Wellness

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. 

Sharon Kramper joins us to discuss her research on the prevalence of PTSD in the veterinary workplace and its implications for veterinary teams. Together, Dr. Andy Roark and former veterinary practice manager, Sharon Kramper, explore various factors, potential index events, and what can be done when a team member may be experiencing debilitating symptoms. Tune in to this episode of the Cone of Shame Veterinary Podcast for important insights and strategies to support mental health in the veterinary field.

You can also listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Soundcloud, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts!

LINKS

NOMV Lifeboat: https://www.nomv.org/lifeboat/

National Alliance on Mental Illness: https://www.nami.org/

Shanti’s Veterinary Mental Health Initiative: https://www.shanti.org/programs-services/veterinary-mental-health-initiative/

Sharon Kramper on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharonkramper/

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

Sharon Kramper is preparing to receive her PhD in Clinical Psychology from Auburn University in August 2024. Before entering the field of mental health, Sharon worked in veterinary medicine, including being employed as practice manager in a small companion animal hospital. Here, she was sensitized to the workplace-specific stressors and risk factors that contribute to negative mental health outcomes among veterinary professionals. Her research during graduate school has included describing experiences of discrimination reported by LGBTQIA+ veterinary students and professionals, estimating the prevalence of PTSD in the veterinary workplace, and characterizing the types of ethical dilemmas that support staff encounter. She is looking forward to two things after graduation: 1) being called doctor and 2) rescuing a new dog buddy.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Andy Roark: Welcome everybody to the Cone of Shame veterinary podcast. I am your host, Dr. Andy Roark. Guys, I got a great one for you today. I’m here with Sharon Kramper. She is a former practice manager, future clinical psychologist, and she’s been doing research with PTSD in veterinary medicine. We talk about her research and kind of what she found, what PTSD is and what it means and how it manifests in our profession and that’s what we get into. It is a really interesting discussion. I will give you just a little bit of a warning. We do talk about things that might cause PTSD or that would rise to the level of being index events for PTSD. We don’t talk in graphic detail or anything like that, but you know, we give some sort of broad examples and things like that, and they might be upsetting to people.

So know that, know that it’s not something that, that we lean into in any way, shape, or form, but, but we do talk about the types of things in vet medicine that, that might that might serve as or might cause, you know, that might cause harm. So anyway, just know that that’s there, so it’s, it’s not surprising. But that, that’s it. Gang, this is a good episode. I hope you’ll enjoy it. Let’s get into it. 

Kelsey Beth Carpenter: 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. Sharon Kramper, how are you?

Sharon Kramper: I’m great, how are you?

Dr. Andy Roark: I’m really great. It’s so good. It’s so good to see you and get to catch up with you. For those who don’t know you, you are, you are finishing up your doctorate in clinical psychology. You are 120 days away from being called doctor at this point. You fascinate me. In that you have this previous life and career in veterinary medicine. You were a practice manager. You’ve been in the profession for a long time. And then you went and went into clinical psychology training.

And so now as we talk, you’re currently working with inmates in a correctional institution as you finish your training. I don’t know if you’re going to come back to vet medicine after that. I think you’ll be well prepared if you do. I think you will be. Honestly, is all of this an elaborate plan to make you a very specific kind of practice manager? Is that what this?

Sharon Kramper: Oh, gosh. I mean, I do have, have dreams of coming back to veterinary medicine and I would love, like, I have this image of myself as being like the, the Mary Poppins and like a cardigan coming in and, and, and to like practices and helping them with their culture and, and with their mental health. You know, you, you come in and they kind of sprinkle some magic and then get out. I mean, that would be fun, but we’ll see. 

Dr. Andy Roark: I, I, I love, so I, you, you’re, you’re up on the literature, you’re actually doing clinical psychology practice and then you have this great wealth of knowledge of the vet industry and you’ve all these stories from experiences that you had and things like that. When when you and I were talking you know, a couple months back and everything, you, you were really interested in PTSD and you were sort of Uh, part of your research and part of your training was focusing on PTSD, and so you’re studying PTSD, and I was really curious in sort of how PTSD as a as a, as a phenomenon, as a, as a condition people have to overcome how that interfaces with veterinary medicine.

And, you know, we, we talked a bit at the time about sort of ethical dilemmas and, and some of the challenges in vet medicine and some of the, was some of the hardships of vet medicine. And so let me sort of stop right here for a second and sort of say, Sharon, can you talk to me a little bit about what is, what is PTSD in a, in a, I don’t know, in just a general context? And then do we see PTSD in veterinary medicine?

Sharon Kramper: Great questions. So to start off with, from a psychology point of view, PTSD or post traumatic stress disorder is a little bit different from many other disorders we see. Think of like depression or anxiety because it involves and what we call an index event, right? Something happens and then you develop symptoms afterwards, and those symptoms persist over time.

I think a really good example when talking about PTSD is to think about a car accident. And so, for example, you might get into a fender bender, right? And it shakes you up a little bit, but maybe you’re unharmed and you are you kind of go up on your way very quickly, versus, let’s say that you were in an accident where maybe your passenger died, right? Or it was very serious. You were hospitalized for a while. You had to have reconstructive surgery. You know, maybe you thought you were going to die at the moment of impact. Right? We think about the difference of scale and the difference of severity there where one is life threatening. And so when we think about things that could potentially be an index event, we’re thinking about things that could potentially be life threatening.

So, when we think about veterinary medicine, there are things that happen in the workplace that are potentially life threatening, right? You could be mauled by a dog, even if you’ve had a cat like attack you in the face, you know, and go at your eyes. If you’re a large animal veterinarian, you’re working with horses and you’re working with, with cows and bulls.

I mean, you’ve very likely had maybe some near misses or even some serious accidents that have happened to you. And so, getting back to this idea of PTSD takes two things. And one is having an index event that happens. And then there are symptoms that develop afterwards and that don’t go away over time, right? So if something’s minor, let’s say you get bitten on the finger by a dog may hurt for a little while. You may need some antibiotics, clean it up, but you know, the next day you’re probably able to go back to work. On the other hand, if you were mauled by a dog at work, okay. You might be feeling some trepidation.

It might be hard to go back to work. And so you might even have nightmares about what happened. You might find that you avoid breeds that look like that particular dog. You might find that you don’t want to go into that corner of the office where the thing happened. You may find that a certain pitch of bark will, will, you know, just set you off and you feel like you can’t even stay in the room with a dog, even if it doesn’t resemble that.

You know, I mean, there are so, so many things that can like trigger the stress response in our bodies. And when we think about PTSD, those things are things that don’t go away over time. Like they stay with us for about six months or more.

Dr. Andy Roark: So, is is that so that was part of my question? So for example, I was visiting with my nephew. He’s six years old and he was he was around this weekend and we both got stung by bees. Yeah, we both got stung by bees. I shook it off much faster than he did. I have to say, I– not trying to, you know, flex on a six year old, but really, he was very dramatic about it.

And, and, so, he’s like, I don’t want to go back to, I don’t want to go back out in the yard. And, again, this is a six year old that we’re talking about. And Well, he will forget this probably by tomorrow, and so I’m assuming that. But he did. There is technically an index event, something bad that happened.

