Grief and Healing in Veterinary Medicine | Episode 69 | Reviving Vet Med

Grief is a constant presence in veterinary medicine—quiet, cumulative, and often ignored. From euthanasia and patient loss to a co-worker resigning or a colleague moving away, grief takes many forms in the lives of veterinary professionals. But what happens when we don’t acknowledge it?

In this thought-provoking episode, we speak with Kira Valentine, Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Certified Veterinary Technician, and Reviving Veterinary Medicine coach, about the hidden grief that veterinary teams carry—and why making space for it is essential for healing, connection, and sustainability in the profession.

Kira shares her powerful journey from ER technician to trauma-informed coach, and how her lived experience informs her work supporting individuals and leaders through burnout, compassion fatigue, and emotional overwhelm. We explore why many in vet med don’t feel entitled to grieve, how unresolved grief can quietly erode wellbeing, and what it looks like to lead with emotional awareness.

If you’re holding grief you haven’t named—or supporting others who are—this episode offers permission to pause, reflect, and begin to release. 

Watch the Video Version of this Episode
https://youtu.be/KsDZ1NZ7dQo

Resources
Learn more about Kira and the other coaches at Reviving Veterinary Medicine: https://revivingvetmed.com/meet-our-coaches 

Book a 20-minute introductory coaching call with Kira: https://scheduler.zoom.us/coaching-rvm-kiravalentine/20-minute-discovery-call- 

Follow Kira Valentine on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kira-valentine-21639917b/ 

Beyond death: Understanding grief in all its forms (blog): https://revivingvetmed.com/beyond-death-understanding-grief-in-all-its-forms/ 

Grief in Response to Uncertainty Distress Among Veterinary Students During the Early Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic (article): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8295725/ 

Impacts of the process and decision-making around companion animal euthanasia on veterinary wellbeing (article): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31409747/ 

Thank You to Our Sponsor
Reviving Veterinary Medicine: www.revivingvetmed.com

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

Online Programs
To learn more about Reviving Veterinary Medicine’s offerings including coaching, lunch & learns, critical incident group debriefing, and online programs, please visit our website: https://revivingvetmed.com/ 

Questions, Suggestions, or Sponsorship Opportunities
Email: podcast@revivingvetmed.com 

Transcript

This episode of the Reviving Vet Med Podcast is brought to you by Reviving Veterinary Medicine, where wellbeing and sustainability in Vet Med are more than just buzzwords. If you're a veterinarian, technician, manager or owner, feeling stuck, burned out, or simply craving more alignment in your career and life, coaching with Reviving Veterinary Medicine can help. Our coaching isn't one size fits all. Whether you're navigating a career transition, managing ADHD, working through burnout, or just trying to find your spark again, we've got experienced, compassionate coaches ready to support you.

Through personalized evidence-based sessions. We'll help you reflect on your values, build practical skills, and set goals that actually feel good to pursue. You don't need to do this alone, and you don't need to wait until you're in crisis to get support. To learn more or book a complimentary intro call, visit revivingvetmed.com/coaching. Let's build a veterinary career that works for you.

Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of Reviving Vet Med. In this episode, we're diving into a topic that often lives under the surface of veterinary grief: what it looks like, how it affects us, and why it matters. And today, I'm joined by one of our incredible Reviving Vet Med coaches, Kira Valentine. Kira is a licensed clinical social worker and certified veterinary technician with over two decades of experience in emergency and critical care, including more than 13 years in leadership. She brings a rare and powerful blend of clinical expertise, mental health training, and nonprofit leadership to her coaching work. So whether it's losing a patient, stepping away from a role, or simply holding space for others suffering, we talk today that grief weaves through the everyday experiences of veterinary professionals.

In our conversation, we explore the many forms grief can take in vet medicine, how it often goes unrecognized, and how unprocessed grief can fuel burnout and compassion fatigue. Kira also shares how her personal and professional journey shaped her passion for supporting veterinary teams through emotional healing. With that said, I'm excited to share this powerful and deeply compassionate conversation with you. So let's go ahead and get into the episode.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
This is the Reviving Vet Med podcast and I'm your host, Dr. Marie Holowaychuk. My mission is to improve the mental health and wellbeing of veterinary professionals around the world.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
Hi Kira, I'm so glad to have you on the podcast.

