Description

Veterinary practice is inherently stressful, with huge demands on staff, who don’t always have the tools to deal with conflict and challenging situations. This talk uses a number of techniques from coaching and mental fitness to give individuals more options to better manage their own responses to stressful situations. This starts with improving our understanding of self and what’s important to us (our vision, values, passions, aspirations and purpose). We will then look at some brain physiology – how different areas of the brain have different roles, and the importance of strengthening the right neural pathways. Accessing the right brain is the key to intuitive, creative and positive thinking. We will look at how we can self-hijack if we rely on the survival parts of the brain and introduce the concept of saboteurs. We will talk about how we can better access the right brain, and how we can use these powers to manage our own stress. In particular we will deep dive into the power of self-empathy, and the need for us to be guided by making decisions that align with what we really believe to be important.


 
 
 
 
 

Transcription

Good afternoon everybody and welcome to today's webinar kindly sponsored by the RCVS Mind Matters initiative. Our topic is managing stress with the right brain, and I have the pleasure of introducing you to today's speaker, Mark Devachnik. Mark qualified from University of Edinburgh in 1995 and is an equine vet.
He has certificates in equine practise and veterinary Business Management. He spent his career in private practise, first as an assistant, then a business owner, and now a clinical director for IVC Evidencia. Mark became interested in coaching as he wanted to run a better, more people-focused business, and has since studied coaching with both the coaches Training Institutes and positive intelligence.
If you have any questions or comments for Mark as we go along, please hover your mouse on the screen, click on the Q&A box, and we will cover as many of those as we can at the end of the session. But without further delay, let me extend a warm welcome to the webinar vet, Mark, and over to you. Well, thank you, Jackie for that very kind introduction.
And thank you again to, Royal College Mind Matters, campaign for, for allowing me to highlight this really important work. So here we are. This is the topic title I chose, Managing stress with the Right Brain.
And I want to crack this off by by telling you about a little survey I did when I picked this topic, I asked everybody in our practise, if you've got a pen and paper, by the way, it'd be really helpful during the course of this webinar. Just to answer this question for yourselves, what do you think is the biggest stress about working in practise? So I asked my team, and I don't think it'll surprise you the sorts of answers I got back.
There was quite a diversity of nasty stresses, and it's, it's not a surprise to understand that stress is really pervasive throughout our industry. And let me just go through this rose gallery. The top of the list by some fair distance was, was the lack of vets, particularly in our small animal teams.
We, we, we're short of vets, the recruitment and retention is an issue. Second thing, That seemed to really cause us a lot of stress was pressure of clients, complaining clients, angry clients, aggressive clients, over-demanding clients, that whole bucket of, of, of, of stuff that the clients throw at us. And then the third on the list was, I just don't have any time.
And that was around long hours, too busy in the day, I don't have time for breaks. And then there were lots of other smaller things which were no less relevant for those people who were suffering from them, working out of hours with a toddler, having emergencies that all come in at the same time, loads of driving that can be exhausting, people not understanding what I do, and lack of progression, which is again another, another problem our industry faces. So when you look at that rogues gallery.
Of things that cause us stress. I, I wonder. How are you feeling about them?
What sort of sensations do you get in your body from those negative emotions? And where in your body do you feel it? For me, I, it feels like an ache deep in my stomach.
For other people, you may feel it in your chest or your head. We're not gonna sit here for very long, but I just want you to touch on that feeling of negative emotions that stress causes. Because I thought that was much, much more useful than giving you this dry Oxford English dictionary definition of stress, which for me didn't help as much as how it feels and where in the body we're feeling it.
But the good news is, and, and, and obviously the topic of this talk is, is around managing stress and, and the definition of managing is absolute control. So the stress isn't going to win here. We're going to have autonomy, we have choices, and we're going to make decisions about what we do with our stress and how we feel it.
So let's crack on, let me tell you a story. It's the story of this quote, Mahatma Gandhi. So this is what happened.
