Are you living the life of balance and wellbeing that you dreamed of living? If you answered anything less than “Absolutely,” then you must read on!
Is there a major relationship between poor wellbeing for veterinary professionals and the level of self-belief veterinary professionals have for themselves?
The first step to creating a life of wellbeing is to first make a life-long commitment to pursue a life of wellbeing.
The second step is to cultivate self-belief that you can actually manifest the life of balance and wellbeing that you have committed to creating.
Do you really believe in yourself?
C’mon! Be for real.
Do you really believe in yourself?
Maybe you do. Maybe you don’t.
In this article, it is my aim to convince you that you should absolutely believe in yourself to create the life that you want to live because, in fact, you can!
But first, let’s define self-belief.
Self-belief is the ability to believe in yourself to accomplish any task no matter the odds, no matter the difficulty, no matter the adversity. It’s the belief that you can accomplish it.
You may need to develop tools, skills, strategies, and support in order to accomplish the task, but an individual with true and healthy self-belief knows that he or she can get a job done if they persist and continuously work at a thing!
It’s time we – as veterinary professionals – cultivate self-belief in ourselves to achieve lives of balance and wellbeing!
If You’re Reading These Words, You Don’t Need Any Further Proof
If you’re a veterinarian, allow me to share with you why you are awesome.
If you’re in the category of veterinary support staff, then you need to read “5 Reasons Vet Techs and Vet Support Staff Rock”, which is an article that exists in my brain at the moment, but will likely exist on paper soon! So join the Get MotiVETed community to be notified of all new videos and articles!
As a veterinarian, speaker and a personal development coach, I LOVE working with veterinarians and other veterinary professionals! It is so easy to provide a space for veterinarians to be empowered to believe in themselves because they have the ability to create a goal in their minds and then work relentlessly and emphatically until they achieve that goal!
Hear me when I say this: You are the cream of the crop! How do I know?
For starters, I’m on the admissions committee of a prestigious veterinary school, and I see the types of applications you had to beat to get in. Therefore, I know you were sharp even before you became a veterinarian!
More importantly, do you remember what it was like to get to where you are now?
Do you remember what the application process was like?
Do you remember all of the hoops you had to jump through?
Do you remember all of the hours of veterinary experience and animal experience you had to get?
Do you remember the grades you had to maintain (organic chemistry… ugh)?
After you got accepted into veterinary school, it got even more challenging!
Do you remember the late nights studying anatomy and physiology?
Do you remember your first time trying to do a ventral midline incision?
Do you remember the chaos of 4th year clinics?
Do you remember the clinician that was put in fourth year to make every student’s life a living HELL by unnecessarily scaring the crap of them?
Do you remember the hard work you had to put in to pass your boards?
These are all obstacles that you overcame if you have the letters D.V.M. or V.M.D. behind your name.
You set your eye on your goal and target to get in veterinary school, and you absolutely crushed it! You rocked it!
You got accepted into veterinary school, and then you set a goal to make it through veterinary school, and it’s no surprise that you crushed it again, and made it through! And you could officially shout:
“Look mom! I’m a veterinarian now! Yay!“
And then… the following happened plus or minus a few other life challenges:
1. Student Loan Debt plus or minus other debts. Hopefully, you didn’t go and buy a house and car that were more than you could afford. Better yet, hopefully you didn’t do like me and go marry another vet that had even more student loan debt than you did!
2. You ended up at a new grad mill — And you thought your job as a veterinarian was going to be fun? Muhahahahaha! You were bamboozled!
3. You got married to Prince/Princess Charming — And now they’re just Prince/Princess Misbehaving that gave you three amazing little angel kids — Well you know what they say: Men are from Venus. Women are from Mars. And Children are from Hell… just kidding! I have a lovely little 3-year old girl and another girl who will be joining us in November! I think my little girls are truly angels. I digress…
4. You don’t like your body image anymore — one too many beers for dad vets. One too many pregnancies for mom vets, and now you both hate your midsections, even though you are perfect the way you are! Side Note: I love the Moms with a D.V.M. group! You all support each other so well. My wife absolutely loves that group!
