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Wellness

“I Wouldn’t Change a Thing”

December 31, 2021 by Andy Roark DVM MS

From Angell Memorial Animal Hospital in Boston to the Los Angeles Zoo, Dr. Mark Goldstein has had a fascinating career. Today he joins Dr. Andy Roark to reflect on his life as a veterinary professional, his fight against pancreatic cancer, and the lessons he has learned from people and pets.

***TW: There is a brief but graphic mention of suicide in this podcast.***

Cone Of Shame Veterinary Podcast · COS 113 “I Wouldn’t Change a Thing”

LINKS

Lions and Tigers and Hamsters: What Animals Large and Small Taught Me About Life, Love, and Humanity (Amazon.com): www.amazon.com/Lions-Tigers-Hams…ooks%2C252&sr=1-1

Strategic Planning Workshop Series: unchartedvet.com/upcoming-events/

Uncharted Veterinary Conference April 21-23, 2022: unchartedvet.com/uncharted-april-2022/

Uncharted Podcast on iTunes: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-…st/id1449897688

Charming the Angry Client On-Demand Staff Training: drandyroark.com/on-demand-staff-training/

What’s on my Scrubs?! Card Game: drandyroark.com/training-tools/

Dr. Andy Roark Swag: drandyroark.com/shop

All Links: linktr.ee/DrAndyRoark

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Mark Goldstein, DVM, has spent over 40 years caring, advocating, and fighting for the welfare of animals. The institutions he worked at are all recognized leaders in their respective fields and the variety of animals he worked with and the varied responsibilities he has had are unique. He was a senior staff clinician in the medicine department at Angell Memorial Animal Hospital in Boston. After being hired to head the Boston Zoos, he led a turnaround for the failing inner city Franklin Park Zoo. “Dr. Mark” then moved west with his wife Kristine and their two daughters when he was appointed to lead the Los Angeles Zoo. During his tenure at the Los Angeles Zoo he was involved with one of the most successful release programs, the reintroduction of the California Condor back into the wild. He vividly remembers watching the first bird being re-released into the Los Padres National Forest soar free one misty beautiful morning. He followed his heart to shine a light on the importance of the human-animal bond and took the helm at the San Diego Humane Society and SPCA where he oversaw the design, development, and completion of the “San Diego Campus for Animal Care.” Many aspects of the campus, its programs and its unique partnership with the municipal animal care department have been copied numerous times both nationally and internationally. He has a BS in Animal Science and a DVM degree from Cornell University. Health Communications Inc. (HCI) recently published his book “Lions and Tigers and Hamsters” What large and small animals taught me about life, love and humanity.

Dr. Mark enjoys giving presentations that are both educational and entertaining. His talks not only draw upon stories from his book “Lions and Tigers and Hamsters” but also from his 40 years of experience caring for animals and their welfare along with supporting the people who care for them. He has vast experience talking to a variety of groups from book clubs, service organizations, and at professional conferences as the keynote speaker. He was also the UCSD OSHER visiting author during the 2020 spring semester. He imparts to his audience the importance of the human-animal bond and how it helps create the fabric of a healthy community. He calls upon his experiences to share with colleagues how he feels honored to
have been able to serve in what he sees as a sacred profession, the practice of veterinary medicine. He enjoys making his presentations interactive and encourages Q/A when the program allows.

SHOW TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Andy Roark:

Welcome, everybody, to The Cone of Shame Veterinary Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Andy Roark. Guys, I’ve got a good one today. I’m sitting down with Dr. Mark Goldstein. Dr. Goldstein has had a rich career in veterinary medicine. He has been a senior staff clinician at Angel Memorial Animal Hospital in Austin. He has been the director of the LA Zoo. He’s been director of the San Diego Humane Society and SPCA. He is just a fascinating person who has done a ton of stuff. Unfortunately, right now, Dr. Goldstein is battling pancreatic adenocarcinoma, as we talk about a bit in the podcast, and it’s led him to reflect a bit on his career.

Dr. Andy Roark:

And I saw that he was doing a keynote presentation at the Fetch Conference, talking about his life and lessons that he learned in practice and what he sees as important in this space of his life, and I wasn’t at that conference, and I wanted to hear what he had to say. It seemed very important to me, and it just… I don’t know. I wanted to soak up his knowledge. And so, I invited him on the podcast, and he came along, and he shared a lot of great stuff that you’re going to get to hear.

Dr. Andy Roark:

And so, without further ado, I’m going to jump into it after one quick thing. I do need to mention, there is a brief but slightly graphic mention of suicide in this episode. If that does bother you, you may want to pass. But it is there, and I just wanted to give people a heads up. So, anyway, without further ado, 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, Dr. Mark Goldstein. Thanks for being here.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

It’s just an honor to be here, Andy. You’ve been such an inspiration to this profession. It’s really nice to do this with you.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Well, thank you for saying that first of all, but you as well. I first became aware of you and your work back in 2019. You had a book, Lions and Tigers and Hamsters, that came out. And it came across my desk. I didn’t know you at all. And so, I looked into your background. You were at Cornell. You’ve had a leadership position at Angel Animal Medical Center. You were the director of the LA Zoo. You’re the director of San Diego SPCA. You have had a rich and robust career, a fascinating career. And so, I was looking at that, and I was aware of your book, and then you did the keynote address at the Fetch Conference in San Diego, just as we’re recording this, so it was just a couple of days ago. And it was called I Wouldn’t Change a Thing. And you talked about your career, and you reflected on a life well lived.

Dr. Andy Roark:

And I thought, that’s the conversation I want to have. I want to talk to Dr. Goldstein. You have done so much, and you have seen so much, and I know that I have a ton of things that I can learn from you, and so I wanted you to come on and just have you talk a bit about your keynote and mostly just talk a bit about your career, and as you reflect on it, what are your takeaways? What are your words of advice, I guess, for the next generation?

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

Talking to our colleagues, and even to animal vet techs, and all the people that are in animal welfare, I think one of the tools that I talked about on Saturday to do when it gets dark, and we all know we have some very dark days in our profession… an irate client, somebody’s complaining about the bill, things that are unrelated to why we got into this in the first place. When those things happen, one of the things I always went back to was the fact that 80% plus of the world has a job to put food on the table and take care of their family. It’s not necessarily what they love doing. We are in the 20%. We got to choose, and we got to do what our calling was and what our passion was. We’re really wealthy for that, that we’re able to do what we wanted to do as opposed to do what we had to do. And it also offers us ways of changing. If you get into small animal medicine, it’s not what you thought it would be, you can change. You can go into a different field. You can go into all the various aspects that veterinary medicine touches.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

The next message I guess I’d share is that the reason I say I wouldn’t change a thing, I really consider our profession a sacred profession. I Googled the other day what the public things of veterinarians, and what came up was, it said, and I’m paraphrasing here, that people think that veterinarians are passionate, trusting. They really feel like they can go to them in a time of need. It was all positive. Versus physicians, who most people think are arrogant, and it had some negative words.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

And I basically said to the people in the room, and there were about 600 people in the room, “Hey, folks, if the public thinks that of us, why can’t we?”

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

We are in a profession that affects animals and people. Maybe in a little bit we can talk about taking a tumor off a goldfish. Now, I want to watch your eyes, because most people do that. And they go, “Mark, I think you’ve gone over the line here.” We can talk about it when you want here in a bit, but we really do affect not just animals, but people’s lives.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

And I also made another point, which we can go into more if you’d like, but I put up this slide that said, “There’s roadblocks that we create. An example…” When I was in charge of the Angel Internship Program, with picking new interns, it was like chalk on a board when I would ask someone, “Why did you become a veterinarian and not a physician?” And they said, “Because I like animals more than people.” Don’t hire that person. Really.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. I agree.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

You’re in the people profession. We’re not just in the animal profession. And I say that because if you’re sick and you go to a physician, you may not like them, but you’re going to take their advice because you’re hurting. When someone comes into our office as veterinarians, if I don’t get their respect, they’re not going to listen and treat their animal the way I’m asking. So, I need to realize that we’re people… Then someone says, “Well, I don’t know, I’m not in clinics. I’m in lab medicine, or I’m in zoos,” or whatever. There’s always something that you’re working with, with that animal. It’s a keeper, a farmer. There’s always a person involved. So, I think we have to be careful about taking people… And if I’m talking to someone that thinks that way, that might be part of the issue that you’ve struggled with. But we are a people profession.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

So, those are some of the points I made. There were a couple others, and it was just to inspire them, and to get them to laugh. And I guess I was successful because I heard later that… Well, we can talk about it at the end, but I got a standing ovation twice at the end. I’ve never seen that happen at a medical convention. I’m very humble about it. I know it almost sounds like I’m bragging. I’m not. It was just a terrific opportunity. And I said to Marty on the stage, “This is the happiest I’ve been in a couple of months now,” because I’m dealing with this issue we’ll talk about maybe at the end.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. So, Marty Becker is who you were talking to, correct?

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

I was talking to the whole group when I said that. He was up on the stage, and I just told him that, after I was done… Yes, after I was done, he gave me a hug, and I whispered in his ear, “This is the happiest I’ve been in months.” I really was honored when Adam called me and said… Adam’s the person that puts together the 360 DVM conferences, and Marty arranged after I told him the day before about the problem I’m challenged with, and they got online and said, “We’d like you to do the keynote.” This was a couple of months ago. And they even said, “We know, you can tell us 30 seconds before you have to go on that you can’t do it,” because my life changes every day a little bit, and they said, “Marty will step in for you.” It was just really an honor for them to take that risk. It was just a great feeling, to talk to my colleagues and connect. And I got to speak to about 150 of them, because that’s how many books I sold right after the talk in two hours, which I had never done.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Wow.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

So, it was a great experience for me, and I hope I stimulated some people, because… I’ll stop here in a second. I said to my wife, “If I can touch one person that comes up and says, ‘Hey, you reignited my spark,’ I’m going to feel successful.” I had a couple of dozen people when I was signing books come up and say, “I was that 65% of veterinarians that would tell a 16 year old today not to go into veterinary medicine. There’s too many problems.” And they said, “You just changed my mind.” Wow. That’s just… It’s so rewarding. I hope you’ve experienced that, too, because you’re very inspirational.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Oh, yeah.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

I mean that. Yeah. You feel good about the fact that you can do something positive like that.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Oh, absolutely. Are you comfortable talking a little bit about the challenges that you reference and what’s going on?

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

Sure. Yep. Very well. Let me go to the talk I did on Saturday. One of the last slides I showed was first, my last point was don’t give up. Follow your dreams. Don’t let somebody take them from you because they have expectations. So, what I did was show a slide of the rejection letter I got from Cornell my junior year applying. And the last paragraph said, and I blew that paragraph up, “You’re welcome to apply after you graduate next year, but we don’t expect the competition to get any better, any easier. So, we strongly suggest that you find a new career.”

Dr. Andy Roark:

Wow.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

I put that up, and everybody in the room laughed like… because I do have an impact, I think. And then I said, “Folks, this is just not theory. Don’t give up. I applied, and I think I did okay. What do you think?” And they stood up and applauded. It was like, wait a second, come on. And then I went on to just explain that a lot of us listen to people who talk theory, don’t live it, really. So, for me, I want to tell you, when I say don’t give up, I’m really going through it right now. I was diagnosed with pancreatic adenocarcinoma. When I was a veterinarian in clinical medicine, I was an oncologist and hematologist. That was my area of interest. So, I know enough to be dangerous now. But I know what I’m facing.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

I put that up, and I said, “I’m not giving up. I’ve talked to Adam, and he said, ‘If you’re around next year, you have the stage again, and I plan to be here next year to talk to you.” And they stood up again and applauded. It was just crazy at the end, but I mean that. I’m going to fight this. I’ve got a lot to live for. It is a tough diagnosis. I’ve gone through three months of chemotherapy. I’m probably looking at a surgery the end of January. But I’m not trying to be morbid here. Everybody gets a problem in their life. I’m a little bit… gone through those stages of grieving because it happened… I’m 69, and I expected something like this to be 20 more years down the road.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

But, it is what it is. And why I say I wouldn’t change a thing is because I’m actually facing this, being able to say, it’s okay. My wife and I have had so many adventures in our life that could fill three or four lifetimes. It’s okay. I have no regrets. How many people can say that at my age? So, I feel very lucky even though I’m facing the hardest battle of my life, for my life. We’ll see where it takes us.

Dr. Andy Roark:

You say you have no regrets, and I look at your career, and you’ve done so many things. What were some of the challenges professionally that you remember facing that seemed insurmountable at the time that you grew past or that you overcame? I don’t know, I have no doubt that you have faced down some monumental challenges, and I always like to try to learn from people who have been through those things and excelled.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

The greatest challenge is because of the nature of the jobs that I had, for instance, as director first at the Boston Zoos, and then I went to Los Angeles, was the politics. When I was at that level, in Massachusetts, it was the commissioner [inaudible 00:12:31] and then the governor, Mike Dukakis, who hired me, and it was a Friends Of organization, and they made sort of a mistake by not bringing them into the fold picking me to do this. And, because of that, I opened up a newspaper once. I was shaving, actually. I was holding a blade, and I went out to the front, got my newspaper, put it down. I had just been appointed. And on the front page of the paper, it was, “A new director for the metropolitan zoos. Some people are really happy, and some don’t like it.” I was like, “What?” And I was holding the shaver at the time, a blade, and I did have this thought of, “Oh, come on. Let’s just end it here.” I never have been in a public… At Angel, I did do some live television slots, but nothing like this.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

And what it was, is that the volunteer organization, which raises half the money for our budget there, was not pulled into the decision making to appoint me. That taught me something: bring a lot of people into the tent. Try and do it before you make decisions if you can, if they should be there, and look for consensus. This was a tough start at first. Ironically, I right away called the board chair and asked if I could just meet with the board, just myself and them, and he said sure, and he set up a meeting for an evening, I remember. And I went to dinner first by myself, just to think, and it hit me. We’ve all been taught to SOAP things: subjective, objective, assessment, and plan. Approaching a medical case. You know what? For the veterinarians listening here, use the same thing when it comes to business practices. Use the same process when it comes to personnel issues. Subjectively look what you see. Objectively look at what the findings are. What’s the bottom line? P&L sheet, whatever.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

But we are talented, and we can take that thought process, and when I explained that to them and they said, “Why do you think you can run the zoo?” And I went into the SOAP thing, and I said, “I’m ready to do that. This is my passion.” And we reached consensus, then became good friends. It worked. Now, I laugh because Governor Dukakis left office, a Republican came in, and I really believe… We had two zoos at the time. They cut the budget, and when it comes to that, I made a decision, we’ve got to close one of the zoos. I’m not going to stand by and… Zoos are wonderful things to educate people, but if you can’t educate them properly, they shouldn’t be there. That tiger behind a cage now. No. You have to naturalize the exhibit so that you get to see what they really are like. And education’s a big part of that, whether it’s in clinical medicine, whether it’s in zoo medicine, whether it’s in animal welfare.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

There’s usually three legs. One of them is conservation, for instance, and whatever that means in the zoo world, it’s easy. Conservation of animals. Education, and entertainment, or interacting with the public. If one of those legs gets pulled out, the stool falls over. We’ve got to keep connecting with people. We’ve got to make sure that we’re educating them. My biggest complaint in clinics from chief of staff [Gus Thornton 00:15:48] was, “Mark, you’re terrific. You’re the third biggest producer. The other two stayed there till 2:00 in the morning, were great clinicians, but I wasn’t going to do that.” But the third best out of 60 veterinarians. “But Mark, a 15-minute appointment is not 45 minutes.”

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

I said, “Gus, I’m sorry. I stay late. I never complain about it. But nobody leaves my office without having their questions answered.” And that’s important to me. I really thought it was very important. And I don’t find that in human medicine today. It’s gotten much worse. There’s 10-minute and 20-minute appointments.

Dr. Andy Roark:

How do you balance that? You and I sat down to record this podcast, and we talked for 35 minutes before I got to hit record and start the podcast because you tell stories and you draw it and you explain, you expand. How do you balance that? Because you also seem to have a rich home life, and you say, “I’m not willing to stay late. I go home.” Looking back at your career, how do you balance that desire, obviously, to build these relationships and to explain, and then still to be able to put your work down and go home? Did you ever wrestle with that?

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

I did. You commit yourself to both, and I think it’s important. In my case, I’m very fortunate, I really am. I’ve been married for 41 years to this wonderful person. I have two wonderful children and a great son-in-law. Two grandchildren. Three grand-dogs. That was important to me. I really understood that you’ve got to balance those two. Was it difficult sometimes? Sure. But, I just worked at it. Some people were critical. There are veterinarians who think you should be working 24/7. Nope. I was always available to my clients, don’t get me wrong.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

In fact, the only time once that I had to tell them, “Find another doctor,” was a dog that was crashing, a patient, and they called me. I wasn’t in clinics at the time, but they called me, and I always knew I wanted to know that. And I had to say to her, because I was in the children’s hospital. My daughter was having a medical problem, and my wife actually had a problem right then, too. And, I had to say… I called them up and I said, “Nancy,” that was her name, “find another doctor to take this.” I had never done that before. I never did it after that.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

And, I was always available, but I made sure that there was time for me to get home, whether it was at breakfast or dinner, to spend time with my kids and my wife. Was it challenging? Yes. But if you commit yourself to do it, and you approach it with an open mind, you can make it work. But I wouldn’t say it wasn’t difficult sometimes.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Hey, guys. I just want to jump in here real fast with a couple updates from the Uncharted Veterinary Conference side of the house. I am running my strategic planning workshop series with my wing man, the one and only practice management goddess Stephanie Goss. We have four different strategic planning workshops: January 26th, February 9th, February 23rd, and March 9th. Information coming soon on those. I’ll put a link so you can watch for when registration opens up. You can come to one of them. They all stand alone. They all do very different things. They are $99 to attend a workshop, or $299 for all four workshops, or if you’re an Uncharted member, you can come for free. They’re all included. And also, you can get replays through our online school.

Dr. Andy Roark:

So, guys, don’t sleep on that. If you’re like, “Hey, man, we really need to plan,” I’ve got your back, and I’m happy to work with you. Come on and be a part of this workshop, because it’s going to be great, and I enjoy working with people and where their business and where their careers are going. It’s something I get a lot out of. So, I would love for you to be there and to work with me.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Also, big one. In April, April 21st through the 23rd, the Uncharted Veterinary Conference is back together live and in person. Guys, we’re going to keep this small. It’s going to be probably under 100 people. And we’re just doing that for COVID precautions, but at the same time, we need to get back together. It’s time for people to come together and get recharged and get refocused and work together, and just rebuild those connections, those face-to-face connections.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Guys, we did our practice owner summit in December, and it was so great, and it was so powerful, and it was so meaningful. I know I got so much out of it, and I think our attendees did as well. So, yeah, it’s time for us to get back together. This conference is all about running smoother, simpler, more efficient practices that are enjoyable. It’s not about getting more people in the building. I don’t think we need that. It’s not about finding new things to do. I don’t think we need that. It is very much about clear communication, building systems, training staff to get more done with less. And also, just to shake off the stress. If you feel like you’re just running from one fire to another fire to another fire, this conference is for you.

Dr. Andy Roark:

You can register now. It is in Greenville, South Carolina. As I said, it will be in person. It is only for our Uncharted members, so grab yourself an Uncharted membership and head on down to see us in Greenville, South Carolina, the 21st through the 23rd. Links to both of these things in the show notes. Guys, without further ado, let’s get back into this episode.

Dr. Andy Roark:

How did you know when it was time to make a change? So, I think about you leaving clinical practice and going to be the director at the zoo. That’s a massive change. And you’ve moved from place to place. And at the very beginning, one of the first things you said when we sat down was you talked about vet medicine gives you options, and I always loved the idea that vet medicine is a house with a million rooms. That is a very attractive thing about the profession to me as well, is you can bend and you can mold and you can do different things. What was your decision process when you said, “It’s time for me to try something new or to go to something else?” How do you make those decisions?

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

It’s great. In that case, Governor Dukakis running for president at the time in Massachusetts back in 1987, ’88, and it took a year for me… because I was actually offered a very prestigious position at Angel if I would stay. I said to them, “Hey, guys, I’ve been offered the job, director of the Boston Zoos,” and I had worked with captive wildlife before. I had took them in clinical medicine. The decision was when I was sitting on a beach up in Massachusetts. We really do have them, but they’re not like beaches in the south. But, we were sitting there with my wife, and I finally just looked at her and I said, “I can probably, if this doesn’t work, go back into medicine,” because I was practicing at a fairly high level with people that were incredible. “I could probably go back to that if this doesn’t work. But if I don’t try this, it’s like somebody just put a mountain in front of me and said, ‘I dare you.'”

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

I said, “I’ve got to give it a try.” And to put my clinical medicine on the shelf… I loved being a doctor. I loved being a clinician, I mean. But the decision was because here I was, presented with a great challenge, and I saw the opportunity to now affect the populations of animals versus individual animals like we do in clinical medicine. That got my interest. And, when somebody’s running for president of the United States and asks you something like that, and they’re willing to put the money into it, and I knew I was going to be able to complete the $26 million tropical forest exhibit, it was, how can I turn this down? Let’s give it a try. And so, I made that change.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

It was hard, because I loved what I did in clinics, but it was a good decision. I have no regrets. I went from that to being a director of zoos, and then politics played a part. Like I said, there was a change in administration, and they wanted to change things, and when I wanted to close one zoo, the state senator from there went after me with a vengeance. That’s another lesson. My wife never understood why these people could be pretty nasty publicly, saying things, and yet when I would go to a meeting and a state senator or a state rep was there that I knew was thinking that, I’d still shake their hand, say, “Hi, Senator.” My dad taught me something. He said, “If you don’t like a teacher, get an A in their class. Don’t complain. Don’t let their problems direct you in a different way.”

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

And the same goes for veterinary medicine. We have this whole list of things that we talk about depression and suicide. Years ago, when I gave this talk, kind of, I would talk about them and say, “Folks, this is what we’re facing.” Today, I feel differently, because of people like you, Steve [Dale 00:24:22], Marty. It’s, “Hey, folks, these are the challenges that we have. Now let’s take them on ourself.” Nobody else is going to help us with them.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

So, for instance, one of them is that we struggle with the fact that people’s expectations… They want to do everything for their animal, and then they ask, “But it’s going to cost that much?” Nope. Our job, then, is to educate them, to let them know that, “Hey, wait a second, we have the same training that a physician has, and if you went in with the same problem to your doctor, it would cost you five times the amount I’m charging. But the skill’s the same. The equipment we use is the same. And all the other things that make it very similar.” And you know what? If it’s a person who’s willing to listen, you change their mind, but we have to be proactive.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

I would love… and maybe you could give this talk. I’d love to see a poster made which says, “This is a physician’s training. This is a veterinarian’s training.” Wow, it’s the same. But we have to be proactive. We have to look at that list and start to chip away with it, the cost, the debt we incur, the euthanasia serum being right on the shelf so it’s readily available, all of these things that we say contribute to this depression and suicide and everything. Well, let’s stop just saying them, and accepting they’re there, and change them, because nobody else, like I said, is going to do it for us.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

I’ve tried to do that.