People used to queue all day in the hot sun for an audience with with Gandhi, and a lady queued all day with her son and she waited to see Gandhi, and she got in front of Gandhi and she said to Gandhi, Gandhi, please could you sell my son to stop eating sweets? The sugar is really bad for him, it's rotting his teeth. And Gandhi thought about this for a minute and he said to the lady, Come back in 2 weeks.
So the lady thinks to herself, well, this is a surprising. Turn of events. I wasn't expecting that, but of course he's Gandhi.
She does what he says. She goes away and she comes back. She queues another day in the hot sun with her son to see Gandhi.
She has her second audience with Gandhi, and she says to him, Gandhi, please, could you tell my son to stop eating sweets? And Gandhi turns to the boy, and he says, Young man, please stop eating sweets. They're very bad for your teeth and, and, and the, all the sugar is, is unhealthy for you.
And the lady says, Gandhi, thank you. Thank you very, very much. You've told my son to stop eating sweets, but I don't understand why you couldn't tell him two weeks ago.
Why did it have to wait 2 weeks for you to be able to tell him to stop eating sweets? And Gandhi said, Well, 2 weeks ago, I too was eating sweets, so I couldn't exactly tell your son to stop eating sweets when I was doing it. Gandhi said, You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
So Gandhi said, You must be the change you wish to see in the world. Starting with yourself. So I would like you to just to consider this phrase, be the change you wish to see in the world.
And I'm going to give you two perspectives, and you can choose which of these perspectives you wish to take forward during our talk. The first perspective is, oh, this is a bad thing. Gandhi's wrong.
It's not me that needs to change, it's them. It's everything else out there. It's, it's the clients, it's the situation, it's my employers.
I'm fine, it's everything else. This, this be the change you wish to see in the world is just wrong, plain wrong. Or you can say, hm.
What if Gandhi is right? What if all I need to do to change the whole world, what if all I need to do is change myself? Because I can change myself because I have that power.
It's within me, so you can say. Be the change you wish to see in the world is a good thing. So let me tell you a little bit about my story, how I've got to this point.
This She is a very extraordinary cat. She was called Shandi. And my parents brought her home when I was about 8 years old, and she was to be our family mouser.
Now, Shandi was a terrible mouser, an appalling mouser, but she was an absolutely brilliant best friend and Shandy and I grew up absolutely inseparable. We, we loved each other and we had a fantastic relationship. And because of her, the eight year old me chose to be a vet.
And I have never, up until this point, and moving forwards, I have never ever regretted the decision that the eight year old me made. I'm, I'm still massively grateful for the choice I made. And I worked really, really hard, as I'm sure many of you have, and I went through vet school and I became a vet, and I actually chose to be a horse vet.
And here's some pictures of me through my career, my hairline has slowly receded. But I worked, I worked and I worked and I worked so hard. And at one point, I had the realisation that things were not working out quite as I planned them to be.
I was working massively hard, nights on call, weekends on call, a massively busy clinical roster of calls to do during the day. While I was doing that, I was trying to study for certificates, possibly bring up a, a family at the same time, deal with complaints, stopping my car at the side of the road to, to speak to the practise manager and all the other things that the bus, the business had to do. It wasn't working out, and I wasn't a bad person.
And I wasn't a bad vet, and I wasn't a bad boss. I just needed help. And in our industry, It is not clear at all where that help's gonna come from.
And, and for me, help came from a very surprising place, a business coach who came into the practise. I didn't even know what a business coach was, but we started to have conversations and after a couple of weeks, talking to my coach, I said to him, hm, you're not going to solve these problems for me, are you? I have to do it myself.
And the light bulb went on for me when I realised that if I could solve all my problems myself, I could change my whole world. And that's what I did. I started with myself, then I worked with the team around me, and I worked with the practise, and now I'm here and I really, really want to help our industry.
So I find myself now in a place where I see there's a lot of stress in our industry. I think we are amazing at training people to get to the point where we're brilliant at fixing animals, those consulting room skills, those clinical skills. It's everything else that I see that we need help with.