5. You are looking forward to the day you retire, which is a huge red flag, by the way. If you can’t wait to retire, click here!
6. You look forward to a daily bash fest — Between the difficult clients, difficult patients, difficult cases, difficult boss, difficult practice manager, difficult co-workers, etc., you have no choice but to have a bash fest about all of the things that are going wrong in your current situation.
If you have all (or some) of these things going on for you, fear not! Worry not! I believe that a lack of self-belief is the ultimate reason for all of your personal and professional riddles. And the remainder of this article is designed to help empower you to believe in yourself!
How do you know if your self-belief needs a depomedrol injection?
If you are living a life that is anything less than a life of wellbeing and complete happiness, then you may need a self-belief boost! If you truly believed in yourself, you wouldn’t allow yourself to live a life that’s anything short of a life of your dreams!
Try to follow the diagrams and words below. Any person who really understands the words to follow will be close to mastering life by cultivating unlimited self-belief.
How Self-Belief is Created
Your life can be summarized by the positive things that have happened in your life and by the negative things that have happened in your life. We’ll call them good experiences and bad experiences for simplicity. We all have them, and no one is exempt from these happenings in life.
The good experiences in life serve to boost an individual’s self-belief, and the bad experiences naturally take away from an individual’s self-belief. Every time we fail, we tend to believe in ourselves a little less. Thus, a person who has failed many many times will tend to believe in themselves less than the person who has won many many times. Fairly simple concept, wouldn’t you agree?
However, according to the diagram above, and especially in the culture of perfectionism that we see nowadays, we tend to allow the bad experiences in life to affect us far more (characterized by the weighted red arrow) than we allow the good experiences to build us up (skinny purple arrow).
Ultimately, allowing the bad experiences in life to stick around and linger in life leads us to having a very limited self-belief. Things that happened to us in our elementary school days can have a negative effect on our self-belief in our adult years. As a personal development and success coach for the veterinary community, I see this very frequently.
In other words, you can do 1000 spays and neuters correctly, and then turn around and make a big mistake on 1 spay, and you will beat yourself up on the 1 spay as opposed to increasing your belief in yourself because you did 1000 surgeries correctly!
The 1 negative spay will carry FAR GREATER weight than the 1000 good. Kinda sucks, but that’s how we tend to be.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could simply end all of the bad experiences in life? What if we could make the whole ‘bad experiences’ box disappear?
While it may seem like a good idea to remove the bad experiences of life, it’s actually the worst thing you could do!
Here’s why.
Maximize Your Self-Belief with Gratitude and Higher Viewpoints
Now, here is where we start to separate the girls from women and the men from the boys!
The truth about life is that both the good experiences and the bad experiences in life are designed to help us to grow in life. They should both be contributing to our self-belief and continuous advancement!
However, we have so many individuals who don’t understand this concept, and we have so many people who are uninformed as to how to treat other humans that we see a lot of emotional trauma caused out of ignorance.
Think about the parent who tells their child that they are stupid and will never amount to anything. Or the coach that calls his athletes lazy and fat even though they are giving it their best. Or the spouse who constantly and condescendingly discourages and criticizes his/her spouse. Even though these are just words, they can stick around for an entire lifetime and cause mountains of hurt and make the recipient of these words decrease in self-belief.
It is imperative that you understand the image above! In the image above, we can some new arrows:
Fat Blue Arrow with Gratitude and Higher Viewpoints Inside — If you want to have success in life, YOU MUST add higher viewpoints and gratitude to your wellbeing toolbox! Gratitude to me means turning your expectations into appreciation and being grateful for EVERYTHING that has ever happened to you. Tony Robbins says, “Life is always happening FOR YOU, not TO YOU.” That phrase has stuck with me since I heard it a couple of years ago.
In regards to higher viewpoints, we are simply talking about your perspective. Do you see the glass as half full or half empty. Do you see the advantages in the disadvantages? Do you see the opportunity hidden deep within every moment of chaos that you face in life? do you see people as bad or do you see them as off of the track? Are the difficulties you encounter each day truly negative life experiences, or are you looking at the experiences with an incorrect mental attitude?
