013-Dedication Transcript

DEDICATION: PURSUING GOALS WITH RESILIENCE GUEST: APRIL KUNG, DVM

[00:00:00] Colleen Pelar: Welcome back, everyone. My guest today is April Kung, a veterinarian and author, who is more commonly known as Dr. K. Dr. K is working on an eight-part series of books called On Being a Veterinarian. The first three books in the series are available now. I loved book one of the On Being a Veterinarian series, What to Expect and How to Prepare. In it, Dr. K clearly addresses the emotional challenges of working with animals and with the people who love the animals. I invited her to join us on Unleashed at work and home today to talk about dedication, specifically how pursuing resilience skills requires the same kind of focus and dedication as academic achievement or a dog desperately trying to get the last bit of peanut butter out of a Kong. Welcome, Dr. K.

April Kung, DVM: Thank you.

Colleen Pelar: Can you tell us what inspired you to write your books?

April Kung, DVM: Well, it was my own personal experiences coming out of veterinary school, [00:01:00] and uh finding that being a veterinarian was not exactly what I expected it to be and struggling for several years and finally telling myself, you know, I had to find a better way of being with this career than the techniques that I was using. Otherwise I wasn't gonna last and so I just started doing some research and came upon these things that I talk about in my book, and I find that they work. They are hard work, but they work.

Colleen Pelar: Well and anyone who's gone all the way through vet school, which is you know seven to nine years of higher education has done some hard work before.

April Kung, DVM: It's true. It's true, but you know what's really interesting about going through school and regardless of whether it's an undergraduate degree, or you know that school is you get a lot of external validation, so you get these external rewards that keep you going, but then when you get into the real world [00:02:00] often that external validation is not there.

April Kung, DVM: And you know you have these expectations of what is going to be oh people are going to be so grateful, all the things I'm gonna do, and that's not the case as much as we think it's going to be.

Colleen Pelar: Right. I talked to one vet who said one of her challenges is you know she will just perform a miracle on an animal and people are so so so so grateful, and they're like you're amazing and then they get the bill, and they're like, "Argh!" And she says so that joy only lasts as long as it takes him to walk to the front desk, and she said "I feel terrible because I have to charge for my services. I need to make a living here, but it's so draining all the time because even when I think like, 'yes, this is a rousing success,' sometimes I'm not getting the feedback." Like you said the external feedback of "Yay, you're fantastic." And making that last.

April Kung, DVM: Absolutely absolutely. I have a story just [00:03:00] like that. I saved a cat's life. The wife brought in her dying cat. I saved the cat, and I was so proud of myself. This was early in my career, and then the husband called up and chewed me out for how much the bill was. So no reward there.

Colleen Pelar: Yeah, that's really hard. In your book you had a some some scary statistics, actually, I thought. You mentioned only 38% of vets say they definitely choose to be a vet again if given the chance to decide again and that vets in their first five years of practice report the highest levels of psychological stress and job dissatisfaction so I think some of that is the disconnect between what we think it will be like and what it really is like. What are your thoughts on that?

April Kung, DVM: It's absolutely true and again it goes back to you know the focus and persistence and dedication are much easier to sustain when you're getting constant feedback from the world saying, "Good job. Hey, you got [00:04:00] an A on the test. You got an A on the exam." But then in the real world, when it's not there, it's much more difficult to maintain that focus and persistence and a lot of vets, I think, in the beginning, they're so overwhelmed with their new responsibilities that um they just lose track of the vision that they had for what their career was going to be and they find themselves in a completely different world than what they expected.

Colleen Pelar: So from the from the perspective of dedication, what do you think are the benefits of dedication as a behavioral trait?