Kira Valentine
Well, I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
Of course. You have had such a unique journey. You and I go way back. We used to work together at NC State when I was a Baby resident, and you were a technician. And from there you've moved into licensed clinical social work. You're a leadership coach as well. What led you into this alternative path where you've had the opportunity to focus on grief trauma and emotional wellbeing in vet medicine?

Kira Valentine
Yeah, it has been a little bit of a winding road. And really, even before you and I met, I thought I wanted to be a veterinary neurologist. So I am not averse to changing my ideas, that is for sure, but it mostly comes out of need, I think there's no one road that has led me here. I think way back when you and I were working together, I started to kind of see that there wasn't as much joy in veterinary medicine. And it made me start to wonder why that was and what is happening. And, you know, research on compassion fatigue has started to come out, and I was very interested in that sort of thing. So I got into leadership because I thought maybe a more compassionate, more understanding, more relational leadership style might help. And it certainly did. It did, for sure.

Kira Valentine
But there were also areas that I was like, ooh, I'm not sure I know enough to not do any damage and not be as helpful as I possibly can. So it kind of moved me more towards learning more about people and loving the people who do this work as much as I love the patients. And also noticing that there were areas of our profession that made us uncomfortable, and it made me wonder what we could do about that and how we could make that better. You know, grief is certainly an area that makes people uncomfortable on a regular basis, but it's such a big part of what we do. Those last loving moments of a client.

Kira Valentine
So by making sure that it's as smooth and as positive an experience as we can make, it really makes a difference in not only the client's experience, but our experience and this being meaningful work for us.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
Oh, my gosh, you brought up so many great things. I had no idea you wanted to be a neurologist. That is amazing.

Kira Valentine
And so we were.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
You know what? I love the notion that I see an issue and I want to jump in and see if I can fix it or do better or better. I think that's incredible. Something you said really stuck with me, and that was this notion of the interplay between the client's experience and the team's experience when it comes to an end of life situation. And I'm reminded of an article that was published, I think it was in the vet record a few years ago, done through research that was done at the Ontario Vet College and they interviewed team members to ask them about their experience with euthanasia. Because I think the public perception is that euthanasia is so hard. I don't know how you do that. This must be the worst part of your job.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
And it was so interesting to read in that study that in fact, when the end of life situation unfolded peacefully and nicely and the client had a good experience, then that did in turn have a positive experience on the wellbeing of the veterinary team members, which is something I hadn't really thought of before. But looking back on my own experience, I can totally see. Yeah, like when a euthanasia goes well, I feel so grateful. And as you said, this work is so meaningful that I can offer this peaceful passing for this family.

Kira Valentine
That relational piece, right, that piece where we're not here just for the animals. Like, that's the beauty of veterinary medicine. There's always a human attached to these animals that we love. But finding meaning and just being in the presence of that loving relationship between the owners and their pets can be incredibly meaningful for us too. Like me, my mentor actually says that all the time. She runs a grief support group for our two hospitals and she says just, it's so honoring to be in the presence of such love. And I think that some of the clients are like, oh, wait, oh my grief is love. Ding, ding. Like, that makes so much sense to them and that's not such a taboo. It's like, oh my gosh. Well, I can talk about love. I love my pet. Of course I love my pet.

Kira Valentine
You know, it makes it just as such. Easier topic to discuss when you kind of reframe it in the light of love.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
Yeah, I love that. Gosh, what a great way to reframe it for sure. Make it more accessible. You know, speaking of grief, that is a constant undercurrent of the work that we do. Like, yes, euthanasia can go really well, but there are sometimes we're euthanizing patients that we've been caring for intensively for more than a decade or whatever it might be, and yet we don't often talk about it. How do you define grief in this context and what are some of the ways it shows up in the day to day lives of the veterinary team members?

