I recently talked to a medical director that was struggling. He was moving to a new part of the country to be closer to family, and the practice he was joining already had a medical director. My friend has taken the job as an associate veterinarian and told me he is really struggling with that.
I asked him why that was such a problem, and he said that he had worked so very hard to become a medical director and develop the skills needed for that position. Being an associate veterinarian felt like a huge step backwards.
I asked if he disliked the idea of being an associate veterinarian. He told me he was actually excited about it; he enjoys seeing appointments and helping people, and he felt the new practice would be a wonderful place to work. However, he also felt like he was giving something up or somehow falling short. It felt as though he were being forced to move backward in a significant way, and that sense of shame was deeply bothering him.
I watched a documentary a few nights ago called Viral: the Indecision on Amazon Prime. It was awful. The documentary attempted to portray an event that happened almost entirely on Twitter as a very significant moment in sports. The controversy had no actual ramifications in the sports world, and was likely missed by anyone not continuously following NBA Twitter. The entire program was hand waving about what was tweeted and the emotional experiences that various sports writers had when seeing the tweets. I really couldn’t believe how little importance this event had, and how much the people on screen seemed to think it was a big deal.
There are a lot of instances in life where we have a choice about what to make important for ourselves. Clearly this Twitter event was important to some people. I just decided it was not important to me.
We all have things that we care about that might not be important to others. Right now, for example, I’m really sweating whether or not hummingbirds are going to come to my feeders this year. This is a big deal to me, and I dramatically report the hummingbird status to my wife every morning and evening. [“They still aren’t here! Do you think they chose the neighbors over us? I bet they all stopped at Butch and Joquita’s house and didn’t even look at our yard.”] A few days ago, I saw a single blue hummingbird fly across our back porch and texted the entire extended family to let them know.
For the record, I know this behavior is extreme (but not “ridiculous,” as some folks in my house have said). The vast majority of people reading this piece have never cared where a hummingbird set up its territory. But I have chosen to make these birds into something I care about.
I personally don’t think it’s very important what kind of car I drive, what brand my clothing is, or what music I listened to before it became popular, but all of these things are clearly important to some people.
The important point in all of this is that often we forget that we can choose what is important to us. We get swept up in what other people tell us to care about, and we are influenced by what we see others fixating on. It is easy to fall into the mindset that our professional titles define who we are or determine our value as human beings. I know veterinarians who are devastated by 1-star online reviews and others who just don’t take them very seriously. I remember a vet who chose not to work at a certain practice because she didn’t like the way the building looked. I’m not saying she was wrong in her choice, but I am saying building appearance is something not everyone would choose to give a lot of thought to (unless it was extreme, of course).
Going back to the medical director who’s taking a job as an associate veterinarian, I believe having a title of medical director is only important if we want it to be. We get to choose how we look at things in practice. We can feel defeated because we don’t have the status that we’ve had in years past, or we can feel elated that we’re closer to family, proud of the work we’re doing, and relieved at not having to shoulder the responsibility we had in our previous job.
Life is not about moving onward and upward. Having a bigger title, house, or salary won’t necessarily make us happier. There’s nothing wrong with being the boss for a while and then going back to being a worker, as long as you decide that’s what you want. Taking a smaller role, whether it’s in practice, our kid’s extracurriculars, or the home owners association, doesn’t mean we don’t care. We don’t lose the skills and experiences we acquired earlier in our lives, and we can always “step up” again later on if time passes and we decide we want to do that. Also, we often find new and interesting paths when we step back that we wouldn’t have considered if we had continued “onward and upward.”
There’s so much pressure in veterinary medicine. There’s pressure around doing a good job, taking care of pets and families, supporting our team in a stressful environment, and doing the best we can with limited resources. I hate to see people adding additional stress to themselves because they have decided things are important that don’t really need to be.
My ask of you today is to think about the things you have decided are important. Do these things really matter? As you imagine looking back on your life years in the future, will these things have importance? No one in the nursing home is going to ask you what your title was in the veterinary clinic or how much money you made. No one there will ask you what type of car you drove. No one will question your grades in vet school, whether or not you let your kid watch an iPad so you could have a moment of quiet, or how available you were on your days off.
But, do you know what they will ask?
Whether or not you had humming birds. (I’m sure of it!)