And if I can help people discover their purpose, unleash their passion, fulfil their potential, if I can help individuals, teams. And the industry in general, I, I love this industry and I'm, I'm here to give back. And let me tell you a little bit about how that's gonna happen, and we can get into a lot more discussion about what the right brain is and where you can find it.
And to do that, we're gonna use some neuroscience. Starting with this area, highlighted on the in the picture as red. Now, obviously, the brain is a massively complex structure, highlighted in red is an area of your brain that's called the survival brain.
Sometimes it's called the primitive brain, the primordial brain, the reptilian brain. What it is essentially is the main brain that our primitive ancestors used to to problem solve. And it consists of the brain stem, the amygdala, the limbic system.
All of the fight and flight, all of the fast responses, all of those negative emotions are all generated in that small area of your brain. Now the survival brain for our primitive ancestors was massively, massively helpful because if you're walking across the savannahs. And you hear the rustle of, of the of the grasses, best thing to do, don't even think about it, run away and climb a tree.
99% of the time, it's going to be a little mass going through the undergrowth. But if the 1% of the time is going to be a tiger, your survival brain can save your life. So you just react very, very quickly and think about it later.
And thanks to the survival brain, we find ourselves the dominant species on, on this planet. So we have a lot to, to be grateful for, to, to it for. The trouble is, it's exactly the same brain as our primitive ancestors had.
It hasn't changed a bit, and we've put it into the modern world, and all of a sudden, our survival brain is struggling to keep up. It doesn't understand the busyness of our lives, the stresses that we have, the, the, the computer screens that we have to use and, and, and stuff. It's still, it still thinks it's in the jungle and it reacts accordingly.
Let me introduce you to a couple of different areas of the brain. So above the survival brain, thankfully, we have the more logical thinking parts of the brain. And as you'll know, that's based into two hemispheres, the left hemisphere and the right cerebral hemisphere.
Now, the left hemisphere is the one that we use loads and loads of time. You'll be really aware of that. It's like our internal computer.
It's in charge of speech, language, mathematics, complex computations, thinking through problems. It understands time, so the future, the past, it stores and processes lots of our memory, facts, and words. We rely on our left brains for processes and protocols.
The left brain is a wonderful structure. And then on the other side of our heads, all over here, we have our right brain. Our right cerebral hemisphere, which is a totally, totally different structure and does different things.
And I'll tell you first, the things that it doesn't do. It has no sense of time and it has no sense of language. It is free of all of those things.
It's sometimes called the non-thinking brain because it computes things in a totally different way to the left brain. You can't access it by hard thinking alone. What does the right brain do?
It's responsible for our positivity, our calm, our creativity, our sense of peace, our sense of intuition, our gut feeling, our sense of empathy, our big picture thinking, our creativity. So it's a It has a totally different set of roles from the left hemisphere. Now what does that mean to a busy vet in practise or a busy vet professional?
This could be a nurse or a manager, whoever. We are massively using our survival brains. We need our survival brains to tell us all of the time.
What do I need to do and, and, and, and push us on, get us through all the stresses. We often overlap, rely on, on our survival brain. We'll talk about that in a second.
Then we massively use our left brain, which is our computer for our process and our protocols. Which bit of this procedure comes next? What do I have to remember to do?
What's on the to do list? I'm remembering what I did yesterday, what I have to do tomorrow, but we're often not at all in touch with our right brain. So what happens is we over rely on our survival brain, we over rely on our left brain, our right brain is kind of just sitting there, forgotten about.
Now, if we learn to access our right brain, we have a source of greater well-being, positivity, happiness, intuition, and well-being. Sounds good, right? And neurophysiologists call this having a balanced brain.
So it's, it's having a good balance between the left brain, which tends to dominate and the right brain, which tends to be a lot quieter, so. The object of the exercise is increasing the work that we make our right brain do while decreasing the work that we make our survival brain do. Amazingly enough, that is perfectly possible.