Kira Valentine
I think most people do think of grief just as it relates to death. That's just a tiny sliver of what grief can be. Really the definition of grief is the feelings that come about from any kind of loss and they can be Any loss, real or perceived. I think in veterinary medicine, we do see quite a bit of death because no pet lives as long as we want them to, and our lifespan is so much longer than theirs. So we do see that life cycle more often than other professions, for sure. But I do think that we can experience losses in other ways, too, and they might be big, they might be small, and it's different for everybody. And I think you were starting to touch on a little bit of, you know, this is the client's loss and how does it impact us?

Kira Valentine
I think we don't want to rob the client of those experiences, but it's still grief for us, too, because like you said, sometimes we are seeing these patients from the time they were puppies to the. They're old and gray. So it's a loss for us, too. I think we are very mindful of not encroaching on their experience. But we do also have to give ourselves some grace, too, that the grief belongs with us, too. And it might be, did I do enough for this pet or did I give the best advice? Did I? All those kinds of things that go into us feeling certain about what we're doing.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
Yeah. It's so interesting, you know. Yes. Death is such a big part of what we do in practice, and yet grief can show up in so many different ways, in ways that I never really acknowledged before. You wrote a blog post for Reviving Veterinary Medicine called Beyond Grief, Understanding Death in All Its Forms. And in that post, you brought to light so many different circumstances where people can experience grief. I'd love for you to talk about some of those experiences.

Kira Valentine
Yeah, well, and that really came about from a personal experience. And I won't go into a lot of detail, but I had a job that I absolutely loved, and through a corporate restructuring, I found myself without a seat at the table, and I found myself just so desperately sad. And it didn't really occur to me at first that it really was grief because I had lost this job, but it was really after talking to my husband, and he was like, well, yeah, you're not doing what you used to do every single day, and your life is very different than it was even a week ago. I'm like, oh, my gosh. Yeah. So by calling it what it was, I was able to start really thinking about it in a different way and thinking about, why did that job matter to me so much?

Kira Valentine
What parts of that job did I absolutely love and are going to look for again? And what parts am I like, oh, gosh, I am so glad to be done with another 8am meeting. I don't want to do those again. Those sorts of things really gave me a compass and kind of set me in a direction of, well, I really loved taking care of staff and their needs and their emotional wellbeing, but do I know enough? So that's when I decided to go back to school and learn more about social work and learn more about how to help and support people in that regard. Grief can be a compass for any of us. We're finding that we have a loss and it is really impacting us and it's really affecting our day to day.

Kira Valentine
And if we can get a little bit of perspective and say, well, why? Why did that loss hit me so deeply where another loss, maybe I just kind of rolled with it and went through it, that might give us some insight into ourselves and teach us something about ourselves that our feelings are telling us where our thoughts were, kind of keeping it from us or the reality of, well, how is it going to make that work, you know? But your feelings are probably more honest than any thought you can have. So if we can pay attention to those, grief can actually be such a positive thing for us and it can actually show us what matters to us and what we're passionate about and what we really love.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
I love that. Again, such a great reframe, right? To look at grief as like, I don't know, a signpost or something to like what is really underneath. I think of anger in that way. I tell people for the longest time I thought anger was bad. I should never be angry and I should never lose my temper. And certainly we have to be mindful of our actions when we become angry. But it's really helped me to recognize that anger is a secondary emotion. Like it's always because of something, some experience of envy where you recognize I want that and I don't have it, or embarrassment, like I'm feeling embarrassed or maybe even shameful that I'm in this experience. And so I'm going to defend myself by getting angry or deflect or hurt feelings or all of these different things.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
So I love that reference in terms of grief as well. You know, it's interesting. So what I'm hearing you say is that we can really experience grief because we lose a job or maybe we lose a team member. Maybe a team member goes to another practice, right? Or the practice gets sold to a corporation and now we're in this like new structure and we've lost that autonomy that an independently owned practice has. It's interesting because recently, in preparing for our conversation, I did a bit of a lit search on grief and I was shocked at how little there is out there in the veterinary space specifically.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
But one paper came up and that was a paper that came out of Lincoln Memorial University College of Vet Medicine where they were interviewing vet students early in the pandemic to assess their response to the uncertainty of the pandemic. And the big theme that came up for them was around grief, like this uncertainty, grief of like, what does the future hold? And this anticipatory grief of like, we're not going to have our graduation, we're not going to finish our rotations. What are your thoughts in response to that? Is that something that we can maybe apply in different situations in vet medicine?

