Episode 75:

 [00:00-01:00] When Everyone Needs Something From You

There is nothing more exhausting than walking out of an exam room and immediately getting bombarded by three people waiting for you with questions about cases, needing to call an owner back, prescription refills, and, one more thing apparently that needs your attention right now.

So in today's episode, I'm gonna show you behind the scenes of one of my coaching clients and how we changed this for her, why it worked, and how you can start using the same approach to feel less pulled in a million different directions. All right, guys, let's get started.

Welcome to Stop the Burnout, a podcast for veterinary professionals who love medicine but are exhausted by the people pressure, expectations, and the constant mental load that comes with it. If you've ever thought, "I shouldn't feel this drained doing something I care about," you're not alone, and you're definitely not broken.

I'm Dr. Amber Parks, a veterinarian turned stress and burnout coach, and here we talk about the stuff that no one taught us, like how to actually break the stress and burnout patterns once and for all, and how to stay in this profession without losing yourself. You won't find bubble bath, toxic positivity, or self-care fluff pretending to be the solution here.

 

[01:00-03:00] Making Vet Med Less Stressful

Let's get into it. All right. Welcome back to another episode of Stop the Burnout. We're gonna start here a little miniseries that is something I've been wanting to do, but essentially, every week I'm gonna share some of my clients' success stories and the big lessons that they learned and that came out of their journey, and also the, strategy that we developed to get them for this breakthrough, right?

To get them less stressed and healing their burnout. So my hope is that listening to this, whether we ever work together, with coaching or not, I hope that you get some tangible, actionable steps that you can start doing tomorrow to really start to break this burnout cycle for yourself. But I wanted to label this Making Vet Med Less Stressful, because ultimately, don't we all want that, right?

If we don't... If you're listening to this and you're like, "Well, I don't know if I'm really burnt out," which side note, there's a lot of people, myself included, that were very burnt out and d- didn't even know it for years. But maybe you just wanna be less stressed, and that's okay, too. So we're gonna get into this miniseries every week for the next few weeks I'm going to be sharing these stories.

But I think the real juice of this is that you will get these really awesome, actionable steps that I hope at the very least will give you another perspective of how we can look at situations. Because a lot of times when we are stressed, we tend to have tunnel vision, and we can't see options, and we see everything very much in, black and white.

And if you listened to my episode last week, I talked a lot about black and white thinking. It was more in relation to, thinking you need to leave veterinary medicine, so it overflows into everything else though, right? Because when we're in that survival mode, our ability to see options are very minimal.

 

[03:00-05:00] A Real Veterinarian in a Real, Busy Hospital

And geez, if we're already in survival mode and we're burnt out, then there's nothing worse than feeling like we're stuck or we don't have a lot of opt-options. So okay, let's get started. So this one, and I, keep my clients anonymous since the veterinary community is relatively small in comparison.

So this is a client of mine who... And you might be able to see yourself in many of these cases, too, right? She is a veterinarian That, and if you're listening to this, the, the series is geared towards veterinarians. However, there are definitely gems and pearls that you can take from this if you are just in veterinary medicine in general, whether you're a technician, you're an assistant, I think there's still a lot of value in this.

So having said that, this client of mine is a veterinarian. She works in a small animal corporate hospital. So what I want to show you is that these are real people. They're not in, these perfect hospitals that let them, do whatever makes sense for them and have a lot of autonomy. That's not the case, right?

And that's not the case for a lot of us because when we start to see examples of people that are in situations that we're in, we can start to see those possibilities So this small animal hospital is corporately owned. It's obviously very busy. They're down at least one doctor, probably more likely two given how busy they are.

And this is the type of hospital that they're doing, she's finishing up appointments, and then they're getting started. They'll do surgeries. So, like, it's just a lot of things going on at once, right? And there's a lot of moving parts. So when one part...

 

[05:00-07:00] Feeling Pulled in a Million Different Directions

Now, obviously, in coaching her, we- there's a lot of different things that we focused on, but this was a huge one, and when people start working with me, I'm always like, "All right.

We're gonna get to the deeper-rooted patterns, but let's get you some quick wins." Like, what is going on right now that is so challenging for you, right? And a lot of this, for many of us, is the day-to-day stuff. So when we really broke it down, she's like, "You know, I just feel like I'm pulled in a million different directions on a constant basis."