Resilience strategies to combat burnout and compassion fatigue and make veterinarians, vet techs, and other animal-care professionals feel valued, acknowledged, and supported. © UNLEASHED (at work & home), LLC, 2018 | www.colleenpelar.com | Page 2 of 12 April Kung, DVM: Well, if you can sustain dedication without external validation, I think this is this is the quality of successful people. So you know when you get out into the real world and like I said before not necessarily graduating vet school, but just starting to work and the workaday world or nobody's giving you an A. The [00:05:00] people who are able to sustain focus and persistence and dedication without anybody patting them on the back or telling them they're great everyday, those are the people that tend to succeed. They're also the people who tend to be really good at delayed gratification. I don't know if you heard about the Stanford marshmallow experiment.

Colleen Pelar: Yes.

April Kung, DVM: So they left a kid alone in a room with a marshmallow and said, "if you can wait until I come back to eat this, I'll give you another marshmallow." And some of them could wait, some of them couldn't wait, but they followed up with those kids years later, and the ones who could wait uh ended up being more successful.

Colleen Pelar: Have you seen the videos of that? Have you seen the videos? Oh, they're hysterical. The children are trying everything. They're like covering it or they're holding it close and smelling the marshmallow. One child is like [00:06:00] licking it. That doesn't count, does it? But I I'm sure I would have been one of the ones who grabbed the marshmallow. You know like after a few minutes. You're just like "oh, I really want that external reward." It's hard to wait and grit is a big subjective study these days, and I think sometimes dedication and grit can be very very similar. I think dedication is an element of grit, but that whole piece of like moving toward a goal and keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going. It's hard.

April Kung, DVM: People who are good at exercising delayed gratification, they are envisioning positive future for themselves. And the vision of that future is what's driving them so when they're thinking about it, that's kind of a reward at spurring them on right, but like in the case of somebody who's going into veterinary medicine, when you get there in the vision doesn't match the vision that you've been using to drive yourself forward all that time, [00:07:00] it can be very disturbing and disorienting. Disillusioning, so which comes back to you know the things that I included in that book one--W hat to Expect and How to Prepare--so resilience, I think, building the skills to be resilient is what's going to enable you to give yourself the rewards that you deserve when the external world doesn't give them to you.

Colleen Pelar: That's very true b.Ecause you do have to give yourself the rewards and and we sort of have this idea that any of that is selfish. You know anything nice. I would do for myself. I need to be hard on myself to make sure I keep moving forward, but some of sometimes we need to be really compassionate to ourselves and really build those rewards

April Kung, DVM: I did 500 miles.

Colleen Pelar: Only 500 Miles? Huh? I think that the Appalachian Trail seems like just absolute dedication kind of stuff. I have friends who have hiked it, and and I tease them. I'm like, "why would anyone want to do it. Where is the external reward in it?" And yet everyone who hikes it seems to really love it . So what were your experiences in that in terms of dedication, like did you have to push yourself to keep going, or was it motivating enough as you went or was it minute by minute?

April Kung, DVM: It was a constant physical hardship. It was just me and my dog. It was scary as well, I had some nights when I just felt like I might be in the middle of a horror movie. But um I was in I was in transition during that time. I didn't know what I was going to do next. I'd left a career in advertising. Had no idea where I wanted to go after that [00:09:00] and uh, I just felt like, "well, maybe being out in the woods by myself will give me a chance to think and find myself again and find a new direction," so that's why I did it.

Colleen Pelar: And did it work? Is that where you found a new Direction?

April Kung, DVM: It did work. You know it worked especially in that it gave me a lot more confidence. You know when you're out in the woods by yourself, as a woman, if you have to learn how to read a map and use a compass and build a fire. Um that's a huge boost to yourself confidence. I think that's where ... I never thought that I was smart enough before that to become a veterinarian and I think that that's when I really realized hey, you know, I am capable. I can do whatever I want. And I think that that was the beginning of deciding that I wanted to be a veterinarian.