And then he did remember. And then he did not want to go back out to the yard. Surely that doesn’t rise to the level of PTSD, right? And then when we say, Well, what would be the difference? Is that the amount of time? Is it the severity of the index event? Are there are there caveats on that? I guess I guess where I’m kind of going with this is just sort of understanding, I mean, I’ve gotten, I got bit on the finger by an old cat one time and when I see old cats, I always remember getting, cause it was bad, and I always remember getting bitten, but I, I mean, it’s not, I wouldn’t call it PTSD, it was just, I, I learned a lesson kind of like burning my hand on a stove where I’m like, oh, I’m, I don’t want to do that again, help me, help me start to parse that apart,

Sharon Kramper: Yeah, some things are stressful, but they don’t rise to the level of being traumatic or resulting in like a cluster of symptoms. Generally, what we look at is what is your level of impairment afterwards, right? So let’s say that you did have something happen at work, and you found that you couldn’t get yourself to go back to work.

Well, we would look at that as like a level of impairment, right? If you, if you were trained as a veterinarian, but now you can’t go back to work, you know, we might start considering PTSD because the level of impairment of what happened…

Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah.

Sharon Kramper: is so high, versus, you know, is your, it was your nephew, right? You know, he’s probably gonna be able to go back out in the yard like you said.

It’s probably not gonna impair him, but there, you know, there are people who have things So, you know, a lot of the times when we are thinking about PTSD, we’re also thinking of examples having to do with like the military, combat, physical…

Dr. Andy Roark: Of course. 

Sharon Kramper: assault, and things like that. And so we think about people who associate certain triggers, smells, sounds, types of people, locations, environments, with the thing that happened to them, the index event. And therefore, let’s say, let’s say they were in a car accident and now they can no longer drive, right? They’re too scared to get into a car. They’re too scared of what’s going to happen. And so that would really impair your life if you could no longer drive yourself anymore, right?

Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah, absolutely.

Sharon Kramper: That is one of the things that we look at with PTSD, we take into consideration is how impaired has your life been?

Dr. Andy Roark: Interesting. Okay. How much, how much of a prevalence of PTSD did you find in, sort of, in your research when we look at, at veterinary medicine versus, versus the general population?

Sharon Kramper: Yeah. So, in the research that I did, we collected stories from veterinarians, but also support staff. And we asked them to tell us about an event that had haunted them, right? Something that really stuck them. And We looked at those stories and we evaluated them for whether we felt that they were an index event, like I’ve been talking about, right?

Did something rise to the level? And let me tell you, so there’s actually A little detour here. There are four guidelines that we use when we’re considering whether something might be a traumatic event. And one is that the thing happened to you, right? Are you the one who got mauled by a dog, who got gored by a bull?

Did you witness something happen to someone else? Did you witness someone get mauled by a dog or trampled by a horse, right? That could be traumatizing. Did you hear about the violent and sudden death of someone who’s close to you? So this is not like grandma died of cancer and I found out.

This is like, I found out that, you know, my sibling was coming over to my house and I found out that he was shot dead in the convenience store robbery, right? It has to be sudden and violent and somebody who’s really close to you. And then the fourth thing that we look at that could be potentially traumatic events would be repeated exposure to extreme and gruesome things happening.

Like, for example, First responders having to pick up human remains or being exposed to stories of child abuse, right? We look at things like that, like this accumulated experience over time. a little bit more background on that. So in veterinary medicine, so one of the things that I was curious about is The I thought that there were things happening in veterinary medicine that might qualify as like these index events, but they don’t fit neatly into those categories that we just talked about.

And so we went through these narratives and read people’s stories and tried to see if they met the criteria for possibly being an index event. And what we found is that there were especially stories of people who had had a patient die during a procedure related complication that seemed really analogous to what can happen in human medicine, right?

Where doctors can lose patients and those can be considered traumatic events. But when you look at, like, the very strict definition of what an index event was, for a psychologist, it didn’t include anything about animals. Right? There was nothing, nothing saying like it was about having to pick up human remains.

Well, what about if you’re working in an environment where you’re seeing gruesome animal remains? You’re seeing, you know, big dog, little dog kind of things or car accidents and you’re being exposed to that. Or maybe you work in shelter medicine where you’re performing a lot of euthanasia. And so one of the things that I wanted to, to look at is are we making the bucket large enough as psychologists, right?

Do we maybe need to expand our criterion a little bit for what an index event is? And then, once we had an idea of we would categorize these different narratives that we had captured then I went through and analyzed for, we’d ask, also ask people what kind of symptoms that they’d had associated with that event.

So we were able to kind of calculate, okay, they’re having an event and they’re having a symptom, right? Because it takes both in order to have a diagnosis of PTSD. And so, we’re finally getting to the meat of this here. So, the prevalence of PTSD within the sample that I was working with, was 3. 6 percent if we only considered a very, like, small, strict interpretation of what an index event was, right?

So if we were only considering It’s like, humans. Let’s see if I can explain this a little bit better. So we actually had gone through the narratives and evaluated them for whether they met the strict criterion for whether they were an index event under, like, a very strict interpretation, meaning it was like you had to do something with human remains or basically there’s a human victim involved.

But what we did is we also went through and we re evaluated every one of the narratives for what if we consider animal victims Then, so basically if we expand this idea of what an index event could be that include animal victims, then what does our prevalence of PTSD look like? Does that make sense?

Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah, 

Sharon Kramper: So it’s kind of like we figured out PTSD with a very strict definition that like psychologists are using, but then we also like I opened it up and I said, well, but what if we consider animals as victims? What does that do to the prevalence rate of PTSD within veterinarians? So we went from 3. 6 percent under the very strict interpretation of what an index event is, which is very similar to what you find in the general population, like everyone who’s not working in veterinary medicine.

But when we, when I expanded that definition of what an index event could be, the prevalence increased to 13. 9%, so just about 14%. . quite a difference. And what it means to me is that there are potentially a lot of people out there who have been impacted by traumatic events that have happened at work, but we’re not catching that.

Dr. Andy Roark: Hey guys, did you know that I have another podcast? I am the host of the Uncharted Veterinary Podcast with my dear friend, practice management goddess, Stephanie Goss. We have been answering questions for years. We started a year before Cone of Shame. I started doing the Uncharted Vet Podcast with Stephanie.

We take questions from our mailbag. We have listeners who write to us and they tell us about what’s going on in their practice and we try to answer their questions and they are all about communication, leadership, management, things like that. It’s about working with clients. It’s about working with staff.

It’s about working with your boss. It is about all of those sorts of things. We have everything from, trying to establish some trust in your team when you’re a brand new baby doctor, actually fresh out of vet school to managing an employee with mental health issues to how to give notice without, without the guilt.

If you are in a place, you just can’t be there anymore. We’ve got all that stuff. We’ve got hiring, firing, working together, working with clients, reviewing your systems, getting your practice to run smoothly and efficiently, and how to manage your time. All that stuff is there. Check it out. I said 250 episodes.

You can see what everyone is about, from the title because it’s what, it’s basically the question that we’re being asked. But anyway, it is a very popular podcast. I hope that you’ll check it out and enjoy it and love it. I just love making it. So anyway, I just want to tell you it’s there guys. Let’s get back into this episode. So help me with this a little bit, right? So we’re talking about PTSD. It’s really interesting when we talk about this way a big part of PTSD is in the response of the individual to the event and I’m not saying I’m missing is a choice that the person has but but, you know, two people could have a similar experience.