I'm like, "Okay. Tell me more." And she's like, "You know-" That's why I started this podcast episode with, do you ever feel like you walk out of an exam room and you feel like you're bombarded, right? There's... This used to happen to me a lot, too, where there's,, a client service representative leaning against the c- the counter waiting for you.

There's a tech who's like that other appointment we just saw is still here. I have a question." And it's just it's never-ending. So in working with my client, I was like, "Okay. What, what feels like you're pulled in a bunch of different directions?" And it was basically that scenario. She's like, "I get questions about cases from my receptionist," and she's like, "And I feel bad, like they're just doing their job, but I get frustrated."

And maybe it was a case, you know, that they saw yesterday. The client's calling the next morning. Sometimes it's a prescription request, and, "Hey, can we refill this prescription?" And she's like, "I gotta drop everything I'm doing. I don't... You know, maybe it was a patient I saw a couple months ago.

I don't remember all the specifics. I have to go back in and look it up." And she's like, "Some, many mornings," or I should say days, "I don't always get back to my desk." And then when I do get back to my desk, she's like, "Then there's notes there. And now I'm like, in my mind, I have... I know the clients I have to call back, and now I go back to my desk, and it's like a whole nother hour of work because there's notes about certain things that maybe they took a message, I was in a room, and then they left a note on my desk.

 

[07:00-09:00] Why All Those Interruptions Are So Exhausting

So now I don't know until I..." And I'm like, "Oh, I, I know this feeling." She's like, "Now I don't know until I go back to my computer," and I'm like, "What the fuck?" You know, there's a million notes and sticky notes on your computer.

I'm like, "Okay. All right. I totally get this." So what I also wanna bring in here too, which I discussed with her, is some of the neuroscience behind why this happens.

And I think when we can understand part of that, that makes it easier to look at this a little more objectively, because it is very easy to get pulled in, as I, discussed this with my coaching client. It's very easy to get pulled into the emotions behind it, and we feel annoyed that our receptionist is staring at us.

We're annoyed that, or irritable that our technician is like, "Why is this client still here? I thought you discharged them," right? And so I'm like, okay. Those emotions are just, like, icing on the cake. Not really the cake we want and not really the icing we want, but that's not-- That's what we feel, and we get frustrated, but that's not really the problem.

It's just the outcome of the problem. So what I explained to her, I was like, "Well, first of all, as far as the neuroscience goes-" This particular coaching client is not, doesn't have ADHD or neurodivergent as far as I know. I do. And when we were talking about this, I immediately for myself was like, "Okay, this is really challenging for a lot of people that are neurodivergent or are neurotypical," because this task switching, so you get out of an exam room, maybe you're like, "All right, I gotta fill this med, I have to get this client handout, I need to get an estimate for the lump removal that we're doing," right?

That's our focus when we come out of the room. Now we're bombarded by different things that all feel very urgent, and w- the hard part about that is we're just constantly task switching, and the switch itself takes a lot of cognitive load. When you're already burnt out, we don't have a lot of that.

 

[09:00-11:00] The Cognitive Cost of Task Switching

So this is why if you've ever had days where you're like, "I feel like I'm running around like a chicken with my head cut off," and you then get to the end of the day and you either, like, look at your appointment schedule and you're like, "It wasn't that busy," or, "I didn't feel like I did a lot of things, but I was, like, mentally busy," that is what is happening.

We're task switching. We're also probably taking on things that aren't our own, which I'm gonna talk about. So that is really exhausting. And then, yes, if you are, like, neurodivergent, especially ADHD, it is hard to... You can switch tasks, but then to switch back to the task in that scenario, you can't...

You might be looking at a case and trying to help a receptionist who has a question, and then after you answer her question, she leaves. You have to now go back to that appointment you were just in. You're like, "Wait a minute." And I used to do this and then forget shit, right? After the client had left.

So that is, it seems like, and I do think it's celebrated in veterinary medicine, to look at this of, like, you should multitask, you should do this. And I used to pride myself on, I can multitask. Which joke is on me, because I didn't know that I had ADHD, and maybe I could multitask, but it was very expensive for me.

And what I mean by that is it cost a lot of mental bandwidth to do that day in and day out, let alone doing it on a busy day, right? So know that It is not really to your benefit or to anyone else's, truthfully, right? This is how mistakes can happen, things get missed. So there is neuroscience behind it that even if m- the thing I always say, even if we can do it, should we be doing it?

