Coaching Yourself Through Negativity

By: Dr. Julie Cappel

This morning as I was drinking my morning coffee I started flipping through posts on LinkedIn. I have a tendency to do this in the morning as I find it a great place to find words of inspiration from thought leaders. Today I found quite the opposite. I ran across an article on the DVM360 website that talked about “buyer’s remorse” in young veterinarians in regards to their veterinary degree. The author stated that most veterinarians feel remorse in the first 3-5 years of their working life. They feel a sense of disconnect between what they THOUGHT life would be as a veterinarian and what life actually is. They are discouraged about their debt, the difficulty of the job, and the work-life balance that they are trying to achieve.

This is a narrative that directly speaks to me. These negative thoughts about our profession are a cancer that we need to cure and why I chose to become a veterinary life coach. Most of us do not know how to manage negative thoughts about veterinary medicine when they occur. If we can learn to manage the way we think about our career, we are well on the way to feeling better about our veterinary life.

Let’s talk about some steps to coach ourselves through this “buyer’s remorse”.

The first thing to think about is that YOU are NOT your job. Your job brings many difficult circumstances that have nothing to do with YOU. There are negative clients, stressed team members, diseases that are difficult to cure, and daily struggles. There are also happy clients, cute puppies, talented team members and successful surgeries. You have no REAL control over most circumstances positive or negative. They are just life. They have nothing to do with YOU personally. When you separate YOU from the JOB you can see that you are 100% human and 100% worthy. You need to start from this place.

Realize that you have control over the way you THINK about any situation. You are in control of your thoughts. It feels as if you cannot control your thoughts, but if you really sit down and look at them, you realized that you are able change them and look at life differently. You don’t have to think from a place of scarcity when looking at your veterinary career. You can choose to think of the abundance and the opportunity that you have to help people in your work every day. Once you start thinking about your scarcity thoughts and realizing that you can change them to abundance thoughts, you will start to feel better about your career.

When you become more abundance minded you will more willingly take positive steps and actions towards making your life better. You will take more risks because you will realize that any action is better than inaction. Forward motion is better than procrastination, always. You will be more willing to risk failure because you know that failure is a stepping stone to future success.

The next time that you think about your profession as a struggle or feel buyer’s remorse, remember that you have the power to turn it around. You can choose to be enamored with your life, not overwhelmed by it. Choose an abundance mindset over scarcity. Choose to think of yourself as 100% veterinary rock star, 100% worthy of a beautiful life. There is no situation that you can encounter that you cannot handle, because you are a powerful, worthy veterinarian.

Let’s do away with buyer’s remorse.

Dr. Julie Cappel

“Everything you need you already have. You are complete right now; you are a whole, total person, not an apprentice person on the way to someplace else. Your completeness must be understood by you and experienced in your thoughts as your own personally reality.” – Wayne Dyer

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