Josh Vaisman joins Dr. Andy Roark on the Cone of Shame Veterinary Podcast to explore the nuanced concept of happiness in the workplace. They delve into the realistic expectations of happiness at work, especially in demanding environments like veterinary practices. Josh emphasizes the balance between striving for employee happiness and acknowledging the inherent challenges of the job. They discuss the pitfalls of solely chasing happiness and the importance of fostering a work environment that values fulfillment and pride over constant joy. This episode offers insightful perspectives for veterinary leaders on setting realistic goals and cultivating a supportive workplace culture.
You can also listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Soundcloud, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts!
LINKS
Josh Vaisman at Flourish: https://www.flourish.vet/
Uncharted Team Leads Summit: www.unchartedvet.com/tls2024
Dr. Andy Roark Exam Room Communication Tool Box Team Training Course: https://drandyroark.com/on-demand-staff-training/
Dr. Andy Roark Charming the Angry Client Team Training Course: https://drandyroark.com/charming-the-angry-client/
Dr. Andy Roark Swag: drandyroark.com/shop
All Links: linktr.ee/DrAndyRoark
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Josh believes all veterinary professionals deserve to feel fulfilled by their work, each and every day. Through his company, Flourish Veterinary Consulting, he combines more than 20 years of veterinary experience, a master’s in applied Positive Psychology & Coaching Psychology, and education in Positive Leadership and Positive Organizational Scholarship and a passion for guiding leaders to cultivate work environments in which people can thrive.
Fun fact – Josh is also an avid beekeeper who teaches beginning beekeepers how to tend to their buzzing buddies.”, Dr. Andy Roark is a practicing veterinarian in Greenville SC and the founder of the Uncharted Veterinary Conference. He has received the NAVC Practice Management Speaker of the Year Award three times, the WVC Practice Management Educator of the Year Award, the Outstanding Young Alumni Award from the University of Florida’s College of Veterinary Medicine, and the Veterinarian of the Year Award from the South Carolina Association of Veterinarians.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Andy Roark: Welcome everybody to the Cone of Shame veterinary podcast. I am your host Dr. Andy Roark guys, I’m here with my good friend Josh Vaisman. He is, He’s amazing. Josh is a force of nature in the vet industry when it comes to positive workplace psychology. I just I can talk to him forever about what it means to be happy and what the point of all of this work that we do in practice is and you know, I just he always gives me a ton to think about.
He is a former practice owner and manager. He is the Lead Positive Change Agent at Flourish Veterinary Consulting. He is a he is the author of Lead to Thrive, which as I talk about a little bit in this podcast, my team absolutely loves. I love it, too. It’s uh, It’s really a great book.
It’s totally worth your time. It should be on your shelf for sure. Anyway, guys we talked today about how happy is happy enough? We talked about, I want my team to be happier. I want to be happy. Well, how happy do you need to be? And what does that really look like? And what does that even mean? This is a fun episode. I hope you will enjoy it. I hope you’ll get a lot out of it. I just, I really enjoy this conversation. Anyway, guys, let’s get into this episode.
Kelsey Beth Carpenter: (singing) This is your show. We’re glad you’re here. We want to help you in your veterinary career. Welcome to the Cone of Shame with Dr. Andy Roark.
Dr. Andy Roark: Welcome to the podcast. Josh Vaisman. How are you, my friend?
Josh Vaisman: I’m doing great. Dr. Andy Roark, how are you today?
Dr. Andy Roark: Man, I am great. It is always wonderful to have you here. You know, the first time I had you on the podcast, I told you
I was angry about you being on the podcast, and I was sick of you. Because my team just loves, loves your book. It’s called Lead to Thrive, The Science of Crafting a Positive Veterinary Culture, and it was being, I had read it.
I got, I got an early copy, and I didn’t say a lot about it, I guess, apparently, and then my team just quoted it to me until I couldn’t take it anymore. And that’s when I had you on the podcast. And so, anyway, we have come full circle, and now I sing your praises so the other people are just sick of hearing me talk about how great Josh Vaisman is.