By using gratitude and higher viewpoints, you can turn any bad life experience into an empowering experience. This process is represented by the upward yellow arrow.
The bad experience happens and affects you (red arrow). Because you operate from higher viewpoints and an attitude of gratitude, you turn the bad experiences good!
The horizontal yellow arrow is representative of the bad experience now going into the good experience category and ultimately leads you to have MORE good things that have happened to you, which will build up your self-belief (characterized by the slightly thicker purple arrow and slightly thicker black arrow)!
But wait, there’s more!
Remove “Bad Experiences” From Your Life and Add Growth Opportunities
Earlier in the article, I mentioned that we want to ‘keep’ the ‘bad’ experiences in life around as opposed to just never having life challenges. It’s not that I want you to have tragedy and trauma in your life; rather, I fully understand that any ‘bad’ thing that happens was meant to help you and not hurt you.
The more traumatic the event, the more difficult it is to see the truth. The truth is that something good is supposed to come from every apparently negative life experience.
“The more unfortunate and painful your life has been up until now, the greater your opportunity for abundance and success moving forward. However, your unfortunate past, if not understood, appreciated, and taken advantage of, may serve as the foundation for your ruin.”
– Dr. Quincy Lee Hawley
In this newest diagram above, the red arrow is now removed altogether, because you now have the ability to see the advantage in every disadvantage IMMEDIATELY! You look at everything in life as either a good experience or a growth opportunity. When you see pain, chaos, and challenges you don’t complain, you act! You act by thinking about the advantage that you know is in there somewhere. This frame of mind will allow you to think clearly in the midst of adversity. This will allow you to be a solutions creator as opposed to a problem amplifier.
Take my word for it… the advantage is ALWAYS there! This is how I live. It has never failed me.
“Take a journey to your past to ensure a meaningful future.”
Quincy Hawley
Once you master this you become a mastermind. You will instantly send every life experience into the good category, and there will be no bad experiences holding you back. Ultimately, you will have tons of good coming into you!
Alas! You now have UNLIMITED self-belief!
What Shall You Do With this Unlimited Self-Belief?
THRIVE!
That’s all you have to do.
Live the life that you want to live. Don’t let anything stop you from making every day the newest best day of your life!
Find meaning in every single moment that you face!
As seen in the image below, living a life with unlimited self-belief allows you to truly create a life of your own design.
By living with unlimited self-belief, you can take some risks in life. You can drive your tendency to be afraid to act into a small corner.
You can literally open up a whole new world!
This cycle is never ending!
You can continue to keep jumping through the hoops of life to create the life YOU want — whatever that may look like for you!
As you go on this journey of self-belief, there is one thing you must make sure to do that could potentially derail the entire operation.
Be sure to be mindful!
You can have the best family relationships, the best job, all of the money in the world and everything you want in life, but if you fail to pay attention to the moments and what they truly mean to you, then you will end with nothing.
As veterinary professionals, we must make sure that we are living the exact lives that we want to live. We can only do this by having the self-belief that we can actually attain a life of our own design. When we combine that mindset with mindfulness, we can thrive!
We must understand that our minds are our greatest guards against poor veterinary wellbeing.
Burnout, compassion fatigue, psychological distress, depressive episodes, suicidal ideation…
All of these things tremble when standing face-to-face against a strong mind! Start with your viewpoints! Turn your expectations into appreciation with deep gratitude!
Conclusion:
Take complete control of your journey through this amazing life of abundant opportunity.
I’ll leave you with a quote, which if you understand it will revolutionize your entire life.
“Your outside world is a reflection of your inside world. What appears on the outside is what has been found on the inside… Harmony in your inside world will be reflected in your outside world by harmonious conditions, agreeable surroundings, the best of everything. It is the foundation of health and a necessary essential to all greatness, all power, all attainment, all achievement and all success.”
Charles Haanel
You… and only you control your inside world!
I hope you enjoyed this article, please consider liking it and sharing it. Also, leave a comment to let me know what you think!