Dr. Andy Roark:

We have to believe it ourselves. I think that’s a big part of it as well. When the clients come in and say, “Why do you charge this for your time?” Or whatever, I think a lot of us, we need pet owners to believe our value so that we can believe our value. I think that’s misguided. I think we have to believe ourselves. We know what training we did, and we know what our time is worth, and we know how many things we’re juggling, and we know what we put up with and how hard we work. I think we should work to explain ourselves and educate people, and at the same time, I think it’s more important that we ourselves believe it, and live that.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

You really just hit a point that I made. I looked up on Google about a week before the talk, and I put in, “What does the public think of veterinarians?” I kid you not, I got this statement that said, “The public believes in veterinarians. They trust them. They think they’re compassionate. They think they’re caring.” It was all these positive words that the public feels about veterinarians, versus physicians, who they think are arrogant, stubborn, and it was negatives. And, what I said to them is, “Folks, if the public thinks of us like that, why can’t we think of ourselves like that? We are. We are compassionate. We are caring. We got into this profession most likely because we weren’t going to make six figure plus salaries,” though I would suggest that we deserve it, but there’s got to be a balance there. “We got into it for the right reasons, and we’ve got to remember that. And if the public thinks that way, we certain should.”

Dr. Andy Roark:

What are the things in your career that you didn’t think that you would enjoy, that you ended up finding reward and enjoyment in?

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

Interesting question. That’s a new one for me, Andy. Thanks. Tough question.

Dr. Andy Roark:

I think about, you’re going into these positions, and you’re at the SPCA, and you know the politics are coming and things like that. Are there things like that, that you said, “Oh, what am I doing here?” And then you got into it and found that you were adept at it, or that you enjoyed it?

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

Well, let me talk about clinically first. When I started practice, I sort of dreaded ever telling a seven or eight year old it was time to say goodbye, and I found out very quickly that age bounces back very quickly. You tell them, and they cry maybe, or whatever, and then 15 minutes later, it’s, “Mom, can we go get ice cream?” I was a bit surprised, but I learned that the second hardest population to tell that to, and I’ll get to the first in a second, is… I still remember the first time it happened, an 18-year-old young lady came in with a 16-year-old Cocker Spaniel. It was time to say goodbye. Now, I realize that she had probably told this animal things, this dog things that she never told anyone else in the privacy of her room. She never had a death in her life. She went to counseling for six months.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

So, for people listening here, if you’ve got a 15 to 25 year old, someone who is just learning, really, the finality of death, and all the things that go with it, be careful. They will hold… It’s natural for those people to hold it inside and not let you know. But, if they’ve had a dog most of their life, or a cat, or a pet, don’t dismiss it. Now, the hardest population I found, which I was surprised, I didn’t think of this, senior citizens. That person who gets unconditional love, and it may be the only source of unconditional love. I had three people come to my office threatening suicide. One of them did after we put her animal down.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Oh, no.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

She started the conversation with she had a 19-year-old dog, and she said, “My husband loved him like, I’m not sure, maybe more than me, before he passed away last year.” And I realized she had transferred her love for her husband to this dog. And, a month or two later, she said goodbye. So, telling a senior citizen… And again, for people who are listening, if Grandma or Grandpa or your uncle or your aunt, and they’re 75, more, be aware that if they have to put down their animal, it’s going to tear their heart out possibly, and you’ve got to be there to support them.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

Please avoid those terms, even though I tell people when they’re going to go through it, “Hey, don’t be upset when someone says to you, ‘Let’s go down to the shelter or the campus and get a new animal.'” Who would ever say that to someone who just lost a spouse? Well, maybe my wife. They might tell her, “Hey, go get a new husband. You’re doing better now.” No, I’m kidding. Sorry, I make jokes like that. But you wouldn’t tell someone if they lost a child, so why would you say that if they’ve lost a dog? They’ve got to go through that grieving and mourning process. But, I try and tell people, they mean well. They’re trying to get you off center and get you smiling. Then it’s, “Oh, come on, it’s just an animal. Come back to work.” Or maybe their work doesn’t even give them grieving time off. When you lose an animal that’s been in your life for 10 years plus, you deserve to take a day or two off work to grieve it, just like a person.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

So, those challenges… Again, like my talk, instead of just accepting that it exists, you look for solutions. One of them for me is to maybe hopefully educate others to be aware, be cognizant. Don’t tell Grandma or Grandpa, “Hey, come on, you need to go into assisted living, and we’ll just give the dog to the shelter. They’ll find a new home.” We have to work and advocate maybe for more assisted living facilities that allow people and animals who have been together, because there are a lot of people who avoid going into assisted living because they’re not going to give up their pets and they should go into assisted living. They need that care. Those are the challenges I’ve seen.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

Another one that I faced, and I work hard at, I showed slides, that’s the terms and words that we use in veterinary medicine. For instance… I’m sorry, Andy. I get this chemo brain from being in therapy, and I lose my track here.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah, no, take your time.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

But, was the words that we use. And I put up a slide, for instance. This would be the external force that come to play. Years ago, there was a headline in the LA Times, “The governor has cut the budget, allowing shelter workers to kill animals sooner.” Come on, folks. What it should have said is, “The governor has cut the budget forcing,” or making it for shelter workers to have to euthanize the animal sooner.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

Those two words, kill and allowing them to do it, they don’t belong there.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Oh, yeah.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

We ourselves accept those things. Another example is low-cost spay and neuter. I may surprise you with this. We should get rid of that term. I always ask, and I did this time, I said, “Anybody in this room take low-cost parachute lessons?” This time, for the first time in 10 years, two people raised their hand, and I said, “I think you need counseling.” But most people go, “No, no way,” because low cost implies you cut corners. Okay. But as veterinarians, we even allow that term to be used. It should be subsidized or affordable, or someone’s paying that bill. And by doing that, veterinarians don’t even realize they’re hurting themself, because if the shelter has low-cost spay and neuter, the public thinks, “What’s my veterinarian doing? He’s trying to just get me to spend more money. A spay and neuter for him is $200, and the shelter’s doing it for $25. How come?” Because somebody else is paying the $175 or whatever.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

So, we should be vigilant about terms. Kill. We don’t kill animals in animal welfare. We euthanize them. The difference is kill implies the intention to do harm. That’s not our reason. So, these no-kill/kill shelter terms… People watch me in meetings, when I went to them nationally, and if somebody used low-cost or kill, my hand went wait up. “Wait a second.” We’ve got to think of the impact of those words. So, those have been some of the challenges I didn’t expect.

Dr. Andy Roark:

You are 69 years old now. Are there things that if you could go back and talk to yourself at age 35, you would try to get young Mark to understand?

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

Pretty interesting question. You weren’t at my talk, but you’re hitting every piece of it.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Well, I think that there are things that are fundamentally important for a lot of us. And so, yeah, I didn’t get to hear your keynote. I didn’t know anything about it coming in. But, these are the questions I rustle with, is, “What am I going to wish that I knew?”

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

Well, I was asked, and I put this up also, is a slide, it’s exactly what you were asking here. Someone who was turning 50, and I wasn’t sure if it was a compliment or not, but he said… He called me and he said, “I’m searching out people that I respect, that have been very successful in their fields, who are older than I am, and what would you tell yourself at 50 that you’ve learned since?” So, I actually put this slide up because I thought about it. I gave it some time, then I wrote to him, and I had four points, because I can never… As you can tell today, I’m not very good at being brief. So, I had four points. I’ll try and remember them here.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

It was, first of all, celebrate the fact that you have good health. At the time that I put that, I didn’t realize how impactful or important that was. Keep your friends and family close. Follow your dreams. And, don’t give up. These were the things I put on there. I asked my wife the same question. She was much more brief. She said celebrate your accomplishments and realize that you still have a lot to learn. Never stop learning. That’s what I would’ve told myself. And I actually followed that path. But, think about that. You never know it all. You need to be challenged, because if you become complacent and you don’t continue to challenge yourself, you’re going to go backwards, as we said.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

So, that really guided me, and that’s the words I gave him. And that’s what I would say to the 30 year old, is celebrate your health, protect it, friends and family are important. I will say, I’m a little bit different. We’ve all heard that thing when you’re on your last days, whatever, you’re not going to even think about your work. For me, I think about my family first with what I’m going through, by far, but I also will celebrate my work, and I feel like I had still more to contribute, and I may or may not get that opportunity. So, I’ve had to deal with that, but I’m going to fight it. I’m not going to give up. That’s what I would say to a 30 year old. Just follow your dreams, don’t give up, and look at it with an optimistic attitude. That’s why I love when you talk, Andy. You’re always optimistic.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Well, thank you.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

That’s a really important thing. I put up the fish philosophy, if people are familiar with the Seattle Fish Market. I suspect you are. I don’t know, have you ever heard of that term?

Dr. Andy Roark:

I don’t know this. I’m familiar with the fish market. I know they throw the fish in Seattle.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

Right, throw the fish. That’s what I’m talking about. These guys got together a couple of decades ago and said, “We’re going to have fun and we’re going to make money.” And they have a hell of a time. Excuse me. I hope that’s okay. But, like you said, you walk up to this guy and you say, “I want a two-pound salmon,” and a two-pound salmon comes flying across the room. They have four points that they make to do that, the fish philosophy. First of all, when you’re in a situation, be there. When I say be there, I’m not just talking physically. Emotionally. Mentally. Turn that phone onto focus, which iPhones have where you get the important calls but not all the other stuff. But be there, if you’re working by yourself or even with a group of people.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

The second is play. If people don’t know the story of Endeavor, it was Captain Shackleton in 1916, took 26 to the Antarctic. They got stuck there for… Their boat got caught in the ice, got smashed. 26 men survived two yeas in the Antarctic in 1916. They didn’t have REI equipment, they didn’t have GPS equipment, they didn’t have computers. It was his leadership that played that part, and part of his leadership was as hard as they were trying to survive, every day they had an hour to play. He took an ice ball and made it into a soccer ball, and they played with it. Or, he came up with ways to have games. When somebody was really, “Hey, leave me alone, I’m going off into the snow. I’m going,” that’s the person he slept next to that night and talked to.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

So, I just lost my train of thought. Sorry.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Oh, yeah. No, no.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

This stuff just affects it. But anyway, what was the question again? So, yeah. Yeah, no, I got you also because I rattle on, but the four points. So, it’s play. And the next is basically, make their day. By that, I mean say something good. Find people that are doing something good. Doug Myers, who is the zoo director at San Diego for, gosh, 45 years, he said, “Mark, when I’m having a tough time, I go out there and I find somebody doing something good, and I thank them, and I recognize it. And I walk away feeling better myself.” I’ve told people, especially after this pandemic, try it. Next time you go through the checkout line on your supermarket, look at the person’s name. Use it. Thank them for what they do. Talk to them as a person, not just someone sitting there checking out your food. You will be shocked. You’ll get a smile from ear to ear. Servers in restaurants, when they come over, “This is what we’ve got.” “Hey, what’s your name?” “Steve.” “Steve, thanks for being here.” Boom.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

And then the last, basically, is just be thankful for what you’ve got, and you get to choose what your day’s like. One of the gentleman from the fish market looks in the camera and he says, “Folks, you get up in the morning, look in the mirror, and you get to decide if it’s a good day or bad day, no matter what you face,” including what I’m facing. You can put a smile on your face, or you can let it pull you down. You get to choose that. Nobody else does. So, be there, play, find someone doing something good, and look in that mirror and decide, “I’m going to have a good day no matter what I’m doing. I’m going to smile, I’m going to laugh, and I’m going to make it work.” It works.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. The stories that we tell ourselves matter, is an idea that I’ve been holding onto a lot recently. The stories that we tell ourselves become the truth for us, and I really like that. You decide if you have a good day or not. Thank you so much for being here. I know when we first talked, you had mentioned you wanted to touch on some of the points you made at the very end of your keynote. And so, are there any final points you want to make sure to pass on?

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

No. Actually, we touched on it, and that was my diagnosis and putting up that slide from Cornell that said find a new career. I put that up on the screen, like I said, and people just laughed when they saw that, and I said, “I think I’ve done okay,” and that’s when they stood up and clapped. And yeah, it was the example of that. I guess I’d leave it with the fact that if you put the effort in, like I just said, to bring these points to an individual or a group or your local Kiwanis, or a large group of colleagues… Wow, it was gratifying. As I mentioned earlier, and it’s a good one to end on, I told my wife if somebody comes up and says, “You made a difference for me…” When I signed those books after my talk, I must’ve had a couple of dozen people say, “I’m going to be here next year. I want you to be on that stage.”

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

Or, one woman came up and she said, “My daughter just got a rejection letter from vet school, and she’s a junior also, and she’s just devastated. She doesn’t want to apply again. Wouldn’t you talk to her?” And I spent a couple of minutes with her. And her mom came back with her and she said, “You changed her mind. She’s like a different person.” Man, that’s so gratifying. It just doesn’t really happen often. And these people just said, “You just reminded me of why I got into this.” So, I hope people here listening, even if you’re just listening and you’re in different professions, and you’re a volunteer in animal welfare, first of all, thank you. We both know we can’t do our work without some volunteers in many positions. Remember why you got into it. Don’t let somebody let you go down a rabbit hole. Control your life. Be optimistic and laugh. Laughter’s a wonderful thing.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah, I agree. Oh, man. Well, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate your time. I really appreciate you coming on.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

Well, I appreciate you, Andy. I meant what I said at the beginning. I’ll say it again. If people haven’t seen you in person, boy, you light up a room. I did the same thing, I hope, with this talk, but really, you’re an inspiration to this profession, so thanks.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

All right, sir.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Take care.

Dr. Mark Goldstein:

Have a great day. Thank you, folks, for listening.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Guys, that is the episode. That’s what I got for you. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got something out of it. I enjoyed this episode. I enjoyed hearing these stories and thoughts and perspective, and I just… Yeah, I really soaked this up. Anyway, I hope you found things that made you think and reflect on your own career and where you are, and what medicine means, and the opportunities that it offers us, and the responsibilities that it puts on us. So, anyway, if you get any of those things, then this was a win for me. And so, that’s my only hope going into it. Guys, that’s it. Thank you so much for being here, and for listening.

Dr. Andy Roark:

If you enjoyed the podcast, please take a moment and write me an honest review wherever you get your podcast. It means a lot. It’s how people find the show, and it’s just a nice word of encouragement for me and for my team who are putting these episodes out. So, anyway, that’s it. Take care. Be well. Talk to you later. Bye.

Editor: Dustin Bays
www.baysbrass.com
@Bays4Bays Twitter/Instagram

Filed Under: Podcast Tagged With: Wellness

The 4 Relationship Types Clients Have with Their Pets

December 23, 2021 by Andy Roark DVM MS

Ann Wortinger BIS, LVT, VTS (ECC) (SAIM) (Nutrition) joins Dr. Andy Roark to discuss the four relationship types pet owners have with their pets (Anthropomorphic, Integrated, Chattel, and Mixed), how these relationships present in the exam room, and how veterinary professionals can adjust their messaging to interface successfully.

Cone Of Shame Veterinary Podcast · COS 112 The 4 Relationship Types Clients Have with Their Pets

LINKS

Uncharted Veterinary Conference April 21-23, 2022: unchartedvet.com/uncharted-april-2022/

Uncharted Podcast on iTunes: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-…st/id1449897688

Charming the Angry Client On-Demand Staff Training: drandyroark.com/on-demand-staff-training/

What’s on my Scrubs?! Card Game: drandyroark.com/training-tools/

Dr. Andy Roark Swag: drandyroark.com/shop

All Links: linktr.ee/DrAndyRoark

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Ann Wortinger BIS, LVT, VTS (ECC) (SAIM) (Nutrition), Elite FFCP
Ann is a 1983 graduate of Michigan State University and got her specialty certification in Emergency/ Critical Care in 2000, in Small Animal Internal Medicine in 2008 and in Nutrition in 2013. In 2020 she attained her Elite Fear Free certification.

She has worked in general, emergency, specialty practice, education and management. Ann is active in her state, national and specialty organizations, and served on the organizing committees for Internal Medicine and Nutrition. She has mentored over 20 fellow VTSs and has worked on a variety of committees and positions. She is currently an instructor and Academic Advisor for Ashworth College’s Veterinary Technology Program, as well as an active speaker and writer.

Ann has over 50 published articles in various professional magazines as well as book chapters and a book, Nutrition and Disease Management for Veterinary Technicians and Nurses in its second edition in 2016 coauthored with Kara Burns. Ann received the 2009 Service Award for her state association (MAVT), the 2010 Achievement Award for the Academy of Internal Medicine for Veterinary Technicians (AIMVT), and in 2012 received the Jack L. Mara Memorial Lecture Award presented at NAVC.

Her fur/feather/fin family consists of 4 resident cats, multiple foster kittens, chickens and a pond full of goldfish.

SHOW TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Andy Roark:

Welcome everyone to the Cone of Shame Veterinary Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Andrew Roark. Got a super interesting one for you today. It’s me and veterinary technician extraordinaire, Ann Wortinger sitting down. We are talking about the four types of relationships that pet owners have with their pets. We get into those, breakdown what the four types are, what they look like. As soon as Ann started laying these down, I was like, yep. I have seen all of these. It’s just a neat way to segment those clients in your mind so you can understand what their relationship is. You can tailor your communication style to them. You can tailor your treatment plan presentation to them. You can help guide the care for that pet in the way that’s going to be most effective in advocating for that pet. Totally worth the time, totally worth the energy. I hope this makes you think about the cases that you are seeing in the clinic and how we approach those cases. Without further ado, let’s get into this episode.

Kelsey Beth Carpenter:

This is your show. We’re glad you’re here. We want to help you in your veterinary career. Welcome to Cone of Shame with Dr. Andy Roark.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Welcome Ann Wortinger to the podcast. Thanks for being here.

Ann Wortinger:

Thank you for asking me, Dr. Roark.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Oh, my pleasure. You are well-known in the veterinary technician community. You currently teach at a vet tech program. You have not one VTS, but three VTS, veterinary technician specialties. It’s small animal internal medicine, emergency critical care and nutrition. Is that correct?

Ann Wortinger:

Yes. Yep.

Dr. Andy Roark:

That’s amazing. That’s incredible.

Ann Wortinger:

And on two organizing committees, which when you’re on an organizing committee, they say you have to be exquisitely qualified. So not only do you need to meet all the qualifications for any of the applicants, but instead of five years, it has to be seven years. You have to be published. You have to speak. All that fun stuff too.

Dr. Andy Roark:

I have never been exquisitely qualified for anything in my life.

Ann Wortinger:

I have been twice.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah, exactly. If someone was like, we need this burrito eaten as fast as possible, then I would be exquisitely qualified. Sure of that. I got nothing. Well, so thanks for being here. You do a variety of lectures. You’ve published all over the place. You’ve got lots of articles. You’ve got some book chapters and you speak all over the place. I saw a presentation that you were putting on called four relationship types clients have with their pets.

Ann Wortinger:

Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:

And as a communication guy, that was really interesting to me. I think that we all know that when we talk to clients, it’s not a one size fits all conversation. People are different. I’ve always really tried to lean into that. I think there’s some general approaches that we take to talk to clients, but everybody’s an individual. The more that you recognize them as an individual, the more you can tailor your communication to that person, their values, their needs, their wants, their desires, their worldview, their self-identity, the more effective you can be. And so now we’re getting down in the weeds a bit. But I’m always looking for tools in my toolbox to help me kind of sort people and spot kind of what they care about and how I might best approach them to advocate for their pet. And so if you don’t mind, can you go ahead and just lay down the general premise of the idea that there are different relationships that pet owners have with their pets?

Ann Wortinger:

Sure. There are three primary relationships that people have with their pets. I think we all recognize that clients, they have an anthropomorphic relationship, or those that give their animals human feelings and human understanding. Then we have integrated, which is usually a client who’s got some scientific background who views their animal as a pet but it is a member of the family. Then we have chattel. Chattel relationships are usually they have no emotions between the owner and the animal. That doesn’t mean that somebody else in the family or in the area does not have an emotional relationship with the animal. But these animals are seen as property. They are a tool. They are a way to get something done. We see this with guard dogs. We can see this with police dogs. Now the police department will see this dog as a tool. The handler most likely has an integrated relationship with it, so we can have mixed. It depends on what you’re doing and who you’re working with.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah, so that’s the fourth card, right, is mixed? Different feelings.

Ann Wortinger:

Yeah, because they can’t just be straight up simple in veterinary medicine.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Well, but our relationships with pets are complicated. You talked a little bit about mixed relationship being within an individual, meaning a person-

Ann Wortinger:

No, within usually a family. Each person, though you can have people that are anthropomorphic. Those of us that have gone into veterinary medicine that have an anthropomorphic relationship, when we start facing burnout, our relationship type will change with our patients. We may become more of a chattel relationship where we try not to get emotionally involved with our patients at all. That is a consequence that we are seeing more often with burnout in our field.

Dr. Andy Roark:

I’ve seen the other way with pet owners. Right. We’ve all seen the stoic guy who comes in who’s kind of like, “This cat is just a cat.” You say, “Well, your cat is really sick.” He goes, “Really?” I mean, he had this idea of like… You know, it’s funny, you don’t know what you got until it’s gone or almost gone. You know what I mean? I’ve seen pet owners, I think that they were maybe, I don’t know. I’m just guessing that they were maybe raised with the chattel sort of approach of pets live in the yard and that’s what they are. There’s nothing tighter than a family member who didn’t want a pet and the pet after they got the pet.

Ann Wortinger:

Oh, you’ve seen pictures of my husband. Have you?

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. I see the guy under the big cat.

Ann Wortinger:

No, the guy with three cats, four cats on him every evening because we have two foster kittens. This is one, this is Kevin.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Oh wow.

Ann Wortinger:

We’ve had them since they were four weeks old. We have two of our adult cats prefer my husband. We let the cats choose. They’ve got their spots on his chair. Then the foster kittens come in. They’re like, well, we want in on this.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. That’s funny. Let’s go back to the vet side of this. Talk to me a little bit more about burnout moving people between these relationships. Because when you said that, I go, oh my gosh, I’ve totally seen that. I have 100% seen anthropomorphizing person who just sort of detaches a bit from the clients.

Ann Wortinger:

I mean, we used to see this primarily in shelter medicine, just because it’s such high volume and high stress that the person that goes in, we call them puppy huggers. They go in and oh my God, I love all the puppies. I love all the kittens. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Then two, three, four years down the line, they’re like, you know, just get them in, get them out. Don’t have any relationship. Don’t remember names of the animals. Don’t remember their history. They’re just done. The more you care, the more it hurts.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. Yeah.

Ann Wortinger:

You can only take so much before you just pull back and say, I’m done. I can’t do this anymore, but maybe they’re credentialed. Maybe they’re a veterinarian. They don’t know they have another option, so they just leave the field. I mean, we’re seeing that in droves right now, that they just get so burnt out from their level of care that they’re not animals anymore, they’re just a means to an end.