Like, you know, two people could be in different car accidents. They could be in the exact same car accident. And one person is going to be terrified to drive thereafter, and the other person is, is simply not. I mean, I would assume that that’s kind of the same thing when we talk about this with vet medicine, right?

I mean, there’s, there’s a, just because there’s a larger, there’s a, there’s a high percentage of people who could develop PTSD. A lot of, a lot of them presumably won’t, right?

Sharon Kramper: That’s correct, yes. Just because you are exposed to something that could be an index event does not mean that you are going to develop PTSD. And so there are like resilience factors, and I’ll be honest, I’m wading into a territory that’s not as familiar to me because we didn’t really look at resilience factors in my research, right?

But there are individual differences between people. There could be people who have been through similar situations in the past and they become more resilient as a result. Right? We’ve probably seen that in veterinarians or, or support staff who you know, they’ve been through it so many times that These things just don’t get under their skin anymore.

On the other hand, there may be someone who I’m thinking of like your nephew, right? If he’s never encountered a bee sting before, right? If you’ve never had something terrible happen to you, and all of a sudden, boom!

Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah.

Sharon Kramper: Your whole worldview changes, and what you thought was safe is no longer safe. And actually a lot of PTSD treatment tries to get at that, at how, essentially like the, what you believed about the world and your safety in the world has now changed.

And how do we, how do we go so essentially you kind of become more extreme in a way, right? Like nothing’s safe anymore. You, and so what we work with during treatment is how do we get you to a more realistic place?

Dr. Andy Roark: Right. Gotcha. Okay. So, when we look at, you know, just say that, that there is, that there’s a 14 percent chance of a vet professional being exposed to a potential index event if we use this sort of more broad, bigger bucket, as you said, sort of, sort of idea. Are there things that we can do for our teams or for ourselves to kind of say, well, hey, look, this, this exposure might happen.

Are there things that we can do to kind of, to prepare ourselves to, to maybe lessen our reaction? And again, I don’t say it’s not, it’s not emotional numbing, but are there conversations that we could have or just things that we could start to, I don’t, I mean, I’m thinking about, about training, you know, is there a, is there a way of sort of having at least conversations about what these things look like if we’re having at, at veterinary technician school or at veterinary veterinary school or, or for onboarding into, into working at the clinics?

Are there? Are there sort of expectations that we should set, or things like that? I don’t, I don’t know, and like, that we may be headed on a very gruesome path of bringing people in and, and exposing them to horrible things, or telling them about horrible things. I, I don’t know. Do you have any insight there?

Sharon Kramper: Let’s see. So first of all, I kind of want to go, go back and the, the 14 percent would be like the number of people who would actually be potentially diagnosed as clinically having…. 

Dr. Andy Roark: Oh, diagnosed. Oh, oh, I thought that was, I thought a percentage was coming in to contact. 

Sharon Kramper: The exposure is much higher, right? Yeah. I mean, think about how many veterinarians are, but you know, like how many people you’ve worked with who’ve probably been exposed to something in the, you know, it’s much higher.

It’s going to be over 50%. but, but like you’re pointing out, like a lot of those exposures happen, but they don’t result in PTSD. So, how do we prepare ourselves, or how do we, because here’s the thing, is we can’t this is one of those things where we can implement all this safety, like safe handling guidelines as we want, and things are still going to happen, right? So we kind of, rather than trying to completely eliminate that from the workplace, because that’s probably not a reasonable goal, yeah, how do we prepare ourselves? So getting back to like, how would we treat somebody if they have PTSD?

And one of the things we do is prolonged exposures. Okay, I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, but so, a lot of times what happens is that the, the body, getting back to this idea that people start to avoid things that, that cause them distress. Because it’s related to the thing that happened to them, like avoiding a particular breed of dog or maybe the area in the hospital where the thing happened to them is as much as possible exposing yourself to that thing that happened.

So you don’t have to do it in a dangerous way. But It’s that sort of adage of getting back up on the horse again in a safe way so that your nervous system learns like that thing happened to me once, but it’s not going to happen to me every time.

Dr. Andy Roark: I have a friend who is terrified of roller coasters, and, and and she worked through it. And the way she worked through it was, at first, you would go to, like, the fair and just be there. And then, she would go and she would stand in line for the rollercoaster. Never intending to ride it, I’m gonna stand in line.

And then, you know, and then she kind of worked her way up like that of just, kind of this exposure to this thing until ultimately, she never got, she never got to where she loved rollercoasters, but it wasn’t this you know, debilitating thing. I think she felt compelled to sort of tackle this thing that, that she felt she was maybe overly afraid of in her, in her mind anyway.

And so that, that, that totally makes sense. 

Sharon Kramper: Yeah, just said a really key word there, which is debilitating, right? It’s, it’s getting back to this idea of like the level of impairment that it causes. So if that thing is really getting in the way of you being able to go about and do normal things in your life, things that you want to achieve, things that you value that are important to you.

Like if you want to go to the fair, like, you know, the roller coasters there. Yeah, a lot of times it’s, it’s just a matter of deciding, right? I just, I don’t want to be afraid of that thing anymore to that  extent. And yeah, exposures over time.

Dr. Andy Roark: I mean, I’ve seen vet professionals work through fear of cats or, I mean, through, like, again, I’m sure that, I’m sure people work through fears of dogs, but, like, the one I’ve seen and remember is someone who, like, they, they didn’t have cats as a kid, they weren’t very familiar but they wanted to be a companion animal veterinarian, and, and it’s one thing to say, well, this is, I, Yeah. I don’t want cats to be my primary focus. It’s another thing to say, I don’t want to see cats at all. And that person was like, I don’t, I don’t want to, I don’t want to be that way. But it was something where they, they had to spend time with cats. They had to, they had to be around them. And like, they would go, they’d go to my friend’s house, who had a bunch of cats.

They’d just kind of be there. And, and then they would sort of start to see them in the exam rooms and stuff like that. But it was, but it was very much just sort of a process through that. So I like this topic and then I think it’s, it’s important for us to be aware of kind of how we stress ourselves so that we can support each other and then also if there’s things that we can do to try to build resilience so that people don’t get sort of, blindsided and, and put into a bad place and then also I, I really love the idea that, that there’s always things that we can do to try to sort of work through these issues and I, I think that’s an important

Sharon Kramper: Yeah. Some, some of them. And then I do want to bring up, like, there is a whole other category that we found in my research of things like, losing a patient through you know, from procedural complications, right? That is the kind of thing that can be traumatic, especially if maybe there was like a medical error and, and that’s related to why the pet died or animal died.

And so, that’s the kind of thing where exposure to it, you know, that, that may not be the right route for getting that. Except, well, going back to surgery, right? Going back to surgery is going to be a route through it because you’re going to have many, many more successful surgeries, right? That one go well, but you take what you can learn and you go back to surgery.

But I’m thinking of, for some people, it’s just the getting stuck in like that mental state of you know, I did something wrong. You and I have talked about this before, that you get into like a negative cycle of yourself, right, all the things that you are, all the awful things that you’ve done in your life.

And so that might be the point in time when it’s good to get an outside perspective from like a mental health professional.

