned out. I dreaded every appointment. I knew so many other veterinarians who felt the same way, and their complaints resonated deeply with me. For months, all I wanted to do was stay home and avoid going to work. I had lost my connection to the meaning of our profession.<\/p>\n
Today, I love my work more than ever. I even loved my job yesterday.<\/p>\n
I want to share my path from despair to enjoyment in case it helps someone who feels the way I did a couple of years ago. Some simple but important shifts in perspective helped me reengage with my work joyously and satisfactorily.<\/p>\n
When people ask me about overcoming burnout<\/a>, I share a fairy tale I made up to explain the experience. The story goes like this:<\/p>\n Once upon a time, a hero was on a quest to capture a dragon. Season after season, she pursued her quest, exploring the wilds, learning new skills and fighting battles in her search for the elusive dragon. Finally, she arrived one day at the dragon\u2019s lair. After climbing boulders and crawling through mud to get inside, she stood up in the cave and looked around. There she found \u2026 nothing. The dragon wasn\u2019t there. It had never been. In fact, all she saw was a sentence written on the cave wall: \u201cDragons do not exist.\u201d The hero looked back at the years spent on her quest \u2014 all the work she had done and everything she had overcome \u2014 and thought, \u201cNow I\u2019m here, and there\u2019s no dragon to capture as my prize? What the hell was the point?\u201d<\/p>\n That was my experience in veterinary medicine, and I don\u2019t think I am alone. It turns out that in veterinary practice, as in life, no accomplishment is so fulfilling that it seals our happiness and ensures a lasting sense of victory. No surgical success, no advanced degree, no client praise \u2014 nothing. No single triumph will land us at a feeling of happy ever after. There is no dragon.<\/p>\n The veterinary career track<\/a> inherently requires us to work toward our goals for decades: acing college science classes, getting into veterinary school, graduating with a job offer, excelling at our specialty, etc. Along the way, many of us develop the sense that we are failing if we are not always pushing toward a next goal. So, we keep setting new goals. We tell ourselves that the sacrifices we made over the years will be repaid just as soon as our quest is over \u2014 when we get the job, marry the partner, pay off the debt, get the raise or start the veterinary practice. But when we hit those milestones, we immediately ask, \u201cWhat\u2019s next?\u201d It\u2019s frustrating and exhausting to realize that the finish line just keeps moving. We\u2019ve been on a quest to capture the dragon so long that we don\u2019t know what the dragon is anymore; we just know we don\u2019t feel right unless we\u2019re striving toward something.<\/p>\n If there is no dragon, then what is the point of all this? The lesson I learned is that a career in veterinary medicine is not a means to anything else. It\u2019s not a path to happiness. It\u2019s not a path to contentment. It\u2019s not a path to a lasting sense of success and personal fulfillment. It\u2019s just a path. But a path has value.<\/p>\n Veterinary medicine is the work I do every day \u2014 nothing more, nothing less. In the fairy tale I imagine, our hero never does find a dragon, but she comes to realize that she enjoyed herself while she was on her quest, and she wants to get back out there. She likes exploring the wilds, learning new tricks and bravely marching into battle. That\u2019s why her journey isn\u2019t a failure. Once she frees herself from the misperception that her quest was about capturing a dragon, she realizes that she just loves questing.<\/p>\n If we want to love having careers in medicine, we have to love doing medicine. That means feeling satisfaction in examining animals and solving medical puzzles. It means finding joy in meeting people who care deeply about their pets, guiding people who have been misinformed and spending our workdays with our colleagues, all the while knowing we cannot fix every problem we encounter. I bet that if you\u2019re reading this, you have felt that joy before. And if you\u2019ve lost it, you can feel it again.<\/p>\n A common belief is that relaxation, not work, makes people happy. It\u2019s why we fantasize about spending less time at the clinic and more time on the couch or beach. And it\u2019s true that people in this profession need their time off<\/a>. Most of us could probably stand to enforce the boundaries around our free time a little better. But we have to be realistic about what we expect from our downtime.