Dr. Andy Roark:

I’m going to ask you a hard question here. Do you think that it may be detrimental to that professionals to have an anthropomorphic view of patients?

Ann Wortinger:

It makes it harder scientifically I think for us. Most of us are integrated. We are looking for facts. We’re looking for science-based evidence. Most anthropomorphic people are not doing that. Anthropomorphic tends to be more feeling. I mean, this may be more of our receptionists, our assistants, but definitely there are people that make it through and get credentialed and still have that. Or you’ll have what we’re calling our soul animals. That there’s one animal that you are exquisitely attached to. You may not even realize the depth of your emotions until that animal becomes ill or you are faced with a trauma of some sort. I think we’ve all been there.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. I agree. I push a bit for the integrated mindset when I talk to especially vet students and people like that. I don’t talk a lot about because it could be an unpopular opinion. I do, I worry about the anthropomorphic people. Going into vet school is where I mostly interact with people. It is hard to have a deeply feeling attachment to every pet and to keep doing this job again and again. I know there are people with stronger hearts than mine that can do it. But for me-

Ann Wortinger:

It’s hard.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. For me, part of wellness, part of self-care has been shifting to the integrated idea of I recognize the value of this pet and the value of this life. At the same time, I can’t, I just can’t live in that emotional space. It’s too hard, especially when I don’t have any control about what the pet owner is going to do as far as the care of this pet. I’ve been calling it, and I really like this, the term is why I want to talk about this. I’ve been using the term professional distance and sort of talking to young doctors and saying, Hey, professional distance is a tool. You’ve got to be able to say, I don’t have control over what this pet owner is going to do and so as a result, I do need to emotionally distance myself.

Dr. Andy Roark:

I have a friend, his name is Dr. Phil Richmond. He does a lot of positive psychology. He calls it, what does he call it? He calls it cognitive empathy as opposed to emotional empathy. Emotional empathy is like, I’m going to be emotionally here with you. Cognitive empathy is more like, I understand how you feel and I understand the importance, but I’m not emotionally coming to where you are. To me, that kind of fits with the integrated approach, or at least what I’ve kind of picked up as a self-protection mechanism to get things done.

Ann Wortinger:

One of the other factors of an integrated relationship is sometimes, especially with that, clients will set limits as to how much time or how much money or how many visits that they will do for this animal. It may or may not be based on any fact. They’re thinking, we’re going to do space for $50. They set limits that we may or may not be able to meet. When we have an animal that is 100% recoverable, but the owners won’t spend that much money on them for whatever reason. As I told you before we started, we have chickens. One of our chickens got an eye injury back in our woods when she was about six weeks old. She was blind in one eye, not a problem. About six months later, her eye starts swelling and she can’t close it. We’re having problems.

Ann Wortinger:

Try to find a chicken doctor for an eye enucleation in the middle of a pandemic. But we went had her enucleated. My husband’s family, and they think I’m the weirdest thing ever, anyways, but I spent money like $500 money on a chicken. But because she was injured as a chick, we were very emotionally invested in her. I mean, I was not. You know, I’d spend $500 to enucleate one of my cats. Not a problem. Why wouldn’t I spend that for my chicken?

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. That’s interesting. This goes a bit back to what you were saying about vet professionals being more integrated at the workplace and then maybe more anthropomorphic at home.

Ann Wortinger:

They can be.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. I mean, I look at my own relationship with my pet. He’s my boy. I get very, very attached to my dogs and that’s probably why I became a veterinarian. I would get attached to my cats if I was allowed to have cats, but my wife is definitely allergic. And so to all the cat people who are like [crosstalk 00:13:30] cats.

Ann Wortinger:

Try the Purina LiveClear food, it is amazing. Yeah. I’m an asthmatic. I’ve been an asthmatic for 47 years. Four months after we started the food, so we got it when it first was released. I was able to stop my steroid inhaler, which I had been on for 47 years.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Wow. Wow. There you go.

Ann Wortinger:

We have four cats. I’m the one with the allergies.

Dr. Andy Roark:

You have four cats before the diet came out, which means that you were-

Ann Wortinger:

I was on a steroid inhaler. I’ve got rescue inhalers. I’m on oral meds. I’ve worked in veterinary medicine for 38 years.

Dr. Andy Roark:

I’m struggling to breathe, but I need another cat. It’s not that you had a cat, you had four cats.

Ann Wortinger:

Four cats, yup.

Dr. Andy Roark:

And difficulty breathing. I love it.

Ann Wortinger:

And we foster. The kittens aren’t on the adult food so they tend to bother me a little bit more sometimes.

Dr. Andy Roark:

That’s funny.

Ann Wortinger:

We still do it.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Circling back, I very much have an anthropomorphic relationship with my pets. I talk to them. I ask them how they’re doing. They have no monetary value to me. I’m going to do what-

Ann Wortinger:

But you would not set a limit as to what you would be willing to invest in your pets. Now, when we give clients estimates, we go in usually with a plan A, plan B, plan C. With an anthropomorphic client, they will tell us to do anything, do anything. They are not willing to pay for us to do anything because they want us to do it for a learning experience or as a research project or something like that. Integrated will usually have limits as to, you know, I can’t pay more than a thousand dollars or $3,000, whatever.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Okay. Let me say this back to you slightly differently, right? When we talk about chattel, there’s not an emotional attachment. This reminds me of old school veterinary medicine where you were doing food animal medicine. You say, this animal has value.

Ann Wortinger:

Well, it’s definitely for anybody who’s raising livestock for a living. My chickens are living lawn ornaments. They have no intrinsic value, but you know, any of our large animal livestock producers, those are chattel relationships. But they will allow us to spend considerable amounts of money to save that LDA on a good producing dairy cow, or the proptosed uterus on one of the beef cattle that really drops nice looking calves. They will spend a lot more money than some of our other clients will.

Dr. Andy Roark:

With the chattel, they don’t have an emotional attachment so those decisions are pretty much financial. The one I’ve heard that is lunacy that I hear is something like, I spend a hundred dollars on this dog and that’s as much as I’m going to spend now. I’m like, that doesn’t make any sense.

Ann Wortinger:

No vaccines, no fecals, no nothing.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. Something like that. That to me seems chattel. When you talk about the integrated approach. You talked about your chicken with the eye problem, right. You clearly spent more treating this chicken than the street value of a chicken.

Ann Wortinger:

Of the $3 chick, yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah, exactly right. Even if you factor in all the eggs, they’re not paying for that eye enucleation.

Ann Wortinger:

At that age, she was not producing even.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Oh yeah. You’re a great vet tech, terrible investor is what I’m hearing.

Ann Wortinger:

Yep. Well, they are our pets. For the most part, they are outdoor animals. We do not have indoor chickens. But when I’m out in the yard, they’re with me seeing what I’m digging up, seeing what I’m getting into. For my husband, they’re just entertainment in the backyard. We do have more of an integrated relationship with them. That they get warmed. They get fecals. We buy good quality food. They have expensive housing.

Dr. Andy Roark:

It sounds like you do enjoy them. You enjoy their personalities. It sounds like you’re willing to go above and beyond to take care of them with the recognition that, and I don’t know how to say this, that they are chickens.

Ann Wortinger:

Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:

And they have a relatively limited lifespan.

Ann Wortinger:

We were just talking, one of my hens we think is about six years old right now. Eight is the longest I’ve had them.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Right. That seems like a fairly integrated approach with me as opposed to the money is no object, do everything. I want to evolve this conversation a bit back towards communication in the exam room and talking to these people. I’m sure there are, but are there differences in how you communicate to people when you are getting signs of these relationships?

Ann Wortinger:

Yeah. When you’re talking to somebody with an anthropomorphic relationship, they work better with simile. That if you were going in and saying, we need to do an ovariohysterectomy and she’s like, oh my God, my friend had a hysterectomy and it was the worst thing in her life. You’re like, no. We want to make sure they don’t reproduce. We go in very fact-driven, and these people are very emotional-driven. We have to figure out a way to get around that, to get what the animal needs, which is what our big concern is. Get what the animal needs and get the owner to understand that. That if we explain that Muffy, if she is not spayed, she can develop pyometra, it always happens on the weekend or on holidays, or she could get pregnant.

Ann Wortinger:

Because she’s such a small dog, the pregnancy may be difficult. We don’t want to contribute to more unloved animals in the world. Things along that line instead of just going in facts-driven and saying, this is what she needs. She’s six months old. We’re going to do it.

Dr. Andy Roark:

My instinct is to often try to counter with facts because it feels like it’s bringing it down from an overly emotional place. When I say that, what I mean is when the person comes in and they have these great concerns, I want to try to use data to try to bring them down. But what you’re saying is it’s probably better to go and try to engage with them in that emotional language and help them understand how this is going to be okay.

Ann Wortinger:

Trying to get them to change what they are thinking. I guess the biggest one we have is male owners and dog neutering. Trying to explain to those big biker dudes that their pit bull needs to be neutered, especially if he’s out running around the neighborhood. They can come in very anthropomorphic that this is his bud, we do everything together. He’s got goggles for the bike. All that sort of stuff. You’re like, yeah. He needs to be neutered. If we talk about pet overpopulation and unloved animals and not being able to take care of everybody, sometimes that will get us where we need them to go. Does that make sense?

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. That definitely makes sense. I try to think back about conversations I’ve had that have been successful with these guys. I think a lot of times just things like this will make the world easier and less frustrating for him. They kind of get that. They’re like, oh, yeah. I can kind of see. Also, other dogs are less likely to fight with him, give him a hard time. That kind of hits on that emotional thing of, I don’t want my buddy to have a hard time. Really what they’re trying to do in their way is they want their dog to have the best life, in their mind as they understand it. Because they’re anthropomorphizing. I’ve heard a lot of different explanations of neutering, and kind of how you explain it. I think the ones that lean into the simile, here’s a way to look at it that these people understand it in their own life that’s not data-driven but helps them to understand the experience of the pet. That definitely makes sense.

Ann Wortinger:

When my kids were younger, we brought home a cerebellar hyperplasia cat. We, I did. She developed hyperplasia secondary to getting thrown out of a car on the highway. My kids were very upset about her trauma. I would always tell them that not everybody feels the same way that we do about animals, and that our job was to ensure that she had the best life and she remembered none of this. That she was young enough as a kitten. She was found during a rainstorm on one of our dug in highways, they flooded. She was never comfortable with storms. Whether that was something to do with that or her cerebellar input or exactly what. We used to tease my oldest son that his first girlfriend was brain damaged in the wrong species because she thought he was all that and a bag of chips.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Hey guys, I just got to jump in real quick with a couple housekeeping items. Number one on my list with big red underlines under it, registration for the April Uncharted Veterinary Conference is open. It is not like anything else that is out there. It is, oh, it is energizing. It is motivating. It is inspiring. It is fun. It will get you fired up about your career and your practice again. This year’s conference is all about running smoother, simpler, more enjoyable and rewarding practices. That’s what it is. You’re like, I’m not a practice owner. If you are a leader in practice, you see yourself as a leader. If you plan to be a leader in the future, this conference is for you. Come and be a part of it. Check out the link, it’s in the show notes. Learn more about the Uncharted Conference. I would love to have you there.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Second point of order, over on the Uncharted Veterinary Podcast front, my friend, Stephanie Goss and I get into a brand new podcast topic. We’re talking about finding the perfect job. We had someone writing and they’re like, Hey, I’m getting ready to look for a job and I have no idea what to look for. And I don’t want to end up in a toxic dump. I don’t want it to be terrible. I don’t want to be awful or horrible, a decision that I’ve made that I’ll regret for the rest of my life. What do I do? And Stephanie and I unpacked that. If you were thinking about, Hey, I’d like to maybe get another job at some point. That’s the episode for you.

Dr. Andy Roark:

If you’re thinking, Hey, I’d like to hire somebody and I would like to do the things that Andy Roark is telling people that they should look out for in a good practice, you might also want to watch this new video episode. Anyway, guys, that’s over there on the Uncharted Podcast. It is free as always. Get it wherever you get your podcast. Get it wherever you got this podcast. Let’s do it right now. Let’s get back into this episode. Let’s shift over and look at the integrated relationships. Approaching them versus the anthropomorphic.

Ann Wortinger:

You’re usually going to be able to go in with your facts. If you stick with the spay and neutering that prevent pyometra, prevent unwanted pregnancies, prevent mammary cancer. If you want to throw in statistics, you can throw in your statistics. Sometimes we have tended to undervalue our services, so when we give them a $300 quote for a spay, sometimes they have a problem with that. And then we can go in and say, well, we’ve added in extra monitoring because that’s important. We do pre blood work so that we can detect anything. It isn’t just the put them on the table anymore.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. As you’re saying that, I’m thinking about all the times that I’ve seen people use that exact language with your anthropomorphic clients and how it doesn’t go well.

Ann Wortinger:

No, and it’s not. They would pay the $300 no question, but if you say, and we’re going to have monitoring the entire time that they’re under anesthesia, we’re going to put an IV catheter in just to make sure that there’s not any problems. That would go over much better, then even doing a monetary breakdown on it so that they know that we’re taking care of Fluffy and we’re keeping her warm. We’re going to have a blanket inside the cage and one on the table. Those are the sort of things that’s going to make a difference for the anthropomorphic.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. It’s very funny that when we talk to clients, often the conversations look a bit similar from the outside, but in some cases we’re having a justify this price conversation. In some cases we are having a help me understand and make me feel safe conversation. We’ve all gotten those conversations wrong, meaning I thought we were having a justify the price conversation and we’re not. Or I thought we were having a make me feel safe conversation and this person is like, no, I just don’t understand why an IV catheter cost $65. And you go, oh.

Ann Wortinger:

I think one of the advantages of having a technician go in and give estimates instead of doctors is we get less of the justify the price, or they think they can wheedle the price different with a doctor than they can with a technician. But technicians are better at presenting those things, I think, than a doctor is. Doctors are so fact-based. And not that technicians aren’t, but we can bring it down to the client level. I think we can switch gears a little quicker.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. I think that’s probably true. I’ve seen that again and again, technicians being better than doctors at presenting estimates as a sweeping rule. That definitely makes, that makes sense to me as well. I have also found that the doctors kind of have the power to make the changes on the fly. And so they go, well, maybe we don’t need this monitoring. The technician would never say, maybe we don’t need this monitoring. Also, I would point out the fact that doctors can say, maybe we don’t need this monitoring, doesn’t mean that they should. As a softie who wants clients to like me, I have battled that urge and impulse my entire career.

Ann Wortinger:

Yeah. I mean, we know what we need, but we also we know what the animal needs and we will put usually what’s to their advantage over what’s to our advantage.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. No, I agree. Then tips for communicating with the chattel people. Everybody wants to know.

Ann Wortinger:

Hey, that’s just straight up facts that… We have, because Detroit is a border city, we would deal with the border docs. You have to get the permission from the department, and all they want is the numbers. They have a chattel relationship. Then you’ve got this big, strong TSA guy who’s worried about his dog that’s maybe blown an ACL or whatever. If we can tell the department that we can get this dog back to full function in six weeks with a surgery, they’ll sign off on it. The handler is not the one paying for this. This is the department. The handler is going to be doing all the work and that’s who we’re going to talk to as far as animal care. So that one dog has two different relationships attached to it. We see that often in our police dogs and I’m sure most any clinic deals with their local police force that has any dogs component to that. But we also get the airport dogs, the border dogs, campus dogs. All sorts of things.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. No, that definitely makes sense. One of the things I think is really interesting is when you have that mixed relationship inside the family. I tell a story. I had this Boykin Spaniel, which is the state dog of South Carolina. It came in. I saw it just like once a year for a couple years. Every time it would come in, this guy would bring it in, and it always had nasty ear infections. It had fleas and it had missing-

Ann Wortinger:

And Spaniel ears.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah, exactly. It totally had Spaniel ears. It always smell. It just had a yeasty smell all the time. Every time I saw it, it was just kind of a hot mess. I would argue with the guy, I try to get him to clear this up but he never seemed all that interested. Then one day, I come in to see him for his annual appointment. There’s this guy and there’s this young lady who’s with him. She has a big rock on her finger. She says, “I want you to clean this dog up so he doesn’t stink.” And I said, “Yes, ma’am.” She was like, “Just do everything. I don’t want to live with a stinky dog. I want this dog to be clean and well taken care of.” She was ready. We cleaned it. We got that dog’s ears under control. We got that dog’s skin under control. That dog went on regular flea and heartworm prevention and stayed there.

Dr. Andy Roark:

I wanted to take the lady aside where fiance wasn’t around and be like, you can’t leave this man because this dog will suffer if you do. Like this dog will go back into neglect. But you better believe that every communication that I can have thereafter is going to loop her in as much as possible. I don’t want to talk to the guy about what we should do because I know what that guy’s behavior is going to be. He’s definitely more in the chattel camp and she’s definitely more in the at least integrated to possibly anthropomorphic camp of this is now our family dog. That means something.

Ann Wortinger:

Good for the dog.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yes. Oh gosh. Yeah, that dog won the jackpot when that guy proposed. But yeah, it is just interesting. You see those relationships, and a lot of times I think to your point at the very beginning, when we start talking about this mixed relationship. The person making the financial decisions in the family may very well not be the person who has the actual loving relationship with that pet. And so expanding the people in the conversation can be really valuable for us.

Ann Wortinger:

Yeah. I mean, we see sometimes with, especially families with small children. Children kind of suck everything in and you don’t have any time or feeling left. You’ll have people move into a chattel relationship when their children are small. The children are very anthropomorphic because they’re living in rainbow bright and all that. The parents may only do something for the child’s benefit rather than the animal’s benefit.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. That makes sense. It’s really is about sort of in those cases, trying to understand the values at play here. I coach doctors sometimes in exam room communication and say, you know, one of the tricks is to not always talk about what you think is most important, it’s to try to figure out what they think is most important and then talk to them about that. And so when we talk about the kid’s dog, my tendency is to talk about the damage that intestinal parasites can do to a poor dog. It’s probably going to be a lot more effective for me to talk about the risk of internal parasites around children and how-

Ann Wortinger:

Doing that little [capsy 00:32:47] handout.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. There you go. But that’s exactly it, right? It really is try to understanding the value system of the person you’re dealing with and just try to put it in language that they understand and that’s going to make its way up their priority list. Their priority list may be very different than yours and mine.

Ann Wortinger:

Especially when we’re dealing with young adults, they may have been raised in a different setting. Maybe they were raised in a chattel family and then they grow up and they’re like, oh, this animal is really amazing. They never did vaccines and they never did fecals. We only saw the vet to have them euthanized. How can we change that?

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah, I think that’s a period of time we’re sort of been going through in vet medicine. I wonder if we’re coming out the other side. It used to be, jump back 30, 40 years ago, pets were outside. That’s just what they were. They stayed in the barn and they stayed outside. Then in the last 30, 40 years, they have moved inside, but it’s been at different speeds. There’s people who were really late to that. There’s people who were at the beginning of that. I feel like the young generation of pet owners we see today mostly had pets inside as opposed to the older generation. We get to just navigate that with people as they sort of start to expand their relationship. It’s just, I don’t know, it’s interesting.

Ann Wortinger:

Well, with the declaw debate we’re having right now. All of our cats have always been declawed. But this is what research is showing us. The arthritic changes that we’re seeing and the changes in posture and gait and how many… If we think they’re integrated, we can throw all that data at them instead of just saying, you know, this is painful and there are other things we can do to, you know, you don’t even know if the six weeks old kitten is going to tear up your couch.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. That’s a great point. It is those chattel relationships when it comes to declawing that make veterinarians want to pull their hair out. It’s the people who say, well, she’s not going to tear up my leather couch. And you say, that has not been an issue. There are things we can do about that. But they do a math equation of kitten worth less than couch or worth less than furniture. It’s very hard if they won’t listen to the data on pain and long term problems with declawing and they don’t have that anthropomorphic view where we can lean into the pain and discomfort of the procedure. Boy, that’s the only time that we end up in these situations and it can be hugely frustrating.

Ann Wortinger:

Yep. Especially when you’ve got a client that’s very insistent and is used to having their way. They’re used to bullying people to get what they want and they’ll start at the receptionist and just work up the line.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. Yeah. It’s true. It is true. Well, one of the things I think is also changing our profession. I think it’s really good. The pandemic has been a challenge for a lot of practices, and we do, as you said, have a lot of burnout. I think we’re seeing more of that. I’m a perpetual optimist. I think that a lot of us have been pushed to the point of making some boundaries that are long overdue making.

Ann Wortinger:

Yeah. Especially for technicians that, you know, don’t call me on the weekends, don’t call me after hours. When I was working in practice, I had an hour to an hour and a half drive each way. That was my decompression time that I had no kids, I had no intercoms, I had no doctor. I could listen to what I wanted to listen to. By the time I’ve got home, I had transitioned to homework and dinner and all that stuff. Actually the drive was not a bad thing. If I had only lived 20 minutes from home, I would’ve had a much harder time transitioning and making sure that I was not still in tech mode when I got home and could be the parent that the kids needed at that time.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. I’m talking a lot these days about what I call practical boundaries for busy practices. Letting people be off and enforcing their off time I think is a boundary that its time has come.

Ann Wortinger:

I think setting boundaries with clients too. You cannot expect to walk in and be seen every day. You cannot expect, maybe we were able to do this before. I adopted a pandemic kitten, one of my foster fails. I have not been in the clinic for any of his visits, but I sent his distraction mat, I sent his churros with him. They get a note. They get an update. That’s just what they have to do. This is a doctor that I’ve worked with over 10 years now. That’s how she’s running her practice. It’s like, that’s fine. If that’s what you need to do, then that’s what we will do.

Dr. Andy Roark:

No, I think that that’s where we’re going.

Ann Wortinger:

A lot of clients are having problems with that.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Oh yeah. Well, that’s why I wanted to talk about this, the relationship types, anything that helps us sort of communicate with these people and find out what they sort of care about so we can get to it. Again, I can empathize with the pet owners as well and say, it’s frustrating, especially if your pet has an ear infection and someone says to you, you’re going to have to wait three hours to get in and get seen. You go, well, I got to go to work. I’ve got my kids at school and I got to pick them up. I don’t think the answer is throwing away empathy for the pet owners, but I do think that we do need to set some boundaries and say to the people, this is what we can do. This is how we can help you. We need to be creative so that we can help people, but just letting clients kind of come in and have whatever they want and do whatever they want and we’ll just suck it up or we’ll stay late or we’ll pull people in on their day off. I think those things need to be off the table.

Ann Wortinger:

Yep. I agree.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Cool. Where can people find you? Where can they read your articles? Where can they connect?

Ann Wortinger:

I do have a LinkedIn page, but not real active on it. I’m speaking at the Ontario Association of Veterinary Technicians, and what’s the other one? Washington State Vet Tech Association. Washington State is going to be live. Ontario is virtual. Even for U.S. residents, the Ontario conference was one of the better ones that is presented. It’s presented by technicians.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. Let me jump in here as well and say I love the Ontario Vet Tech Association.