Colleen Pelar: That's awesome that me because it's a real important thing because that's one of the first questions people ask if you're considering becoming a veterinarian is you know oh, you must be really smart and that [00:10:00] pulls into that whole fixed mindset concept of either I am or I'm not. Putting yourself into that experience gave you this growth experience where you were like "I can figure things out. I've got it. I can do this." That self efficacy because Monty sure wasn't gonna start the fire for you. Yeah, that's really interesting so from a dedication point of view the benefits of dedication are that it keeps us going and keeps us moving forward. And we'll need to find our own rewards. I mean that that is a piece of it. What are the downsides of dedication? Like what

April Kung, DVM: Yeah? So if you're doing delayed gratification because of the vision that you have in your head um, and you never give yourself the rewards that you deserve, then I think the downsize are burnout, compassion fatigue, and depression [00:11:00] you know and worse. You know there's a high rate of suicide in the veterinary medicine field, and I think these are people who they're not recognizing how great they really are. Because the world isn't showing them you the appreciation that they really do deserve. The world doesn't understand what they do, doesn't understand how hard it was to save their cat. And uh they just never give themselves the rewards that the world withholds from them, and so they end up feeling hopeless and worthless. I think that's the downside of dedication.

Colleen Pelar: Yeah, you had a you had a really beautiful part that I'm going to paraphrase a little bit. I'm not paraphrasing. I cut out of the middle piece just to shorten it for the podcast, but I thought this was really nice in your book. You said, "if you are compassionate perfectionist, I can say unequivocally that you are the best person for this job, [00:12:00] but unless you can learn to accept the imperfections of practice, unless you can learn to be patient with your own shortcomings, unless you can learn to forgive yourself, unless you can learn from your mistakes without being emotionally crushed by the accumulating weight on your conscious, even though you may be the best person for the job, this isn't going to be the best job for you." And I thought that's really the piece there is that some of the people who really are the best person for the job may not have the tools to stay in the job long-term, to really thrive in the job. They can do the work, but the work eats away at them.

April Kung, DVM: It does and what you're bringing up is really interesting because there's dedication which can exist without perfectionism, and then there's perfectionism which I don't think can exist without dedication, right? I think that a lot of people who [00:13:00] end up getting into vet school and graduating with their DVM degrees are both dedicated and perfectionistic. And perfectionism is is great when you're in veterinary school because um it drives you to get A's and to learn the material, but you're learning material that you're going to be tested on from professors, and you know it's either A, B, C, or D. That's not how medicine works, right? It's A, B, C, D, and E. And maybe F. And in some cases G too, but so perfectionism works really great for people in very controlled and structured environments. But when you get into the real world especially the real world of medicine, perfectionism is a huge liability. And it's something that gets people into vet school and through vet school, and I think that that's the [00:14:00] main reason why I wrote Book One is because once you get out of vet school, you really, you really need to learn how to temper that perfectionism. It's gonna

Colleen Pelar: Have you been a perfectionist in your life? I mean is that something that you've struggled with along the way.

April Kung, DVM: Oh, yeah.

Colleen Pelar: Me too. It can just like stop you in your tracks. "If you can't be perfect, I'm not going at all."

April Kung, DVM: Sometimes don't you find yourself going throughout the day and like I don't know you just like across the room like oh "that picture is off-kilter. I need to go fix it right now." Then look at yourself like "you're crazy."

Colleen Pelar: Yes. Yeah, it's a tricky thing. Another thing I saw in your book that though I thought was interesting was in a June 2015 article in Veterinary Economics, Dr. Dean Scott wrote, "when people enter the veterinary field, we are flat-out not [00:15:00] prepared for the mental stress that the job entails. When I was a teenager, some veterinarians gave soft warnings about the job, but what I have encountered was so much more than they hinted at." And what's interesting about that to me is I was a teenager who was going to be the vet. I was the dog crazy kid and everyone said, "what are you going to be when you grow up?" "I'm gonna be a vet," and it was a veterinarian, who I probably caught on a really bad day because I was volunteering in his vet clinic, and he sat me down and gave me the most depressing conversation, and and I left going "I'm never going to be a vet" and just to read that line about that there was some warnings, but I couldn't really understand what it really meant and how common that must be for veterinary students is to have a rosy ideal of you know what practice actually is like and then not not fully seeing the emotional demands. I mean this is someone's beloved pet, a member of their family, and [00:16:00] of course with animals short lives, you're helping them through the entire life span multiple times, and it's so draining. Whereas human doctors at least our hope is that most of your patients are going to last longer. Animal doctors, that's really hard.

