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. 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 1 of 12 Colleen Pelar: Yeah. 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 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 3 of 12 in and find them for ourselves when When The World Isn't providing. You mentioned [00:08:00] in the book that you hiked along the Appalachian Trail. Did you do the full trail? 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.