Ann Wortinger:

Oh yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:

They do such a good job. I have been to a couple of their events and they are always well done and they are just a well-organized, just passionate group of technicians. And so yeah, it’s a virtual-

Ann Wortinger:

Well, and they’re one of the self-governing groups of technicians. The provincial government, all the licensing, all the credentials, all the renewals, all the CE is done through the tech association.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. If they’re having virtual events, other technicians should take a look just because they really do great work. Guys, thanks a lot for being here and thank you so much for taking time.

Ann Wortinger:

Thank you.

Dr. Andy Roark:

That is our episode. Guys, I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got something out of it. As always, the best, kindest, nicest thing you can possibly do for me if you like the episode is to leave an honest review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast episodes. It’s how people find the show. It gives me some guidance about what the people like. It keeps me encouraged to keep doing the episodes, so I really appreciate it. Guys, take care of yourselves. Be well. I’ll talk to you soon.

Filed Under: Podcast Tagged With: Wellness

Alarmism and the Challenge of Talking About Mental Health

December 16, 2021 by Andy Roark DVM MS

Dr. Jen Brandt sits down with Dr. Andy Roark to discuss the challenges of talking productively about mental health and suicide. They talk about what is productive when discussing mental health and what is not, the truth about the narrative that veterinary medicine is “the worst” industry for mental health and suciide, and how we might correct this narrative. Dr. Brandt discusses internal vs. external loci of control, negativity bias, and toxic positivity. They end the discussion talking about how to challenge damaging communications and venting vs emotional dumping.

Cone Of Shame Veterinary Podcast · COS 111 Alarmism and the Challenge of Talking About Mental Health

LINKS

Uncharted Veterinary Conference April 21-23, 2022: unchartedvet.com/uncharted-april-2022/

Uncharted Podcast on iTunes: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-…st/id1449897688

Charming the Angry Client On-Demand Staff Training: drandyroark.com/on-demand-staff-training/

What’s on my Scrubs?! Card Game: drandyroark.com/training-tools/

Dr. Andy Roark Swag: drandyroark.com/shop

All Links: linktr.ee/DrAndyRoark

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Dr. Jen Brandt, AVMA’s Director of Wellbeing, Diversity, and Inclusion Initiatives, is a licensed independent social worker, certified crisis worker, certified anti-oppression informed practitioner, and senior trainer for the Institute for Healthcare Communication. In 2000, Dr. Brandt co-founded The Ohio State University College of Veterinary Medicine’s Honoring the Bond services, one of the first programs in the nation aimed at recognizing and supporting the human-animal bond by providing education and resources to animal owners and animal care professionals. Dr. Brandt helped launch the AVMA’s Workplace Wellbeing Certificate Program to support veterinary professionals in developing the knowledge and skills needed to create healthy work systems and AVMA’s Brave Space Certificate Program which explores the impact of stereotyping, unconscious bias, and workplace harassment.

In 2020, Dr. Brandt was elected as a Distinguished Fellow of the National Academies of Practice in Social Work. She received her Ph.D. and Master of Social Work from The Ohio State University and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Social Work and Sociology with a Minor in Spanish from the University of Indianapolis.

SHOW TRANSCRIPT

DR. ANDY ROARK:

Welcome everybody to the Cone Of Shame Veterinary podcast. I am your host, Dr. Andy Roark. Guys, I have got a super interesting interview today. It is me and the one and only Dr. Jen Brandt. We are talk about alarmism and the challenges of communicating about mental health. We talk a lot about the narrative that that medicine is the worst profession for mental health and how that’s not true. And there’s not a lot of research to support anything like that. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have of unique challenges. Obviously we do. It doesn’t mean mental health is not important. Obviously it is. But there are some good ways that we should talk about taking care of ourselves. And there are some damaging ways that we talk about mental health. And we hear these narratives a lot. It’s a really useful, really interesting conversation with my friend, Dr. Jen Brent, let’s get into this episode.

KELSEY BETH CARPENTER:

This is your show. We’re glad you’re here. We want to help you and your veterinary career. Welcome to Cone Of Shame, with Dr. Andy Roark.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

Welcome to the Cone Of Shame podcast, Dr. Jen Brant. Thank you for being here.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

Thank you so much for having me.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

Oh, it’s always a pleasure. I love getting to talk to you. For those who don’t know you. You are a sociologist. A social worker by background training. You are the AVMA’s director of wellbeing, diversity and inclusion. You are a speaker and thought leader in our industry. And you are always an insightful person. When I get a chance to talk to you about mental health and wellness and how our profession is doing. So, anything you’d like to add to that?

DR. JEN BRANDT:

I think that covers it.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

Very nice. Well, thank you for being here. I reached out to you because I always… Obviously mental health and wellness is important to me in our profession and I’m trying. I’m on sort of this journey recently to try to figure out what’s real and what’s not.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

And also to figure out what do we do about this? And, really when I talk to you… What I really want to talk about is how do we communicate about mental health and wellness? How do we talk about this to our staff? How do we talk about to ourselves? What are we doing from a communication standpoint that is good and useful and what is harmful? Because I see stuff out there that I think that’s really not good. I reached out to you when I saw there was a new story in jab news in early November. It’s called education, communication or important used to prevent suicide among veterinarians and you were featured prominently in the piece. And so I thought, I haven’t talked to Dr. Brandt in a while. Let’s get together and touch base about communication.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

So all of that to say, as far as… Just let’s start really broad. As far as how we talk about mental health and suicide and vet medicine. My worry is that we have a lot of people who they want to do good. They want to support their staff. They want to support their colleagues, but they’re either not sure how to do it. And so they say nothing to their staff and I don’t think that that’s good. Or they enthusiastically jump into it and possibly do more harm than good. Yeah, exactly. I’ll just leave it at that they possibly do more harm than good. Do you think there’s validity to that concern? Do you see that when you see veterinarians talking about mental health and wellness?

DR. JEN BRANDT:

Yes and I would say maybe, importantly that that’s the feedback that I receive from veterinarians. Right. That it’s either we’re not talking about it at all, or we’re talking about it in a way that has us feeling more alarmed and less certain about what might be helpful. So I will say as a caveat. I very rarely like to think about terms as right or wrong, or good or bad. I more think about is this moving us in the direction that we want? Are we getting the outcomes that we want? Is this a constructive way of having a dialogue?

DR. JEN BRANDT:

So I will… I like to give that caveat first, because I don’t think that there’s… What is helpful and not helpful is far more nuanced. Right? We can’t necessarily put something that this is the absolute right way and not right way.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

So I want to say that first. The summit that you reference in terms of how we talk about suicide, that really came about because of ongoing concerns about how we’ve been talking about suicide. And many people aren’t necessarily aware that there’s been a good body of research done on again, what is a constructive way to have this dialogue? And so it’s not constructive to misreport information.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

Yeah.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

So. Most audiences that I talk to when I ask them, what do you… Or who do you think has the highest rate of suicide among healthcare professions or on the planet? Universally, everybody says VetMed, right? That’s what they have read. That’s what they’ve been told. That is not true, but that has become the narrative. And then unfortunately, because that’s become the narrative, it feeds the rest of the narrative. So if that’s true, then we need to figure out, “what’s wrong with VetMed?”

DR. JEN BRANDT:

And so it has this rabbit trail in this direction that is not proving helpful. So, for the record, that is not true. Veterinarians don’t have the highest rate of suicide. And what we also want to be asking is what are some exceptions? Who’s thriving? And what can we learn about those who are thriving that might be helpful as opposed to focusing on people who say they are not thriving? And then what really came out, also from the summit was this body of research that we know effective ways to talk about an issue are solution focused. Right? Not using alarmist language.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

So I know one of the examples that somebody from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention said, “It might be accurate if somebody screams fire in a building” and yet we don’t have you do that because it raises alarms so much and then we overreact to that information in ways that end up causing more harm than good. So the language that we choose. We want to be very factual without being alarmist. When we talk about suicide and media we need to be very responsible about the way that we’re doing it and not continue painting a narrative that has it only as worst case scenario. Or again, information that isn’t even factual to begin with, and more about what you can do to promote wellbeing as opposed to things to avoid.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

How do you think that the narrative that vet medicine is the worst for suicide got established? I mean, that’s probably not something that someone just pulled out of the air. And of course I’ve heard that a lot too. Is there some… I mean, yeah. Where do you think that comes from?

DR. JEN BRANDT:

I would say that’s, for me, it’s a million dollar question. We have some sources that did share the information early and often going back seven or eight years ago. So I think just a proliferation. On social media, you see a fact, you don’t necessarily know to question the fact, you hit the share button and all of a sudden that becomes true. And what was interesting in VetMed is that even years ago, people would challenge that and say, well, actually that’s not what the CDC has said. And then it was fascinating to watch kind of the anger that got directed at the people who were saying, wait a minute, maybe that’s not the story. So there were two interesting things happened. The sharing of incorrect information. And then the reaction to the people who were trying to say, just like could we call a timeout?

DR. JEN BRANDT:

The reality is though that that information has been widely shared. And so it’s really created an impetus for understanding. One, how do we correct the information? Which is also by the way, a science, right?

DR. ANDY ROARK:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

DR. JEN BRANDT:

We know in terms of studying the political climate, that if somebody has a belief about something and you simply say, well, that’s not true and here’s the data that we think that using that rational approach you’ll get them to see the truth of the situation. When actually what happens in our brain is we double down on the misinformation and so it becomes even truer in our brain.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

So learning how to even step back from that and figure out what’s the best way to help a brain take in information that it didn’t realize was true. And the science of that is also interesting that those of us who are misinformed or not informed about an issue tend to be the absolutely most confident that our view is correct.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

Yeah.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

Whereas the people who know a lot about it are like, wow, there’s a lot of uncertainty here. Right? We are far less certain about what is, and isn’t the right thing to do. We know enough to be curious and continue to ask questions.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

Yes. Dunning Kruger, right. We are 30 minutes of internet research makes you an expert. But then spend a year looking at it and you realize all the things that you don’t know and all the nuance and you need to fall back. So that does make a ton of sense that it’s easy to get excited about how our profession is doing.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

And then, yeah I’ve always wondered that. When I talk to people like yourself who do this day in and day out. There’s a lot of nuances and there’s a lot less certainty that I get from a lot of social media posts and factoids that are put forward. I’ve been really interested in the last six, eight weeks.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

In the stories that we tell ourselves and how they impact us. And so that’s really, when I start talking about communication and mental health and suicide and vet medicine, I’ve just become a bigger and bigger believer that again, not invalidating anyone’s personal experience, but for the vast majority of us who are living our lives and we’re in practice day after day. We do have a lot of control about how we perceive our situation. To be meaning that we can, through our perspective and the way that we look at our work. We can decide a lot about whether we feel like we are having a good life? Having a good career? Or not having a good life and not having a good career.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

And so I want to put that sort of forward to you and say, do you agree with that? As we talk about mental health at the professional level and not necessarily for an individual person. Do you think that we impact the happiness? The satisfaction in our career? When we tell ourselves stories about, we’re struggling, we’re, we’re drowning, we’re sacrificing versus when we say, this is a hard job, and it’s a uniquely stressful job, but I am going to set boundaries because that’s what’s required for me to continue to come back and do the good work that I do.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

Yeah. Again, I always say I’m a brain science nerd, because I love to see what’s going on in the brain when we talk about this. And so there’s a large body of brain science that talks about the influence that the stories we tell do matter. And there’s this concept of internal versus external locus of control.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

And in internal locus of control says, I do have some capacity. I have choices in how I respond to something. So internal locus of control could say, certainly bad things will happen in my life. And at the end of the day, I have responsibility and accountability for the step that I take next. And so an easy example that I use is if somebody yells at me, I certainly can say I am justified in yelling back. But that is a choice I can yell back, or I can say, Hmm, isn’t this curious? I wonder what’s going on with that person that might be contributing to their level of anger. And so I might be able to choose empathy or compassion.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

Again, some of the brain signs behind that. That our brain really does have what we call a negativity bias. So I’m going to be… My brain is going to be much more sensitive to the bad things. The things that I label as bad happening around me rather than the good things. And so an example I’ll give to that is, let’s say I had a performance review from my boss and my boss gives me 10 things that I’m doing really well, but I hear the one thing that he says I could work on. And so then my story is I had a lousy review today with my boss. And then I go online and I tell people that. And so the important thing to understand is that I am telling a true story when I say something negative happened in that review. Or true for me, it’s just that I’m not telling the whole truth. And so this negativity bias causes us to really narrow down the story.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

The good news is that there are a number of things that we all have available to us to start challenging that. We can even know that the negativity bias is a thing. We can start to be aware of it. We can start to check the stories that we tell and do I feel better after I tell this story? Am I closer to finding a solution that is effective for me? Am I more consistent with living with my values? Am I healthier because of the story I’m telling myself? Or am I not doing that?

DR. JEN BRANDT:

When we look at people who thrive, one of the things that we can look at are the stories they tell. And so people who tend to thrive and report wellbeing tend to have stories that are of redemption, of learning, of growth, even at the same time, they acknowledge that that was very painful. So I want to be clear, it’s not this Pollyanna view that I need to say, everything is great. It’s being able to say that some things are great, some things are not great. And that ability to tell kind of the whole story helps then influence my decision making and my mindset and a variety of other things in my life.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

Yeah. I hear that pushback a lot. This is Pollyanna thinking. This is toxic positivity or things like that. The way you described of negativity bias, it really resonates strongly with me. I think when I first started to have real reservations about like the amount of time that I was spending on social media. What I found would happen is that, I would have a fairly regular day at the vet clinic and I would see a dozen happy clients and one unhappy client.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

And then I would get home, and of course the unhappy client is the one that kind of clings to me a bit. And then I would get on social media and I would see other people struggling or other people venting, or someone else would just say, can you believe these pet owners?

DR. ANDY ROARK:

And it wasn’t just that. What I was reading. It was that plus the fact that I could easily pluck this personal example out of my day and apply it to the voice that I heard. Seemed to make a very powerful combination in my mind, to influence my perspective. And only when I sort of got away from it. And I said, let’s really walk through your day. Did I go… Wait a second, I think the narrative in my mind is not representative of the experience that I had. I’ve cut way back on social media. I used to be real. I used to be on there all the time. I used to do a ton of social media stuff. And I had people sort of ask me like, well, how did you cut back on social media?

DR. ANDY ROARK:

Because I find it’s addictive for me. It becomes a habit and I just sort of spend time and scroll and scroll. And it was funny. And I tried all these different blockers and things and time limiting things. The only thing that happened for me that really worked was, I had read this article and so I started doing it. I started paying attention to how I felt when I was actually spending time on these services.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

And so to your point of asking yourself, do I feel better? I started asking myself, do I feel better now that I’m on here than I did before? And when I would get off in like sort of close out the app, I started asking myself, do I feel better than I did before I spent 10 minutes on social media? And again and again, the answer was no. And by bringing that answer to my forefront I sort of was able to self-train and say, why are you doing this behavior? When the net feeling that you get is negative at the end. And honestly it was never about setting limits or anything. I just consciously didn’t enjoy it. And I pulled it back. But I think when you don’t have those thoughts. It’s a hundred percent that engagement. It’s the resonance. You hear things that you sort of relate to. You kind of… People call it the ecstasy of outrage. You feel, you get mad and it feels good to be mad sometimes. And so I would engage with these things, but when I ask myself, am I happy? The answer was, no.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

So let’s expand a little bit on sort of toxic positivity and the Pollyanna view. When I talk to people, because I wrestle with this as well. I sort of say, the way that we talk about mental health online especially, but just out in the world. I think it can be damaging in the same way. Oftentimes I get pushed back and people say it’s very valuable for me to be able to connect with other people and share this experience and feel supported. And I go, okay. I do see that. And then there is research that I use when I talk about customer service, that talks about the benefits, psychological benefits of venting.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

And so if someone has a negative experience, they’re more likely to end the disagreement satisfied, if they have the option to vent and to express their feelings. And so I’m kind of in a quandary. Jen, what are your thoughts on sort of that balance of assuming the positive, changing the way we think versus saying, hey there’s real benefits in sharing these experiences.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

I guess a couple things come to mind. Again, I’ll go back to brain science a bit that our brain uses 20% of our total energy in a single day. 20% of our energy. And our brain is really wanting us to be successful in life. And so it tends to want us to be… It wants to simplify processes that could be complex. And kind of just a general way to explain that, is it likes to put things in the good box or the bad box. Like I mentioned at the beginning when really life is really far nuanced than that. And so I will often hear, first of all, I want to say toxic positivity is a thing. And it is not a healthy thing. That is a legitimate concern. What isn’t though a fair argument is to say that either you’re being toxic or therefore you have to be a downer about everything.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

So I have people picture a ruler. So we can put toxic positivity on one end of the ruler and then just absolute gloom and doom on the other. And then if we think about all those little lines. The millimeter lines on a ruler, can we bring the storytelling more into balance? So I don’t want toxic positivity either. That totally rubs me the wrong way but so does this limited gloom only.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

So one way to think about that, is to understand the concept between that there’s venting and then there’s what we call emotional dumping. And a lot of people who… What we call venting is really emotional dumping. So when we are venting, it is very self reflective. There’s some eye statements. Like this is how I’m perceiving it. This is how I’m feeling it versus those people did X, Y, and Z to me.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

It’s solution focused. So we’re wanting a way out. We’re wanting to find a solution. We’re open to feedback when we’re venting. It isn’t just one way, like we really do want somebody to check our perspective and challenge my way of thinking about this. We accept that we have personal responsibility and accountability for our own integrity in that process. And we’re aware that how we’re presenting that story could actually be helpful or harmful to someone else. So we’re not only seeing our perspective. So that’s venting. When we think about emotional dumping, there is no concern about how this is landing. It doesn’t matter that we are now sucking the life joy out of someone else because our story is really primary. We can become very defensive in the story of somebody challenges and even says like, is that the whole story?

DR. JEN BRANDT:

We shut that down. We have no receptivity to that. Very much a victim or a helpless mindset. It aimed at blaming, I had a bad day and it’s everyone else’s fault. I had nothing to do with it. It happened at me, not with me. Very resistant to feedback from other people’s perspective, and then we’ll tend to cycle. So I like an emotional dumping. I don’t know what the proper term is now. I think of them as soap opera as maybe they’re maybe their daytime serials now. But we used to joke that if you watched a daytime serial a year ago, didn’t see it for a year and tuned back in that you would have some idea what was going on with the characters because they were just living pretty much their same lives in many ways. And so emotional dumping you’ll know, like if you are having this same dialogue with somebody it’s five months down the road, it’s the same complaint.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

You’ve not taken any action steps, then it lets you know that again, is that really getting you the outcome you want? And is that helpful for anyone else in the process? And generally the answer to that is going to be no. So there really is this way that our brains can get stuck in this cycle and it prevents us from moving forward. And if it only harmed us, that would be bad enough. But unfortunately we take other people down in that process that there’s really a contagion to that. And so I do have concerns when I see people dumping all on social media and then the kind of the piling on and blaming other people. I always look for, is there somebody in that thread that’s going to say, hey, wait a minute. You know, could we talk about the exceptions? Is there something that it happened positive today? And that is not toxic positivity. That is just expanding the truth of your story.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

Hey guys, I just want to jump in real fast with a couple of quick updates. The first one is, the April uncharted veterinary conference. Registration is open. If you’re not familiar with uncharted, you are missing out. It is a leadership development and business conference that I started back in 2017 with my team. It is active learning. It is about building relationships, networking, new ideas, working on your business, not sitting passively and having people talk to you about just vet medicine and general. But no, it’s working on your stuff. So you get the most out of the possible you can.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

It’s the stuff of legend. These conferences are very very popular. They are very small. We’re probably going to have about a hundred people in at April. And that’s just for some COVID precautions trying to keep it a bit smaller. But you’ll want to… You’re going to want to grab your spot soon, if you’re are going to be there. I’ll put a link in the show notes, check it out. Learn more at the link. I’d love to see you guys in April.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

The other thing I want to talk about is this week on the uncharted veterinary podcast, which is our sister podcast. It’s the one that I do with practice management goddess, Stephanie Goss. We are talking about when you don’t have enough time in your staff meetings to get everything done. If you feel like your staff meeting happens and it’s an hour and you have 47 hours worth of things to do in your staff meeting, we got you covered. Go check out the episode. It is all about making meetings work for you. Guys with that, let’s get back into this episode.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

That is not toxic positivity. That is just expanding the truth of your story.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

Yeah. Let’s talk about that a little bit, because that’s a tricky wicket right there. How do you point out the emotional dumping? When someone or when you see negativity or someone that you care about is just living in this space of this is awful. I can’t believe I’m being mistreated, I’m being abused by the clients, I’m being unappreciated. That may be true. At some point you’re hearing these same things again and again and again. How do you question that? How do you challenge people on the story that they’re telling themselves?

DR. JEN BRANDT:

So one, I’d say again, it is tricky. So there’s no absolute blueprint for this and some of it will depend on the relationship you have and the context of these conversations. So what I’ll give is general advice. But one, is to just be aware of how that’s affecting you. And so you may be able to say that, like when I listen to this story, I find that I feel worse. I feel not energized to go do things and I want you to be aware of that. So you’re not telling the other person what to do. You are simply owning that it has an impact on you and that may be enough. And so, and you might need to even say, so I’m going to need to set some limits around that. Right?

DR. ANDY ROARK:

Yeah.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

Here’s what we can talk about. So that would be one approach. Another approach, maybe if it’s even in a coaching situation, might be to ask somebody, tell me what you’ve done to address this situation. How well is that working for you? What might you be willing to do differently? And again, I want to be very clear. We’re not shaming the person.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

No.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

We’re not bad mouthing the person. I mean, people have pain and this is the coping strategy that they are bringing to the table to manage that pain. And I’d rather have a coping strategy. That’s at least maybe keeping them afloat as to one that doesn’t. So just asking those questions in a different way. And a lot of times I’ll find when I say, and what are you willing to do different is when you can see their eyes just kind of freeze for a minute, like, oh, I haven’t thought about it that way.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

And then you might find some people have some ideas. It’s just, oh, you’ll think they’re silly, or I don’t think I can do them. And so then you can really empower them. You can support them. You can be an ally in helping them achieve that. Other people might say I’m completely stuck. And so that’s tricky because anyone listening to this will have the experience where somebody might have been stuck and you just rattled off 20 great ideas. And they say no to all of them, right?