April Kung, DVM: I mean the short life spans of our dogs and cats it's something that continues to sadden me because I've had so many and uh each been just very good friends. You know I miss them still.

Colleen Pelar: Yeah, and then as a vet you're playing a role in the passing for family after family after family of their family members, which is a really valuable service, and such a

April Kung, DVM: What do I say to them? If you I mean, I totally empathize with the idea that you're too busy, and you don't have time for it because I was there myself and that is a road that leads to a very unhappy place. Unhappy and unfulfilled place. I think we're here once. We have one life on this planet. We're lucky enough to live in a country where it is actually within our control to choose a positive or negative road for our own lives, and if you are not I don't believe that it's true. It's not true that you can't find time. You can. We all have the same amount of time. And some people find the time. So that excuse just doesn't fly with me. You're making a choice. For whatever reason you're making that choice, but it's the wrong choice.

Colleen Pelar: It is, [00:18:00] it is. It's hard though when when people it's that whole oxygen-mask theory. You know you just feel like "I have to save all of them" and the short- term strategy of like "I have to put my efforts elsewhere," and you become sort of martyred. You often see that where people are like "I can't take a break because they need me" and you think "oh, no, no, you're driving toward the cliff."

April Kung, DVM: Yeah, there's a lot of martyrdom in veterinary medicine, and I totally understand it, but um you know there was a vet that I was talkin to on Facebook, and she was saying she had gotten to that point where she was completely depleted because she hadn't been taking care of herself. She'd been giving every every ounce of her energy and love away. And she had nothing left, and she was suicidal. She was thinking, "Why am I here? I don't want to be here anymore. I should just end it." And I said to her, "Okay. [00:19:00] Well. You know you want so much to do good. If you end your life, you will never do good again. Whereas if you stay and learn how to take care of yourself, you will continue to do good." I think a lot of times, we need to allow ourselves to be much smaller than than what we want to be. We don't have to be the hero to the entire world. What's wrong with being small? Taking pride in like making the grocery cashier smile. Or giving their dogs a single happy day. Why is that not good enough? So allowing ourselves to be smaller and realizing that we cannot be all things to all people. We cannot be the world's hero. We can't and we never will so just allow yourself to be small. You're just a speck on the planet you know and it's okay to take care of yourself.

Colleen Pelar: I love that way of looking at it because I I [00:20:00] do think, and particularly in American culture, there's a be all you can be mentality, but it's those little things that make up life. It is the smile at the grocery store person and you've made that person's day better. You've made your day better by that experience. And same with the

Resilience strategies to combat burnout and compassion fatigue and make veterinarians, vet techs, and other animal-care professionals feel valued, acknowledged, and supported. © UNLEASHED (at work & home), LLC, 2018 | www.colleenpelar.com | Page 7 of 12 dog. You gave your dog a really happy day. Odds are that felt pretty good to you too, so as you mentioned in the book, A lot of the best strategies for dealing with stress things like deep breathing and gratitude, meditation, and exercise they can come across sounding glib or trite to somebody who's kind of at the end of their rope. So what can help people shift that perspective? What what suggestions do you have for that?

April Kung, DVM: I don't know if this will work for everybody, but this is what worked for me because all of those things did sound glib and flippant to me. Yeah.

Colleen Pelar: Breathe.

April Kung, DVM: Crystals and incense, great. But the research that I did to write this [00:21:00] book was um the material came out of scientific journals, and so it all comes down to for me. What incentivized to try these things in earnest was understanding why they work, in terms of how the brain works. That's what was really exciting to me like oh, there's scientific evidence on why this works. It's not fluffy, hoo-hoo fairy tale, fairy dust. You know this is based on functional MRIs, and it's based on evolutionary theory. Why, why do we tend to interpret things in a negative way? Because in the past when we lived in the jungles and tigers and lions and things that wanted to eat us, focusing on the negative gave us a survival benefit. That part of our brain thinks we're still living there in the jungle so it really [00:22:00] um we have to use the more recently evolved part of our brain to tell the older, more reactive part of our brain, "Hey, it's okay. There's no lion, there's no tiger. It's okay, let's have a cup of coffee.

