A note for anyone who keeps learning things but doesn’t seem to get closer to their goals
Let me start by saying that I am a big fan of learning and education. I teach for a living both in the exam room and at the Uncharted Veterinary Conference. I’m also married to a college professor and am constantly hassling my teenage daughters to do their homework and focus on their grades. I’m a big fan of knowing stuff and continuing to get a better understanding of medicine and the world around me.
At the same time, I wish someone in veterinary school had told me the limits of how far education alone can take you. I graduated focusing on all the things I didn’t know, hadn’t tried, and was not certified in. I looked at challenging cases and questioned whether I was qualified to handle them. I think I had internalized an idea that if you didn’t know everything about a case, you shouldn’t be doing it.
Today, I see this same idea in a lot of veterinarians. Our profession idolizes knowledge and credentialing, and there are certainly great benefits to having academic rigor at the heart of a medical vocation. At the same time, formal education is only a piece of what makes a technically competent doctor.
The complimentary (and wholly underrated) piece of medical proficiency is confidence. Greatness requires a willingness to try things, to take responsibility for cases and procedures we have not done before, and to step up for the clients and patients who need care and can’t afford to engage a specialist. None of these things happen if we veterinarians fail to generate the confidence required to push forward.
We live in a world of endless theoretical access to resources. Hypothetically speaking, there’s almost always someone who pet owners could see who has more expertise than you do. They have better trained staff, equipment you don’t have, experience you lack, and far more letters after their name than you ever will. Even if the client has to drive two hours and pay thousands of dollars to see this person, the fact remains that someone objectively better than you could be doing this work.
Every day, veterinarians step back from opportunities to push themselves and grow because they know more qualified people exist. So many of us falter in the face of questions we don’t have clear answers to, plans we have not carried out before, and therapies we didn’t learn about in veterinary school. We tell ourselves that we don’t have the knowledge to move forward or the experience, but what we really struggle with is the confidence needed to say “I have not done one of these before, but I believe I can figure it out.”
Of course I’m not advocating for rushing blindly into challenges we are unprepared for or for being reckless in any way. I am, however, pointing out that you will never gain experience or feel qualified for a task if you don’t attempt it for the first time. Yes, it is vital that you communicate to the pet owners what options they have for treatment, and yes you should be honest with yourself and others about how much experience you have. You should also be willing to step up, review best practices, ask a mentor to look over your shoulder, and get to work making yourself into the experienced and adaptable type of caregiver you want to be.
Education without confidence is like a car without gas. It’s all potential, but it doesn’t go anywhere. I wish someone had told me that success as a doctor comes at least as much from picking up a scalpel as from attending advanced surgery lectures. I wish I’d known that believing in myself would mean as much to my patients as the information I used to pass my exams.
As the cost of care rises, support staff gain autonomy to help provide wellness care, and direct-to-consumer veterinary services enter the marketplace, general practitioners are going to have to adapt. We are going to need to embrace medical needs that are beyond what well-educated technicians can provide and to fill in the growing gap between wellness services and specialty services. I do not believe the greatest obstacle to this evolution is a lack of education or access to information. The greatest obstacle to the best future for general practice veterinarians is a lack of confidence.
