How to Inspire Wellbeing in Others | Episode 29 | Reviving Vet Med

Given the high rates of psychological distress and burnout in veterinary medicine, many veterinary team members are considering education and advocacy in the context of wellbeing. Questions asked regularly are “How can I become a wellbeing advocate?” and “How can I get my team members to take better care of themselves?”. These incredibly important questions are great launching points into a conversation about what it takes to educate and inspire others to foster their mental health and wellbeing. 

What you can expect from this episode is a candid conversation about my journey to becoming a mental health and wellbeing advocate, as well as suggestions and strategies for those who strive to do the same. I also share my thoughts on how we can inspire others in our lives to invest in their self-care and wellbeing. 

Resources

Stop Being a Martyr and Start Modelling Healthy Behaviour (blog): https://marieholowaychuk.com/2019/10/16/stop-martyr-start-modeling-healthy-behavior/ 

So You Want to Be an Advocate for Veterinary Wellness? (blog): https://marieholowaychuk.com/2018/10/10/so-you-want-to-do-what-i-do/ 

AVMA Programs - Scroll Down to “Wellbeing events, trainings, and CE opportunities”: https://www.avma.org/resources-tools/wellbeing 

Online Programs

To learn more about our 4- and 8-week online programs approved for CE credit in jurisdictions that recognize RACE, please visit:
https://revivingvetmed.com/programs/


Newsletter

For more practical pointers and tangible tips related to veterinary mental health and wellbeing, subscribe to our e-newsletter:
https://revivingvetmed.kartra.com/page/newsletter

Questions or Suggestions
Email podcast@revivingvetmed.com

Transcript

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Reviving Vet Med. As a well-being advocate and someone who has been in this space for many years now, there are some questions that I get asked on a regular basis that I feel inclined to share with you in today's episode. The first is, how can I do what you do as a well-being advocate? And the second question that I often get asked is, how can I get others I work with to take better care of themselves?

These are both incredibly important questions and ones that I want to take the opportunity to dive into during this episode. So, what you can expect from this episode is a candid conversation about my journey to becoming a mental health and well-being advocate, as well as some suggestions and strategies for those of you who strive to do the same. Likewise, I will share my thoughts on how we can inspire others in our lives to also invest in their self-care and well-being. So, with that said, I'm excited to share my stories and some hopefully helpful information with you. So, let's go ahead and get into the episode.

This is the Reviving Vet Med podcast, and I'm your host, Dr. Marie Holowaychuk. My mission is to improve the mental health and well-being of veterinary professionals around the world. So, as I mentioned in the intro, I get asked the question, how can I do what you do, very often via LinkedIn messages, or direct emails, or Facebook? And it's a really hard question for me to answer, because the reality is, is that my path was not a straight shot into veterinary well-being.

And so, I think it's important to, when answering this question, explain how I got to be where I am today, so that others have a bit of a context for what their journey could potentially look like. Not to say that everyone who becomes a well-being educator or advocate has to necessarily take the long and sorted route that I took, but all that to say that this isn't just one of those cut and dry situations where I can apply for a certification and finish it, and then, you know, be in the space that I want to be in. So, my story began very many years ago. I was actually born, into a family of two veterinarians. So, both of my parents are vets.

They met in veterinary school as students and got married. And after graduation, my mom opened up her own private small animal clinic. And my dad, did some practice experience very early on and then went into, regulatory medicine. So, he worked in, jobs, really around food safety and animal welfare, for the bulk of his career. So, as you can imagine, growing up with a mom working full time, building her own companion animal clinic, that I spent a lot of time at the vet clinic from a very young age, and I came to love the ups and downs of vet medicine.

I loved getting to interact with clients. I loved helping the animals. I loved working in a team environment. It was very easy for me to make the decision to apply to vet school. And so, I was pretty aggressive with my pre vet schooling.