Colleen Pelar: Yeah building in that time between the stimulus and the response, but it is interesting how our brains are so wired for negativity. In fact this weekend, I was out with some friends, and I had texted my husband earlier in the day, and I don't even remember what I texted him--oh it was a photo--and he texted back several hours later. So my phone vibrates and just on the home screen it says "mice" with an exclamation point and immediately I'm like "oh my gosh, there are mice in our house." And then another text pops up "Oops. I meant nice" about the photo, and I'm like, "Too late, my limbic system has been hijacked." He was like, "What do you mean? Why would you jump to the conclusion?" Like because 12 years ago, we [00:23:00] had mice in the basement, like four, but it doesn't matter my brain still thinks when I go in the basement, "I hope there aren't mice,"

April Kung, DVM: What a great example.

Colleen Pelar: And it's I was totally like there's mice in my house.

Colleen Pelar: Totally, and it happened so fast before you I mean there's no like oh, I'm going to get upset because apparently my house has mice. No. I was totally taken away.

April Kung, DVM: Yeah, yeah. So the practice is in this book actually they do allow you to create a space between stimulus and response and that is that's where magic happens. I've seen people who have a really big space between stimulus and response, and I am in awe of that. Those people are in [00:24:00] total control of their lives their emotions, thoughts, amazing, and I've always wondered I always thought all they must have been born that way. I wasn't born that way you know, but, and it's true I think some people are born that way, but to those of us who are not lucky enough to be born that way there are actually things we can do to train our brains to be less reactive.

Colleen Pelar: Yeah, resilience is a skill set and a mindset that can be learned and it can be. Some of us may have a head start, but I think all of us can learn it, and it's an interesting thing because those people too, we're drawn to them. You know almost everyone is drawn to people like that and we think wow they're so amazing and it's really just that they are sort of open and calm and relaxed and kind of accepting of "you do what you need to do, and I'll do what I need to do" and and that's not how the rest of us are we're all running around going now, "You're in my way! Move! Need to get things done." [00:25:00]

April Kung, DVM: I heard of this quote and it's sort of a secondhand quote so unfortunately I don't know who said it, but allegedly it was a monk, but he said um the key to happiness is learning how to say yes to everything. It doesn't mean we accept it or that we're not going to strive to change it um but to allow it to happen and to just realize this is reality. This is what's happening. And instead of just reacting against it, we can be calm and accept it and then try to change it, but I like that say yes to everything.

Colleen Pelar: Yeah, in theory. And then in practice it's so uncomfortable that we have to learn to like it there too because of the negativity bias.

April Kung, DVM: Yeah, the negativity bias, but that brings us back to the subject. You know really fascinating subject that you wanted to discuss which is dedication and dedication to building the skills of [00:26:00] resilience. It's kind of like you know exercising your body too. Like anybody really want to get on the treadmill. No, I don't think so. I don't. see you know I do it every day and every day I'm ugh. But afterwards I feel wonderful. I feel glad that I did it. I think it's the same thing with these these exercises is taking care of our mind, so being dedicated to doing these things um despite the fact that

Resilience strategies to combat burnout and compassion fatigue and make veterinarians, vet techs, and other animal-care professionals feel valued, acknowledged, and supported. © UNLEASHED (at work & home), LLC, 2018 | www.colleenpelar.com | Page 9 of 12 there may not be an immediate reward, but I think if we can hold the vision of ourselves in the future as somebody who has that presence of mind, somebody who's going to be less reactive, and somebody who's going to be able to um be happy even when the rest of the world isn't telling us that we're great. If we can hold that vision in our mind and perhaps we'll be able to muster the dedication that we need to learn to become good at these skills.