And the reason it's perfectly possible is thanks to this second concept of neuroscience I'm going to very, very briefly tell you about, and that is the idea of neuroplasticity. Now, in our brains, we have 1 trillion nerve cells, absolutely amazing. And a lot of these nerve cells are with us throughout the whole of our lives.
They don't regenerate like some of our other cells do. But the good thing is, as you know, you can learn things and relearn things throughout your life. That's why you can learn to play the piano or learn a different language anytime later, later in life, because your brain, your brain is plastic, it's malleable, it can change and it can grow.
And the way that the brain uses does that is by changing the connections between the different neurons. And very briefly, this is how it works. If you are, if, if, if you want to send electricity signals through one part of your brain, you, you can create a neuronal habit.
So, if, if we want to keep using our saboteur brain all the time to respond from that sort of place, what we do is we build up the neural pathways and the information that's coming down those pathways. The neural pathways get bigger, the nerves get bigger. The synapses get bigger and all of the information, then the electricity will choose to go down that channel.
So therefore, we will get ourselves into habits where we keep using our survival brain. But we can choose, if we would like to, to rewire our brain to access a different part of it. And essentially, all we have to do is start using different neural pathways.
We just have to make a to, to, and we'll talk about how we can do this, but we just have to make mental images for ourselves to stop using the survival brain so much. And what will happen is the nerve fibres going to survival brain will start to atrophy. They'll start to get smaller, and our brains will put more resources into building up the nerve fibres to the more positive brain into the right brain for easy access.
And that is how we will create good habits. Does that sound good? Fabulous.
So what's the best place to start to really wake up our right brains? The absolute best place to start. To wake up your right brain.
I think about yourself. What's really important to you? What fulfils you.
So this is a visioning exercise that if you have time later, it would be great if you could do on a longer contemplation. You're trying to ask yourself, who am I? What really, really matters to me.
What's important to me? What's my vision for a fulfilling life? What do I want?
And once you've come up with your vision. The next stage is to start to look at what's really important to you. This is your values.
Your values are your internal principles that guide you. They're like your internal compass, always giving you the direction of this is our true north and this is our true north. Now you have a set of values.
But unless you kind of think about them and try and work them out, possibly get them written down so you've got them in your head and really clear, sometimes it's not always that clear why you're making decisions that do, that do what you want to do. We know when we're on the right track in life because it kind of feels right. We kind of feel like we're aligned to it, and we know when we're in the, in the wrong track and we're lost in the woods, because it kind of doesn't feel right.
Having a good knowledge of what your values are is really helpful for you to help you make the right decisions, to align yourself with the right people, to get, focus your attention on the right things that you really want to do. So again, it's another little bit of homework for you to spend time really trying to think and work out what are my values, what's really important to me. I'm going to give you 3 different ways that you could go away and start to think about your values.
The first is to think about your peak experiences. So, when in life were you actually in your flow? Were you absolutely at your happiest?
What is the best moments of your life so far? What were you doing? Who were you with?
How does that align? With what's really, really important to you, what really matters to you when you knew you were on the right path. What comes up for you?
Also what makes you happy or what makes you angry? Because what makes you happy aligns with your values. If you're doing something you enjoy, it's likely that you're honouring your value.
If you, if you're clashing with something, if something makes you really angry or distressed, it's likely to be something that's really dissonant with your values. It's really stopping you from getting to your values. What is it?
So it's the opposite of, of, of what makes you happy. And also what's important to you? Do you enjoy spending time with family, spending time with your friends, reading books, travelling?
Presenting webinars, coaching people, what is it that really, really matters to you? And if you go through all of those things, it's likely that you'll have a lovely long list of things that are really, really important to you. So once you've got your vision and your values, you're well on the way to accessing and making great neural pathways into your right brain.
So I want to go a little bit deeper now and tell you about the concepts of mental fitness and how that's gonna help us go even further. So, let me give you a definition because it's likely that you've never met this concept mental fitness before. Mental fitness is defined as your capacity to respond to life's challenges with a positive rather than a negative mindset.