So someone else is now going through the Josh It’s the Josh Vaisman cycle, is when you’re like, I am I like Oh, this is interesting, and then you’re like, I’m sick of hearing about this
Josh Vaisman: guy.
Sick and dizzy,
Dr. Andy Roark: And then you meet him and you’re like, he’s fantastic. I should evangelize about him to other people. And that’s the Josh Vaisman cycle.
Thank you for, thank you for being here. The last time, the last time you were on the podcast, we were talking, so every time we get together we talk about what, workplace culture. And, and that’s one of the things that I really love. It’s one of the things that you write a lot about. I think it’s why I just, I really enjoy our time together so much.
The question I think I put to you that we didn’t, I can’t remember if we were recording or not, but I put it to you last time we talked, and basically I said to you, how happy is happy enough?
So when we start talking about making a workplace for our people, when we start talking about making a vet practice, we tell people, oh, you know, I want my employees to be happy, or yeah, you know, we want this to be a, we want this to be a great place to work.
And, and I, I hear that, and I am on board with that. Nobody’s, nobody’s anti happy. But at some point, Josh, you go, how happy can you actually be? You know, taking money from clients, and, and cleaning up diarrhea on the treatment room floor. Like, you know what I mean? And like, a lot of this comes down to expectation setting, where if I say, Our goal is for our employees to be happy, for our staff to be happy, for me to be happy.
Am I just setting myself up to these unrealistic expectations? And so let me just kind of start, pause here and sort of put that to you and say, you know, Josh, when you talk about how happy is happy enough, like how happy are we trying to make our teams? Or should we be trying to make our teams?
Josh Vaisman: I love that question. It’s such an important thing for us to explore. You know, Andy, in my in my experience, there’s generally a bell curve on this, but it’s not It’s sort of like a reverse bell curve. There seems to be concentration at the polls. There’s one side of the coin where I run into organizations, veterinary hospitals, practices, companies, where they’re hyper focused on team happiness.
Like that, that is the primary goal. And they’re running themselves literally ragged, trying to create a happy team. And any sign of discontent is so overbearing upon them like, Oh, man, we made them happy 98 percent of the time, but that one day they were unhappy. And so obviously we failed. That’s not sustainable.
And then the other end is like, I remember like very, early on in, in my career at flourish and leading a workshop and talking about workplace wellbeing through the prism of applied positive psychology. And this, this gentleman, it’s like a six hour workshop, right? It’s about halfway through the workshop.
And this guy raises his hand and he owns a small practice with a relatively small team, one or two associates. And he says, you know, Josh, this is all great and dandy, but it’s not my job to make them happy. And, and there’s that, that end of the spectrum too, where they’re like, listen, I pay you to do something.
You do what I pay you to do. And that’s the end of it. I don’t think either of those ends of the spectrum are really healthy or sustainable. I think we got to find something somewhere in between. And I think that. Some of it, honestly for me, really boils down to the language that we choose to describe our goals and aspirations.
I think language really, really matters because language is a way of expressing a mental model. You know, when we use words, we have an image in our mind of what that word means, looks like, feels like, sounds like. And others also have an image in their mind. And sometimes those images align and sometimes they don’t.
But any word is going to solicit that. And when we start talking about things like this is a place where you’re going to be happy, we want to make you happy at work. Our goal as leaders is to create a happy team. That word happy, that has a mental model associated with it. And the reality is that mental model is not achievable.
Dr. Andy Roark: yeah. No, I think, I think you’re, I think you’re spot on. It’s funny. I’ve also had people say, you know, I pay these, I pay these people. And, and again, that is, that is a far, that’s a far end of the spectrum. I will tell you that I I say to owners and managers, you can’t make your team happy. Only, only they can make themselves happy.