Probably not, right? Now, a client comes, or a client, a receptionist comes back and is like, "So-and-so's on the phone, their cat can't breathe well." Okay, that, we wanna t- switch the task for that, right? That's a different story which we'll get into too. But these are things that, yes, they have to be addressed, but they're not like life or death emergency, okay?

 

[11:00-13:00] When Everything Feels Urgent

So the first thing was a problem. Second thing is, okay, I talk to her more. I'm like, "Okay let's dig a little bit deeper. What's going on? Why does this feel like so much?" Besides the fact that we're task switching, and that's a lot of cognitive load, and she's like, "Everything feels so urgent," and I can so resonate with that.

I'm like, "Okay." And she's like, "You know, the receptionist is staring at me 'cause the client's on the phone, so that feels urgent, or the prescription request because the client's waiting here, or, they have to order the medicine. They need to know if they need to order the medication," right? Like, my technician's like, "We're out of it.

Can I refill this? 'Cause if you can refill this, I gotta go tell the manager to order it and call the client." And you're like, "Ugh, okay." So w- what I, what we teased out, I'm like, "Okay, so everything feels urgent." But when we really broke it down, I'm like urgent in our context of veterinary medicine, and I think this has to be remodeled in how we look at things, but, and what the norm is.

But urgent to me, an emergency is like things are gonna die. Like, let's look at it through that lens, okay? Is that client calling about a case yesterday? Maybe it was like a vomiting dog who's eating, but he did vomit. He seems like relatively okay. Okay, he's probably not necessarily gonna die in the next hour, right?

 

[13:00-15:00] How We Train People to Treat Everything Like an Emergency

Assuming we're not loading, right? But you get what I mean. So- And a lot of this too, yes there's nuances to this and getting your receptionist really well-trained, right, to do a lot of this fielding of calls and emergencies. But anyway, I digress. So a lot of times it feels urgent because we have probably been living our life through the lens of it is urgent, right?

'Cause all those feel urgent, so what do we do and what have we been doing? Well, my coaching client has been accommodating that. So all right, the receptionist that has a question, let me dig into that, give you an answer. My technician who wants to know if they can fill this prescription, I need to get you an answer, right?

So we've trained our colleagues and coworkers that's how we work. And again, I think this isn't just you or me or my coaching client, this is vet med in general. So it can feel harder to change from that. You know, if you're like, everything feels urgent, especially if you're in that fight or flight he-he-he type of like energy all day long, it can feel really hard to be like, "Nope, I'm not gonna deal with that right now," because that's not, A, where we've been trained, and B, that's not what we have been doing.

The other thing though is that because the, some of this other neuroscience is because we've been doing it like this, the problem comes in where our brain, because we're so maxed out, is like, it takes a lot to look at this from a different perspective, come up with a different way to approach this problem, and that takes a lot of cognitive load.

We're not doing that. We're gonna just keep doing what we've been doing,

 

[15:00-18:00] How Constant Availability Becomes the Norm

and that's why a lot of times we can feel very stuck. And my coaching client, really kind of said this as well. She's like, "I just, I don't even know where to start. I'm so... I don't have time to like break this apart and figure out how to tackle it."

And I'm like, "Absolutely. That's why you got me." But just notice that it can feel that way because we've always been doing it that way. So that was really what was going on here. The other part was that the big piece, which I kinda mentioned, is we have been training people to treat us and utilize us in a certain way.

And I can speak from personal experience. I was I don't even wanna say bad or good at this, I don't know. It really didn't serve me, but I'll give you an example.

I would be Inducing a patient for surgery, a receptionist is coming back asking me questions. I'm like over there intubating, my tech is prepping, moving to surgery, I'm scrubbing in, I'm still having this conversation with my t- um, my receptionist, and then maybe I answered her question, I go into surgery, I start surgery, same receptionist comes back 10 minutes later is like, "Hey, that was all good.

Thank you for answering my questions, but now they have a question about this medicine, or this one made his stomach upset. Can we send something else home?" I'm like, "Yeah, absolutely. Hey, get me his weight and grab me a calculator." And I'm in there, in surgery doing surgery. Now, this obviously, the pet that I'm doing surgery on is my primary focus, but pet's stable, my technician is monitoring, I'm doing maybe a spay, for example.

And so I'm in there doing the surgery, and I'm like telling her like, "Okay, let's go ahead and give me his weight." Like, I'm literally walking her through the calculations and obviously using my veterinary brain to be like, "Does that dose sound right?" And like, "Okay, so let's fill that medicine. You can call the owner, tell him we're gonna try this."