Dr. Andy Roark: Oh, that, yeah, that totally makes Yeah. Some, sometimes getting back on the horse is just like that. Maybe that’s not, maybe that’s not the immediate right suck it up kind of move.

Sharon Kramper: Going back to surgery is, but going back to like losing patients isn’t, right?

Dr. Andy Roark: No, exactly. Right. Yeah. Let’s not do it. Let’s just, let’s just not do that again.

Sharon Kramper: Right, yes, yes, and yet, every time you go into surgery, you are taking that risk.

It’s always going to be there, and it’s so hard to, it’s so hard to face it, and that’s one of the places where the mental health professional can kind of help you to get into a more neutral place about going into surgery and how do you handle the risk that you’re taking every time, what the outcome could be.

Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah, well Sharon thanks so much for being here. Do you have favorite resources in sort of the veterinary mental health kind of space? Yeah.

Sharon Kramper: Yeah, one of them that I would recommend that is very specific to veterinary professionals would be it’s called Lifeboat, L I F E B O A T and that is through NOMV, right? Not one more of that. And Lifeboat is a peer support application that you can find on the computer. and like if you’re seeking help for burnout, depression, anxiety, PTSD, you will be supported by peers who are also veterinary professionals and who can, who have been there, right?

They’ve been there, they’ve had their own mental health struggles, and they can help support you. If you wanted to go more broadly than veterinary medicine, there’s of course NAMI, which is also usually called, like, NAMI, I think, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and they’ve just got a lot of great resources for a variety of different kinds of mental health issues.

And if you yourself were like, I really would like to find a psychologist, I would probably say go to Psychology Today Their website, they’ve got a, a directory of psychologists all across the country.

Dr. Andy Roark: Very cool. Cool. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much for sharing with us. Where can people find you online? And are you on LinkedIn? Are you out in the world where people can you re–

Sharon Kramper: I am LinkedIn, yes, yes, you could probably search for me as Sharon Kramper. But yes, I don’t have a very large social media presence, to be honest.

Dr. Andy Roark: We’re gonna, we’re gonna blow, we’re gonna blow you up. That’s, that’s what we’re gonna do. Great. Well, thank you for being here, guys. Thanks for tuning in, everybody. Take care of yourselves. I’ll talk to you later. And that’s what we got. Guys, I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got something out of it. Thanks to Sharon for being here. Guys, thanks to you for listening. Take care of yourselves, everybody.

Josh Vaisman joins Dr. Andy Roark on the Cone of Shame Veterinary Podcast to talk about positive psychology and purpose driven leadership. Together they look at both sides of purpose, how it can be motivating to a team and how it can also be weaponized. They also touch on how purpose should not be prescribed and why it shouldn’t be set in stone forever.

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 on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-vaisman-mappcp-pgd-8371877

Flourish Veterinary Consulting: https://www.flourish.vet/

Lead to Thrive Book: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/lead-to-thrive-josh-vaisman-mappcp-pgd/1143946758

Uncharted Veterinary Conference 2024: https://unchartedvet.com/uvc-april-2024/

Leadership Essentials Certificate: https://www.vetfolio.com/learning-paths/uncharted-leadership-essentials-certificate

Charming the Angry Client Course: https://drandyroark.com/charming-the-angry-client/

Dr. Andy Roark Swag: https://drandyroark.com/store/

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.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Andy Roark: Welcome everybody to the Cone of Shame veterinary podcast. I am your host, Dr. Andy Roark. Guys, I am here with Josh Vaisman, who You get to hear my thoughts on Josh Vaisman in just a minute. I really like him a lot. I don’t tell him that in this episode. I tell him the opposite and you’ll hear why.

But I like Josh a lot. He is a really interesting person. He’s a really deep thinker. Boy, I throw hard curveballs at him today. I asked him about motivating people. And then when he tells me that purpose is important, I tell him. What my concerns about motivating with purpose are, and then he breaks them down into things, ways that we should not motivate people with purpose or use them to drive our culture.

So we talk about weaponizing purpose. We talk about prescribing purpose and we talk about purpose and me. And so he sort of breaks out in these three different, different components and we go through it and I press him for examples and push him to see if he can convince me of his ideas and man, he does pretty darn good.

But this is something I’m really interested in so he gets the full court press in this because I really well I put him through his paces because I wanted to ask him about some stuff that I’ve tried to figure out and things that I wrestle with a little bit, you know in my own job and my own teams and so anyway, that’s it.

But he boy, it’s a great episode. So, all right guys, that’s enough from me. Let’s get into this. 

 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?

Josh Vaisman: I’m doing good, Andy. How are you today?

Dr. Andy Roark: Man I am sick of your face. That’s where I am. I am so sick of you.

Josh Vaisman: Yeah. 

Dr. Andy Roark: I tried to hold it back and I just, I didn’t, I made it this far in the podcast before I have to tell you. My employees think that you are so great. They are so enamored with you.

And the number of times I have had to hear about what Josh Vaisman thinks, and what Josh Vaisman says, and what is in Josh Vaisman’s book, I just, I didn’t know that I could get through this podcast, and I can’t. I just have to tell you up front. I can’t take it anymore.

Josh Vaisman: You know, I get it. I think you need to add your name to the list of people whose nightmares include this.

Dr. Andy Roark: Josh’s face. Oh, no. It’s I– it’s one of those things I was like, ah, I have to go talk to Josh now because clearly his book is phenomenal and people like I, my employees are literally passing a copy around and like someone’s like, have you read Josh’s book? And she’s like, no, I’m going to get it when Tyler’s done.

I was like, You can have mine. Like, he sent me one. Like, he gave it to me.

Josh Vaisman: It’s true. It’s true. 

Dr. Andy Roark: And they’re like, No, I’ll wait for Tyler’s. It’s annotated now. I’m like, Oh, you gotta be kidding me. So,

I’m like, I, I write stuff, and they’re like, it’s not like Josh’s book. You don’t. And so, anyway, that’s my personal hell. I’ve heard from years, like, practice owners say, You know, I tell my team this, and then you come and say the same thing, and they listen.

I’m like, I had that experience at a staff meeting. I was like, well, guys, I, this, I really think this is what we should do. And they all sat in silence, and one of them said, That’s what Josh Vaisman says too. And they’re like, oh, okay, let’s do it. And I was like, oh, you gotta be kidding me. So, anyway,

Josh Vaisman: Andy, that could be your new in with the team. The next time that you need them to do something, you just say, well, you know what Josh suggested.

Dr. Andy Roark: You know what Josh Vaisman says? Let me, I’ll quote you, I’ll enter into the quoting Josh Vaisman contest.

Josh Vaisman: Just make up a quote and just tie my name to it. And, you know, yeah,

Dr. Andy Roark: As Josh Vaisman says, working an extra hour on the weekends is good for character. No,

Josh Vaisman: There we go. Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark: Anyway, that’s not it. Let’s talk about your book because it’s all I hear about in my team.

It’s called Lead to Thrive, The Science of Crafting a Positive Veterinary Culture. And so, Talk to me about a little bit, lay down some background of kind of how you settled into this, what your objectives going into the book were, like, when you were like, I’m gonna, I’m gonna write a, as opposed to doing a speaking tour or a course or whatever, like, I’m gonna write a book.

What were you hoping to do with this book?

Josh Vaisman: I was hoping to somehow have the opportunity to make your every day a living hell at work.