And there is, there is truth to that. Now when I say that, I’m talking about external validation. I think a lot of us are external validation junkies,
and we’re like, I’ll know that I’m, that I’m good at my job because the clients will be happy, and the people that work with me will be happy. And I’m like, that’s, that’s not in your power.
We need to find other measures that you can use to decide if you believe you’re good
at your job
Josh Vaisman: Agree. Totally agree.
Dr. Andy Roark: Are not meant on the feelings of other people.
Josh Vaisman: you, you used this word, this phrase, external validation, and it, it, it, it sort of sparked a memory in my mind. There’s a. piece of research that was done by Barb Fredrickson, Barb Fredrickson and some of her colleagues where they they essentially, they identify people. One way that you could, you could describe this is folks who are driven by external validation so that, like, I’m here for the party thing, right?
I want to feel good all the time. And then another group of folks who are motivated by internal validation or, or you could say, like, the pursuit of purpose and meaning, right? Like, I want to make sure that I’m contributing in a meaningful way. I’m seeking fulfillment, not necessarily joy and happiness and and then she followed them in the study.
They followed them periodically. They had like a pager and the pager would periodically go off at random times and then they would complete like the PANAS, which is a way to measure positive and negative emotional states. like that. A variety of measures over a period of multiple, multiple weeks. And they found two very interesting things.
Number one, the people who were driven by external validation. So the happiness seekers, if you will, the happiness seekers were actually, I think it was somewhere like 70 to 75 percent more likely to report depressive symptoms and negative emotions because they were I shouldn’t say because it caught correlations, not necessarily causation, but it was correlated with the pursuit of happiness, whereas the people who were pursuing meaningfulness contribution impact that kind of thing, right?
They were significantly less likely to report negative emotional states insignificant, more likely to report positive emotional experiences. But interestingly, it also seemed to have a physiological relationship in that the people who were the happiness pursuers when blood works and when blood samples were taken showed significantly higher levels of Inflammatory markers in their bloodstream to the point where the the authors of the study the authors of the paper said It seems based on our data that the pursuit of happiness is about as good for you as chronic illness.
Dr. Andy Roark: Wow.
Yeah. I, I mean, I, I, I see it. I, I do see it. I think you know, it was pointed out to me years ago that one of the quickest ways to not feel happy is to ask yourself, Do I feel happy right now?
Josh Vaisman: I feel happy? Yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark: It’s like a, it’s like a trap, it’s like a trap door out of
happiness.
Josh Vaisman: Yeah. Yeah
Dr. Andy Roark: but yeah, it’s but you’re, but you’re totally right.
It’s, it’s, it’s. It’s so ephemeral. I think you know, it’s funny. I have a good friend. She’s a veterinarian, and she’s a good friend of mine, and we were talking at one point about her husband, and he’s not in vet, medicine, but she said, she sort of revealed a story about their relationship, and she said one of the things that, that it took her a long time to work through within their marriage was that he doesn’t believe that happiness is important. He, she said, well, what, what drives you forward? And he said, I feel satisfied fulfilling my obligations. And, and that was it. And it absolutely shattered her brain that her husband would say, I don’t think being happy is that important. I am, I take pride in fulfilling my obligations.
And I just, that is such a radically different way to think.
Josh Vaisman: Yes yeah
Dr. Andy Roark: But, so, so, so, I, and again, I just, I have, I remember it’s been years since she told me that, and I still just, I think about it. But I, I get it now. At first I was like, I don’t it. I, I get it now. I really do. It’s I go out and I work in my yard. I like, I like to garden. I really like landscaping.
It is June, July in, you know, June, July, summertime in South Carolina. It is hot. And the sun beats huh not fun. There’s no part of rearranging boulders, you know, in the yard and planting them that’s fun. But I get a great sense of pride looking at that wall, you know, that wall.