I'm not sure that you can do this in many places anymore, but I finished my pre vet requisites. My prerequisites, I should say, for vet med in two years at the University of Alberta. And then I was lucky enough to get into the University of Saskatchewan Western College of Veterinary Medicine, when I was just 19 years old. And so, I moved to Saskatoon, I completed vet school, and I loved every minute of what I was learning and what I was striving to become. But what I wasn't sure, closer to finishing my schooling, was whether I wanted to join my mom in general practice.

And so, what I ended up doing after vet school was applying for internship programs. I matched with Washington State University, and I moved to Pullman. That was back in 02/2004, after I graduated. And that was where I fell in love with emergency and critical care. I had an incredible mentor who was a criticalist, and I loved my shifts on emergency.

And I was, again, lucky enough to match at North Carolina State University. So, in 02/2005, I moved to Raleigh, and I completed a three-year residency, passed my boards. And soon after, I moved to Guelph, Ontario, back to Canada, where I had taken a job as an assistant professor of emergency and critical care at the Ontario Vet College. So, it was really there where I was, you know, full time in my career, in practice, in, in my academic role that I started to, you know, started to, you know, experience a lot of the things that many of us are experiencing today. So, I had, perfectionism traits that were definitely wreaking havoc on my mental health.

I was not practicing mindfulness at the time, and I tended to function in a state of reactivity, or rumination for most of my days. And I hit the wall several times, in the form of burnout. What I didn't know was burnout at the time. What I felt was just me in the wrong job, you know, the wrong situation or that I just wasn't cut out for this job or this career after all. Not recognizing that being a workaholic, being a perfectionist, not having healthy boundaries, not practicing mindfulness, all of these things and skills that I know now and take so seriously and share with others.

I just thought, you know what? I'm just not cut out for this. Versus focusing on self-care and things that were within my control in order to change that. And, again, I think at the time, you know, we weren't talking as much about burnout and mental health, or compassion fatigue versus compassion satisfaction. And so, I didn't have the language around what I was experiencing.

I just knew that what I was experiencing wasn't sustainable. And I think when people reach out to me and say, you know, I can't keep doing what I'm doing in clinical practice, I want to do something else, and shifting into well-being seems like the place to go. I just wonder what is underneath that that could potentially be improved upon with skills and tools for enhancing well-being. So, you know, I wrote a blog about this topic, about four years now, four or five years ago now, when I first started getting asked this question. And in that blog, I make the statement that you can't give to others what you haven't first given to yourself.

And I really, really believe this truly, especially within the well-being space. You know, even when I think of my friends who are psychologists and social workers, you know, they acknowledge that many of them went into that field because they were looking to heal themselves, and they recognize the importance of doing their own work in order to, you know, improve upon their mental health and well-being alongside their, you know, career of helping others with their mental health. So, all that to say, you know, looking back to 2013, when I hit the wall and I left my job as an emergency and critical care professor, which I loved. I mean, there was nothing wrong with that job. I absolutely loved it.

At that point in my life, I owned a house, I had a dog, I, you know, had some amazing colleagues and friends that I had, you know, grown to care for in Ontario, and I just felt like it wasn't sustainable. And in hindsight, I think if I had the tools that I have now, it would be sustainable for me. I would have been able to stay in that job long term and make it work. And, you know, hindsight, of course, is twenty-twenty, and I share that with you all because I do feel that there are some who are reaching for a change and reaching to do something different, without first looking at their own lives and wondering what can I do differently right now? So that in this current job, in this current state of my life, that I can be happy and healthy.

And then from that place, based on my experience, what I've learned, what I tried, that I can share that with others. So really, what I recommend to people who are in a place of wanting to learn more about veterinary wellness, to learn more about mental health and well-being, is to become the learner rather than the knower. So, you know, we get to a place in our careers as veterinary professionals where we feel confident in our skills, and we can just go about our jobs. And when you're embarking on something new, you have to really take the seat of not knowing anything, being open, being curious, you know, having a zest for knowledge. And that's exactly what I did, you know.