Colleen Pelar: It's the simple, but not easy, but I [00:27:00] think if we focus again on on being smaller. You know like focusing on doing what I can do and what can really make a difference in my life today and build out from there. I think that will really start to change things for lots of people.

April Kung, DVM: I hope so.

Colleen Pelar: I hope so too.

April Kung, DVM: You know, what you said earlier about Dr. Dean Scott, I actually interviewed him for my podcast. He's so wonderful. But um I want to make it clear that I am not trying to dissuade people from becoming veterinarians. People who become veterinarians are called to become veterinarians. And I don't think there really is any dissuading them. Yeah, 30 years ago. I think there were different reasons for becoming a veterinarian. People became a veterinarian because it was a good way to make a living and it was a great way. You could open your own practice and become you know very financially successful, but that's not why people are [00:28:00] becoming veterinarians these days. So you can't talk them out of something that they're called to do, but they feel called to do. I really, really, really want to help them be prepared for the reality of this career because once they step from veterinary school into practice one of two things are going to happen. They're going to get hit by a freight train and knocked over and once you get knocked over, it's very difficult to be proactive. Or they're going to be emotionally and mentally prepared in advance for what it's really going to be like and they're going to have the tools that they need to manage that early part of their career where they are going to be making mistakes, most of their mistakes, where they are not going to know everything, where translating what they've learned in that's goal into actual clinical practice is going to be a huge challenge for the first several years. If they have the tools that they need to manage their emotions through that period then at the end of you know the [00:29:00] five years or whatever it takes until you feel like "Okay, I can do this."

Colleen Pelar: “I really am a vet.”

Colleen Pelar: Which I think is is why your book series is eight parts. I mean, I think that whole idea that it is a multi-layered process of figuring out all of the tools that they need to really make it through and um I'm not going to read all eight because that will drive everyone crazy, but the idea of you know what to expect and how to prepare; really focusing on what to get out of vet school; recognizing some of the boundaries you know competence, caring, and caring too much; and and being aware the financial pieces, and I think some of those are pieces that people don't learn so much in vet schoo.L like how to deal with the financial aspects of it and the emotional aspects of it seemed [00:30:00] extraneous to the how do I take care of this animal's body? Well, it's not relevant. How do I take care of my emotions while I take care of this animal's body or how do I take care of my finances while I take care of this animal's body and yet and yet um all of these pieces are really going to make a difference in in vet students being able to thrive so I think that you're going to just make such a big difference with the work that you're doing.

April Kung, DVM: I hope so. I mean the way I see it, you know once you get in and you get bowled over by that freight train through no longer in a position to come up with the solutions, so my hope is that all of these kids that want to be veterinarians to talk to them before they even get to vet school, while they're in vet school, because they're the future of veterinary medicine, and they are going to come up with the solutions and the broader their perspectives um and the more better prepared they are emotionally and psychologically, the more likely they are going [00:31:00] to be able to come up with the solutions that we need.

Colleen Pelar: Yeah, I think that's that's wonderful, and I think that because this is slow practice, it takes some time to do it. If they can be learning these skills now as they go through school, they'll be that much further along by the time they start practicing that they will really be able to use it. One of my favorite questions to ask people in my podcast is if your dog could talk, how would he describe you and you mentioned that you have three dogs, but your dog who's a real character is a mutt named Leonard, so how would Leonard describe you, Dr. K?

April Kung, DVM: Leonard would say that I am the best thing that ever happened to him. He was a sad dog when we got him from the shelter, and he's a very very happy dog now.

April Kung, DVM: Probably the easiest thing to do is just get online and go to my website, which is www.reallize.vet.

Colleen Pelar: Wonderful. I will put a link in the show notes. So we'll wrap up here. Yes, working with animals is emotionally draining. You're likely to experience burnout or compassion fatigue and nobody wants that to happen. So if you're ready to take some baby steps toward greater resilience why not go to my website and download the free pdf 10 ways to recharge when you don't have time to take a break. It's at www.colleenpelar.com/10tips. Thanks so much Dr. K. Oh, thank you. It was a lot of fun, Colleen.