And, and, and when it’s, and when I’m there and I’m got dirt up to my, to my elbows, I feel good, Josh. Like I do it’s I’m sweaty and it gets in my eyes and I just, I, I, I, I do, I do love, like, it’s just at a deep level, it’s very fulfilling a way that’s not happiness. I wouldn’t call it happiness, but, so when he says, I, I meet my obligations, I go, I, I do, I do get that.
Josh Vaisman: Yeah. No, I think you’re really onto something here. For me, what it, what it, what all of this really boils down to is that I think oftentimes when we’re pursuing this thing of happiness, right? So I’m a, I’m a practice manager and I’m talking about, I just want my team to be happy. What we’re kind of saying is like, we just want our team to feel good.
Like we want our team to feel good and so we think we turn this into like an either or proposition. Like either they feel good and then imply there is all the time or they don’t and I’m failing and so I have to do better to make them feel good. But the reality is is that there’s no such thing as a challenge, stress, stress, adversity or pain free life.
And there is certainly no such thing as a pain free existence in veterinary medicine. The work we do is really hard. It’s incredibly demanding. Sometimes things don’t go well. Sometimes we have to make unbelievably psychologically and emotionally difficult decisions. That’s the reality of our work. And so if the goal in that kind of work is to be happy, we’re going to have moments of happiness.
Absolutely. Every single one of us can point to moments of happiness in our veterinary career. Moments. But they’re never going to be consistent. It’s impossible to make it consistent. However, you said two words that really stood out to me that are consistently achievable. Pride and fulfillment. We can have painful, difficult days that we take pride in.
We can have challenging, stressful days that we find fulfilling. And that’s the interesting reality of the human experience, and I think that’s what we need to set as our goal. We should aspire to that. Let’s create workplaces where people find joy, pride, and fulfillment in their work each and every day.
Not happiness. Happiness is the lagging indicator of those things.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah, I you’ve said that before that happiness is a lagging indicator. I think that that’s a really I think that that’s a really good concept. So is it is it as simple as just taking the word happy out of our vocabulary and and talking to our teams about hey I want us to I think this is kind of where where I am as
I talk a lot my team about the impact of the work that we have. Being proud of the work that we do. We do thing at, we do this thing at Uncharted we give a lot of trophies.
Not, not, not literal trophies, but we, we say, Hey, I want to give a trophy to this person. I want to give a trophy to that person. I know it can be kind of, maybe it’s hokey. I don’t, I don’t know. I don’t care. But it comes from this, it comes from this there was, there was a member at Uncharted who came in and did a presentation for us one time, and she was talking about her practice and she, she made the point that, you know, a lot of us don’t.
We’re uncomfortable sitting with victory. We’re uncomfortable being proud of something. We feel like it’s not humble. proud of something that we did. We’re, We’re supposed to, you know, poo poo our successes and go on because that’s the humble thing.
Mm-Hmm. .
Josh Vaisman: Mm-Hmm.
Dr. Andy Roark: and she said that she makes a note to herself to hold the trophy, meaning this is the thing that I’m of and I’m, I’m just going to hold it.
and and that really resonated with me and I
know it people on my team because we started talking about, you know I’m just gonna hold the trophy for a moment. You know and we would talk about something that was good or something that we’re proud of. And so now we give each other trophies and we’ll say, you know, I want to give I want to give josh a trophy because you he he did this thing where I saw him do this thing And not about happiness, but it is about being called.
I think it’s probably about appreciation I think try to call is the impact that you made and I think that that has been very free positive for our culture. But I tell you one of the hard things for me was, you know, kind of giving up on this idea. That I was gonna make everybody happy.
Yeah. Yeah.
they’re not unhappy,
Josh Vaisman: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark: but that was, that was hard for me.
I, I wanted, I imagined a place where if you put a microphone in front of my, you know, any of my staff and said, Are you happy here? They’ll say, I’m so happy. I imagined that. I don’t think that that’s real. So, I don’t know. Is it as simple as kind of switching, switching that language, switching those goalposts, or is there more to it than that?