Dr. Andy Roark: I knew it.

I knew that’s where you were going.

Josh Vaisman: I, Andy, I, gotta tell you, I often share with people, and I really do mean this, I’m, I truly am being serious here, I was a failed leader in veterinary settings. I had a wonderful opportunity to be a managing partner in a couple veterinary practices, the on site hospital director, thinking that I was showing up with great intentions and leading well.

And the reality is that I didn’t do a good job of it. In fact, I didn’t do a good job of it to the point of actually causing unintentional harm to other people and myself. And going through an experience like that, I had this sort of realization that I only could do the best that I had with the tools and the skills that I knew.

And no one had ever taught me a different way to do things, so I defaulted to what I thought I knew, and it wasn’t working. I wanted to make sure that no one else had to have that kind of experience. That no one else in a leadership position in this wonderful profession that we’re in ever had to go through the kinds of trials and tribulations that I went through.

I wanted them to have a set of tools so that from day one, they could be the kind of leader that they aspire to be.

Dr. Andy Roark: I love that. When you start sort of laying out your book, you start talking about sort of positive psychology and what it is and what it’s not. And, one of the things that I sort of picked up, I wrestled with this early on in running my team and stuff. Because a lot of things that you talk about are, I think are, real, I mean, the book is really good.

It’s a really good book. The things that you talk about, they’re absolutely important. And I have felt, sometimes in the past, like when my team talks about positive psychology, psychological safety, things like that. At some point, as the person who has to kind of make the sausage actually get made, I’m like, guys, we can’t, it can’t all be good vibes and warm, fuzzy feelings, as much as I want it to be.

Like, I am a very positive person. We’ve got a very good culture on our team, and I feel like we have for a long time. And also, there are some parts that are not fun, and sometimes people are uncomfortable, and that’s not failure. And so I wrestled a bit with this, positive psychology means that it should be good feelings, good vibes, comfortable all the time.

And you sort of start off your book talking about that sort of idea. Can you sort of lay out your thoughts on that?

Josh Vaisman: Oh, absolutely. I appreciate you bringing that up, because it’s actually a very important distinction to make. Positive psychology and this approach to positive leadership that I’m trying to convey in the book is absolutely not about happy, joyful unicorns and rainbows, feeling, you know, cuddling with kittens and puppies all day.

It should not be that way. In fact, that’s in some ways the antithesis to the message. What positive psychology and this approach to positive leadership is really about is a recognition that the work that we do in veterinary medicine, regardless of what role we’re in, whether you’re a small animal practitioner in a local general practice.

You’re a solo equine practitioner out in a truck. You work in industry. You work in pharmacy, you know, pharma. Whatever you do in this profession, you are facing daily stressors. This work is deeply purposeful, and it doesn’t always feel meaningful. Positive psychology is an approach to taking difficult things and finding ways to make them fulfilling so that even though we’re doing hard things, we still find joy and well-being in the overall trajectory of where we’re going.

Dr. Andy Roark: So, you say this profession is purposeful, but it’s not always meaningful. Par parse those apart from me a little bit.

Josh Vaisman: Sure. Yeah. So, I’ve done this activity in front of audiences where I’ll ask them, tell me what you see as the purpose of veterinary medicine. And Very quickly, people come up with things like we all know intuitively in our mind that the work that we do has a purpose to it. I have a good friend, a colleague of mine, Zach Mercurio.

He’s a researcher and a speaker and consultant out of Colorado State University. And Zach often talks about the difference between the purpose of work and the purpose in work. So the purpose of work is how people tend to respond to that. You know, I hear things, Andy, that you’ve probably heard similar things.

You know, veterinary medicine exists. To celebrate the human animal bond, veterinary medicine exists to give voice to the voiceless, veterinary medicine exists to make sure that our, you know, our food net is safe. You know, all of those things apply to veterinary medicine. There’s a why, a purpose that drew us to do this kind of work.

But there’s a thing about purpose of work. Purpose of work can get diluted over time. So you become a veterinarian. I imagine if you think back to, you know, your first day on the job in practice, it was probably a mix of excitement and terror, but you really felt like you were doing the thing that you meant to do.

You know, now I finally made it here. My why and the what I do are intertwined. And now years in, for a lot of us, what happens is that day by day, the why and the what start to separate. And the why just becomes what we do every day. It’s sort of like the water around a fish or the air around us. We don’t really notice it’s present until it’s gone.

The purpose in work, that experience of meaningfulness, so meaningfulness you can think of it as purpose activated. It’s when I have an acute experience that to me I perceive as positive, purposeful, and significant. So I’m doing something right now that feels like, wow, this is meaningful. That’s purpose activated.

That’s that why and that what slamming back together in a singular moment. So we can be doing work that is imbued with a deep amount of purpose, being a veterinarian. And it doesn’t feel purposeful in that moment. When the client is standing in front of you and they’re in a bad mood, and you feel like, you know, you’re shorthanded in the team, and you’re overwhelmed, and things aren’t really going right, and you lost a patient yesterday, or whatever might have happened, in that moment it doesn’t, you don’t feel the purpose of your work.

You know it’s there, but you don’t feel it.

Dr. Andy Roark: So, are you saying you don’t feel it because it’s not the purpose being activated, as you put it? Like,

Josh Vaisman: Yes, there are things that we can do that can activate purpose and there’s things that we can do for ourselves. But what I like to encourage people to think about– and that’s what the book is really about is– when we’re in a leadership position, we have an unbelievable opportunity, a gift, if you will, to be able to increase the opportunity for meaningfulness in work.

We can take the purpose of work and activate it into purpose in work for others. And that’s the key thing. If you think about the definition of meaningfulness, that it’s positive, purposeful, and significant, that’s significance. That’s almost always involving another human being. It’s an impact on the world, right?

If we can show people their impact in, in, you know, meaningful, intentional ways, it activates moments of purpose. It activates moments of meaningfulness for others.

Dr. Andy Roark: So, when you talk about leading with purpose, leading with meaningfulness, what I’m hearing you say is that this is a focus on activating these moments, right? To making sure that we have these expressed moments along the way. I am very much about purposeful leadership in that I always, I, have a mission, we have a higher purpose, we talk a lot about what is the mission, what are the values, what are we trying to accomplish, what does done look like, and I talk a lot about that, and I talk to people about what are their motivators, what do they care about, how do they feel appreciated, and I talk about those things a lot.

Is there a is there a double edged sword here? Is it possible that we talk to people about purpose in a way that they ultimately I know this sounds a little bit strange to say, but one of the things I’ve run into in my career at certain times is I’ve always been very good to get people to focus on the meaning and the purpose.

I have seen frustration come back when people say, well, we talk about the purpose, and now We have to meet these sales targets that are coming down from, you know, from corporate, or we have to do these other things and this is incompatible with my purpose. And for me, it’s always, it’s, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten a little bit less likely to talk about purpose as directly as I used to.

In that, I still weave it into what we do, and I very much talk about it. But it also, I’m, I get a bit wary that when we, when we navigate the difficulties of practice, not every day is going to be a celebration of the bond with the pet owners. Because some days we’re just going to have angry people.

And then people go, “God, I’m here for my purpose, and I did not achieve my purpose, today was a failure.” And I go, No, it was a success in so many other ways, but we can kind of get myopic about defining this goal almost too tightly. And so I don’t know if that makes any sense when I say that, but, do you ever have that kind of balance idea of how we talk about purpose?