Kira Valentine
Yes. And how real is that feeling? And we're only just seeing that now as we're getting a little bit further away from the pandemic. And when things opened back up, we're finding that interns and students at the time are feeling like kind of that loss of clinical rotations and that loss of in person rounds and the loss of graduation and how is that impacting their clinical practice now? Are they feeling like, well, I didn't have those things, so am I good enough? Am I, do I know enough? So there, those could be entangled with all sorts of other emotions about feeling not good enough or imposter syndrome and that sort of thing, which, my gosh, we suffer from enough in veterinary medicine as it is.

Kira Valentine
But adding in that I didn't have the traditional experience as other veterinary students or other technician students can really be impactful for you. Just feeling comfortable and confident in your day. And those were really losses, you know, they, those were grief. I was expecting to be able to go to grand rounds and I was expecting to be able to hear that clinical professor that I've heard about speak to us or you know, I was looking forward to who was going to be my graduation speaker. You know, those sorts of things, they might seem silly to some, but they are really impactful to others. And it just depends on your personal perspective of what matters to you. And what were you really looking forward to and how is that going to change how you look at things going forward?

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
Gosh, as we get into this conversation, it just really reminds me how complicated grief is. I think about going back to what we started with, which was our pets, our patients. When a client loses a dog, for example, they don't just lose the dog, but they lose that daily routine of taking the dog for a Walk.

Kira Valentine
Right.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
Or the daily presence of their dog in the office while they work. And I think about these situations as well. And similarly, yeah, those daily changes that can happen. I remember when I first got hired at the Ontario Vet College after my residency and there was a very renowned surgeon who had been there for a very long time who had suddenly passed away before I arrived and it was still recent enough that it was very heavy. You could see that when people talked about this surgeon that they were very emotionally affected. And one of the biggest things that I heard from the residents in training was I was so looking forward to working with him or learning from him or all of these things.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
So it's again not just the loss of this colleague, this friend, this mentor, but this loss of what could have been. So yeah, it's just so multifaceted.

Kira Valentine
It's not only multifaceted, but it can be compounding. So if you had that mentor that just reminds you of your grandfather who you lost to, like now you're feeling that loss and your grandfather's loss, it can be, I mean it just, there's so many things that can get wrapped up in it and it might feel selfish cuz that professor you hadn't even met, but you could look forward and be like, oh man, I was really looking forward to learning from that person. That's a loss for me. And we should feel selfish when we feel that kind of grief because it's a feeling and that is truly how you're feeling and that matters to you. It doesn't matter that you didn't know him. It's that what you were dreaming about isn't going to happen now. And that is a loss.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
That's so interesting. So I think that dovetails really nicely into the next question I wanted to ask you, which was around veterinary professionals not feeling entitled to grieve, whether it's after a euthanasia, a patient loss, leaving a job or like losing a colleague like this. What will you say to somebody who feels that their grief isn't valid or big enough?

Kira Valentine
It really is such a personal thing and something that maybe 10 years ago wouldn't have affected you, might be affecting you now and it's just your feelings. Feelings. We often think about feelings as being good or bad or negative or positive. Really all feelings are just feelings. And the human experience is having an array of experiences and being able to recognize what that feeling is really where the learning comes from and really the self-expression comes when you can say ooh, that's hitting me when I didn't expect it to. What is that? Oh, maybe it's a loss and, or maybe I need to do some self-reflection of why that particular pet hit me? Did it remind me of one of my dogs growing up or did the owner look at my mom or those sorts of things.