Josh Vaisman: I, I think that switching the language or changing the goalpost to use your words is valUable.. I think that we need to be cognizant of the language that we use internally and focus on those things, especially when we’re in a leadership position. Andy, you know better than anybody, when you’re in, when you’re in that position of authority and power, the things that you pay attention to are the things that become the culture, right?
So if you’re talking about, hey, it’s really important to me that we, you know, give each other these trophies and take the time to hold the trophies, guess what happens? You start giving each other trophies and people take the time. So, so as leaders, it starts with us and we have to think about what, what are the things that I’m going to try and pursue here and then apply language and meaning clear, vivid meaning to that language.
Now you can do that. Sometimes you do that on your own.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah.
Josh Vaisman: You might, I don’t know, maybe at the end of every day, you might go around and sit down with two or three people on the team and say, Hey, Today was a hard day. There were a lot of patients that came in. We had a couple unexpected, you know, drop offs and there was that emergency that came in over lunch and I know your lunch got cut short.
What worked for you to get through the day and what What helped you find some pride in the work that you did today? Like, if you just ask those questions, you’re choosing that language, and you’re implanting that idea that this is a place where we scan for that. And, and the reality is, is that when people start thinking and talking about those things, the result of that is going to be a, a boost in the neurochemical experience of happiness.
You can also invite your team in on this and say, Hey, listen, you know, I know that for a long time I’ve talked about, like, I want this to be a happy place to work, and I realized that that’s probably not been serving us really well. I’d really like to talk about what would it mean for this to be a fulfilling place to work.
Andy, what does fulfillment sound like to you in the context of your job here? You know, Tess, what does fulfillment sound like to you? Foster that conversation with your team so that collectively you create a shared mental model of what fulfillment looks and sounds and feels like in this building. And then notice it when it comes up.
Look for opportunities to repeat that conversation. That’s really, this, we’re doing that all the time anyway. The thing is, is that we don’t always do these things with intention. We do it out of habit. We default to whatever we’re used to, we’re accustomed to, comes naturally to us, or we’ve experienced in past workplaces.
And then we repeat that cycle. So all I’m asking is, I don’t think this is big profound stuff. Like, I don’t think this is, you know, this kind of culture change is like this big explosive thing that requires 18 months of intensive consulting support. It’s literally just about thinking, I spend my time noticing things here, and responding to what I notice.
What’s the thing that I’m going to choose to notice and respond to today? And then go do that. And if you choose that intelligently and repeat it over time, it’s going to become part of your environment. Yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark: just it’s, it’s really consistency, right? It’s funny, I’ve been, I’ve been, I’ve been sort of encountering this, this idea a lot, a lot recently. There are so many things in our lives that we feel like we feel like we need to make a dramatic statement. You know, it’s, it’s the big speech at the end of the movie.
And we say, aha, this is how we will, this is how we will make the impact, or this is what will motivate the people. But the truth is, it’s not that. It’s, it’s the consistent work along and along and along. It’s it’s kind of this this idea, you know, we, we get inspired, which is good, but we go in, we do the dramatic sort of, you know, you know, show,
and then everything kind of falls away.
And it’s, it’s, but it’s,
funny is having the workplace culture. It really is a lot of a positive workplace culture comes down to a lot of mundane work, which is, which is taking the time to notice when things are going well, and to say things to people and say, Hey, I saw you do this really good thing. I really liked what you did.
Hey, I just wanted to call out for the staff meeting. I’m going to give Josh a trophy because I saw him demonstrating one of our team’s core
Josh Vaisman: values.
Yes. Yes.
Dr. Andy Roark: it’s that and it’s like, but it’s not, I think a lot of people are like, I’m going to, I’m going to tell the team at the staff meeting how I feel about them.
And
Josh Vaisman: Huh. Yeah. Nah. That’s not it. That’s not it. Yeah. right.