Like what the fuck, okay? Because I kept telling myself that if I just do this now, then I won't have to worry about it later. Or if I do this now, then I might forget it later, and that won't be good either. But what I did was I trained, inadvertently, my colleagues and my coworkers, my receptionist in this example, that I am always available, that I can answer every question.

So that obviously takes a lot of cognitive load and ... But they never thought like, "Oh, I'll just ask her later," or, "She's in surgery." It was just like, "Nope, I'm 100% always available," right? So that is part of our challenge here because we get frustrated. Like, I would get frustrated at my r- receptionist, but why am I frustrated at them?

Because I always allow them to do that, and that is really the deeper part of what's going on here. So that's what I reflected back to my coaching client, and not that it's her fault.

 

[18:00-21:00] Not Everything Is Yours to Own

It's, in her case, this is, like, the norm of the practice, and this is the norm of a lot of practices. So why would she do anything different?

You know, they're gonna be like Dr. So-and-So lets me," like in my example, "come in and..." Dr. Parks lets me come in and ask her questions during surgery, right? Which is insane to even fathom, but you see where this is the deeper problem, and this is what we have to get into is, all right, how can we change this?

So number one was, okay, what is the primary problem? Number two, okay, but what is really going on? The third part is, okay, what are the parts that we need to solve here? Because what I showed my client in this was that, you know, some of this isn't yours to own, and I know it all feels like it's your responsibility, but it's not necessarily.

So that's number one, and the number two part of that is not everything is urgent. So what we kind of, like, pulled apart is that For some of these things, my client was like, "The receptionist would ask me a question about a case I saw the day before." Maybe the client called, had a question about the medicine or the dosing or something, and she's like, "I know that I put it in my notes, and it's in the record."

And so instead of Being like, "Okay it's in the notes, but here it is. Like, the dosing is blah, blah, blah." I was like, a lot of times we have to retrain people on how to... You know, they always say, like, treat people how you wanna be treated, but train people how to treat us. So in that example, I told her, I said, "Well, if it is in the notes, we're gonna just gently reflect back that to the client service representative," right?

We're not gonna say- And sorry, I'm using representat- client service representative and receptionist interchangeably here. But what I mean is we're not gonna say it's in the notes. Did you read them?" Nope, probably not gonna get received really well, right? So we're gonna say, "Hey, you know, like, I, I understand you have an, a question.

I'm doing this thing right now," right? 'Cause we've just made ourselves too available. So I was telling my coaching client, I'm like, "We just kind of want to reflect back to, like, what this person needs and that you'll help them, but it's not gonna be at the drop of a dime and at their beck and call." So saying things like, "Hey," I don't know, maybe the receptionist name is Sarah.

"Sarah, I know the client's on that phone. I know they have a question. I totally get it. It's gonna take me a while. I can't answer it right now. However, I know for sure that those answers are in the notes, so if you pull up and you go to the client discharge instructions, that should answer your question.

If it doesn't, come back and find me." So do you see how, like, Sarah just wants to fucking get the client off the phone, right?

 

[21:00-23:00] Redirecting Questions Without Shutting People Down

She just wants to answer the question for the client and be done with it. That is her focus. We cannot expect other people to understand what stress we're going through because, not from, like, a malicious place, but it's not their responsibility, number one.

Number two, we're assuming if they understand how stressed we are that then they'll be, they'll understand that our capacity, which isn't true. So I'm not telling Sarah, "No, I can't help you." I'm just saying, "I can't help you right now, but if you do want the answer right now, here it is." And I've done this.

You guys, I, I'm not gonna tell you to do stuff I haven't done, okay? I've done this, and it takes some time, but eventually they stop asking you questions like that. And assuming that, I know all of you, most of you listening are, like, painstakingly thorough in your medical records, especially if you're using AI now.

So those are the things to put- You're probably already putting in your discharge instructions, right? So instead of, like- "Oh, I think I remember what I put. Let me go pull up the record, go through it." You've got that other client waiting that you just came out of the exam room. Your tech from the last appointment has a que- Right?

Like, you can see how this just snowballs. So what will happen over time is they don't e- the receptionists like this, right? Because they don't even have to get up off of their desk or their chair because they can pull it up and look. So it's more efficient. The clients are happier. They get an answer faster, and the, the receptionists aren't trying to run all over the hospital to find you to answer this question.