Kira Valentine
You don't really know necessarily why a feeling is hitting you until you take a moment. Maybe that moment is not the best time to do it because I think we often feel like, oh, gosh, we have a responsibility to keep it together so that we can treat the next pet. We're going to just shove that to the side and kind of keep going with our day. But if we don't at some point reflect on why that one hit us, it's gonna compound and it's gonna, like, get bigger than it needs to be and it's gonna be harder to, like, disentangle. It might be, you know, at the end of your day, before you turn your car on, it might be take an afternoon and go see a movie and you think about it a little bit.

Kira Valentine
You know, those sorts of things in the shower where you're shampooing your hair. Sometimes people have the best ideas in the shower. But we do need to, like, be brave enough to take that moment to do some self-reflection so that we can truly understand what matters to us and why it doesn't matter to us.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
Yeah, I love that. It's so interesting. You know, so many things come up as I hear you talking about that, and they're all like, words of wisdom from social workers I've worked with in the past. And the first one is we need to name it to tame it. Right. Just recognizing, you know, you get to your car at the end of the day and you're like, well, that was a horrible day. Well, let's stop for a moment and think about what was horrible about it. What am I feeling, what's coming up for me, what are the thoughts, feelings, et cetera, that are arising? And when you stop to recognize, wow, we lost one of my favorite patients today, what I'm feeling is grief, then we can start to process it and like you said, prevent it from compounding.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
I think the other thing is, and this is something that I've said to a lot of people, you know, coaching clients and others, even in my family or my life, you gotta feel it or it's gonna keep coming up at the most inopportune times. Like if you keep shoving those feelings away, then at the worst, you're gonna Be in a situation that totally doesn't feel called for and suddenly you're gonna be a puddle of tears because it's those feelings that you never processed from something that happened before. And they're gonna find a way to come back up whether you like it or not, until you can properly process them and move on.

Kira Valentine
You're like cataracts. They just keep building layers and changing your lens and it keeps, like, distorting your vision. If you really want to be able to see clearly again, you gotta get those taken care of.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
You gotta get to the underlying cause. I love that. So when we don't process our grief, how can it contribute to burnout or compassion fatigue? And what are some signs that a person might be impacted by grief? Like more deeply than they realized before?

Kira Valentine
Yeah, it's so funny to me because. Well, not funny haha, but you know what I mean, that people are always just surprised to find that the problem is happening with them. Because one of the things that I see a lot of times with compounded grief and compassion fatigue and burnout is the blame game. And they think everybody else would just do what they're supposed to do with my life would be so much better. And it's like, ooh, but let's figure out what's going on with you and how you're feeling about things. Which is so scary sometimes to have to really think about yourself and really think about how you're feeling, because it's so much easier to just say, well, somebody else should change.

Kira Valentine
So a lot of times I see the blame game happen and it's like, oh, but what's happening with you? And they're like, no, not. We're not here to talk about me. We're here to talk about this. TA isn't working. It's like, well, no, I hear about you and what's happening with you. So that's one of the things that I see a lot of the time. I think attorney Brown said that too, that blame is just a discharge of pain and discomfort. So you're feeling uncomfortable about what's happening. It's so much easier to turn it outwards.

Kira Valentine
So when you start to see a co-worker or a staff member or even yourself start to kind of think it's everybody else, that's the time to stop and get a moment of self-reflection and maybe through with a trusted person and be like, I am feeling like everything is everybody else's fault. What is happening with me? We also see grief is, you know, it's specifically related to a loss. But the symptoms are very similar to depression and anxiety. You might be feeling tired, you might be feeling just the blahs, able to sleep really well, not eating really well. Hypervigilance. Oh, that's another one that we see a lot.

Kira Valentine
We are always looking for the next threat and you're always like waiting for the next thing to happen or taking on the world as your responsibility and everything has to be done by you, kind of that isolation. So those are things that kind of can be confusing because the way depression and anxiety is diagnosed is how deep it is, how impactful it is on your life and how long it lasts. Where grief can show the same symptoms, but it's specifically related to a loss. So I want to put an asterisk on this conversation that even though symptoms are similar, if you're finding that you're not being able to function your daily life or it's really persistent, that's the time to seek medical care and make sure that it's not a true depression or a true anxiety.