Now, the analogy here is with physical fitness. If I was to say to you, do you see that mountain in the background? I'd like you to go run up it.
You may say to me, there's no chance. I might be able to walk up it, but I might be able to walk up it slowly, but you know that. If you train yourself long enough, you will get physically fit enough to run up that mountain.
You know that physically, physical fitness is something that you can grow and you can strengthen your muscles by going to the gym and working hard, and you can get yourself physically fitter. Mental fitness is exactly the same concept, except it's working on your mental strength rather than your physical strength. If you, and if you work on your mental fitness, it will allow you to access that right brain to perform better, be happier, with much more positivity, to climb those mental mountains that we see in front of us in life.
And the concept of mental fitness divides our thoughts into two different camps, negative thoughts and positive thoughts. Now we are gonna call all of the negative thoughts we have saboteur thoughts. And we're gonna call the positive thoughts we have sage thoughts.
Now, Saboteur thoughts. Are originating. In the survival brain, they are from that primitive ancestor brain that told us to quickly react to stuff and get out of trouble.
So in your brain stem in the limbic system. The positive thoughts we have, that we call the sage thoughts are coming from essentially the right brain. Now, if you want to think of it like a battle between inner Darth Vader, the saboteur, negative thoughts and the inner Jetta, the positive, mindful, clear-headed.
Empathetic thoughts, then that's absolutely fine. The internal battle within us all between good and evil. The saboteur thoughts are motivating you through negative emotions, fear, stress, anger, guilt, shame, all of these emotions, emotions of anxiety.
All originating from the survival brain. The same thoughts motivating you through much more positive emotions, the joy of empathy, curiosity, intuition, creativity, passion, enjoyment, purpose. So our saboteur thoughts tend to hijack us when we least expect it.
And we'll find out later, our saboteur thoughts often lie to us. They tell us that they're going to generate success, we all get to the same place, but often they don't generate happiness, they just generate more stress and more anxiety. The sage thoughts from the right brain can generate a higher level of success and can make you happy.
Let me give you the very simplest example of the smallest mental muscle that I ever had to lift. Just to illustrate this, and this is around the farm gate. Now, as I said, I'm an equine vet.
I have to go through farm gates on a regular daily basis, I would say, and I have had to do this for the last 25 years of my career. Now, so far, every farm gate I've driven up to, I have found intensely irritating because I have to drive up to the gate. I have to stop my car, I have to get out of my car, I have to walk to the gate.
I have to open the gate. I have to drive, get back in the car, drive it through. It's a big rigmarole, and I'm already late, and the gate is gonna make me even later.
So I would have spent the majority of the first part of my career saying to, saying to myself, the farm gate is a bad thing. But the truth is, I have, however long I have left in my career, I have another 10,000 gates to go through. It's not really serving me to keep thinking that the farm gate is a bad thing because I have to get out of the car and deal with it.
It is much better actually if I have a response that's far from that's from the sage that says, oh, goody, there's a farm gate. This is a fantastic opportunity to stop the car. Stretch my legs, stretch my body, be at one with nature for a few minutes and just take time.
Yes, I'm going to be late. Isn't that fantastic because I've got a few minutes here where I am forced to just slow down and stop. So, if I've got another 10,000 farm gates to do for the rest of my career, what would you advise me?
Do I consider every single farm gate for the rest of my career a bad thing? Or could I possibly get more good out of the farm gates by thinking, a farm gate is a great gift and an opportunity just to stop and just to check in with myself. That is the smallest mental fitness muscle that I had to, that I had to grow.
So, our lives are full of these negative emotion, saboteur thoughts that come from our survival brain. And the ringleader, the key saboteur, is a character called the Judge. Now, the judge sits in judgement.
He finds faults or she finds faults with yourself, with others, with your circumstances. And therefore causes much of our disappointment, anger, regret, guilt, shame, and anxiety. All of these thoughts, all originating from a judge, which is essentially a neuronal habit sitting in your survival brain.