Can you lean so far that you’re just dogmatic about what the purpose is? And then people say, This is all that we care about, and I just, I’ve never been able to actually work in clinical practice because there’s always, it’s a mixed motive game, and, you know, the group that we work for has got motives, and I’ve got motives, the things that are important, and the client’s got motives, and so, Yeah, so I don’t know.

Do you parse that apart? Do you just continue to lean into values? I know this is sort of a hard question, but I’m really asking you to insert these are things that I struggle with is I’m on board with purpose. Don’t get me wrong, but at some point we’re playing at a very high level of motivating people in difficult challenging changing circumstances and I go how tightly do you hold the wheel on this Josh?

Josh Vaisman: Yeah, I think it’s a really important question to explore. There are 3 things that were coming to mind as I was listening to you describe that, that experience that you’ve had around purpose and, some of those other things and, especially that that, that marker that you landed on of, like, not Every day is going to feel like a celebration of the human animal bond.

And that’s just the reality of our work. So three things, I’m going to say them out loud, and then I’ll kind of come back to each of them. The first one is this idea of purpose being weaponized. it’s never helpful to weaponize purpose. The second. Yeah, I’ll come back to that. The second thing is purpose being weaponized, the, oh gosh, I just had it in my head and now it’s escaping me.

 The third one is, um, it’s, uh, purposeful to me, or meaningful to me is one thing to do. Oh, and then the second one that I was thinking was about purpose being prescriptive. We don’t want purpose to be prescriptive. And those–the second two kind of relate. So let me come back to the weaponization thing. There’s actually some really interesting research in, circles of research around purpose and meaning and work and things of that nature. Around the dark side of a calling. So, you know, we often talk about veterinary medicine, especially for veterinarians and technicians, is, you know, “I felt called to this work.”

Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah. I don’t like that. I don’t, it’s not popular, but I’ll push back against that sometimes. I feel like it puts so much pressure on people.

Josh Vaisman: A hundred percent. 

Dr. Andy Roark: If you’re called to something, you have zero exits. You know what I mean?

It’s like, it’s like the only option is come, is failure or to continue down this path.

And I go, Oh, yeah. God, why would you hem yourself in? And it’s the story we tell ourselves. But I know that some people go, no, it is a calling. And a lot of people say that to us in a very kind way. They’re like, oh, this is a calling. And I’m like, it’s really not. It’s just a job. 

Josh Vaisman: It’s just a job. 

Dr. Andy Roark: Hey guys, is your clinic slowing down? Are you having more open appointments than you had in the past? Are you wondering a little bit about what you need to do to get clients to, one, come into the building, and then, two, listen to your doctors and your staff when they get there? Well, you, my friend, might need to head over to the Uncharted conference in April.

That’s right! It’s in Greenville, South Carolina. It is April 18th through the 20th. This is the granddaddy of the Uncharted Veterinary Conferences. This is the one that we started with. This is our marketing and strategy conference back to our roots. I love this stuff! The theme of this conference is ‘Standing Out In A Sea Of Noise’

It is all about strategic communication. It is about getting heard. This is going to be a lot about your brand identity is understanding the modern consumer who is getting more price conscious because things are getting more expensive. We are going to need to up our marketing game, our communication game, our client bonding game, our trust building game, we’re going to have to turn the volume over on that stuff.

Guys, we didn’t have to do that for the last couple of years. People have been coming in, the pandemic was a surge in business. A lot of us are trying to keep our head above water. It’s not going to be that way going forward. It’s time to re-engage with our clients in a motivating, educating way to get them coming back into the building.

Guys, Uncharted is not a bunch of lectures. You are not going to come here and sit in lectures. You are going to work on your business at this conference. You are going to be surrounded by butt-kicking, positive people who love that medicine, who love pet owners, and who want to create a great experience and make a wonderful place for pets to get the care that they need.

They want to have a positive workplace. They want to have a place where people smile when they come to work and they’re working on making that happen. And so if that sounds like you, or if you want to be surrounded by those people, you got to come to the April conference. Also, this is the last time for a while that the April Uncharted conference is going to be in Greenville, South Carolina.

This is our birthplace. It’s our home base. It’s our nest, this is kind of a big deal for me, at least. I, you know, I, I have loved this conference in Greenville. I still love it in Greenville. I think Greenville will always be our home, but guys, we’re spreading our wings. We are going to be moving out and doing new things and going to new places.

And it is going to be amazing. But if you want the original Uncharted experience, if you are like, man, I’ve heard so many people talk about Uncharted in downtown Greenville and how the conference just fits into that community and how amazing it is, this is your chance. You want to be here. Also, if you have been an Uncharted member, if you’ve come to our conferences before, if you loved it, you always thought there’d be a chance to come back to the old Westin Poinsett and downtown Greenville you should grab a spot.

I think that there will probably be a chance in the future, but it won’t be for a while. I think there’s going to be a lot of people coming back because they want to do it one more time at the Westin before we move on and check out some new places and do some new stuff.

So I do expect this event will sell out. Guys, go ahead, head over to UnchartedVet.com and grab your registration spot right now. I’ll put a link down in the show notes. Again, you do not want to miss it. This is an investment in yourself and in your practice and your future. It is an investment in skills that you will have and use again and again, and it’s an investment in connections.

You are the average of the people you spend time with and you’re about to be surrounded and spend time with some really amazing people. Anyway, let’s get back into this episode. 

but it’s just a job. And I have, I’ve gotten more and more willing to say that. not to pet owners who are being nice, but to our colleagues. Cause I really, I don’t think that’s good headspace for us.

Josh Vaisman: I completely agree with you. There’s a veterinarian here in Colorado. She’s a friend of mine and she’s been advocating for exactly what you just said. She is on a lifelong mission to encourage people in our profession to embrace the phrase as a positive. It is just a job.

Dr. Andy Roark: It’s just a job. Yeah. 

Josh Vaisman: Her name is H. Howells, by the way and H is shout out to H. She’s doing some really, great stuff out there in the world. 

Yeah. You know, when there’s a risk to viewing work as the sore, the sole source of your identity or the sole source of your sense of purpose or meaning in the world, there’s a risk because it can become exploitative.

Whether people intend it to be or not, so the research that I’m referencing here was on zookeepers and what they found was that there seemed to be a very strong relationship between their sense of calling, how they thought of their work as a zookeeper as a calling, and all sorts of deleterious outcomes like burnout, overwork, all those kinds of things.

So we never want to weaponize purpose. We never want to make purpose these, like, a thing that we’re using to coerce or manipulate Others. We got to be very careful 

Oh. So, so, so let me give you an example here. So it sounds like what you’re saying is The old, I mean basically it’s the old, If you really cared, you would do this for free, or I thought you loved animals. How could you charge me money for this surgery that you know have? And that’s very much weaponizing purpose and uh, they’re guessing about what your purpose is, but if they’re right, boy, they’re, that, but that’s why vets get so upset about that particular barb is because it is weaponized purpose. You know, it is, it is, weaponized morality. And so, it,

it really, it hurts. It stings.