Kira Valentine
Or if you can't think of anything, what loss am I having? I'd wanna make sure that people are getting the care thing.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
Yeah.

Kira Valentine
Are the symptoms just? They are so overlapping totally.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
And it's even the same with burnout. You know, like in the later stages of burnout, it's. There's a ton of overlap with depression. And I remember reading a really comprehensive paper dissecting how do we as mental health providers or other caregivers differentiate between depression in the late stages of burnout? And it does ultimately come down to the cause. As you said, like with burnout, it's usually or often a work related phenomenon. Right. So there's some issue with work. And in this case for the individual, if there's some unprocessed grief at work and that's just compounding, then that could be leading to burnout. And concurrently they could also be having signs of or symptoms of depression as well. So I agree, I think always default to connecting with a mental health professional if you have any questions about what you might be experiencing.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
You work a lot with veterinary leaders. You've been a leader in veterinary practice for some time now. What emotional burdens do you feel like practice managers or supervisors often carry and in what ways might they suppress or ignore their own grief or exhaustion?

Kira Valentine
So there's. I'm not sure if this is in other fields because I have only ever worked in veterinary medicine except for those little jobs here and there. But I feel like in veterinary Medicine, we tend to promote people who are the best at their jobs. So we promote the best veterinarian to the chief medical officer. We promote the best technician to the supervisor or the practice manager. And we don't give them a lot of education for it or training for it or support for it. So I think a lot of times people end up in a leadership role and they feel like they have to be. You know those. The cartoons where people are spinning plates? They probably could do that. Indeed. And they just feel like they have to keep a dozen plates spinning in the air at all times.

Kira Valentine
And no one's ever told them how to spin a plate, so they're just kind of like winging it. So I think I have to put one more plate up there to take care of myself. What are you asking? That's asking too much. But it's not, because if we don't put that plate in the air first, all the other plates are going to come down at some point, just like we were talking about before, that those compounded feelings are gonna come out at some point or another. And I think that it really does a number on our veterinary leaders when they think that's a fault to be a human. It's not a fault to say, I don't actually know what I'm doing, I need some help.

Kira Valentine
It's so important for veterinary leaders to have some educational background or be exposed to some training or have a mentor. There are times that veterinary leaders are legally not allowed to share information. And if you're at a practice that you're the only leader, there's legally no one you can talk to. So building a community, because if we don't kind of give each other that support, it really is kind of an impossible hill to climb. Because I do think that veterinary leaders think that they just have to take it all on themselves. They've seen good leaders and they've seen bad leaders and they don't want to be one of the bad leaders. So they're just going to keep working harder and harder. The community is really important when you get to a leadership position.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
Yeah. Such great words of advice. And I think, going back to our. The point about grief, I imagine, too, as a leader, you're carrying so much, as we know there's so much turnover in vet medicine. You know, there's a lot of attrition, a lot of technicians and nurses, especially even client care representatives, veterinarians, et cetera, are leaving jobs. And there must be some loss in that for the manager or supervisor or practice owner. That just feels like it's compounded sort of by like, what did I do wrong? How did I fail them? Did I not work hard enough? And all of these expectations they're putting on themselves. So just, you know, so much going through and compounding things as well.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
What is something that leaders of teams might be able to do to support their team members who might be going through one of these grief scenarios? What would be helpful for them?

Kira Valentine
Yeah, so I very much believe in relational leadership. I feel like, especially in this kind of field, I kind of call veterinary medicine an intrinsic field because there aren't a whole lot of bells and whistles that we get from being in this field, except from ourselves. So it's like the passion for wanting to do this comes from inside us. So I feel like relationships are really how we maintain this field and how we maintain wanting to be here. So if leaders can kind of develop those relationships with their staff on the good days, then you're gonna notice when you're walking by somebody and you say, how's it going? And not in the way where you're like, you use how's it going as a greeting and you just keep going like, how's it going? And stop for a second, pause.