Let me tell you a bit more about the judge. The judge has 3 phases. Firstly, the judge judges yourself.
Now, you might think of this as your inner critic. Your judge tells you, you're no good at this. Oh, I'm a terrible surgeon.
Oh, I can't do this. I'm rubbish with difficult clients. Oh, I hate these sorts of things.
Badges yourself for things you've done in the past that you won't forgive yourself over, or things that you're doing at the moment which you judge just doesn't think are good enough. Or judges other people, focuses on what's wrong with other people rather than just accepting and appreciating them for what they are. Oh, this person's too fat, this person's too thin, this client is stupid.
My boss is an idiot. This situation is terrible. That's the circumstances.
So the third characteristic of the judge insists a circumstance or an outcome is bad rather than seeing it as a gift and an opportunity. Oh this is, we're short of vets today. This is a terrible situation.
It also Doesn't allow you to be happy in the moment. It fends off your present happiness. So what the judge will tell you.
Is you will be happy when. You will be happy at some point in the future when something happens. You will be happy when you get a pay rise.
You will be happy when you get a new job. You'll be happy when you get a promotion. Whatever it is, you just tells you, well, you can't possibly be happy now.
You'll have to be happy then. But what happens is you get to then, you get to that point where you get your pay rise, your promotion. Your new job.
And your judge allows you to be happy for a bit and then tells you, hm, no, you'll be happy when and pushes you on. So the judge will never let you be happy in the moment of your life, always pushing you on to a promised future happiness, which may or may not happen. So not surprisingly, that generates a lot of distressing feelings, a lot of stress coming from this character, the judge, sitting in your saboteur in your survival brain.
Guilt, regret, shame, disappointment, all generated from this neuron habit, the judge in your survival brain. Anger and anxiety, all from the judge. So what we hear very often is, well, hold on, negative emotions are good for me, aren't they?
Because they make me perform better. No pain, no gain. I need to be hard on myself to improve myself.
I need to give myself a hard time so that I can push myself to better performance. Are negative emotions good for you? There's the question, is pain good for you?
We've already discussed how these negative emotions feel like pain in our body. Is pain good for you? Here's a hand touching a hot stove.
Is it good to feel the pain of that hot stove? Negative emotions are helpful for one second as an alert signal. Yes, it is good to feel the pain of the hot stove because if we feel the pain of the hot stove, we very, very quickly move our hand away from the hot stove.
But if we keep our hand on the hot stove for long periods of time, what happens is we burn ourselves. If we stay in negative emotions, if we keep our hand on the hot stove for long periods of time, it hurts our ability to see clearly and respond from the right brain. If we really stay in the saboteur survival brain negative emotions, we cannot respond from a sage perspective.
If you are feeling negative emotions, you are listening to a saboteur voice from your primitive ancestors survival brain. It is not serving you for more than a second. So let's really start to have a good detailed look at the sage.
The sage is the character living in the right hand side of your brain, the intuitive. Side of your brain associated with much more positive things. This is where we want to be.
Positive emotions, peace and calm. Clearheaded focus, creativity, big picture thinking. Gratitude, intuition, gut feeling, artistic natures.
These are all of the nice places to spend time. And it operates from a perspective called the SA perspective. Let me tell you what the sage perspective is.
The sage perspective says this. Every outcome or circumstance in your life can be turned into a gift and an opportunity. Every outcome.
Or circumstance can be turned into a gift or an opportunity. Let's have a look and see how that might work in veterinary practise. This is one of our common issues, stress issues is about clients making complaints about members of the team.
And I'm, again, I'm gonna offer you two perspectives, and you can take whichever forward you choose to be the most useful. A client has made a complaint about a member of your team. Number one.
This is a bad thing. The client is an idiot. He's wasting my time.
Oh, I'm so busy, I'm too busy for this. I've got to reply to him. I've got to speak to the person.