So it does take some time, and you don't have to necessarily go talk to Management and be like, "This is a thing I'm gonna do," right? This is just a different way of handling things, and there's some nuance to this, which I'll talk a little bit about, but this, you're, there's nothing wrong. You're not telling them to go fuck off.

I can't help you, right? You gave a solution. So I want you to look at it through that lens. It might be different than what they're used to, but it's still a solution, okay? So that's number one.

 

[23:00-27:00] Building Better Prescription Workflows

The second part is, yeah, so what is or isn't urgent? Now, if a client is upset because you can't give them an answer right then and there, and maybe you saw them two months ago, now they call, they have a question, and you're like, "Oh my gosh, I don't wanna call this client back.

I'll just get on the phone and talk to them right now," you can do that. But ask yourself, "Do I have the capacity to do that right now?" And that's where things that feel urgent and things that are actually urgent are two different things. So that, that's what we have to pull apart, and that's what I did with my coaching client here of like, "Hey we need to really identify what is going to be urgent."

The other thing that was a challenge for her, too, was getting those questions about prescription requests, and there's different ways to do this, but what we instituted is, and I've seen this done a couple different ways, for things that are chronic medications that the pet is on, maybe it's like methimazole or thyroxine, and you're fine if this client refills for the next six months.

Or you put the dates. You know, like refill until whatever date. And I've seen some practices, they'll put it in as an alert, like per, you know, your initials or Dr. So-and-so, okay to refill, et cetera, et cetera, right? So that, again, this is making your technicians or your receptionist, however that works in your hospital, happy because this is less steps for them, too.

So whether that's an alert. The other thing, sometimes people will have either a technician that's in charge of looking up those RX requests. I really urge, even if you're not like a super busy hospital, have some sort of workflow for that because to have your receptionist getting calls and then having to like track you down and look at, like that is not efficient, and it doesn't help the clients, right?

Because it's not efficient, it's gonna take longer for the clients. Some of this, too, I won't go into the details, but you can like train, retrain your clients of, "Hey, RX refills, minimum 48 hours, you know, request," or something like that. So that's a whole other podcast episode, and you probably wanna get some leadership buy-in on that, too, but there are certain things that You can institute that take you as a veterinarian out of the picture.

And For my veterinarian coaching client in this case, that was what it was. There really wasn't a workflow, and so she started putting, like, an alert in or notes in, and same thing, "Hey," you know, "my technician's asking me a question. I- I'm pretty sure that there are some notes in the computer," or there's, you know, whatever practice management software you have, there's a way to, like, highlight it or you know exactly where to look for those notes to see if you can refill meds.

And so it was training the technicians of, like, "I pretty sure it's okay, but you know what? Find my notes in X, Y, and Z, and go ahead and refill, based off of that. If it says that, it was okay to refill up until last month, come find me." So it's giving people... They still have to do their job, and I'm not saying veterinarian technicians or assistants or rep- or s- you know, receptionists aren't doing their jobs, not what I'm saying, very hardworking, but sometimes they're not allowed to do that depending on the practice or the culture of the practice, and everything gets put on the veterinarians, which I think we thought that was a good idea because then we're control...

Well, a lot of us are control freaks. The problem is it just creates more work for ourselves, so we have to slowly re- release those reins a little bit in a way that feels comfortable for us, and we're training the staff to do it all the same way, and it's repeatable, okay? So those are the biggest things that we worked on.

 

[27:00-30:00] When a Client’s Reaction Makes Everything Feel Urgent

And, some of this one-offs were like... She's like, "Sometimes I'll get a call, and it's a client that I know it's gonna be a long conversation. They're really high maintenance, and they're asking a lot of questions, and I just know it feels better to, like, have the conversation now than later. So it feels urgent."

I'm like, "Okay. If you had some time and you take that, great. If you don't have any capacity to do it, do you still take that phone call?" And she's like, "Yeah, sometimes I do because I tell myself it's better just to do it now than, than to wait." And sometimes she's like, "Sometimes that particular client has called back multiple times during the day and is getting upset."

I'm like, "Okay, here's what we have to recognize. It feels urgent because we're trying to prevent the outcome of this client getting upset. Is it, if assuming your dog's not actively dying, your pet's not actively dying, and it is a legit thing that can wait," which sometimes we have to train, you know, the people, whether it's a receptionist or technician, that are talking to these clients to ask those specific questions.