Another version of that may be a bit unexpected. It’s certainly a bit more subtle when you referenced those days where like, listen, it was just a shit day. Everybody was mean to us. Nothing really went well. We’re all ragged and overwhelmed and feeling a bit crusty. If I walk into that space as the leader in that practice, the medical director, the lead technician, the practice manager, and I say, “Hey guys, I know today was tough, but let’s talk about how we lived our purpose today.”

That can also feel like weaponization. That can feel dismissive to people. That can feel like Not always, but there are times where

Dr. Andy Roark: Tell me more about that. So, okay. Yeah. Paint, paint me a more clear picture of this, Josh. So, so, so it’s been a crap day and I walk in, I say, guys, today was a bad day, but hey, we really lived our value, we really pursued our purpose today. Tell me why you don’t like that.

Josh Vaisman: I’m not saying I don’t like that. I’m saying that we need to be cautious about how and when we use that. So an example I’ll give you, you’re married, you have a wife, your wife, you come home from work and your wife starts telling you about all of the things that were bad in her day. And your first response is, well, something must’ve gone well today.

Tell me what went well. How is she going to respond to that?

Dr. Andy Roark: I Get that. Yeah, that’s like the old I love the phrase choose happy and I have a hundred percent seen choose happy used to dismiss people of well You got to choose happy Like at some point you’re like I got screamed at they look spittle on my face and “well, you should choose happy” 

Josh Vaisman: There’s a reason for that. 

Dr. Andy Roark: Like okay.

Are you serious? Okay. I got ,now I’m on board with this. Okay, I got 

Josh Vaisman: Yes. So when we walk into a space where our team is completely downtrodden from a terrible day, and our immediate reaction is to try and pull the purpose back to make them feel better or to make them see that what they’re doing is meaningful, you can’t force purpose on somebody.

You, you have to, there’s an in between phase that we call empathy. And that has to happen first, right? Before you can start tying it back. So that’s one of the, I mean, there’s, very clear examples of weaponizing purpose and where we literally exploit people. But there’s less subtle ones that we need to be aware of.

There’s also the prescriptive side that we have to be cautious of. Your purpose is not what I tell you it is. I don’t get to prescribe that for you, right? I don’t get to, I don’t get to go in my little back office and decide, okay guys, these are going to be your values now. Now go live them.

It has, there has to be some sort of communal you know, collaborative effort to activate purpose.

I can’t tell you that things were purposeful. I have to show you that what you did was purposeful. That’s different. That means I have to understand what you talked about earlier. What are your motivations? What are the things that really seem to matter to you? When do you light up and how can I tie what you’ve done to that?

For you, because sometimes we can’t do it for ourselves. So we got to be careful about it being prescriptive.

What was the third one? I forgot what the third one was now.

Dr. Andy Roark: Purposeful to me. 

Josh Vaisman: Purposeful to me. Yes. Thank you. Sometimes the experience of meaningfulness is not actually activated through that quote higher purpose that we think of in our work.

Sometimes it’s simply through human impact. So there’s a tool you’ve probably actually heard of this. I would be willing to bet because I know you well enough that you probably already do this on a regular basis. But there’s a feedback tool that we often try and teach folks. The acronym for it is SBI.

Maybe you’ve heard of it. Situation Behavior Impact.

Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah.

Josh Vaisman: Sometimes that tool is used for corrective feedback, but often it’s a really, yeah, often it’s actually a really nice way to meaningfulness in somebody. Andy, when You asked me the question about purpose and how I think of it from my book, right?

So that’s the situation and your behavior. Gosh, it really made me feel like you really did actually take some time to read through what I wrote and you took it seriously and so seriously that you put some thought into it and threw me a question that actually made me think. Gosh, what an impact that had on me.

Thank you for doing that.

Dr. Andy Roark: I did not do that, I’ve just a book that’s been quoted at by members of my team and until I know it, I just know it. I can quote pages to you. 

Ah, right. 

I did. But no, I love it. We teach a very similar model at Uncharted the company I run, which is basically an engagement sort of question or statement.

Dr. Andy Roark: And then the behavior statement of this, we. when you behave this way, when you said this, is what the outcome was. And the last thing is, what would I like you to do with that? Would you keep that up? Thank you very much. Or, could we do that differently in the future? But yeah, it’s, but it’s, you’re right, on it.

It’s very much about that, you know, I would say, you know, people are simple animals and I don’t care how many degrees you have. And we know how training works and it’s generally positive. And it’s about being clear about the behavior that you see and that you’re trying to recognize and reinforce.

And so, anyway, I just think, I think that’s, I think people, when they think about feedback, they immediately think of negative feedback. And I’m like, but why? We don’t, that’s not how we, that’s not how we do training.

Josh Vaisman: So, so I think of that day that you mentioned, that day where it doesn’t feel like anything tied to our purpose of, you know, celebrating the human animal bond. It was that horrible day. Now, imagine that I walk into that space and I say, guys, today was awful. And I gotta be honest with you, I don’t know that

I felt at times that I was going to make it through the day, but you know, Andy, earlier, when you jumped in with that cranky client, when you could see that I was like at a loss for words, and you jumped in and you made those two statements that you made, not only could I see the impact it had on the client, but gosh, that actually made me in that moment feel like maybe I can get through today.

So thank you for doing that. That is activating meaningfulness. That’s showing that Andy, that thing that you did in this God awful, horrible day, it was positive, purposeful, and significant for me. So thank you for that.

Dr. Andy Roark: Oh, I, love that. This, fits into, you know, one of the things, the reason I always love talking with you is because there’s a lot of practices that I’ve come up with or that we’ve come up with Uncharted and we use. And then I’ll talk with you and you sort of lay down the science behind them.

I’m like, oh, that’s, I love it. I knew, I know it works. We’ve done it, you know, for years and hundreds of times. So one of my big things, I’m not a big mission statement guy. For, just logistical reasons mostly, but I am a huge core values guy, and so I, I love core values from teams, and and I love for a team to come together and say these are our values, and then one of my favorite, in order for, to make core values work, they have to be real, because talk is

cheap, and so one of my favorite things is the example exercise, where I say, you know, we we’ve got our core values painted on the wall today was hard, you 

And I’m wondering if any of you saw anyone on our team living our values.

And then somebody says, well, I saw integrity as our core value. 

And I saw this person talking to a pet owner who was trying to sort of be manipulative and she was very kind, but she did not bend the rules. She said, this is how we do things. And to me, that’s acting with integrity. And it’s just,

it’s this beautiful thing, especially if you take it to the team, because then they’re reinforcing each other. And

Josh Vaisman: Yes. 

Dr. Andy Roark: I don’t want to build a culture where the culture is the leader, Andy the leader is amazing. And so that’s why we’re here. that’s not a culture. That’s like a cult, you know, and like I want them to appreciate each other and to create that experience for each other.

So I really love how you kind of laid that out. But to me, those examples of values, I think are kind of right, right in line. Let me ask you this. I know we’re gonna, we’re sort of running short on time, but, this is something I’m just really curious. So one of the things I’ve sort of come to believe is that one of the things you have to do if you want to have a team that runs on values is you have to hold those values kind of loosely and be open to recreating them as the team changes.

And so what I do so I’ll say I, I don’t have a problem putting the words on the wall. But I still think you have to be willing to paint over those words and paint new words every couple of years because my, what I have seen is exactly what you were saying is if I bring people in and I say this is our culture, to some degree that works, especially it works if it’s one new person coming in and they sort of integrate into that culture.