Oh, I'm so angry. Oh, and it just generates a lot of those saboteur thoughts. Or you could say, hm.
A client's made a mistake, a complaint about a member of the team. I've read the complaint. I can see there's an element, a small kernel of truth.
The client is 10% right in what they say, just 10%. And within that 10%, there is something for this business to learn. There's something that the individual can take away to make sure it doesn't happen again, that means in the long run, the practise can benefit.
Which perspective serves us better, serves our business better, serves the people we work with better. So here's the question. Which perspective is true?
The saboteur perspective said the client complaint is a bad thing. And the SA perspective said, hmm, there's a gift and an opportunity within this perspective to do some training to make sure that we all learn and develop our skills from it. So which of those perspectives is true?
The answer, whichever perspective you believe to be true will become true. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I choose the sage perspective.
So hopefully you can see that sitting within the right brain, really developing our neural pathways into the right brain so we can access that much more readily, is going to serve us in veterinary practise far, far better than sitting in the negative emotions of the of the survival brain of the saboteur. How are we going to make sure that we access the right brain very, very quickly and, and, and with as, as, as much energy as we possibly can? Remember that the right brain is a non-thinking brain.
You can't just think your way into the right brain. It doesn't work like that. It has no sense of language and it has no sense of time.
This is where we have to be mentally fit enough to allow ourselves to get into that right brain mindset. Now, remember what we said about neoplasticity. We can build the neural pathways to the right brain and therefore atrophy the neural pathways to the saboteur brain, to the survival brain, should we choose to do it, but it takes time and it takes effort.
So, If we want to make lasting positive changes to our stress levels, it's brilliant that you have the insights, so you understand about saboteurs and you understand about sages. But actually, a lot of the work starts after today. It starts on you building mental muscles for increased strength and resilience so that you can run up life's mental mountains without drawing breath.
And this is how you do it. This is exactly how you access the right brain. You stop.
You stop. And you take notice of what's happening in the world around you. You slow down.
You pause. And you just become really, really aware. Of your sensations.
You stop the chatter from your left brain. You stop the saboteur thoughts from your survival brain. And you just stretch your right brain.
Calm and peace. And just pause. These are small moments of mindfulness.
You might have come across it in meditation and yoga. But you can do these Pauses at any time you want to do it. You just have to stop, and you can literally stop for two minutes and just bring your awareness to what you're seeing outside.
You're breathing, what you're feeling with your fingers. Stop the chatter of the left brain, stop the saboteur thoughts and the survival brain, and just be with the right brain. This is the mental muscle.
That we all need to build. So it becomes a very simple operating system. If you're feeling negative emotions, stop.
Negative emotions means you're in saboteur mode, means you're being driven by your survival caveman brain. Just come into the present. Remember in the present, you're in the right brain.
The right brain has no sense of time. It can't do the future and it can't do the past. Get into the present, bring your awareness down to one of your sensations, quieten the saboteurs, and activate the sage within the right brain.
Assume the Sage perspective that says every problem can be converted into a gift and an opportunity. Every problem can be converted into a gift and an opportunity. And finally, generate the gift by using the sage powers, and we're gonna start to look at those sage powers in a lot more detail just now.
Empathy, curiosity, creativity, and calm, clear-headed, laser-focused action. So let me give you an example of how this might work, and in this example, to make it easier, I've taken you out of this and you're now the coach for a, for a new graduate vet who you've got who's about to start a bit late. But she's lacking in a little surgical confidence.
She thought it was going to be a Jack Russell, but in the end, it's turned out to be a fat lad that she's got to, to, to, to spa, and she's having a wobble, and she's full of saboteur thoughts, and she says, I'm no good at these things. Terrible things will happen if I start to operate on this horse on this dog, story, and she's seeing all sorts of catastrophes that are coming out in front of her. She is Obviously overtaken by saboteur thoughts from her survival brain.
Now, nobody wants to be operated on by a saboteur. It's absolutely the wrong place to start doing surgery from. So, you might take this person aside and say to them, Stop.