DR. ANDY ROARK:

Yeah.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

None of these are going to work. And so I might even, again, depending on my relationship with this person in the context, I might even say, we’ve ruled out 20 ideas. So tell me what you do think will work. And at least there’s a moment of ownership that I’m committed to being stuck and I don’t want it to work. And that’s where they are right then. And you can decide for you, if that’s something you’re going to continue to engage in, or they might realize from there that there might be some things or approaches that they can take that might be more helpful for them.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

Yeah. I like that a lot. The coaching standpoint of what are your options? Where do you think you’ll go from here? I think that makes a lot of sense. I have… I’m not a confrontational person. Like, I don’t like having conflict with people. That’s just a sort of an innate piece of my personality. And one of the things I think that has helped me in these types of conversations is I ask myself a totally, this is Brené Brown, what is kind? And I end up in these positions and I’ll talk to this person, I’ll talk to them again and again, and it’s always negative and it’s always bad, and it’s always the same conversation. And I end up just feeling crappy afterwards.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

And so then the question for me, when I say, well, am I going to talk to this person or not? The question of what is kind? And I go, well, is it kind for me just to avoid this person? And just not to answer the phone when they call or is that kind because that’s kind of where I am, or is it kind for me to say, Hey, when we have these conversations, I don’t know what to do with this. And it brings me down because I care about you and I don’t know what to do to help you. And I feel like you’re stuck in this place. And so these are conversations, getting hard for me.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

And that has enabled me to have those conversations otherwise never would’ve had, because I always said, well, I don’t want to make this person upset, or I don’t want to let them down or want them think I’m a bad friend. I go, no. What is the kindest thing I can do for them? And it’s to tell them kind of what I see and how I feel. The other part of that, I think really is when we get into this, what are you going to do about it? I think, as you know, we talk a lot about personal boundaries when we talk about mental health and stuff, but I’m really on this kick of organizational boundaries and professional boundaries. Meaning I think our practices, to some degree, they need to protect the employees from sort of emotional abuse. And from putting them out to the place where they’re going to get unreasonable demands, or they’re going to be sort of pushed around emotionally by pet owners who are trying to do the best thing for their pet.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

I think that their practices have a certain obligation to take care and try to protect the wellness of their staff. And so when we say, what are you going to do? I always kind of push into the practices a bit and say, how are you supporting people who need help? And so let me ask that to you and sort of say, are there things that practices can kind of do… That you see for wellness and employees when they start to struggle or when they get into a rut?

DR. JEN BRANDT:

So again, a couple thoughts come to mind when we look at kind of the brain science of things. So it may be helpful for people to have an understanding that there are kind of two concepts about how we might problem solve or face an issue. And one is the approach stance, and the other one is avoidance.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

So approach would be for lack of a better word, leaning into the problem. Let’s learn more about it. Let’s be curious, let’s brainstorm solutions and the other one is avoidance. Let’s not talk about it. Let’s deny it. It’s a problem. Let’s distract ourselves. I want to be again very clear that either one of those approaches could potentially be harmful or helpful. So there’s not a universal rule.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

In general, however, approach techniques tend to be healthier. So we’ll go with that. And when… And I’m a hundred percent, I’m not sure I’d give a single presentation that doesn’t mention boundaries. I’m like, don’t leave home without them right. We need it.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

Right.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

And absolutely, both at an individual and an organizational level. We need to talk about what are the boundaries? And then what barriers get in the way? So when we talk about organizationally, I would love if every team did sit down. What are the standards of behavior that we expect in this practice? And not just our clients, by the way, but each other. We need to be in there too because we are not always kind to each other. How will we hold people accountable for that? What kind of training might we need to have the words or feel empowered enough to say, that is really not working for me. I do not feel safe in this conversation. I’m going to step away because oftentimes what happens, I give this example a lot, but let’s say a client is mad about their bill.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

You know, they go back out. And so the person who’s receiving that payment or having the conversation is very good about holding the boundary. This is what you owe. We reviewed the bill, it’s correct, et cetera. But the client continues to make a scene. I want to speak to somebody else. The somebody else comes in does not. They have an avoidance approach. Don’t want to deal with it. Want to just get the client out of there before they escalate further. So we go ahead and waive those charges. So we’ve reinforced now this behavior.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

The behavior is more likely to happen in the practice rather than less. We didn’t actually raise all it. And in the process, we betrayed this person at our front desk who was holding the line and was able to do their job. And so it really is a team discussion. Are we really going to hold the line on these things? And then do we teach people in a respectful way to hold that line because the key is consistency. And if one person on the team or in that organization waffles on the boundary, then unfortunately it actually does impact every single other member of the team. And I think that’s when we’re taking in an avoidance approach, we think we’re saving ourselves in that moment without realizing that we’ve actually caused harm to the entire team in doing so.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

Yeah. I like to talk about… When we talk about organizational boundaries and I love your point about consistency. The sort of phrase I’ve been using a lot recently is if your strategy ends in someone making a moral decision on the ground. That’s going to… Ultimately that’s failure. You know what I mean? Because we have kind, compassionate people and any time that the decision is going to be made and it’s made in front of a tearful pet owner, they’re going to choose compassion for the pet owner over the over boundaries, over the sort of the wellness of the team. I believe because again, it’s this small thing, it’s just today, it’s just this one time, it’s just this one person, but ultimately your boundaries are made up of a series of these conversations.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

And so I just think there’s a lot of policies out there that are based on, well, ask, if this happens, just ask the doctor and I go, what’s going to happen when you ask the doctor? She’s going to fold like origami, every time. Because that’s what I do. Every time, I’m going to.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

I’m going to be the nice person and I’m going to help the person. But me helping this one person one time and seven other doctors helping one person one time. And it happens every week means that my staff stays late every single night. And those are the way that these things sort of pile up. And so when we talk about the brain science, one of the big biases I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is present bias. Which means we have a natural tendency to do… To take a smaller gain right now over a larger gain later on. Especially if that larger game is not guaranteed.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

And so doing the thing right now and just getting it done is the easier, shorter, quicker thing I solve the problem. I feel good about it versus, Hey, let’s stop and figure out a system for handling this so that in the future, we don’t have these little problems we have to fix. And I think a lot of us just… We just put out fires. And so we’re always putting out the fires and we never actually stop and step back and say, let’s get a system for dealing with this recurrent problem.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

Yeah. I would say beautifully said. When we talk about systems, we want to ask what are the pain points? And a lot of pain points in organizations, certainly including veterinary medicine are pretty predictable. Like we know where there are pain points. And I also go, when you use the language, I want to be nice to the client. Part of that then is the story we tell ourselves. That we tell ourselves we’re being nice to the client. We don’t then tell ourselves and in doing so, I was not nice to my staff. So again, when we’re telling the full story, the full story is somebody did not perceive that as nice. And then so stepping away at the end of the day, what are our desired goals for this practice? You know, to maintain positive, healthy relationships with our clients so that we can maximize good health outcomes.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

And part of that is making sure that our staff feel protected, and cared for, and seen, and heard, and knowing that if somebody is coming and bulldozing them, that there’s a process in place, well, that will stop that and protect them and help prevent that from happening again. So that’s all part of this story that we tell ourselves. That when we say yes to something like, yes, in this case to the client, it does come with a no somewhere else. And that’s been the piece that we just haven’t… We’ve not been as comfortable looking at..

DR. ANDY ROARK:

Yeah. When you say, tell the full story. It’s really about balance, isn’t it? It’s about balancing the good, this pet owner is asking for against the impact that this course of action is going to have on my staff, on myself, on my family who’s waiting for me to come home at the end of the day. And I always tell people, I’m not telling you not to do the thing. I’m not telling you not to help the person, but I am telling you to look at it holistically across all the affected parties as you make your decision about what to do. And the downside, it it makes things a lot more shades of gray than just help this person or not. Yes or no. But, I really do think that that’s a healthier long term view.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

Yeah. And again, our brain doesn’t want to deal with the… Like it’s a natural instinct to want to simplify it. And it’s natural to find ourselves getting very defensive. When somebody is saying, I’m going to ask you to operate in the gray here. So one exercise that I encourage staff to do is let’s deconstruct one of those. So we’ll stick with the financial example. We waived the bill. So I have people go write a pros and cons list. The pro of waving the bill is what? The con of waving the bill is what? The pro of not waving the bill is what? The con of not waving the bill is what?

DR. JEN BRANDT:

And so, one, it gets it out of the emotionality in our head and that intensity that happens, it allows us to look at it a little more concretely. And then another concept that I like, that helps us kind of check our balance is called the rule of six, which has roots in indigenous practice. But it basically says, if you think you know an answer, or if you have a hypothesis about something, allow yourself to have it. Like that’s hypothesis one. But the challenges now come up with five more and it’s just this exercise to teach your brain to start looking beyond that easier fixed solution that we had again realize that there’s more nuance out there so that we can become more skilled at doing that. Again at an individual level, but also as teams.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

Yeah. That’s yeah. I had not heard the rule of six. I really like that a lot. It feels a lot like in sort of the uncharted community, which is a leadership community that I run. I sort of asked in there recently, because I’ve had this idea, I always say assume good intent. And I just think that’s so important in dealing with other people. Is just assume good intent.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

And what I was thinking about a lot recently is man, it’s really easy to assume good intent. If you’re on the ball, it’s easy to assume good intent the first time you have conflict with someone. But like the fifth or sixth or 10th or 30th time that you have conflict with this person, it’s very hard to assume good intent. And the reality is if you and I just have radically different communication styles or radically different value systems. We’re probably going to have conflicts over a lot of different things especially if we work together and we spend time together.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

At no point, does that make you a bad person or make you malevolent. It’s just you and I are going to continue to kind of run into each other because we work very differently. And so my question to the group was, how do you continually assume good intent?

DR. ANDY ROARK:

And one of the answers that came back that that sort of seemed similar to the rule of six. Someone sort of said, what is the most likely motive of the person? And that way they say, I’m not trying to assume good intent. It’s easier for me to whatever say, what is the most rational, logical motive this person probably has? And it’s their way of kind of generating these alternate problems other than this person is undermining me. This person doesn’t respect me or things like that.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

And so I just, I really like that idea of trying to generate alternate hypotheses especially about people’s motives. So that, man, that’s so helpful. Thank you so much for being here, Dr. Brandt. I really appreciate your time. I always enjoy our conversations. Where can people learn more? Are there resources that you think people should definitely have access to?

DR. JEN BRANDT:

Yeah. A couple things in terms of AVMA, they can go to avma.org/wellbeing. That has a variety of resource. Also, our Axon platform that has a number of seminars that they can access. And then in terms of this concept of checking our story, I’m a huge fan of Dr. Jaron Jones. You can go to his website at www.selfnarrate.com. And for the record I don’t… I get no kickbacks. I have no relationship to Dr. Jones, other than I just think he does phenomenal work. And he has a book out there called, Break Your Invisible Chains that walks you through kind of your storytelling and allows you see your story in a slightly different way. And then he also has a self narrate podcast. So I would highly recommend any of those resources.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

Outstanding. Thank you so much.

DR. JEN BRANDT:

My pleasure.

DR. ANDY ROARK:

And that is our episode. Guys I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got something out of it. As always the best kindest, nicest thing you can possibly do for me. If you like episode is to leave an honest review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast episodes. It’s how people find the show. It gives me some guidance about what people like. And it keeps me encouraged to keep doing the episode. So I really appreciate it. Guys. Take care of yourselves. Be well, I’ll talk to you soon.

Filed Under: Podcast Tagged With: Wellness

Holiday Cat Dangers! (HOF)

December 9, 2021 by Andy Roark DVM MS

Dr. Margie Sherk is on this Hall of Fame podcast to talk about those easily forgotten holiday dangers that we (and cat owners) need to keep in mind.

Cone Of Shame Veterinary Podcast · COS 110 Holiday Cat Dangers! (HOF)

LINKS

It’s All Fun and Games – How to Play, Engage with and Reward Your Team: unchartedvet.com/product/its-all-fun-and-games/

Uncharted Podcast on iTunes: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-…st/id1449897688

Charming the Angry Client On-Demand Staff Training: drandyroark.com/on-demand-staff-training/

What’s on my Scrubs?! Card Game: drandyroark.com/training-tools/

Dr. Andy Roark Swag: drandyroark.com/shop

All Links: linktr.ee/DrAndyRoark

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Two weeks before graduating from OVC in 1982, Margie Scherk packed all of her worldly belongings into her rusty, yellow Honda Civic named Jaundice and drove west to take her last two weeks of school at WCVM. Moving to a place she could see the mountains and ocean every day, she opened Cats Only Veterinary Clinic in 1982, at that time the second feline specific clinic in Canada. The first time they became available to sit, she sat and passed ABVP Feline boards in 1995.

Since 2008 she has been teaching, writing and editing exclusively. This takes her around the world where, like a locum, she gets to see how other people practice, only in this case, under some very different circumstances and in different cultures. She is the North American editor of the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery, serves on a whole bunch of committees on national, international and feline projects. As a break, she loves to cook.

SHOW TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Andy Roark (00:08):

Welcome everybody to The Cone of Shame Veterinary Podcast. I am your host Dr. Andrew Roark. Guys, I got a great one for you. This is a hall of fame episode. This is me and my friend cat whisperer extraordinaire, Dr. Margie Sherk. And we are talking about cat holiday dangers and how we keep our kitty cats safe and sound during the holidays. And what conversations we have with pet owners and what things we need to look out for that maybe we’re not already looking out for. Quick, to the point, super useful. Let’s get into this episode.

Dr. Andy Roark (00:59):

(singing).

Dr. Andy Roark (00:59):

Dr. Margie Sherk, welcome, welcome. Thanks for coming back.

Dr. Margie Sherk (01:03):

Hey, pleasure. Lot of times gone by since we last spoke.

Dr. Andy Roark (01:08):

It’s been minutes since we recorded our previous episode. And in 2020 minutes are like day.

Dr. Margie Sherk (01:15):

Wasn’t it though. I mean, March I came back from… My last trip was to Germany and I came back three days early because of COVID. Got home on the 13th of March. Haven’t been anywhere since. And the month of March, even though that was only the 13th, was the longest month of my life. Oh my goodness.

Dr. Andy Roark (01:37):

One of my favorite memes was during the election here in the states. After the polls had closed and the counting was going on, and it was like Friday, and I saw this meme that said, “From the year that brought you four months of April comes Tuesday part three.” And I was like, “That’s so fun and that’s so true.”

Dr. Margie Sherk (01:59):

Oh my goodness. One good thing about this year, I’m learning patience.

Dr. Andy Roark (02:07):

Yeah. In new and significant ways. I’m also learning how to teach a nine year old math so that’s a skill I didn’t have. When I learned math at no point did my teacher say, “You need to learn this so that you can teach your own child during a pandemic.” That was new to me.

Dr. Margie Sherk (02:22):

Oh my goodness. I am so, so many things I’m grateful for, but I’m very grateful for the fact that my kids are well and gone and out of the house. I don’t know how you could have to work from home, teach your kids when we don’t know how to teach. I honest to goodness… Or I mean, I know how to teach, but I don’t know how to, relatively, I don’t know how teach that material.

Dr. Andy Roark (02:46):

Yeah.

Dr. Margie Sherk (02:46):

And I don’t think if I had a three year old I don’t think they’d want to be learning veterinary medicine.

Dr. Andy Roark (02:52):

No. “Let’s talk about sterile cystitis.” “Not again, mom. Not again.” Got it.

Dr. Margie Sherk (02:57):

“Today we’re going to learn how to place an E tube.”

Dr. Andy Roark (02:59):

She’s like, “When will I use this in the third grade?” I want to talk to you today. I want to run through Christmas risks for cats. This is great material just for me to have on top of mind. And honestly, this is great stuff to communicate to pet owners. So this is going to help me make a social media post for my practice. It’s going to help me make handouts for my clients and give me things to mention in the exam room that are interesting and topical that the pet owners will like. But lets you and me real fast, we’re getting in the month of December, what do I need to be looking out for? What are risks to cats associated with the holiday season that may not be present the rest of the year? So as people unpack their decorations, what dastardly, devious, diabolical things are they getting out?

Dr. Margie Sherk (03:52):

That’s a lot of D’s there.

Dr. Andy Roark (03:53):

It’s a lot. I was like, “I’m onto this now. I’m going to keep going as long as I can.”

Dr. Margie Sherk (03:59):

So I mean, the most obvious one is tinsel. And it’s been literally decades since I’ve had tinsel on trees. You just can’t have tinsel on trees because not only is it dangling and shiny and appealing and moves and a cat wants to bat at it, but of course if caught can be a linear foreign body, which can slice, literally slice, the intestines open in a cat and cause… It’s totally unnecessarily so sadly no tinsel.

Dr. Margie Sherk (04:29):

Other hanging decorations. Hang them up high enough that a cat can’t get to them. And for heavens sakes, make sure you attach your tree to the wall in some way shape or form because should kitty decide that it’s a cat tree rather than just a Christmas tree, this whole thing can come tumbling down and glass ornaments break. And you don’t want those glass ornaments to break. You also don’t want them slicing Kitty’s paw or being ingested in any way. So angel hair also a problem because that can cause, that fluffy white stuff, if they get that cloud on the barbs of their tongue they can’t get it off. And just like tinsel they have to swallow it and that could cause an obstruction.

Dr. Andy Roark (05:13):

When you say angel hair you’re talking about the fake snow stuff that people put around the bottom of their tree?

Dr. Margie Sherk (05:17):

No. No, I’m talking about that stringy, it’s almost like fiberglass or something. It’s that white, fluffy… It is like snow, but it’s not the snow that you spray on. Sorry. Maybe you were talking about same.

Dr. Andy Roark (05:30):

Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Margie Sherk (05:32):

But the nice puffy, marshmallowy kind of snow. Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark (05:36):

Yeah. Okay. Perfect. I know what you’re talking about now. Okay. Yeah. I had no idea that was called angel hair, but that makes a ton of sense.

Dr. Margie Sherk (05:43):

Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark (05:43):

Okay, cool. So angel hair, I got to tell you that I had no idea. That totally makes sense.

Dr. Margie Sherk (05:48):

Then also Christmas lights. Of course, with Christmas lights we’re talking electrical and that’s always an issue if they could bite the electrical and then get a horrible burn on their tongues and some sloughing there. They could also get caught up in them in the wires so supervise your cat when that’s on. Battery powered lights would be better at least in as far as not getting caught in cords, but there’s still the electrical. Snow globes, a real problem. We don’t think of snow globes as being, if they break, because snow globes are filled with ethylene glycol. [crosstalk 00:06:27].

Dr. Andy Roark (06:26):

What? Is that true? I had no idea.

Dr. Margie Sherk (06:28):

Didn’t know that, right?

Dr. Andy Roark (06:30):

I didn’t. In all seriousness-

Dr. Margie Sherk (06:31):

I thought it was just water.

Dr. Andy Roark (06:31):

… you said, “Snow globes,” I was like, “You got me here.”

Dr. Margie Sherk (06:37):

[crosstalk 00:06:37]. And there’s ethylene glycol in snow globes. I mean, I don’t know if it’s in all snow globes, but of course that is deadly, absolutely deadly, so that’s an important thing too. And then if we’ve got kitty Christmas presents under the tree, probably not a good idea to be putting the catnip filled presents under the Christmas tree where kitty’s going to want to dig through the wrapping and all that kind of stuff.

Dr. Andy Roark (07:09):

Hey guys, I just want to jump in real fast with a quick announcement. On December the 12th, that is right around the corner, that’s this weekend as this podcast is coming out, the one and only Jenn Galvin is doing her workshop called It’s All Fun and Games: How to Play, Engage With and Reward Your Team. I saw Jenn this last weekend at the Uncharted Practice Owner Summit. I can’t say enough good things about her. She is truly amazing. She runs a great practice. This is going to be super valuable, useful workshop. It is from 4:00 to 6:00 PM Eastern time, 1:00 to 3:00 PM Pacific. That is, again, on December the 12th. It is free for uncharted members. It is $99 to the public. Don’t miss out on this great workshop and this great opportunity. I hope to see you guys there.

Dr. Margie Sherk (07:59):

One of the things too that when we think about cooking, there’s a lot of cooking that goes around holidays. And who knows what it’s going to be like during this pandemic where everything’s sort of dialed down smaller because we’re not having people over, public service announcement, we aren’t having people over. But even so we may be cooking, well, we will be cooking fancier and for those of us who have the ability to do so. So we need to be careful of strings on roasts, strings on ham, birds, that sort of thing because that can also be, like tinsel, can be awfully tasty. And if they’re getting into too much fat it’s not going to give them pancreatitis, but it can certainly give them a day or two of a pretty upset tummy.

Dr. Andy Roark (08:49):

Yeah.

Dr. Margie Sherk (08:52):

Poinsettias have gotten a really bad rap. Poinsettias actually aren’t, well, strictly speaking, yes, they are toxic in that you get drooly and feel kind of crummy after eating them. They may be vomiting, a little bit of drooling, maybe some diarrhea, maybe even conjunctivitis, but the reality is poinsettias aren’t going to kill anybody. It’s a really, really mild, a really mild thing. They can get dermal irritation, just some itchiness from them. But really, I mean, when I had my practice, every Christmas I would buy these huge, from a charity, I would buy these huge poinsettias and we’d have about 20 of these things out on the floor and I was never worried about them with either the clinic cats or the patients.

Dr. Andy Roark (09:41):

What do you say to the pet owner who calls in a panic and she says, “My cat just ate, I saw her eating flowers off the poinsettia.” Do you just sort of run them through that? Is there a point where you say, “Okay, bring her in if this happens.” Do you just say, “It’s going to be fine?” Walk me through that conversation really quickly if you don’t mind.

Dr. Margie Sherk (10:01):

Yeah, sure. I mean, it’s a really low level of toxicity. And if the kitty were vomiting and more than once and continuously vomiting, then might be a good idea to bring kitty in and to give them an antiemetic. Give them an antiemetic and maybe some fluids, subcu fluids, because of the electrolytes and water that they’ve lost, but really that’s it. It’s much less dangerous than lilies. Of course, amaryllis are lilies. And I have them in my house, but they stay in the living room and the living room has glass doors and the doors stay shut unless we’re in there, then the cats can be in there. So lilies. There’s other types of lilies that people like. Even those alstroemeria that you see in bouquets really commonly, those are also lilies. And when we’re talking lilies now we’re talking acute kidney injury, just like as we are with the snow globe ethylene glycol thing.

Dr. Margie Sherk (11:06):

Christmas holly, holly is really dangerous. As well as you can also get the mechanical injury from the spiny leaves because that can really slice their tongues. And then there’s other plants too like, let me think here. Oh, well mistletoe can be toxic too. You think about the Druids and how they used to always look for mistletoe and I think it has some hallucinogenic property. That’s what that’s about. But with mistletoe, certainly you European mistletoe tends to be more toxic than the American varieties, but people plant things that aren’t necessarily native to their region.

Dr. Andy Roark (11:47):

Sure, sure, sure.

Dr. Margie Sherk (11:48):

And that can cause collapse, hypotension, ataxia, really seizures, even death. So it’s pretty wild what it can cause. And then, lastly, around Christmas what I want to think about too is stress. Stress, stress, stress, and anxiety. I mean, there’s all kinds of stuff happening. Just think about it. Thanksgiving, Christmas, everybody looks forward to them. And within about how long, how many minutes, is the family fighting or arguing? [inaudible 00:12:20]. And there’s more people there. I mean, again, that’s one probably really good thing with the pandemic, for the cats, is there’s fewer people coming over.

Dr. Andy Roark (12:27):

Yep, yep.