"But if that pet is not actively dying-" It is not your responsibility to manage their response to things, right? So it's kind of like we can't always ge- we can't always get what we want, right? And I know some people, that just sends them over the edge. But it's the same thing of trying to, like, train people that you're not as Actively available at their beck and call.

And it, is it gonna piss people off? Yeah, probably. Are those people gonna get pissed off anyway if you don't call 'em back right away? Yeah. They're gonna be pissed off, so why not do it in a way that we're, like, retraining them? Or if they're truly that miserable and upset, they go to another practice that maybe can accommodate them or, whatever happens.

So just know that even though... Like, that's how we're not really setting, like, an emotional boundary because we're trying to manage and prevent that outcome, so we kinda gaslight ourselves into thinking it's just better if I take care of it now," when really that's not the problem. The problem is that this client thinks that you are readily available whenever they call.

So she's like, "Oh, okay. I see what you mean." And so we worked through, you know, how to say those things to the client, and sometimes it, i- I think for her it was one of those things where she couldn't get to the phone right away. Finally, when

 

[30:00-32:00] You Are Not Responsible for Managing Their Reaction

she... she's like, "I decided not to take the phone call right away.

I called the owner at the end of the day, and the owner was pissed." And her and I had talked about, like, how to handle that, and I, I really said, you know, having this conversation with the client, you just gotta set your boundaries of, "I understand you're upset, but hey, your pet wasn't actively dying. You have a question.

I'm not avai-..." Right? Like, we just "Here are the facts of the case." And so she's like, "That felt a lot better." I'm like, "We're not making shit up. We're sticking to the facts, and the client can take it or leave it. The client's response is not yours to manage." So that was hugely helpful for her, and she's like, "Now if the client calls, she knows I'm not gonna talk to her right away.

I still don't love talking to her." She's like, "But I don't feel like I have to... Like, I'm not, it's not weighing over my head all day, and then I'm, like, panicking. Now the client already knows that, 'Okay, it's gonna be the end of the day.'" I'm like, "Perfect. That's how we train people, okay? And not to necessarily be at their beck and call."

Now, side note, you don't have to do all this, but if you're fucking burnt out and you're exhausted and you feel like no one, and this is what I hear, "No one can do their job. I have to do everything," we have to retrain people, and it's not that they're bad at their job necessarily as a whole. It's just that we've taken on too much.

So people aren't gonna wake up tomorrow and say, "You know what? I think I'm going to do this different just to help out Dr. So-and-So." That's not... And it's not a malicious thing. Their brain space is not there. We're so focused on ourselves that- We can't see. Like, we're just like, "I have this job. I have to get this question answered.

I'm a technician. I need to ask my doctor this question," not like, "How can I make it easier for her?" Like, that's not necessarily other people's approach. So we have to do that. That's how we set boundaries around what is acceptable.

 

[32:00-34:00] What Changes When You Stop Owning Everything

So in all this, as a result, she's like, you know, when we first started working together, she's like, "Oh my gosh."

I'm like, "How are things going?" She's like you know, it took some time, people kinda getting acclimated to that." She's like, "But now I can do, like, appointments, and then when I have a break in the action, I do my callbacks, and I'm not walking back to my desk, getting a bunch of random fucking questions either, or notes."

Because the other thing that we worked on, too, was she's like, "Sometimes I get notes that" ... She's like, "I was in a room, so they put a note on my desk, and then I look at it," and again, it's something that someone, like a doctor doesn't necessarily have to get involved, but she was still calling those people back.

So we got really good on, like, all right, who's the best skilled person? Is this a receptionist okay to call? Is this a technician? And then having conversation with the technician, like, "Hey, I need you to call this person back. This is what we're saying," right? So you're not like, "Oh my God, these 10 notes on my desk are all those ones that I have to do," and again, I'm not saying overload your technicians. That's not what I'm saying. There's ways to do this where you're carving out more time, and s- if it feels like you're passing the buck, then something bigger needs to change sometimes.

 

[33:00-35:00] You Do Not Have to Be in Leadership to Change This

So that's a great segue into I want you to know that this veterinarian that I worked with, she, as a coaching client, she's not in leadership.

She is not o- obviously a practice owner, a medical director. Like, she's an associate. So for all of those lovely people, I was one of them, who were like, "Yeah, no, that's, this is great, but, like, I can't change things," you're not changing things. You're still ... The end result is still there. The clients get their question answered.