But over time, if I have people leave and I have new people come in, which is not failure, by the way, that’s just. That’s growth and development and life and how things 

go is the 

Josh Vaisman: Agreed. 

Dr. Andy Roark: impermanence of our world. And so they come in at some point, it’s probably good. I think to step back and say, let’s take a blank slate here and let’s come back together and talk about what we really believe in.

And I find that process of laying down the values is such a bonding process for the group. I’m not interested in having, you know, the, holy values and purpose that don’t change because that’s not really what the, what everybody’s feeling. And so, so to me, I’ve just kind of bought into the idea of everybody can hold this up, but also know that this is going to change as we change and the world changes.

So let me pause there and just ask you that question, Josh, when you think about the purpose and you think about getting the team on board. How permanent is that purpose in your mind? How, how sacrosanct is that? How untouchable is it versus this thing’s play dough. And I don’t think we want to change our values every week, but I, but anyway, I’ll just, so let me stop talking there and just to say, how does that mesh with sort of your thoughts?

And you could feel free to tell me, I think you should push harder to keep your values, Andy. I don’t know. What are your thoughts?

Josh Vaisman: No, I don’t think I’m going to do that. In fact, I’m going to ask if I can come work with you so that I can also join in quoting my book on a regular basis. No, I really love this. What you’re talking about is a sense of community around why we’re here. So, you know, one of the things that we often ask when we’re working with organizations is, you know, when we’re trying to do this sort of organizational identity work, like really define who are we and who do we want to be in the world, right?

There are questions that need to be, ah, that need to be answered to really get to that. and we’ve tried to sort of simplify it into three questions. Why us? Why now? Why here? Right. And if you, those questions, you’re, you may have very different answers to those questions five years from now than you have right now.

And it’s actually worth consistently revisiting those questions. Culture, organizational identity, core values, purpose, mission, vision, all of those things should be as organic as we are. They should be as shifting as we are. They should change over time if we change over time. And the only way that we’re going to know if they have to change is to ask the questions.

Hey guys, you know, a year ago we sat down, we had this conversation and this was the conclusion that we all came to. Does this conclusion still work for us today? What doesn’t work anymore? What do we need to evolve? Where do we need to pivot? What do we need to renovate? But that word renovation is something I’ve been playing with a lot lately.

I think about like, you know, in this house, my wife and I have lived in this house that I’m sitting in right now talking to you from for 15 years. And every couple, three years, my wife gets an itch. She looks around at something that we’ve, you know, that we did a couple, three years ago, move some furniture around or painted the cabinets or something.

She says, you know, I think we could do that better. And then we launch some new renovation project in the home. That’s kind of the reality of living in a home. It’s very uncommon that we move into a space and keep it exactly the same for 50 years. Something changes over time. Our workplace environments should be the same and we should be able to evolve that.

So I love that you do that and I love that you include your team in that effort.

Dr. Andy Roark: Well, it’s just something, so first of all, if you want to motivate your team, you want them to own the purpose and the values.

Josh Vaisman: Yes. Yes. 

Dr. Andy Roark: It’s funny the number of people who come to me and say, Andy, I have a purpose. Help me to indoctrinate the team into this, they don’t say it that way, but that’s what it is.

It’s how do I bring the stone tablets to the team in a way that they’ll. Pick them up and honor them, and I’m like, I don’t know, buddy, I’ve been doing this 20 years, and I’ve never been able to pull it off I, but I’m pretty good at getting the community to come together, circle up, and we can hammer, you know, some cool stuff into some tablets together, and then it’s their tablets, and they’ll, be all about it.

But we can do that. But I just think that’s sort of a fundamental thing. And so if you buy into that, I’m not bringing the tablets down the mountain. We’re gonna circle up and create our own guidelines. I think you have to buy into the ideas. If you believe in that, 

then you probably also have to believe in the fact that it’s not Once you make it, it’s not permanent.

You’re going to have to make it and remake it. There’s also sort of the It’s almost well, what have you done for me lately? Idea, too. We’re just because we were all excited about this purpose five years ago. Maybe that’s not what we’re feeling today, you know, and we should have a different purpose.

But anyway, I don’t know I really enjoy these conversations. I think it’s fun to just think about what we’re doing and what really matters But I think that’s

something that We need more of in that medicine. It’s so funny because we’re so innately purposeful. Like we do such meaningful

Josh Vaisman: Yes. 

Dr. Andy Roark: But we just don’t talk to our people enough about like hey, what are you really doing?

Maybe I don’t know if you think about what you think about this but maybe it’s because we make assumptions about what people’s purpose are

Because such a strong purpose. You know, we’re like, you’re here for the human animal bond. And like, I don’t know, maybe they’re not here for that.

Maybe they’ve got other reasons. So, anyway, Josh Vaisman, thanks so much for being here. I don’t care what my team says. I still think you’re okay.

Um, Just okay. 

And, uh, your book, Lead to Thrive, The Science of Crafting a Positive Veterinary Culture, I’ll put a link down in the show notes for that.

Where can people find you online? Where can they follow your adventures and learn more from you?

Josh Vaisman: Before I respond to that question, you know me enough by now to know that I have to leave with some sort of complimentary remark. 

Dr. Andy Roark: Are you Canadian? 

Josh Vaisman: No, but I’ve 

Dr. Andy Roark: Honorary Canadian.

Josh Vaisman: Yes, I’ve been to Canada. So, I feel like I absorbed a little asmotic. Andy, I You and I had a conversation before this episode started, and then we’ve gotten to talk for the last 25 or 30 minutes in this episode.

And you know, one thing that is really emerging to me is you have this beautiful way of being very confident in your beliefs, but also being open to revising them. And that is a very special mix. That I think back now in my career in vet med and just watching you and in the work that you’ve done, and I think you’ve actually had that mix for a long time.

And you’ve sort of set the stage that this is possible in our profession. That really means a lot. And I really appreciate you sort of opening those doors for the rest of us to walk through to be able to do that as well. So thank you.

Dr. Andy Roark: Oh, you’re very kind. Thank you.

Josh Vaisman: Where folks can find me flourish.vet is our website. That’s where you can find Flourish Veterinary Consulting.

We’re pretty active on Facebook and Instagram as well. And then I personally like the sound of my own voice a lot in written form on LinkedIn. So if people want to read my musings, that’s a good place to find me as well.

Dr. Andy Roark: That sounds great. Thanks a lot for being here. Guys, thanks for tuning in everybody. Have a great day.

And that’s our show. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Thanks to Josh for being here. Gang check him out. If you’ve not picked up a copy of his book, I’ll link it up in the show notes. Definitely go and grab it.

I’m not kidding when I say my team loves it, and they quote it, and they talk about it, and they kick it back and forth, and it’s just it has been something that they have really liked, and it Pushed me to go back and I get, everybody sends me books. When people in vet medicine write new books, they generally send me a copy and I love it.

But I get a lot of books and his has absolutely stood the test of time and it has been brought up again and again. And so, anyway, if you are looking for something to read and you like positive psychology, like the idea of running healthy, productive teams, there’s a whole lot worse resources you can find than that.

So anyway, maybe take a look at it. I’ll link it up for you. Take it easy guys. Talk to you later. Bye.