Dr. Margie Sherk (12:28):

But we’re kind of wound up. We need to get our presents mailed off, we’re decorating the house, we’re doing all this stuff that we may be feeling financially stressed. And so we pass on all this stress and that may be a time where some pheromones might be, if you don’t already have them in place, you might want some pheromones. You want to make sure that the cats can get away, that they can always get to a peaceful place where they’re not pestered without having to… So they can take care of themselves that way.

Dr. Andy Roark (13:00):

That makes total sense. Is there anything else in the kitchen that people might need a quick reminder on, that pet owners should be reminded of? I love the string. I think that’s a big one to call out. Any other ingredients that come out? Are people doing funky things with xylitol now that I’m not aware of? Anything like that?

Dr. Margie Sherk (13:21):

Yeah, I don’t know about xylitol. I mean, cats do, at least my cats, love peanut butter. And we only use peanut butter that’s peanuts and that’s not any of the processed peanut butters that may have xylitol, which certainly is toxic. But thanks for this prod, for this leading question. That’s awesome.

Dr. Andy Roark (13:41):

Yeah. Well, you are a cook. You’re a chef.

Dr. Margie Sherk (13:44):

Yeah, [crosstalk 00:13:44].

Dr. Andy Roark (13:44):

I know it’s a passion of yours. I’m like if anybody’s going to unpack this well it’s going to be Margie.

Dr. Margie Sherk (13:50):

Oh, I love cooking. Although I’m getting a little bit sick of it with the pandemic because it’s like gardening and cooking. What else [inaudible 00:14:02]? Anyways, I can never retire. I don’t know, I’ll probably poke my eyes out. But okay, so onions and garlic. I mean, my kitchen is a super toxic place for cats because pretty much every meal has onions and garlic in it. Especially, onions are an issue for cats. So that could be in gravy if you’re giving them a little bit of turkey, give them the turkey, but no gravy.

Dr. Margie Sherk (14:26):

And then raisins and grapes. I’m just about done assembling all my ingredients to make chocolate bark. And with that I have dark cabou chocolate and there’s some raisins in it. There’s nuts in it. There’s ginger in it. There’s mango in it. There’s dried cherries. And well, pretty much all those things could be problematic. Or at least I should say the raisins and the chocolate could definitely be problematic. Cats aren’t usually really big on chocolate, but if a raisin hits the floor they might just investigate it. And one raisin isn’t going to likely do anything, but if they decide that this is a good thing and they bat them around, that could be a problem.

Dr. Andy Roark (15:06):

That sounds great. I feel good. I feel like I got a lot to talk to my clients about. I think I got some great stuff for some client handouts. This is super good. Any last tips, tricks, pearls, anything about the holiday that the veterinarian with the cat love should have in mind that you can think of?

Dr. Margie Sherk (15:25):

Well, I mean, we love our cats and we love, certainly this year if the numbers don’t lie, we’re loving our alcohol and we might want for ourselves to relax a bit have a nice glass of something, maybe it would be a toddy or something. Whatever it is, cider, don’t give your cat any of that. Cats don’t have the alcohol dehydrogenase they need to break down the alcohol in their livers, so please don’t let your cats drink from your whatever lovely thing you’re enjoying, no matter how much you love your cat.

Dr. Andy Roark (15:57):

That sound great.

Dr. Margie Sherk (15:58):

Give them some [crosstalk 00:15:58] instead.

Dr. Andy Roark (15:59):

That’s a good one to leave on. Margie, thank you for being here. I really appreciate, always appreciate your time. I hope that you will come back and talk with us again.

Dr. Margie Sherk (16:07):

Anytime. Would love it. Love seeing your friendly face.

Dr. Andy Roark (16:09):

Thanks my friend.

Dr. Margie Sherk (16:10):

Okay. Take care.

Dr. Andy Roark (16:11):

Take care of bye-bye.

Dr. Margie Sherk (16:12):

Bye.

Dr. Andy Roark (16:13):

And that is our episode. That’s what I got for you guys. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got something out of it. As always, if you did go ahead and leave us an honest review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. That is how people find the podcast. It always means the world to me. It’s a nice thing that you can do. It really makes my day. That’s it guys. Otherwise, I hope you’re enjoying the holiday season. Take care of yourselves. I’ll see you soon. Bye.

Filed Under: Podcast Tagged With: Wellness

Cultivating a Positive Workplace

December 5, 2021 by Andy Roark DVM MS

Josh Vaisman, cofounder of Flourish Veterinary Consulting, and Dr. Andy Roark discuss what it means to have a positive workplace, where most veterinary practices go wrong and what we can actually do to make our practices more enjoyable places to work.

Cone Of Shame Veterinary Podcast · COS 109 Cultivating a Positive Workplace

LINKS

Uncharted Podcast on iTunes: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-…st/id1449897688

Charming the Angry Client On-Demand Staff Training: drandyroark.com/on-demand-staff-training/

What’s on my Scrubs?! Card Game: drandyroark.com/training-tools/

Dr. Andy Roark Swag: drandyroark.com/shop

All Links: linktr.ee/DrAndyRoark

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Josh Vaisman 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.

Editor: Dustin Bays
www.baysbrass.com
@Bays4Bays Twitter/Instagram

SHOW TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Andy Roark:

Welcome everybody to the Cone of Shame Veterinary Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Andy Roark. Guys, I love this episode. I am so happy with it. I am so excited about it. Josh Vaisman, this is my first time really getting to sit down and do anything with him. And man did I enjoy the heck out of it. I’m getting that guy back on the podcast for sure, because I could have talked to him all day. It was a fantastic conversation about what it means to have a positive workplace and to feel good about going to work. We talked about how some practices put numbers ahead of people and how that manifests and how that looks and how we do that differently. We talk about having compassion for the people we work with and still holding people accountable, and how you can do that. It just takes some balance. But man, such a good conversation. Guys, I’m not going to delay any longer. Let’s get into this episode.

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. Josh Vaisman, thanks for being here.

Josh Vaisman:

Oh gosh, Andy, thanks for having me. I’m super excited to chat with you today.

Dr. Andy Roark:

My pleasure. So I met you at the first event I had been to in two years when I went back to Vegas for Western. And I had lunch with you because of our mutual friend, Dr. Phil Richmond. And man, we had a great conversation and I really loved talking with you and I wanted to have you on and talk some more. So thanks for making time.

Josh Vaisman:

Oh gosh, yeah. I appreciate the opportunity, and shout out to Phil. Phil is such a wonderful guy and he’s the ultimate connector in the veterinary community.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. If you don’t know Dr. Phil Richmond, you’re missing out. He’s doing so much for mental health in vet medicine and he’s out there just … He’s one of those guys that doesn’t make a big show about it and just does the work that helps other people. And yeah, I have so much love in my heart for that guy.

Josh Vaisman:

Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:

All right. Cool. Why don’t we just start a little bit with your background. Can you tell me a little bit about … So you are the owner and founder of Flourish Veterinary Consulting. Tell us a little bit about positive psychology and coaching psychology and what you do.

Josh Vaisman:

Absolutely. So Flourish was started with the goal of taking, what does the science tell us contributes to human thriving, specifically in an organizational context. So what are the kinds of things that seem to allow people to really thrive and get a sense of fulfillment in their work from a scientific evidence-based perspective. And then we try and bring that to the veterinary space in really tangible and digestible ways, so that we can empower leaders to cultivate that kind of environment in a veterinary hospital. And that’s the basic gist of it. So for me personally, how my journey got started on that, I’ve worked in the veterinary space since the late ’90s. I’ve done just about every role in a hospital, except be a full DVM. I like to joke I was once the right hand of a veterinarian for about two months when she broke her wrist.

Josh Vaisman:

And I did all her medical records and pretty much everything that required her right hand. But I found myself stumbling into practice management and ownership. And I did that in a couple small animal hospitals over several years, and went through a pretty significant bout of occupational burnout. I mean, depression level kind of burnout. Crying in my kitchen over scrambled eggs one morning for no apparent reason, as my shocked wife looked on and couldn’t figure out what was happening to me.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah.

Josh Vaisman:

And going through all that, I had two realizations. One of them community based and one of them personally based. On a personal level, I recognized that I was, pardon my French, a shitty leader. I did not lead in the best possible ways. I had allowed myself to get into the habit of putting numbers ahead of people. And I don’t think that numbers are the leading indicators that we really should be after, I think people are what make things happen. And when you care for people, they care for outcomes. But I didn’t do a good job of that. And then on a community level, I realized that the veterinary space, we’ve gotten really damn good at taking care of others and not quite as good at taking care of ourselves and each other.

Josh Vaisman:

And I felt like there’s got to be a better way to do this wonderful, worthy work that we do so that it actually contributes to our individual and collective fulfillment instead of our depletion. And so that led me to go back to school and pursue a master’s in applied positive psychology and coaching psychology, because I really feel like that is the prism of science that can help us get there.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. So the challenge of separating care for people from care from numbers, I think that that’s something that a lot of people don’t really appreciate or recognize. I don’t know how much you see it until you’re in a leadership role. And then a lot of people go, oh, yeah, obviously you care for people and not for numbers. And I don’t know that people really appreciate how strong there is a push to manage numbers. And let’s be honest, numbers are easy to manage, people are hard to manage. You know what I mean?

Josh Vaisman:

Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:

And there’s all these phrases like, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. And we need to make this objective so that we can look and have a dashboard and see how we’re doing, because it’s easy to lie to ourselves. And man, it is easy to get sucked into that vortex of looking at these numbers. And so when I hear that, I think most of us wrestle with that. I would say in my career, I’ve done a pendulum swing a number of times. And I think that’s probably what most of us do is where we get really focused on our people and taking care of our people and then we start to say, oh, I’m getting close to not making payroll. Or there starts to be behavioral issues and you go, okay, we need to quantify this so that we can really track it or we can start to have very specific conversations with people.

Dr. Andy Roark:

And so then we start to track numbers and look at people clocking in and clocking out on time and absenteeism and things like that. And those are very valid reasons to get into looking at these numbers, but the staff sees that as well. And it’s just funny how our mind shifts over time and then it shifts back. So first of all, validate that struggle. Let me begin with that.

Josh Vaisman:

Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Let’s talk about positivity and positive work cultures in vet medicine. So what do you see when you look at most veterinary practices? Do most practices do a pretty good job, a pretty bad job? Just give me a picture of the general landscape. When you look at your average vet practice, what are the things that you feel like most of them do right and what are the things that most of them do wrong?

Josh Vaisman:

Yeah, that’s a really great question, Andy. And I do want to validate that struggle, because that struggle is real and it can feel like it’s pulling you in two diametrical directions. I think there’s an opportunity to navigate the space between both.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah.

Josh Vaisman:

And I think that that’s what the hospitals that do this well, that’s what they do. They honor and recognize that there are pulls and pressures from both sides, and that we can find a way to live in a both and world instead of an either or. And the hospitals that have an opportunity to do better, which I would venture to say is probably the majority of practices, do find themselves being pulled in one direction or the other and really struggling with that. A positive environment. When I use that word, positive, I recognize that that word can be a little bit loaded.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah, totally. It’s a fluffy, fuzzy word that means a lot of things. And it’s gotten a lot of use recently and that always makes me go, all right. The meaning of this is really getting distorted probably.

Josh Vaisman:

Yes. Yes. Distorted is a great word to describe that. Yeah. So when I’m talking about positive, I’m not talking about ice cream and sprinkles every day at work. I’m not talking about this fluffy, everybody is best friends and we all hug it out all day long and it’s kumbaya and roasted marshmallows. That is not a positive environment, that’s an apathetic environment. That’s an environment of learned helplessness, that’s an environment that is not fulfilling. When we think about things like meaningfulness and impact and contribution and fulfillment, we don’t imagine scenarios that were full of joy from beginning to end. We imagined scenarios that had challenges, that were difficult, that we overcame and that there was maybe an environment of support or help in. And I think that’s what the practices that do this well recognize.

Josh Vaisman:

One of the things that I talk about, at Flourish, we have a leadership framework. We call it the four Ps of positive leadership. It’s something we’ve been working on for several years. We’re actually writing a book about it for AHA Press right now. And there’s these four pillars. And one of the pillars that we talk about is the progress pillar. And the progress pillar is really what we think of as the connective tissue of the entire framework. I often, when I’m standing in front of large audiences of hospital owners and practice managers and medical directors and I talk about leadership, I say, really, I don’t have to talk to you for two hours or four hours or six hours here, I can sum it up in two sentences. Other people matter, leadership is relationships. If you can really, truly embody and embrace those two statements, other people matter, leadership is relationships, then you’ll be an excellent leader.

Josh Vaisman:

And that’s what it really boils down to. But that can also be taken to that pendulum swing that you referred to. That can be taken to the extreme side of, I will solve all your problems. I’ll cuddle you, I’ll take care of everything for you. And that’s actually antithesis to positive leadership. If you’re the kind of leader who finds that, A, everybody seems to dump all their problems on your lap, or B, you take on everybody’s problems. That’s not an effective way to cultivate an environment that contributes to professional fulfillment, because that’s an environment of learned helplessness. We have to create leadership through partnership. A partnership in where, Andy, I care about your success and I care about you as a person. And I care enough to give you the kindness of helping you be the best version of who you can be.

Josh Vaisman:

And sometimes that means calling out your strengths and where you’re kicking butt and where you’re doing great. And sometimes that means we’ve got to have these difficult conversations where you’re falling a bit short of my expectations, because that’s the kind thing to do. Sometimes we think of positive environments as the nice environment, where everything is nice and we never say anything bad. But actually, a positive environment, a positive culture, positive leadership is about kindness. And kindness sometimes means calling people out when they’re falling short.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. No, I like this a lot. So the big thing as we talk about the struggle that a lot of people have of say measuring numbers versus the compassionate relationships. And I look at this and I say, okay, other people matter, leading is relationships. I get that. I think the part that people have to wrestle a little bit to get their head around, and I had to wrestle with this for a long time.

Josh Vaisman:

Sure.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Accountability is still a thing.

Josh Vaisman:

Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:

You know what I mean? And I think that’s the biggest mistake I see people make. Is they’re like, okay, got it. Relationships matter, people matter, I got it. So what I’m hearing is, I just take care of people and I make people happy. And I’m like, no.

Josh Vaisman:

No.

Dr. Andy Roark:

That’s flawed. And I think that that’s an important point, because that is the difference between sunshine and rainbows, a bunch of fluffy, fuzzy garbage. That’s not true. And people getting walked on and people not having personal boundaries. I think responsibility and accountability are things that we have to bake into being compassionate.

Josh Vaisman:

Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:

And you can do that. But to me, that is the middle path. That is the path that I think a lot of people struggle with. And so I very much like how you talk about relationships matter. And I agree with that as well. And I’ll say, relationships matter and relationships are built on trust, and trust matters.

Josh Vaisman:

Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:

At the same time, anyone who’s ever worked at a business where people are not held accountable, or forget a business, a family. If you got people in your family who are not held accountable, you know what I mean? And who other people are just determined to make happy, those people are maddening. And I don’t have any of those people in family or extended family at all, ever. But you see those people … I make a joke, but you see people out in the world all the time who have never been held accountable and they’re not happy people.

Josh Vaisman:

Correct.

Dr. Andy Roark:

And you don’t want to spend a lot of time with them. And so that brings me to the other part of navigating this path, it’s balance, which means you do want to be compassionate to this person. But it is also your job as a leader to be compassionate to everybody else in the clinic as well.

Josh Vaisman:

Correct.

Dr. Andy Roark:

And so if you are being a pushover and other people are picking up the slack because you’re not holding this person accountable, you know what I mean? Or you are not telling them the truth and giving them honest feedback and saying, hey, you’re kicking butt in these ways, but you’re not kicking butt in these ways and it’s causing frustration to Pam, then you are not being compassionate to Pam.

Josh Vaisman:

Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree.

Dr. Andy Roark:

I like that. I suspect it probably threw some people for a loop when you said, oh, we’ve got donuts in the break room and sprinkles, and that’s learned helplessness. Unpack that a little bit more for me. When you say learned helplessness in the vet world, what does that look like?

Josh Vaisman:

Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about learned helplessness and this idea that we can learn to be helpless. Oftentimes, it’s subversive and it’s not something that’s necessarily overtly conscious. But we have to realize, people, all of us, every human being, we’re driven by a lot of basic psychological needs. And when those needs are unmet, that’s when we get these deleterious effects. These problems in a team environment or the problems that you hear about at the front versus the back and all that kind of stuff. To me, whenever I hear problems in a team environment, what I hear is there are needs in this environment that are being unmet. One of those basic needs is the need for autonomy. Every single one of us needs to feel like we are in some way, shape or form the captain of our own lives. That we have a voice and a say in the direction that our life is going.

Josh Vaisman:

When you have a team environment where somebody in leadership is the be all end all, whether that’s intentional or not. And I want to clarify something by the way, Andy. I’ve had the opportunity over the last several years to meet and interact with thousands of people in leadership positions in veterinary medicine. I can tell you with complete confidence, I’ll take this to my grave, I can count on one hand the number of actually bad human beings in leadership in vet med.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah.

Josh Vaisman:

Most of the people, the vast majority of people in veterinary medicine who are in leadership positions truly want to do the best they can for and by the people that they serve. They want to create this kind environment where people feel happiness at work and fulfillment and all that kind of stuff. It’s just that nobody’s really ever taught us how to do that. And so what we do is we revert to what we know. Okay, I need to take care of people and make them happy, so bring me all your problems. I’ll solve everything for you. Or, ooh, I’m in the leadership position now, so I’ve got to be the person who’s the strongest and has all the answers and knows all the right things to do. And I can’t ever show any weakness in my armor.

Josh Vaisman:

All of that creates an environment that tells people two things, you can’t ever be wrong, so get somebody who can be right. And if you can’t ever be wrong, you can’t ever lean into the discomfort of trying new things and learning and growing and innovating and creating. And so essentially you have to put on this facade of everything is always good and right all the time. That’s impossible.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah.

Josh Vaisman:

But people lose the sense of empowerment. If you work for a leader who either expects everything to be right or takes all your problems on, you have lost control over the environment. You have given that control to somebody else or they have taken it from you, which means you don’t feel a sense of autonomy. You don’t feel like you’re the captain there. That human need is unmet, you’re going to try and find it somewhere else. And most of the time in this environment of learned helplessness, that’s the whispers and complaints in the corners. Most of the time, that sense of empowerment and control is ruminating with somebody else on the team who gets it.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. No, that definitely makes sense. I hadn’t thought about the whispers and complaints as being a manifestation of autonomy. I think a lot about personal agency as a requirement. I think that that’s pretty much the same thing as what you’re talking about with autonomy. I don’t think that people can be happy when they don’t feel like they have some control. Right?

Josh Vaisman:

Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Imagine playing a video game where everything was so on rails that you just, you couldn’t mess up. And you go, how fun is that?

Josh Vaisman:

Right.

Dr. Andy Roark:

That’s some people’s jobs. And people say, well, my job is not a video game. And I say, well, there should be similarities. It should be challenging. It should be engaging. It should change. It should give you a feeling of accomplishment. That’s why people play video games, is to immediately have that engagement, that challenge, that quick hit of accomplishment. People aren’t too hard to figure out what entertains them in one way or entertains them in another way or what engages them in one way and engage them in another. So yeah, I think that that’s funny. The thought of, I’m the leader, I’m going to make this perfect to the point that my people don’t feel like they have any autonomy. I hadn’t really thought about that. I did think, when you were talking about the leader that doesn’t let people fail or that is there to solve problems, is the old Karpman drama triangle. The hero, villain, victim triangle.

Josh Vaisman:

I don’t remember that, please.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Oh, you don’t. Oh, yeah, okay.

Josh Vaisman:

I love Karpman though.

Dr. Andy Roark:

All right, so here we go. The drama triangle is the hero, villain, victim triangle.

Josh Vaisman:

Okay.

Dr. Andy Roark:

And what it says is generally when we have conflict, we tend to have three roles. We tend to have the victim who is the person who has been wronged. And we have the villain, who’s the person who did the despicable deed. And then there’s the hero, who is the person who comes in and saves the victim, punishes the villain, writes the wrong and rides off into the sunset. And that is the drama triangle. And think about your vet practice, think about the victim and the villain who the victim comes and complains about. And then they want you to be the hero.

Josh Vaisman:

Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:

And the takeaway from the Karpman drama triangle and the thing I always hammer on people is, you don’t want to be the hero. Don’t be the hero. Because we have these people who are like, you know what, I am a professional hero. All day long, I’m a hero. And the problem with it is it makes you feel good. You’re like, yeah, I righted 10 wrongs today. And you’re like, you shouldn’t have had to write any wrongs, you should have done your regular job that you want to do and that you need to do. But you didn’t, you were protecting the victim all day. And so it really comes down to, don’t be the hero. Make the victim be the hero, empower the victim to be their own hero.

Josh Vaisman:

Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:

And now you’ve got people who have some agency. They’ve got some autonomy, they’ve got tools in the toolbox to fix their problem, and they can fix their problem and navigate the course without having you to be involved. Of course, there’s problems that come up that need to go up the chain, but that’s not most of the problems most of us deal with all day.

Josh Vaisman:

Yeah. I love that. The drama triangle. That’s awesome. The hero and the victim and the-

Dr. Andy Roark:

I use it all the time.

Josh Vaisman:

Yeah. Oh, that’s awesome. See, I think that what we can also do to add to that is, we can shift our mindset around what it means to be the heroic leader. And see, I think that you’re right. I think that so many of us in this space, we try to be the superhero. The one who sweeps in and punishes the wrong doer and saves the one who’s been victimized. You’re right. I mean, it does feel good when you make that contribution to people’s lives. And it’s incredibly exhausting to be the hero all day, every day, and it’s disempowering to the people around you. You’re right, it removes any sense of agency. And when we lose agency, when we lose a sense of autonomy, we invariably become disengaged. We become demotivated. And that’s the opposite of what we’re trying to accomplish.

Josh Vaisman:

So what I think we can do is we can shift the mindset. We can create a new way of thinking of what the hero can be. The hero, rather than being the lifesaver, can be the kind of partner who sits down with people and says, I hear you. This is a struggle. I see how this is affecting you. How can we solve this together? And truly embrace that together part and be the partner. The person who can empathize, who can offer support and tools when people don’t feel like they have all that resources, and enable a sense of agency and autonomy. So they can actually, instead of being the victim, they can play a role as a hero as well.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Oh yeah. It’s the difference between trying to be Harry Potter and being Albus Dumbledore. Be Albus Dumbledore.

Josh Vaisman:

Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Mentor Harry Potter to handle his own problems.

Josh Vaisman:

Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Be Yoda, not Luke Skywalker. That’s where you’re doing the most good in the world. Right?

Josh Vaisman:

Totally.

Dr. Andy Roark:

I really like the idea that part of being a leader, part of being a business owner, because business owners are leaders, part of being a manager is growing people. And part of that is just because I find that deeply rewarding, to see people grow. And this is a big part of making people more competent, is not fighting their battles for them. God, this is the hardest part of being a parent. I totally want to fight my kids battles for them. That’s not my job and that’s not the best thing for my kids in the long term. But boy, those are hard muscles to work. No one teaches you how to coach. They think they teach you how to fix problems, they don’t teach you how to coach. And man, I think that that is one of the most undervalued skills that is out there.