Meds get refilled. But we're doing it in a way that is more streamlined. You're stating your boundaries of your capacity, right? "Hey, I know you have that question. I know it's in the discharge notes from yesterday. You're talking to your receptionist. I can get that for you, but I know that this is where the answer is, so can you look there?

And if it's doesn't answer your question, come back and find me." Because the nice part about that, too, is you don't have to remember that. The onus is now back on them, of like, "If you can't find it and you can't get your answer, you need to come find me. I'm not gonna remember to go f- check in with you." So yeah, so she wasn't in leadership.

Now, some people would be like, "Well, I can't make those changes," and I would ask especially the examples that I gave in this scenario and this episode, ask yourself- Can you not do them, or have you told yourself that these aren't possible? 'Cause those are two different things. Because many times, having, stating our b- boundaries and pushing back a little bit can feel very uncomfortable, and especially if we think, "Ugh, management won't be a fan of this," or, "My medical director does not like this," or, you know, we immediately are taking those options off the table even before we've d- dive into that.

 

[35:00-36:00] Small Changes Can Improve the Whole Workflow

So some of this too I have found when I work with my coaching clients is that they start to do this, and then other people that they work with, whether it's other doctors or sometimes leadership, are like, "Wait, what are you doing? 'Cause this is better." Like, they're like, "Well, I think that we need to make this how everyone does it," because it standardizes the workflow, which is good, and it's more efficient.

So you don't necessarily have to ask for permission. It's getting comfortable. We're not jumping to, "I'm never talking to anyone on the phone again. Screw you." These are incremental changes which make it feel so much more feasible when we go to make these changes because it's not a huge jump. Because if I told you to go to work tomorrow and say no to everyone, whatever they ask you, and that you'll do it later, that's

You're not, you're gonna be like, "Yeah, that ain't gonna work." It ain't gonna work because it doesn't feel comfortable to make it work.

 

[36:00-39:00] Say No Without the Guilt

So that is actually a great segue into September 23rd, I'm doing a live masterclass. I've never done this one before, but these are the things that I see so commonly in my veterinary professional colleagues of I can't say no."

And literally the name of my masterclass is Say No Without the Guilt. So this is gonna be a live 75-minute workshop that I'm going to walk you through this really simple framework that I use and that I used with this client that I'm talking about here. But we're gonna get into a lot more detail, and by the end of it, of the 75 minutes, you'll be able to do things like this and start setting these boundaries and start saying no, but in a helpful way and not just, like, shutting people down.

And this framework, though, even after the workshop, you'll be able to just use going forward. It's, like, the only framework you really need to be able to start doing this. And yes, this is for the people that are like it's exactly why I created it, for the people that are like, "That feels really uncomfortable.

I can't say no to my manager. I can't say no to a client." I know, and I get it because in this example of my coaching client in this episode, this is exactly it. It felt really uncomfortable to say no, so she took all these things on unknowingly until one day she's like, "What the hell? I'm getting pulled in every different direction."

So this masterclass, 75 minutes for veterinarians only, and this is a proven step-by-step approach for veterinarians, and really we're doing it so you can protect your time, your energy, and honestly, your sanity. So even though sometimes saying no doesn't feel like an option, I'm gonna walk you through the process of how to do that.

So you're gonna wanna get registered. It is open now. You can, on Instagram, @dr.amberparks. So that's my Instagram handle, dr.amberparks. You can DM me the word class, C-L-A-S-S. I will send you the link to learn more and get signed up. Or you can go to my website, thestressandburnoutcoach.com/masterclass,

and it'll give you some more information on it, as well as getting you guys signed up. So I'm so excited. I'm really excited. I think that you guys are gonna get a lot of juicy details out of this. And the best part I love about this is I'm not doing it in a way of "Oh, this is a great training," and then at some point I'll go back and revisit and figure out how to do this.

I'm gonna walk you step by step in that 75 minutes of how to do it. So by the end of it, you'll have your, like, your thing that you're dealing with right now in your life, honestly, it could be your personal life or at work, you'll have the whole steps of how to do it and start to do that the next day at work.

What more could you ask for? You're burnt out, you're tired, you're exhausted. You don't need to go read a book and figure out how to do this 'cause you don't have the bandwidth to do it, and that's totally understandable. That's why I created this masterclass. All right, guys, I hope to see you in there, and I will see you next week on the next episode