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.
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.