That’s not sustainable. It’s, but it is that, it is that little, it’s just, it’s the consistent thing. And so, so it really clicked in my mind when you said, I’m going to pick one or two things and then I’m going to go in and I’m going to pay attention to those things.
Dr. Andy Roark: And I go, Isn’t that really how you build and maintain a great clinic and a great culture? It’s just that, it’s that one or two small things, and then sort of cycle through them.
Josh Vaisman: Yeah. On our team at Flourish, our director of operations, Tess often says that the work that we do as culture leadership and wellbeing consultants is really dog training for humans. And basically what she’s getting at there is that, you know, ultimately what, what a, an environment, an organizational environment, a team of people working together towards purportedly common goal.
Hopefully it’s a common goal. A group of people like that, really all that is, is repeated norms because those behaviors were incentivized, you know, we get what we incentivize, we get what we reward. And I think where you’re going at with this like, you know, this big grandiose gesture of like standing up in front of the team and staff meeting and today we’re going to change our culture.
Like that kind of stuff is we tend to think of like, I think we intuitively know that, that we get the behaviors we incentivize. We think of that word incentive in these like, Big objective hammers. Pay is an incentive. Like what we pay people to do is a massive incentive to motivate them to do things. We also think that those big, grandiose gestures are a way to incentivize things.
Andy, if you don’t show up in a better mood tomorrow, this will happen, right? And yes, those are incentives, but the incentives that actually build compounding interest over time are those mundane, repeated behaviors that are done with intentionality, what you were just talking about. So if we want to see an environment where people experience fulfillment in their work, we’ve got to find a way to incentivize fulfillment.
And that means we’ve got to understand what fulfillment is and we’ve got to notice it. A great example of this, I’m going to force it a little bit, but it’s recent in my head and I think you will very much appreciate this. There’s a veterinarian who I’ve been doing some leadership and communication coaching with.
And when she approached me, she had started at a practice that had a very different culture than her prior practice. And in this practice, the norms of like, decorum and respect were so intense, that like anything that you did that was in any way perceived as abrasive, people took poorly, but didn’t tell you.
And so over a long period of time, management was getting feedback that this veterinarian was kind of a jerk. Finally, management sits down with like their laundry list, like, you know, sometimes managers, we want to collect all of the data to show somebody that what we’re saying is real, right? So it’s this laundry list of stuff.
And they tell this person, you’ve got to be nicer. What do you mean? What’s that? What does that look like? You just got to be nicer. So she comes to me to like help like figure out ways to do that. So we work together for a while. She comes up, she really, really passionate about changing the perception that others have of her really wanting to be a positive contributing team member.
What her team was experiencing mattered to her. She did not take this stuff personally or defensively. Like she really dove in. So she went back to work to try and implement a lot of the things that we discussed. One of the And then I didn’t hear from her for months, which to me was an indication that things were going pretty well.
Until a few weeks ago when she reached out to me. I need some help again, management sat down with me and told me that in the last two weeks, I’ve really backtracked. And I asked them, what does that mean? And they can’t really describe it or give me some really clear guidance. They just are telling me I got, I got to get better again.
And I said, well, what about like the four months prior when I didn’t hear from you? Oh yeah, things were going great. Well, how do you know things were going great? Well, because I didn’t hear any negative feedback from management. Well, wait a second. Did, did anyone ever tell you that things were going great?
Well, no, but when they gave me this feedback about the past two weeks, they did say, well, just so you know, the four months prior things were great. Like, why weren’t they telling you during those four months? Like we get what we incentivize, you know? And so what they’re incentivizing is fear. This person is terrified now that anything she says or does is going to rub people the wrong way and she’s not going to get feedback from them.