Josh Vaisman:

Yeah. I totally agree. And that’s one of the biggest questions that I get. When I talk about these kinds of concepts, I think that it actually resonates with a lot of people. I think that actually the preference would be for most leaders is to have an empowered team that solves problems, that innovates and creates, that overcomes and is resilient, and that the leader is supporting in a supporting role instead of an overarching role. But then what they invariably ask is, well, okay, this sounds great, Josh, but I have no fricking clue how to do it. How do I do it? And you touched on that word. I think the very best leaders are leaders who coach up or coach out. But coaching is always essential to it, but coaching is an acquired skill and it’s not something that most of us naturally possess.

Josh Vaisman:

And so how do you do that? How do you have those kinds of conversations? See, I think when we get caught up in the day-to-day fires and we feel like it’s the 476 complaint that’s come through our door that day and I’ve still got a checklist of 74 items to get done by 6:00 and it’s already 4:00 PM and somebody comes in and complains about somebody, it’s really easy to fall into that habit of like, all right, Andy, I’ve heard what you’ve said about Diane and I’m going to fix it. And then just let Andy go. A coaching response would be, okay, Andy, I heard what you said about Diane and I can see how it’s affecting you. I’m curious, if you were in my shoes, what would you do?

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. What options do you think that we have going forward?

Josh Vaisman:

Yeah. Coaches ask questions.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. What do you think we could do to prevent this from happening in the future? There’s three pieces of this, I think. So not knowing what to say, I think that’s the first one. Right?

Josh Vaisman:

Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:

So how do you coach, how do you ask those questions so that they figure out. When they come to you and they say, well, this is the problem. And you say, all right, what have you done to try to address the problem?

Josh Vaisman:

Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:

So the first one is they don’t know what to say. I would say the second thing that I see a lot is this … And this comes from me. It’s this twisted self identity leader thing.

Josh Vaisman:

Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Where you are the leader and in order to be a good leader, you have to have the answer or you’re supposed to fix the problem. I do a little bit on this in one of my lectures and I put up a picture of General George Patton. And I’m like, I thought that this is what leadership looked like. And when you were a good leader, people didn’t question you because they trusted you. And they were like, oh, Andy knows the answer and he’s the boss, he’s a great boss. And so the great boss knows what the answer is and so we’re just going to do the answer. And I found that that does not exist outside the military. And if your people don’t question you, that’s a terrible thing-

Josh Vaisman:

Andy-

Dr. Andy Roark:

… because it means they trust you.

Josh Vaisman:

… I feel personally attacked right now. I mean, you have completely hit a nerve with me. That’s entirely the kind of leader that I was. I thought that I had to be George Patton.

Dr. Andy Roark:

I’m with you.

Josh Vaisman:

Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. Oh yeah. So then my next slide is Kermit the Frog. I’m like, this is what a leader looks like. It’s like, Kermit gets questioned constantly about everything. And you know why? It’s because people trust him enough to tell him what they think.

Josh Vaisman:

Exactly.

Dr. Andy Roark:

And they think that he’s trying to do the best thing and he’s worth engaging with.

Josh Vaisman:

Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:

And the George Patton to Kermit the Frog leadership shift, dang, that’s hard. And it’s hard because I’m naturally Muppet. And so just owning that and feeling okay about it and being like, this is a good identity for a leader, is to be questioned continuously from people who are good at their job and who care. And they ask you because they care. And to be criticized because people feel safe enough around you to say, hey, I’m not sure that this is the best thing, or you should think about this. The self identity thing is a thing, I think, that holds a lot of us back. And the last thing that I think holds a lot of us back too is, like so many things in leadership, what is easiest in the short term is detrimental in the long term.

Josh Vaisman:

Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:

And so, I’ll just fix it. You know what I mean? You got a problem, just tell me and I will go talk to the other person or I will send the email or I will call the pet owner and I’ll just do it. And today, that is by far the easiest thing to do to move forward.

Josh Vaisman:

Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:

The problem is, in the long term, I haven’t grown this person at all and I’m just going to end up doing this again and again. And so when you zoom out for three to five years, you’re going to say, that was a terrible idea. You could have had that person trained and empowered in the first six months. And then you would’ve had three and a half years of not having to deal with this crap. But you did what was easy in the moment and you paid for it in the long term. And so those are the three things that I see.

Josh Vaisman:

Oh, no., I think that’s incredibly insightful. I’m really grateful to hear that perspective from you, because I think you’re really spot on. You talked about the two additional things beyond what we were talking about, this idea of identity, self-identifying as a leader and the [inaudible 00:28:28] approach. And then you talked about what I heard as the urgency of the immediate and the urgency of the immediate seems to take over. And I’d really love to talk about those two things from a little bit of an evidence-based perspective. So there’s a researcher out of Wharton business school named Adam Grant, who I totally nerd boy over. I always like to joke, one of my claims to fame is I’ve gotten Adam Grant to exchange emails with me twice. So I feel pretty good about myself.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Well, give and take, [inaudible 00:29:01].

Josh Vaisman:

Yes. A little give and take. Excellent pun.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Thank you.

Josh Vaisman:

There’s going to be like three really nerdy listeners who are going to get that.

Dr. Andy Roark:

They’ll be like, wow. God. Okay.

Josh Vaisman:

Phil is going to be one of them, by the way.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Phil, that pun was for you, buddy.

Josh Vaisman:

Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:

All right. Hey guys, I just want to jump in real fast and let you know that registration for the April 2022 Uncharted Veterinary Conference is open. We are live and back together in person. Again, downtown Greenville, April 21st through the 23rd 2022, because it is the five-year anniversary of Uncharted. That’s right, in 2017 we kicked off the first Uncharted Veterinary Conference. Single best live event I’ve ever been to in my life. I got to tell you. I mean, I was among the people who cried when it was over, because it was that amazing and awesome. Guys, if you have not been to Uncharted, you’ve never seen anything like it. It is truly a special, wonderful event. Yeah, it’s hard to explain. It is all about running smoother, more efficient, more enjoyable practices. That is what this conference is all about.

Dr. Andy Roark:

It’s about getting things done and enjoying the process of doing them. Gang, if you are not an Uncharted member, you’ll need to be one to be able to come. This is a member only conference. There’s only 150 spots. The reasons for that are plentiful, but mostly they involve the fact that Uncharted is a conference that never ends. There is stuff that goes on before the conference, there’s stuff that goes on after the conference. It’s just unlike anything else that’s out there. If you’re like, this is crazy talk. What is he talking about? Head over to unchartedvet.com and learn more. Guys, I would love to see you in April. Do not miss your chance to get your membership and get your spot. Like I said, there’s only 150. Guys, I can’t remember the last time I was this fired up about a live event. It’s going to phenomenal. And I would love to see you there. Now, let’s get back into this episode.

Josh Vaisman:

One of the things that Adam Grant is really passionate about, which is one of the reasons why I totally adore the man, is this idea of psychological safety. And you talked about that a little bit, you talked about the safety. That as leaders, if we put on the persona of being George Patton, what we’ve essentially done is created an environment through messaging that says we only tolerate perfection here. And if you can’t be perfect, keep it to yourself. The problem is, no human being is perfect, we’re all fallible. We all fall short. We all stumble. Nobody has all the answers and all the skills and talents. The only way that we can achieve the higher purpose of our work together is if we do it together. Collectively we are so much more resilient, more creative, more innovative, more able to accomplish things than we are as individuals.

Josh Vaisman:

But the leader sets the tone for that. And psychological safety is essentially this concept of in a team that it is safe. It is safe to say, hey, you know what, Andy, the way you did that, I’m not sure that was the right way. And I know that you’re not going to lash out at me or freak out or I’m going to get punished in some way, that we can actually have that conversation. So Adam Grant did some work in the Gates Foundation. He’s friends with Melinda Gates. And so they wanted to see what they could do to enhance psychological safety in the Gates Foundation. One of the typical approaches is we train managers on that and we tell them, okay, you know what, maybe you need to go have these vulnerable open-ended conversations.

Josh Vaisman:

And certainly, when they go through that training and then they go try it, when you measure psychological safety scores a week out, two weeks out, you do see an improvement. But the improvement doesn’t last because more often than not what happens is these managers say, okay, I’m going to have this vulnerable conversation. And then they get feedback that they don’t like or they don’t agree with. And then they’re like-

Dr. Andy Roark:

They’re telling me the truth, damn them for that.

Josh Vaisman:

Yeah. Damn them for that or this is the total waste of my time, and then they stop doing it. So they tried something a little bit different inspired by … Oh gosh, who’s the late night host who does the mean tweets thing.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Oh, Jimmy Kimmel.

Josh Vaisman:

Jimmy Kimmel. Yeah. So they had executives, including Melinda, who’s at the very top of this huge organization, do mean tweets videos. Where they took feedback that they had received and then on video they talked about it through the mean tweets kind of approach, but then also talked about what they learned from that feedback and how that feedback was valuable to them. And then they talked a little bit about constructive feedback that they’d gotten in the past and the value they got from that. They did not see the same immediate boost to psychological safety scores that they saw with that initial training. However, a year later they saw significantly higher psychological safety scores than they saw with the initial training. You see, doing this kind of thing, being the vulnerable leader, the kind of leader who says, this is not an environment of perfection, this is an environment of growth. This is where we learn and I have to learn too. And this is some constructive criticism that I’ve gotten and this is what I’ve learned from it.

Josh Vaisman:

This is what I’m trying to work on now and I’d really love to hear from you all now how I can be better here, starts to create that kind of environment long term. Which then leads to that second point you made, the urgency of the immediate. We do, we get caught up in the urgency of the immediate and we lose the capacity to think in long term. But the truth is, and there’s some really vibrant research on this too, when we put an immediate, sometimes painful but intentional investment into the long term. For example, in this particular piece of research I’m thinking about, where they implemented one-on-one programs that were nothing to do with performance evaluations, they were all about the employee. Where do you need more autonomy? Where do you need more support? How are you doing? What are you struggling with? How can I help you? Kind of meetings one-on-one with direct reports for a minimum of one hour a month.

Josh Vaisman:

So most of these teams, we’re talking like five, six, seven, eight people that the manager is sitting down with for an hour every month. To most managers, you share that and they hear, wait, you want me to work another full day just to sit down with my team and talk about these things? They did that for 18 months and they saw a double digit percentage increase in productivity and job satisfaction. They saw reduction in turnover, retention rates went up, all of this kind of stuff happened. And at the end of it, they asked the managers qualitatively, how did this impact your time doing this an hour per direct report every month? Did you find that you had to work more to get that done? Did you find that it didn’t really impact your time? Or did you find that actually it increased the amount of time you had available? The average response from these managers, I found I had an extra seven hours every month to get my work done.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. We do a lot of that stuff. So I run a group called Uncharted, and so we do conferences and we have an online community and stuff. And one of the struggles for me personally, when getting Uncharted up and going, was there are things like that that I just believed deeply in that I would say to people. And I would say, hey, we’re going to talk about having effective one-on-one, so we’re going to talk about getting your leadership team on the same page with you. And we’re going to talk about strategic planning and we’re going to talk about these different things. And the pushback from so many people is, I don’t have time to do strategic planning and I don’t have time to do one-on-ones.

Dr. Andy Roark:

And God, that’s probably the biggest trap that I see. Is there are some of these things that are so transformational and people go, I don’t have the time to do it. And I’m like, but if you did it, you would have the time. You know what I mean? It would open up so many other things. And it’s that first painful thing. So just the path of what’s easy and convenient right now in the short term hurts the long term. That is the greatest trap in life, is how many things are easy now. Think about how much we use social media. I’ve got five minutes to kill. The easiest thing for me possibly is pop out Instagram and scroll through it. But then the problem is, I got five minutes to kill again and again and again. You look at the end of the week and I “killed” three hours over the course of the week.

Dr. Andy Roark:

You know what I mean? And had I popped my Kindle app open, I could have read 10 chapters of something actually meaningful and that helps me be a better person, however I want to be, or that I would remember. Instagram is just like, what did you look at today? I have no idea. There was dancing, there were people jumping and then they were in a different outfit than they were before.

Josh Vaisman:

There were kittens.

Dr. Andy Roark:

There were kittens. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Or it’s like, there was that dog running in circles. That’s the most memorable thing I saw. But yeah, it’s that way. But it’s not like the one-on-one and stuff like that, it’s really trying hard to cajole people to do the thing that’s not easiest in the moment.

Josh Vaisman:

Especially when you don’t get that immediate feedback of the value of it. When it doesn’t feel like it’s making a difference now, it’s really easy to let go and lose motivation for those things. We did some work with the hospital. We started working with them about a year ago now and they came to us … Large practice, over 150 employees. They came to us for a lot of the same reasons that a lot of folks are coming to us these days. We’re struggling, we’re overworked, we’re under-resourced, we can’t find help, the caseloads are through the roof. It’s insane, what do we do? People are leaving and we need to help them. And so we conducted a large discovery process. We did some wide sweeping surveys and really touched base with the team and the leadership to get a good idea of what was going on. And it’s interesting, one of the clear themes that emerged through this process was people really crying out for connection.

Josh Vaisman:

We feel disconnected, we feel so overwhelmed by the work that we’ve lost touch with each other and we just need to touch base. So that screams for one of these effective one-on-one programs that you’re referring to. But of course, you can’t really go to a team like that and say, okay, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to cut out seven hours once a month where you’re all going to meet and sit down. That felt like way too much for them, a quantum leap. So we thought, well, gosh, how could we do this incrementally? And this is what they came up with, which I thought was genius. They said, hey, what if we just recruited people to conduct these mini check-ins and we’ll make it no more than 10 minutes once a month. We’ll divide the team up so that everybody has no more than five or six people they got to check in with and we’ll create a standard framework for how this is going to work.

Josh Vaisman:

We’ll create a small committee, we’ll put these three people in charge of overseeing a program and being of support. And we did, we implemented that. We did a coach the coaches kind of training and I sat down with these … By the way, 34 people in the hospital volunteered to conduct check-ins, which was amazing.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah, that’s great.

Josh Vaisman:

And we just trained them on coaching concepts and how do you conduct a check-in from a coaching perspective and talked to people in that way. And then we implemented that program. Eight months later, we redid the surveys and we looked at some of the quantitative scores. And one of these things was a measurement on just the team’s self-perception of resiliency. We saw those resiliency scores. So we divide them into categories of how we view people in terms of their perception of their resiliency. I feel like I’m doing pretty good despite the challenges I face or I’m struggling or I’m just getting by. We saw the low end of that. The people who said they were really struggling at the beginning of our work with them was at 12%. Eight months later, we had cut it down to 4%.

Josh Vaisman:

The people who were in those, I feel like I’m actually doing pretty good despite the challenges I’m facing, went up by 17%. All by just doing this little check-in intervention. And that was through a period of time that by the way I think you would agree as somebody who’s in practice. From last October to this October, have things gotten easier in veterinary medicine?

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. Not remarkably, no.

Josh Vaisman:

Yeah. So I mean, that I feel like is a tangible in our profession. Something that shows that this stuff, it really does matter. Putting a small, incremental investment now into a long term relationship with your team will pay dividends.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. No, I like that a lot. Two comments I think that I want to make. The first one is maybe a little dicey here, so I’m going to be careful how I say this. I think that one of the mantras I hear on social media that always makes me cringe a little bit, I think that there’s this idea that’s out there that I’m tired. Let me start with a caveat. I think a lot of us struggle to understand how we really feel and what we really need. I think most of us don’t really know. If I said I’m not happy right now and you said, Andy, what do you need? I don’t think I can tell you like … I’m not going to be able to list three things that I need.

Dr. Andy Roark:

That’s not the case for me at the moment, but there have been times I’ve been unhappy and if you said, what do you need to be happy? I’d be like, if I knew that, I would’ve done the thing that I needed to be happy and this would’ve been over. And so I think a lot of us struggle with that sometimes. We know that we don’t feel good or we know that we’re not enjoying our work like we used to, or we know that we seem tired. And it just seems like that part of that is a human condition, it always comes in waves. But I think we’re generally pretty craptacular at putting our finger right on what we need. And so I see a lot of narratives that say, we need more time off, we need to rest more, we need to relax more.

Dr. Andy Roark:

And again, I don’t know the specific circumstances, it’s very context specific. So in some cases that may be true. I think for most of us who say we’re tired, it’s probably not really about the hours that we’re working. It may not even be with the speed with which we’re working. It’s often something else about how we feel about our work, how we feel about how other people see our work, our appreciation level. A lot of it is, we feel like how successful we are. We’ve all done things before where we’re like, I’m doing this and I suck at it and it’s terrible, versus I’m doing this and I’m doing a thing and I’m great at it. And I’m scoring points and people are like, damn, you’re killing it, buddy.

Dr. Andy Roark:

You know what I mean? And I’m like, I can do this all day. Because I feel like I’m doing a good job and there’s this rewarding thing and I’m getting positive feedback. And so when you talk about moving to these types of check-ins, things like that where we connect with each other, I think for most of us, finding things like that really does so much good. And again, I’m not trying to downplay other people’s concerns when they say, oh, I need time off or I need to rest. That may very well be true. But I think for our profession as a whole, I think most of us really do benefit by thinking more deeply about, how do we connect? What makes us feel appreciated? What do we need to have psychological safety here? And things like that.

Josh Vaisman:

Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:

I like Adam Grant’s stuff for sure. I really think the power of vulnerability and leadership is really important. And I think it’s really scary for a lot of people. They go, I don’t know how to be vulnerable because I don’t want to lose credibility. And so there is this thing too of like, I don’t want to see my boss as a crying, sobbing mess.

Josh Vaisman:

Correct.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Not as a regular thing anyway.

Josh Vaisman:

Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:

But generally, I do like to feel like my boss is confident and still being open. And so there’s a balance in this. I think for a lot of people who have maybe not led with vulnerability or never been comfortable with before, I think right now is a really good opportunity. And I’m curious what you think of this, but as far as trying out vulnerability and flexing the leadership muscle, I think a lot of people right now are dealing with tired teams.

Josh Vaisman:

Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:

And I think a lot of people are starting to see some maybe negativity in their practices that didn’t use to be there. Maybe not overt, but maybe just some eye rolling, maybe just some snarkiness. And it comes from fatigue, I think. And I think those types of problems are the best time to flex your vulnerability muscles as a leader. And you can go to the team and you can say, guys, I’m noticing that we’re not getting along as well as we used to and I don’t know what to do about it. And honestly, I know that I’m having some grumpy days as well and sometimes I’m not the nicest person to be around, but I don’t want to be that way and I don’t want our team to be that way. And I want to talk to you guys about why this is happening and mostly more importantly, what can we do to write the ship? What can we do to get along better and to feel more supportive of each other? And I like that as a 101 level vulnerability conversation.

Josh Vaisman:

Totally.

Dr. Andy Roark:

But just saying, I don’t know what to do and I own the fact that I’m probably part of this problem. I’m sure I’m part of the problem, but I don’t want to be and I want to work with you guys to figure out what we can do.

Josh Vaisman:

Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:

I just feel like a lot of practices are struggling with that problem right now and I really think that vulnerability is the key. You might be able to roll out some appreciation program like, guys, this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to have smile books and-

Josh Vaisman:

Smile books.

Dr. Andy Roark:

But yeah, you may have a great thing, I don’t. I got to go to my people and say, I don’t know what to do.

Josh Vaisman:

No, I love that.

Dr. Andy Roark:

But I love you guys and I want to be happy here. And I know you want to be happy here.

Josh Vaisman:

I’m listening to you describe this opportunity for vulnerability and how you would talk to your team, and I’m thinking to myself, I think I’m going to send Andy my book manuscript and just have him revise it. I mean, that is spot on what positive leadership is about. I think one of the challenges that people have … because you’re right. Again, this is like what we were talking about at the beginning of this conversation, that sort of being pulled in two directions. And it’s really easy to teeter-totter between the two poles, the extremes. And I think there’s an opportunity in between, the both and. That’s where that both and lives. That tensional space in between two polls is where often the most vibrant and effective approaches live.

Josh Vaisman:

And what you just shared was between the approach of action and vulnerability. See, I think that a lot of us, when we hear talk about vulnerability, we hear what Brene Brown talks about, we hear what you’re talking about, what I’m talking about, a lot of us can’t help but hear only the vulnerability piece. And that feels like, well, I can’t show a kink in my armor, I’m the leader. They won’t believe I’m credible. They won’t follow me anymore. It’s not vulnerability by itself. You can’t stop at vulnerability.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah, quite.

Josh Vaisman:

There also has to be action. And that’s what you just said. It’s vulnerability to sit down with your team and say, guys, listen, things are not going well right now. And we are overwhelmed and I’m probably just as guilty of the shitty attitude as I’m seeing around us. And that’s not okay, I don’t want it to be this way. We got to be better together because we’re in this together. That’s vulnerability. But if you stop just there and that’s all you ever do, yes, the team will eventually see you as the person who doesn’t know what they’re doing and doesn’t have the answers. And why would I trust that person?

Dr. Andy Roark:

Right.

Josh Vaisman:

What you just did was, you followed it up with, okay, let’s talk about why we think this is happening. And perhaps more importantly, what we can do about it together.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Right.

Josh Vaisman:

Because we are in this situation and scenario, these are the tools and resources we have, things are not going to just change on their own. Caseloads, they’re not going away.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Right.

Josh Vaisman:

The staffing shortages that we have, it’s not like Santa Claus is going to deliver a whole bunch of veterinarians and technicians.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah.

Josh Vaisman:

That’s not going to change. So given that we’re here together and we want it to be better, what can we do?

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. That’s right. I think this is such a good workout tryout for a vulnerable approach, because it does lend itself to, what are we going to do going forward? And that’s why I said, why is this happening? More importantly, what are we doing in the future? I think a lot of people get tied up in dissecting what’s going on. And really, the truth is, what’s done is done. It doesn’t matter why we felt crappy two weeks ago, what matters is how we’re going to feel two weeks from now.

Josh Vaisman:

You just touched on something that is very, very important to me. It’s not a mindset that I always had. I had to develop this mindset. But when we get fixated on dissecting the problems, what we’re doing is we’re trying to make things better by eliminating. And eliminating problems never contributes to innovation, to new ways of doing, being, or feeling or any of that. To loosely steal Dr. Martin Seligman’s words, the absence of mental illness is not necessarily mental wellness. Often, when I talk about this leadership stuff, I paint a picture. Just imagine the scenario, you go to bed tonight and a miracle happens. And overnight all veterinary debt disappears, everybody in this space gets triple the pay, you never have to work a minute over 35 hours a week, you never get double booked and every client also got triple pay.

Josh Vaisman:

And so that means that every client is now ready to say yes to all your recommendations. Glorious scenario. Sounds amazing. And I watch people’s eyes light up. And then on next slide I say, do you think in this miracle scenario that everybody in veterinary medicine with a snap of a finger would be happy and fulfilled? And everybody in the room shakes their head, no.

Dr. Andy Roark:

No way.