I've experienced burnout a number of times in my life, and it was probably the third time that I experienced burnout, and ultimately was in a bad car accident that really forced me to slow down, that I, accident that really forced me to slow down, that I took a step back and I said, like, something needs to change. Because what I'm doing right now, this isn't working. And I am, again, in the space of feeling like life is not sustainable. So how do I make life sustainable? Well, I started doing a deep dive into the research around well-being.

I started reading journal articles and magazine articles around mindfulness and meditation. I took an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction program on the advice of my physician. I attended human well-being conferences to learn, you know, what is the research out there? What are people focusing on? What are people sharing in this well-being space?

I, you know, read as much of the research as I could that was present in the veterinary well-being space at the time, which was mostly focused on suicide and, student well-being. And I just continued to read books upon books and listen to podcasts upon podcasts of anything and everything related to mental health and well-being. And even more so, I began to apply these strategies into my own life. So, I mentioned doing the mindfulness-based stress reduction program that then has culminated since in my daily mindfulness and meditation practice. I also did my two-hundred-hour yoga teacher certification, as well as my two-hundred-hour meditation teacher certification, so that I could really immerse myself in the information.

Not so much that I thought I would become a yoga and meditation instructor, but because I wanted to really deeply understand the concepts and integrate them into my own life, so that at some point, you know, maybe that could be information that I could share with others. And it was really upon learning all of this information, and applying it to my own life, and then seeing the benefits of those applications to my own life, that I thought, you know what? This has been so transformative for me. Could this be transformative to the veterinary profession? At the time, you know, again, this was, you know, almost a decade ago, we weren't really talking a lot about well-being and self-care.

We were talking a lot about the issues. We were talking a lot about suicide, and not so much about what to do, and how to fix it, and how to be healthier, as veterinary professionals. And so, as a criticalist who had been traveling to speak at conferences, you know, across Canada and The US and other parts of the world, for about a decade at that time, I started to, you know, pitch to conferences. Could I have a session on mindfulness? Could I present a session on self-care?

Can I talk about healthy boundaries? And I'm not gonna lie at the beginning, people were very resistant. They said, nah, you know, nobody's gonna wanna come listen to those sessions, let's just stick with the emergency and critical care. You know? And so, I did, and then I got to the point where I just was so passionate about sharing this information that I started offering, yoga retreats and workshops to veterinary team members who wanted to come to the mountains, close to where I live here in Calgary.

And it just has unfolded from there since. But I'll be honest with you, the work isn't done. I continue to do any well-being certifications that I can find the time for, especially those that are offered by the AVMA. I find that their, you know, Brave Space Certificate Program and Workplace Wellness Certificate Program are excellent starting points for individuals, and those are ones that I recommend. I recently also did the AVMA well-being train the trainer program, and this is despite being in this space for many, many years now.

You know, not so much that I feel as though I need additional training, but that I want to support this field. I want to support this space whereby others can feel that they can also, embark on this training as well. And of course, as a lifelong learner, I always recognize that there is always more for me to learn. And so even though I have been talking about communication and self-care and mental health and mindfulness for, you know, many years now, there's always more information that is coming out in the research, and there's also information that others are sharing too, that is a benefit for me to listen to. So, all this to say, there are many starting points that you can springboard from if you are interested in being an educator or being an advocate for well-being in the veterinary profession.

And I will link to some of those trainings, like I said, the AVMA trainings, in the show notes. And I highly suggest that you consider working on yourself, as cliche as that might sound, but to start with you before thinking about what you can bring to others. And when you see your own life change, and you see the benefits of what you've implemented in your life, and how they've helped you, I think that's a wonderful place then to springboard from and share that information with others. Now, along those same lines, this question that I add that I get asked also frequently is, how can I get my coworker to look after herself better? Or how can I get my colleague to accept that he needs to engage in self-care?