She’s going to get it from management weeks or months later.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah, that’s, that’s terrible. And I, I, I see that all the time. You’re, you’re exactly right. But management is really failing this person, especially given, like, from what you’re communicating about, about this. She’s excited to, to try to grow and change. Like, boy, if you’ve got somebody who’s willing to work on themselves and you you,
can’t support that person. Like, Oh, what a missed opportunity. You know, the, the, the thing for me is funny. I seen these scenarios again and again and again. And I, I always try to communicate to people. This is a big sort of Brene Brown thing, but like, what is kind? And I would say, Is this, is management being kind to this doctor by not communicating to her what the problem is or what’s going on?
Absolutely not. They’re just, I mean, I would, if I was her, I would be so frustrated. So frustrated. And again, you would never feel like you could let your guard down. You would never know what you, I just, I, I would, I could not feel comfortable in that place. I don’t think I could, I could stay there after that.
I’d be like, I’m sorry, I don’t know what you people want from me, and you’re not telling me. So, you know, it’s funny, the one of the big things for me is we’re sort of talking about happiness. I keep sort of circling back around. It’s such a simple analogy, but Josh, I, I, I always look at Our relationship with work as a relationship. And I really think that that’s, that’s, for me, that, that makes so many things clear. And it’s sort of like, if I’m in a relationship with someone, I don’t need that person to make me happy. Like, I think that that is a bogus ask to put on that person, you know? I want, I want to feel heard. I want to feel supported.
I want to feel important. I want to feel cared about. But I’m not looking at my spouse going, you’re not making me happy.
Um,
and, and I think that that’s a fair, a fair analogy for work also is I want you to feel safe. I want you to feel supported. I want you to feel cared about. But I’m, you know, you know, I, this, this relationship has to work for you.
Meaning you have to be fairly compensated or compensated in a way that, that, that meets your needs. But at no, but at no point is the requirement that you should be made happy.
Josh Vaisman: You’re, you’re familiar. I guess I’ll ask you, are you familiar with the work of Daniel Kahneman and thinking fast and slow and so
Dr. Andy Roark: Oh, I’ve heard, I’ve heard Thinking Fast and Slow. I’ve not read that book.
Josh Vaisman: So the very basic gist of this is that very, very robust research suggests that our brains are sort of built with two systems. He calls them system one and system two.
It’s basically the way that we process our lived experience. And one of those system one is like that instant. It’s that momentary experience, how we’re perceiving things right now. That drives us to pursue momentary, like instant gratification kind of things, right? And then system two is sort of that overarching, more deep, thoughtful part of the brain.
Essentially, what you’re getting at is like when, when you think of a relationship, you don’t think of like, is this person making me happy? You think in terms of. The system one stuff. Does this person validate me? Do they respect me? Do they, you know, like all of these data points that are momentary experiences that combine to give us a system to perspective.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah.
Josh Vaisman: This is a happy relationship. Right? A happy relationship is not defined by every moment is happy. A happy relationship is defined by all of these inputs, all of these momentary experiences that over a trajectory of time contribute to me defining the whole of the relationship as happy. I think that’s how we need to shift our perspective.
We can’t be trying to make happy teams in every moment of every day, but we should absolutely think about what are the inputs that lead to an overarching belief that my entire career trajectory in this place was happy. about those inputs and find ways to inject those moments into each day. And if we could do that.
Over time, like you said earlier, when you ask them, are you happy working here? They’ll say, yep, sure am. Even though I don’t feel happy every moment of every day.
Dr. Andy Roark: No, that makes Josh Vaisman, where can people find you online? Where can they learn about you and Flourish Veterinary Consulting?
Josh Vaisman: Our website is flourish.vet. So F L O U R I S H . V E T and I’m pretty active on LinkedIn and Flourish is present on Instagram and Facebook and all that kind of stuff too.
Dr. Andy Roark: Well, sounds great. Thank you for being here. Guys, thanks for tuning in and listening. Take care of yourselves, everybody.
And that’s what I got for you guys. Thanks for being here. Thanks to Joshua for being here. Gang, I hope you took some pearls out of this.
I just really enjoyed this conversation. Anyway, guys, take care of yourselves. Be well. I’ll talk to you later on. Bye.