<\/p>\n Studies show that jobs, in general, are easier to enjoy than unstructured free time because they have built-in challenges, goals and rules, which encourage us to concentrate and engage. Unstructured free time must be molded into something that can be enjoyed and that requires effort.<\/p>\n Have you ever looked up after a busy morning at work to find that afternoon has arrived and the day got away from you? Or started the week only to find that, in a blink, it\u2019s Friday already? In psychological terms, this state of being fully engaged in work to the point that you lose track of time is called flow. If your hours and days are flying past, then congratulations, you\u2019re in a state of flow, and you have a job that fully engages your mind and spirit. That\u2019s wonderful.<\/p>\n When I was young, my father took me on hiking trips into the Appalachian Mountains. I wasn\u2019t as grateful for the experiences then as I am now because my father had absolutely zero chill. We could not go on a gentle three-mile walk in the woods. Nope, our father-son hikes came with a 10-mile minimum. When my dad was involved, we went big or went home, and I was not allowed to go home. I wouldn\u2019t have called these hikes \u201cfun\u201d while I was on them.<\/p>\n I often felt thirsty and tired on our hikes and sensed that my legs had turned to jelly. Looking back now, I can see that \u2014 especially at the end of each hike \u2014 I also felt proud. I felt special for getting to go on these outings. Splayed out to rest on the rocky overlooks, I savored the views. I had long talks with my father, I breathed fresh air, and I learned about the land around us. When each hike was over, I knew I had done something that mattered to me and that other people could not do. There were moments on the steep, rocky inclines when I felt anything but happy, but today, I\u2019m grateful for those experiences, not because they brought me to some elusive goal but because the hikes were a meaningful and memorable way to spend my time.<\/p>\n Nowadays, I get a similar sense of pride and gratitude from my work. Yes, even on a day like yesterday, full of difficult moments. I chose this hard work, and I get to do it every day.<\/p>\n When I started looking at my work this way, I began approaching days like yesterday as part of my quest \u2014 as worthy challenges rather than pointless frustration. I took pride in how I handled my cases, including the ones that couldn\u2019t possibly qualify as best-case scenarios. And I did a better job taking note of small joys. I internalized the short, simple thank-you notes from clients. I started taking a little more time to listen to clients talk about the lives they lead and their (often quirky) perspectives on the world. I recognized that, often, a sad euthanasia case was the final moment of a glorious life and a moment I was privileged to share with an animal and family.<\/p>\n There is no perfect job, not in veterinary medicine nor any other field. A career can\u2019t give anyone nonstop happiness, solve all our problems or affirm our value as people. Waiting for a job \u2014 any job \u2014 to deliver us to some ultimate sense of achievement and inner peace is a mistake. That\u2019s not what the quest is about.<\/p>\n What veterinary medicine can do is give us a path to walk on during our days on earth. Our profession offers challenges that engage our minds, and it gives us a chance to make a difference in the lives of others. Those are great reasons to get up, go to work and enjoy the journey.<\/p>\n One CE credit hour will be awarded to VetFolio visitors who complete any of these free courses on burnout and personal wellness:<\/p>\n We\u2019ve been on a quest to capture the dragon so long that we don\u2019t know what the dragon is anymore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":10601,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[323],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-august-september-2021","column-dicharge-notes","clinical_topics-personal-wellness"],"acf":{"hide_sidebar":false,"hide_sidebar_ad":false,"hide_all_ads":false},"yoast_head":"\nThe Key: Enjoy Doing Medicine<\/h3>\n
Vacations Aren\u2019t the Answer<\/h3>\n
Happiness and Fun Don\u2019t Overlap Every Minute<\/h3>\n
Enjoy the Walk<\/h3>\n
\nLEARN AND EARN<\/span><\/h3>\n
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