And the fact of the matter is, in these situations, we can't get anyone to do anything. We have no control over other people. We only have control over ourselves. And a statement that has really stuck with me over the years as a coach and a well-being advocate is, I can't help anyone any more than they want to help themselves. You can't force anyone into coaching or therapy or self-care or self-help.

They have to want to do it. And so, the best advice that I can give for you when you want to enact change in others whom you spend time with is to lead by example. You know, in the words of Gandhi, be the change that you want to see in this world. And again, I know it sounds very cliche, and you might be rolling your eyes as you listen to me right now, but I've seen this in my own life. I've seen this in my relationships.

I've seen this in, you know, amongst my family members and my close friends is, you know, I have some very strong boundaries. I have some very strong daily non negotiables, as far as exercise, mindfulness and meditation, time outside, etcetera. And when people spend enough time around me and they see me adhere to those principles and those boundaries, they really feel called to do the same. They feel as though they have permission to do the same. I wrote a blog a couple years ago as well on this martyrdom mentality that we have in veterinary medicine, and how I want others to lead by example and lead by positive example.

So rather than, you know, throwing yourself on the sword and taking one for the team and always being the one to stay late and, you know, always giving your energy and selflessness to others, which, yes, are amazing traits. And if you continue to do that, you are going to have nothing left to give those others. So, recognizing that as veterinary professionals, we have to take care of ourselves first. We have to prioritize our mental health and well-being. And in doing so, we are able to show up as the best version of ourselves.

So, focus on, again, what you have control over. You have control over your boundaries, your daily habits, your self-care. You also have control over how you communicate, and communication is such a baseline skill for wellness in the veterinary workplace. So be mindful of how you communicate with your team members. Right?

How you address them when you feel that they might be struggling. What you share with them. How you empathize with them. How you listen and meet them where they're at. Okay?

So, really, you know, when it comes to these conversations and these communications, just asking open ended questions to understand where a person is coming from, where their behavior stem from, and then sharing your experience and what's worked for you as you feel it's appropriate. And allowing them to take or leave whatever it is that you share, depending on what place they're in. Because, again, we have to meet everyone where they're at. We can't simply, you know, throw an exercise and diet regimen at them, and expect that they're just going to, you know, take it on and just, you know, follow in your footsteps. Right?

They have to get to a place where they feel ready to do that. So, you know, I think, again, in addition to what I've shared as well, we might also think about giving other people permission to do what they need to do, to honor their boundaries. Very often, I hear people say, you know, well, gosh, what is it about these young millennial veterinarians and team members? You know, they're just so, about the work life balance, and they don't want to work and, you know, they just want to spend time with their families and their friends. I think if we want to be in a place of well-being in our own lives, we have to fully embrace and honor how others achieve well-being in their lives.

So, giving others permission to have their own boundaries, even though they might not be your boundaries, they're their boundaries, and if it's in support of their mental health and well-being, then honoring that and accepting that. So, there's a lot of things that you can think about when you think about inspiring others to improve in their mental health and well-being, and also in being an advocate and an educator for well-being. Again, I want you to keep in mind that we really are the product of the handful of people that we spend the most time within our lives. So, if you can be that person that embodies that healthy communication, those healthy boundaries, that self-care and daily habits that foster your mental health and well-being, and that you feel comfortable to share others and inspire them to do the same, I think that is a wonderful and incredibly impactful place to start. So that's it for this episode of Reviving Vet Med.

Thank you so much for listening to me share my story and some ideas and suggestions that I have for others who really want to inspire mental health and well-being in those around them. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to send it to a colleague or a friend. And of course, I would appreciate it if you would subscribe to get the episodes as soon as they are released. I'm also excited to share that I have my 2023 online programs planned for this year. I urge you, if you're interested in an online program about burnout, boundaries, or workplace wellness, that you visit my website, marieholowaychuk.com, to learn more.

And each of those programs has a wait list that you can sign up for so that you can be the first to register when registration opens. I want to thank my amazing assistant, Jamie, for producing this episode, and I want to thank you for listening through to the end. Until next time, take care of yourself. Bye now.