Josh Vaisman:

Because we all know that elimination of problems is an important thing, we have to work on that stuff. But elimination of problems alone does not create fulfillment. Fulfillment is cultivated by adding things into the environment. And that’s what you’re trying to do with that conversation, that vulnerable conversation with your team. You’re looking at the problems, you’re honoring that, you’re giving them the space to share and looking what we can add to make the best of the situation we have.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. Josh, I love that. I want to unpack that more with you. I think we’re going to be out of time for now. So will you come back and talk with me more about that in the future?

Josh Vaisman:

I’d love to. Andy, this is a joy for me, to chat with somebody like you, who just clearly gets this.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Oh, thanks. I enjoyed this as well. Where can people find you online? Where can they learn more about Flourish Veterinary Consulting?

Josh Vaisman:

Yeah. So our website is just flourish.vet, F-L-O-U-R-I-S-H.vet. You can find me on LinkedIn, I’m pretty active on there. We’re on Facebook as well. And then just at various conferences and things around the country.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Awesome. Thanks, Josh.

Josh Vaisman:

Thank you, Andy, appreciate you.

Dr. Andy Roark:

And that is our episode. Guys, I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got something out of it. I hope you’re like, ah, I see why Andy said at the very beginning that this was a good episode, because it was. I really enjoyed it. Guys, if you enjoyed it, leave me an honest review wherever you get your podcast. That’s a nice thing that you can do and it means the world to me. Other than that, guys, I don’t have anything else for you. Have a wonderful day. I hope this gave you some really good food for thought. Hope you’re enjoying your holidays. Take care. Be well, bye.

Filed Under: Podcast Tagged With: Wellness

Rowdy Kitten Won’t Stop Attacking Mom! (HDYTT)

November 30, 2021 by Andy Roark DVM MS

Description: Dr. Andy Roark has a tough case! A rambunctious 3 month old tabby kitten won’t stop attacking his owner! He stalks her, pounces on her ankles from under the bed and rabbit kicks her hand when he gets the chance. It may sound funny, but his owner is fragile and can’t have this keep happening. Luckly, Ingrid Johnson, a feline behavior expert, is here to talk through the case and how she would tackle it.

Cone Of Shame Veterinary Podcast · COS 108 Rowdy Kitten Won’t Stop Attacking Mom! (HDYTT)

LINKS

WORKSHOP: It’s All Fun and Games – How to Play, Engage with and Reward Your Team: unchartedvet.com/product/its-all-fun-and-games/

Fundamentally Feline: www.fundamentallyfeline.com/

Uncharted Podcast on iTunes: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-…st/id1449897688

Charming the Angry Client On-Demand Staff Training: drandyroark.com/on-demand-staff-training/

What’s on my Scrubs?! Card Game: drandyroark.com/training-tools/

Dr. Andy Roark Swag: drandyroark.com/shop

All Links: linktr.ee/DrAndyRoark

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Ingrid Johnson is a Certified Cat Behavior Consultant (CCBC) through The International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants (IAABC). 
Ingrid owns and operates Fundamentally Feline, providing in home consults for locals and virtual consultations worldwide for clients experiencing behavior challenges with their cat(s). In addition to behavior consults, Ingrid also offers medicating consultations to help clients overcome, or get ahead of, medicating challenges. Prevention and training, the best medicine! She makes her own line of feline foraging toys, scratching posts, vertical space, and litter boxes. She lectures nationwide on cat behavior at veterinary conferences such as AAFP, VMX, ACVC and the like. She is employed at Paws Whiskers and Claws, a feline only veterinary hospital, as a tech, groomer, and office manager and has been working exclusively with cats since 1999.

In the Fall of 2016 a paper she co-authored, Food puzzles for cats: Feeding for physical and emotional well-being, was published in the JFMS (Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery) and to compliment it she co-developed FoodPuzzlesforCats.com. To date it is the most popular and widely downloaded paper in the history of the journal! Ingrid’s home, cats, and environmental enrichment expertise has been featured on Animal Planet’s Cats101 show and featured in numerous publications including the website WebMD. She has created a series of educational How-To videos of her own, viewable on Fundamentally Feline’s website and YouTube channel. Ingrid regularly interviews and offers her expertise for various media outlets. She is Co-Director of Paw Project-Georgia, working towards ending the cruel practice of de-clawing cats. 

Cat Fancy magazine’s 2008 “Home Issue” showcased her feline friendly accommodations and the aesthetically pleasing ways you can provide for your cats innate basic needs while still having a home the humans can enjoy. Ingrid is a huge advocate for enrichment and is determined to thwart the belief that one’s home will look unsightly in efforts to provide it. 

Ingrid shares her home with husband Jake, five rescue cats, and Sebastian, a rescued Great Pyrenees Dog. Follow Fundamentally Feline on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and You Tube!

Editor: Dustin Bays
www.baysbrass.com
@Bays4Bays Twitter/Instagram

SHOW TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Andy Roark:

Welcome everybody to The Cone of Shame Veterinary Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Andy Roark. Guys, I got a fun one today, got a good one today, got a useful one today. My friend Ingrid Johnson, feline behavior expert, is back with me to talk about a tough case. I’ve got a rambunctious kitten that’s pouncing on his demure owner, who doesn’t handle being scratched and bitten very well for legitimate reasons. Is this just what it means to have a kitten? Is there any way these two can live together? What other pieces of advice that I can give her that are going to be helpful? Let’s get into this episode.

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, Ingrid Johnson. Good to see you again.

Ingrid Johnson:

Hi, there. Thanks for having me back.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Always, I love having you on the podcast and I appreciate you being here. I love talking cat behavior with you. You are super fun to chat with and I always learn stuff when we talk, so yeah.

Ingrid Johnson:

I always have a good time. I love doing these, so thank you.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Well, I’ve got one for you. I want to ask you about a case that I’ve got and I’ve got this very nice lady. She is a librarian. She is just a very demure, quiet lady that I think the world of. And she has a three-month-old male tabby cat and she brings him in to see me. And I think he’s very fun. We have a lot of fun in the exam room. He chases cotton balls. You know what I mean? And bats things around and I love a cat that loves the little toy fishing line and he goes right after it.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Anyway, at home, he’s a predator. He attacks from under the bed skirt. He grabs and he alligator rolls. He invites her to pet his tummy and then he grabs her and then he just bunny kicks the crap out of her with his back feet.

Ingrid Johnson:

Classic.

Dr. Andy Roark:

He comes off the top rope with a flying elbow. He’s a one cat professional wrestling company. And his mother, she doesn’t want to participate in his WWE fantasy. And she’s asking me, “What do I with this? Yeah, what do I do with this?” And she holds out her hands and she’s got little kitten needle teeth. It’s KNT. It’s a disease that I think we should write more of the awareness of the KNT and the PNT, the puppy needle teeth and the kitten needle teeth. And so I feel bad and for her, she’s a little bit older person and she’s got some concerns about getting bitten, honestly. So yeah, that’s a lot to drop on you but help me out. How do you treat this case? Where should I get started trying to help this person?

Ingrid Johnson:

How much time you got, Andy?

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah, yes.

Ingrid Johnson:

Well, my very first and foremost suggestion, if the client is willing, is to get another kitten.

Dr. Andy Roark:

What? Really?

Ingrid Johnson:

ASAP.

Dr. Andy Roark:

You’re like, “You know what? I know this is terrible. Let’s double it.” And that will-

Ingrid Johnson:

Had we gotten a pair of babies from the get go, this behavior may not be happening at all. It might. Some cats will still do that but it’s just that they need an outlet for their predatory aggression. They’re practicing their hunting instincts and their killing blows and they [inaudible 00:03:57] practice on something. And well, when mom moves across the living room floor, she’s prey and it’s really fun to bust out from under the bed skirt and attack the prey. And then she probably vocalizes, which is very exciting because now we’re screaming and squealing just like real prey.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You look at the kittens and you see them doing these things and they’re clearly hardwired. It’s actually fascinating to watch. It’s evolution and-

Ingrid Johnson:

At its finest.

Dr. Andy Roark:

And yeah, exactly, at its finest of, this was baked in and it totally is. So okay, that does make some sense. And it- [crosstalk 00:04:39]

Ingrid Johnson:

Have a pair, they do this to each other and then the human hands are reserved for love and affection. But since they don’t have an outlet for it, anything’s fair game in the house and it could be the family dog, too.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Is there an age range on that or is there a place where you say, “As a kitten, it’s really good, but if there was an older cat I wouldn’t do it or at some point, it becomes more of a headache to introduce another cat”? Any considerations like that or is that-

Ingrid Johnson:

Oh, absolutely.

Dr. Andy Roark:

A go-to whenever you see this?

Ingrid Johnson:

That’s a great question. So their early socialization period, that’s sealed in pretty early. I mean, by nine weeks of age, they’ve learned a lot of their social skills and their ability to interact with other cats and what we call bite inhibition. So when you start getting into six, eight, nine months and that cat’s lived alone all of those months, it can be very difficult to introduce a new kitty because their instinct is oftentimes to be aggressive towards that cat. They don’t know how to cat. Now there’s exceptions to every rule, right? I mean, there’s totally exceptions to this rule but as a whole, the older the cat gets and the longer they’re raised as a “only child,” the harder it can be to ever bring in another cat. So, it’s not too late at three to four months. I would give it a whirl and I would get another male.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Okay. Tell me about that a little bit. Why do you say another male, I mean, if I’m going to neuter and spay both cats?

Ingrid Johnson:

Yeah. Male cats like to engage in physical rough house play really well into their teens. And again, while there’s exceptions to every rule, you get a little female kitten, she’s going to give him a run for his money for a while. But once they hit two to three years of age and they’re in social maturity, she’s going to be a like, “Really rather sit and watch the birds out the window and play with the feline flyer. We’re not wrestling anymore. That’s dumb,” so the physical rough house starts to subside more in the females. Doesn’t mean she can’t hold her own with him, but she’s just not going to give him as much of a run for his money as another boy would for 15 years.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah. No, my wife and I had that dynamic. I get that. All right. What else? I get that. That’s been my experience as well.

Ingrid Johnson:

Crosses many species.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah, so that’s number one, is another cat. Moving on, number two.

Ingrid Johnson:

Moving on to they don’t want another cat.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Right. So yeah, I don’t know. Honestly, I think you make a good value proposition. Especially at three months of age, that seems pretty reasonable to put forward, but whether she takes it or whether she doesn’t, I’m assuming there’s probably some other things I want to start to unpack as well.

Ingrid Johnson:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, we do have to make sure that we are reserving our hands and feet only for affection. A lot of people have created this behavior because when they’re six weeks, it’s super cute when they are ferocious little adorable fuzzballs attacking your hands. But as this client and many others may start learning, they are carnivores with sharp teeth and claws and when they’re 12 pounds and don’t know when too much is enough, then it really hurts. So, it’s really, really, really important that we focus on a lot of interactive play here and reserve hands for only affection. And I will say, and this is pretty difficult homework assignment when you’ve got a baby, and this is probably my second least favorite homework assignment to recommend. I have clients stop touching their cat for a couple of weeks. They can train. They can play. They can use their food puzzles. They can do all kinds of fun activities with their cat, but no petting. And when they start to introduce petting again, we’re going to just stick to the head, neck, cheek and chin, and we’re going to only give them a couple little scratches and strokes and immediately stop and always leave them longing for more affection so we don’t push them to the point where they roll over and grab our forearm and bunny kick our forearm.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Gotcha. Okay, I had to sit with that. I don’t know that I, as a full grown man, have the willpower to not… I was like, “Wow.”

Ingrid Johnson:

[inaudible 00:08:33].

Dr. Andy Roark:

I know. I love to pet a kitten. But no, it makes some sense. Okay, cool. That definitely makes sense. I really like the idea of reserving hands for affection. Yeah, that definitely does make some sense. I imagine in practice, once you come up with some workarounds and you have some things to play with them, you know what I mean? Some toys, if you’re doing things like that, that it is feasible to do for sure. But honestly, I could a hundred percent. Now for the client that I’m talking about, this seems very reasonable. You know what I mean? Because she’s not a rowdy cat owner. She wants a little companion. And I think that that is something. She might jump at the chance to be like, “Yep, sounds great. I’m on board. I’m just going to do some head petting and that will be that.” So, okay, I do like that a lot.

Dr. Andy Roark:

So we’ve talked about getting another kitten, reserving hands. We’ve talked about using toys and things like that and again, just starting to reintroduce petting to make sure that everybody’s on the same page, yeah. What else?

Ingrid Johnson:

And again, I mean, this is a predatory behavior, right? So this is just cats being cats, practicing how to be a grown up cat. So, that means just amplifying these suggestions times a hundred. So, getting on a play and feed schedule would be really important so we get an outlet for predatory aggression prior to a meal, our “kill.” So playing before you feed, really important. I feel like we talk about that almost every time we chat, but that’s okay because everyone needs to [inaudible 00:10:07].

Dr. Andy Roark:

But it’s good and people need to hear it and honestly, I need to keep hearing it because it’s one of those things that diffuses out of my brain over time. But yeah, it makes a ton of sense and it’s just a good recommendation [inaudible 00:10:20].

Dr. Andy Roark:

Hey guys, I just want to jump in with one quick update, something I want to put on your radar. On December the 12th, we are doing our last Uncharted workshop of the year. It’s called It’s All Fun and Games, How to Play, Engage, and Reward Your Team. And if you hear that and you’re like, “Oh man, I would like to play, engage and reward my team. That sounds like a fun thing for me to do at the end of the year. I would like to have that positivity in my practice right now. I would like people to be happy at work and to feel like we want to take care of them. That’s what I want.” Well then guys, don’t miss this workshop. It is coming up fast so you’re going to have to jump on it. Like I said, it’s December the 12th. It is from 4:00 to 6:00 PM Eastern time, 1:00 to 3:00 PM Pacific time. It is free to Uncharted members. It is $99 to the public.

Dr. Andy Roark:

If you’re looking at your CE budget and you’re like, “I got some money left in my CE budget,” you should be an Uncharted member. You should. I mean, duh, you should be an Uncharted member. You should go ahead and get your membership and then come to this for free. And it’s going to be great. Guys, Uncharted really is a smoother, simpler, faster, better way to run your practice and run your career. You are the average of the people you spend time with. Come and spend time with us. This is going to be a fantastic year coming up. You should be a part of it. Unchartedvet.com. I’ll put a link in the show notes. Now, let’s give back into this episode.

Ingrid Johnson:

And then I think we have to really focus here on interrupting and redirecting the behavior. And sometimes we don’t have to do much to interrupt the behavior. We could simply just redirect, but that means we have to set ourselves up for success all over the home. And so the families have to equip themselves with interactive wand toys or some of those nice long kick pillows. If you guys are familiar with kick pillows, they basically serve the purpose of the forearm that the kitties, grabbing and kicking. When cats kick that forearm, what they’re doing is mimicking eviscerating their prey. We call it bunny kicking for a reason, right? They catch a rabbit. It’s a rather elongated body and they have to kick the stomach of the rabbit and slice it open. And then boom, now we have our meal prepared for us. So they’re just-

Dr. Andy Roark:

That’s not at all why I thought it was called bunny kicking. I thought it was called of bunny kicking because bunnies kick with both feet as they run happily through the field in the sunshine amongst the flowers, Ingrid, not because their guts are being torn out for a meal.

Ingrid Johnson:

Well [crosstalk 00:12:48]-

Dr. Andy Roark:

In your horror world, that’s what it’s called bunny kicking for.

Ingrid Johnson:

Are we going to wait to air this for next Halloween?

Dr. Andy Roark:

Exactly, we’re going to hold on to this now for a year. Okay, so first of all, I’m going to have to google bunny kicking [crosstalk 00:13:03].

Ingrid Johnson:

Okay, maybe some of it is about bunnies jumping through fields.

Dr. Andy Roark:

I don’t know. I’m like, “God, I feel naive. I feel like my rosy world view is a lie right now,” is what I think. Okay, [crosstalk 00:13:14] Kick pillows, I love it. I’m sorry. I did not mean to derail us with that but I was reeling. So, okay. So kick pillows, I do love it. I mean that makes a ton of sense, to give them other things to attack on.

Ingrid Johnson:

Yeah [crosstalk 00:13:28] insert appropriate.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah, totally. Let me make some suggestions and you tell me. You give me a thumbs or thumbs down. It seems like probably when we talk about puppies as well, a variety of toys are good to have, different toys for different purposes, different needs that they have. Then also, probably each individual is going to have types of toys that they tend to like and resonate with. Is that true?

Ingrid Johnson:

Absolutely, 100%. Cats can be very predatory, prey-specific. And so they might only like birds and they might only like things that fly. They might only like snakes things, things that slither and they want to play with strings and shoelaces but they might be non-discerning and just go for everything you get. But I think we all have to accept. For some reason, people don’t accept this as much with cat toys as with dog toys. You’re going to waste some money on some stuff the cat’s not going to be more motivated to chase and that’s okay.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yes, we see that a lot, too. People are like, “I got her toys and she just didn’t do anything so I stopped buying them.” And I’m like, “I need you to go back to the store.”

Ingrid Johnson:

Yeah, exactly. You just haven’t found the thing yet that gets them going. And also we need to learn how to play with our cats. We’ve got to evoke that prey drive. Move away from them, evoke chase. Hide behind the leg of a chair and writhe around in pain and scooch under some tissue paper and really give this guy a chance to pounce and kill stuff. Not just laser pointers because laser pointers offer no satisfaction, nothing tangible to kill.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Right, a lot of chasing and then no satisfaction. Can you talk me through a couple things about talking to pet owners about interruption and redirection? And I feel like the stakes are a little bit high here because I think that people can grab onto interrupting and redirecting and make this a traumatic experience for the cat. And correct me if you don’t think I’m right, but in my experience, I’ve had concerns in the last couple of years of like, “Oh man, I think people get a little carried away with this,” or they end up making the cat really frustrated or evoking bad behaviors through their attempt to interrupt. Can you help me to coach people with that?

Ingrid Johnson:

Well, what we want to do is not instill fear. So, I once learned from another behaviorist and I’ll snag it and reiterate it here. We want a yuck response. So if we do something to correct a behavior or stop a behavior and they run a [inaudible 00:15:51] for three hours, we’ve instilled fear and that cat might now start to fear us and we’re not fixing anything. We’re just terrifying them.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Right, it sounds like we’re creating more problems. We get some anxious behaviors, litter box problems, things like that. That’s exactly what I’m not-

Ingrid Johnson:

Exactly. And I’m not a fan of the water bottles, but just as an example, some cats, you spray them with water and batting at the stream. They could care less. Well, that’s just play so you’re also not doing anything effective there. So punishment really isn’t effective for most species most of the time, right? So when we’re doing things like spraying them with air and spraying them with water or doing any of these scary things that we think are somehow scolding them or correcting them, we’re often just terrifying them and then we’re not giving them an appropriate outlet for the behavior. So people often say, “Well, why are we trying to play with them with a feather toy when they have just attacked my foot? We’re rewarding them for attacking the foot.” I’m like, “We’re not rewarding them. We’re giving them an appropriate outlet for this energy and that’s what we have to overcome.”

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah, that’s so insightful because I hear that exact thing. Is this is rewarding? And people have this justice thing about it like, “You don’t get toys when you bite me.” And I go, “We have to reframe this in your mind.” I think that’s really helpful. Awesome. That is super useful. So we’ve talked about getting another kitten, reserving hands for affection, play before feeding, timing, things like that, and then finally, interruption and distraction. I feel like this is pretty good little set of tools. Is there anything else I want to touch on?

Ingrid Johnson:

I think one of the other things I want to mention is, and I know this is really, really hard for people, but freeze and try not to react because say the kitty attacks the ankles and you pull away. Well, that’s what a prey does so we’re going to want to dig in harder. So, freeze and be so boring like a tree that we eventually just give up and walk away because the foot is no fun. And same thing with any of our body parts. If we get a little bit of a finger nibbling or anything, we want to make sure that we don’t vocalize and scream and squeal like prey.

Dr. Andy Roark:

I’m sorry. I made a face at you. I didn’t mean to. I felt myself making a face because I was imagining this tabby cat just attached to my arm and me trying to keep a straight face. And I felt my face bending into this redness of hidden pain like, “Ooh, that feels uncomfortable but I’m freezing.”

Ingrid Johnson:

I have had some people successfully booby trap themselves. They’ll wrap their arm in something yucky or one little trick is crazy, but double-sided sticky tape all over the bottoms of your pants or some rain boots or some just crappy boots that you don’t care about. And when the cat dives at your ankles, they get a whole bunch of sticky tape, which is really unpleasant. So, you got to keep the tape fresh. That’s a lot of tape on your boots and jeans.

Dr. Andy Roark:

That’s a heck of a project. When people get really inspired and you’re like, “How much time did you spend on this project?” And they’re like, “Way too much.” That’s this. That’s sticky tape pants.

Ingrid Johnson:

Yeah, that’s pretty creative but we try not to have to get there. And if you just get two kittens, oftentimes you don’t have this problem.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah, you know what? Coming all the way back around the end. I’m like, “Yeah, two kittens sounds a whole lot more reasonable now than…” It’s like, “I think this might be what you need.” That’s awesome.

Ingrid Johnson:

Honestly, we feel so strongly about it at our office. I mean, we talk to everybody that walks in the door with a single kitten that they need another kitten. They’re social species. They should have friends. They don’t usually get to go outside like dogs, so they need a buddy. And if you don’t want to get two, get an adult that hates other cats. We’ve got to stop the cycle.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Yeah, gotcha. I love it. No, I think that’s fantastic, Ingrid. Thank you so much. I got a lot to think about that. It’s really good advice for me to able to give to my client. And man, I always appreciate your insight. Where can people find you? I know you’re doing some lecturing out in the world these days, which I think is super great because I love when you get to lecture. You are amazing and you help people and you have a ton of insight. Where can people find you? Where can they learn more?

Ingrid Johnson:

So many places. So, fundamentallyfeline.com and I offer behavior consults, medicating consults and vertical space design consults, so feel free to utilize us however they’d like. And of course Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. And occasionally you might see me lecturing for, I don’t know, a couple random companies, Royal Canin, et cetera.

Dr. Andy Roark:

Good deal. Awesome. Thanks for being here.

Ingrid Johnson:

Thank you.

Dr. Andy Roark:

And that is our episode. Guys, I hope you enjoyed. I hope you something out of it. I always enjoy having Ingrid on. She’s great and she gives super practical, to-the-point advice that I find myself using in the exam room, so thank you to Ingrid, again, for being here. Guys, check her out at fundamentallyfeline.com. I put links to all her stuff down in the show notes and in her bio, so have a look at that. Guys, if you did enjoy it, if you got something out of it, leave me an honest review wherever you get podcasts. It really does mean a lot. It lets me know what kinds of episodes you guys like to hear and it’s how people find the show. So anyway, guys, we’re in the holiday season. I hope you’re having a great one. Guys, take care. Be well. I’ll talk to you soon. Bye.

Filed Under: Podcast Tagged With: Wellness

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