Kira Valentine
That person who says, oh, I'm peachy keen every single day. And then one day they say, I'm okay. You're like, oh, wait, that's what you usually say to me. Just okay, today. And then you can start asking some more questions about what's going on. And sometimes you can catch something before somebody even realizes it themselves. In social work, there's a kind of an acronym for these kinds of conversations called ORs, and it's asking open ended questions. So those questions that are inspiring people to not give one word answers, they're asking people their thoughts and feelings. So validating how somebody actually is feeling about something and that like their feelings are worthwhile. Ours is reflective listening. So kind of active listening. I'm not just listening to respond, but I'm listening to gain understanding of what's happening with this person.

Kira Valentine
And then the S is for summarizing. So be able to repeat back that I, I'm understanding what you're saying and I'm, my words are kind of also validating what you're saying to me. So if leaders can learn those kinds of communication skills, it really does make that relationship more solid. So people feel more comfortable when something's not going well to be able to say, actually, you're right, I'm not great today. And sometimes it's something happening outside of work and they just need to kind of spill their guts a little bit. And that's okay. I have, in my office, an emotional chicken that people are allowed to hold. Gosh. And they need to hold Eleanor.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
She's a knit guppy or a live chicken.

Kira Valentine
He's knitted. Imagine if I had a real hen. That'd be so funny.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
But yeah, sometimes people just, I'm like, just to clarify.

Kira Valentine
Yeah. So they can come in and sometimes you just need to give Eleanor a hug and that's fine. But sometimes it's something that I can actually help with. You know, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed today and I can kind of help figure out priorities with them. Or we're missing some supplies that we really need to do our job. Oh, let me look into that. Oh, we have three of them broken. Let me see where they are. And repair. So sometimes it's something that I can quickly do something about, but sometimes it's just they need to talk about it. But having that relationship makes that just okay into something meaningful and something maybe we can do something about.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
I love that you have such great wisdom and advice to offer. I love that you're really working towards supporting other leaders because as you said, so many of us kind of fall into these roles, but we don't really have the training and skills. And so I love tangible things like the ORS acronym and other things that can be helpful. As we wrap up towards the end of our conversation here, what is one grief related insight or practice that you wish every veterinary professional had in their back pocket?

Kira Valentine
I think we've already touched on it a little bit that grief is not necessarily a bad thing. It's just a feeling. And really we can use it to kind of guide us and give us a compass and show us what is really meaningful for us. And I think that if we can look at it as something that's not scary, that should be shied away from, we can learn so much about ourselves and the people that matter to us.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
I love that. Okay, then, last but not least, the final question. What does reviving veterinary medicine mean to you as a phrase?

Kira Valentine
Nuth. Well, I mean, first, I love the double meaning because as criticalist you probably have revived plenty of patience, but also just love the idea of bringing back meaning and joy and fulfillment in this field. Because I love this field and I love the people who do this work and I love the animals that we save. So bringing this into more of a long term, sustainable, fulfilling career. It just makes my heart sing.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
I love it. I feel the exact same way and I'm so glad that we had this time together today. Such great thoughts and perspectives that you shared with us. So thank you so much for your time today. Kira.

Kira Valentine
Thank you. Have a great one.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
Yes, you too.

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk
So that's it for this episode of Reviving Vet Med. I hope that you took away some tips and helpful tools for naming your grief, supporting others without losing yourself, and navigating the emotional realities of this profession with more compassion and care. If you know someone who might be quietly carrying grief, I hope you'll share this episode with them. Sometimes just hearing that we're not alone can make all the difference. Please subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already so that you don't miss future episodes. And if you're curious about any of the resources or articles we mentioned today, you'll find everything linked in the show notes. You can also follow us on social media at Reviving Vet Med for more wellbeing tools, tips and support.

OUTRO
And if you have questions, suggestions, or want to inquire about sponsorship, you can always reach us at podcast@revivingvetmed.com Special thanks to the team at Podcast Prime Solutions for producing this episode. And most of all, thank you for listening. Until next time, take care of yourself. Bye for now.