You are in saboteur mode. You are being driven by negative emotions. This is not the place to start operating on the dog.
Get them into the present. By listening to their breathing, stopping the chatter in their left brain, stopping the saboteur thoughts, quietening all of those parts of the brain, looking out the window, looking at the clouds as they go past, just collecting them so that they are absolutely in the presence of the sage, the right brain. And then tell them The sage perspective says every circumstance can be converted into a gift and an opportunity.
The bitch space you are about to do, this fat lab, can be converted into a gift or an opportunity. What's the gift? And ask them to generate the gift.
What is the gift? Perhaps the gift is teamwork. Perhaps the gift is the knowledge that they can do it.
Perhaps the, the, the, the, the gift is confidence. Perhaps the gift is, we're all here, perhaps the gift is for the future, you're going to be a better surgeon. There are many gifts in this, in this circumstance.
And then what happens is, the dog is operated on. By a sage working from a right brain perspective. So I said I'd talk about some superpowers of the sage and I'm just gonna very briefly talk about three key superpowers that your sage can give you.
The first is empathy. Empathy is a wonderful thing and I think as vets we're really, really good at empathy for our patients. So I show you a picture of a cute kitten or a lovely old arthuristic dog and you feel empathy.
What I wish for us as an industry of individuals and people is that we felt that same empathy for ourselves, that we would look in the mirror and see us in all our beauty and our wrinkles and our boldness and our perfect imperfections and have unconditional love for the body and the soul that we see in front of us. And that we have the same for our clients and the people that we work with, that we don't approach them with judgement, that we don't consider that they're idiots and they're stupid and they're too this and that, that we know that these are people with full lives who are like us trying to do their best in often very, very difficult circumstances. So another example that I had from, from my practise and came up right at the beginning in terms of what stresses us out is the concept of, oh, I'm too busy to stop.
My, my day is so full I can't possibly stop. This is a self-portrait I grew, I drew at one point during my coaching journey. This is me driving around, the phone's ringing off the hook.
I've lost all my hair. You can see I've got saboteur face. I'm all scrunched up, my hands are grasping the steering wheel.
It's a saboteur that's driving the car. Same way that I heard, I heard on the on, on my stress survey, my guys telling me, I'm working long hours, I'm too busy to stop. So the first question I have for you, for me, is how much time are your saboteurs wasting?
Because if we save the time that we are wasting in negative emotions and drama and stress, we could actually use that time just to stop and get into Sage. And the action is Just consider what would you say to your best friend, if your best friend phoned you up tonight and said, yeah, so tomorrow I'm gonna work from 8 in the morning till 7 at night, and I'm not gonna stop. I am not gonna stop all day, not even for a, not even for a tea break.
And, oh, I'm not going to just do it today. I'm gonna do it every day of my working life for the next 20 years. What would you say?
What would you say to your best friend? You'd say you're nuts. This is absolutely crazy.
Nobody should have to work like that. Nobody should have to work under those conditions. You have to stop.
So treat yourself like you are your best friend. What would your best friend say to you, you can't work like that. You have to stop, you have to take breaks.
So there is the paradox, because your saboteur is lying to you, your saboteur says that you are too busy to stop, but the paradox is, you are too busy not to stop. Which one would your client rather see, turn up on a yard or be in the consulting room? The vet that's on time, but it's full of saboteur because they're so hurried to get there and they're thinking how quickly they can get rid of you so they can get onto the next client because they're so late, they're so late.
Or the sage fat, the right brain fat that says, I'm just gonna take a couple of minutes here and pause and make sure that I'm working with this client, with this animal from the sage perspective, from my right brain intuition, creativity. So now what I say is, the busier you are, the more you should stop. Now, I came up with this amazing concept, I don't know if you've ever heard of it before.
It was absolutely revolutionary in my life. I start, I started stopping for lunch. After all these years, I started stopping for lunch, and then I said to the receptionist, yes, I can go to that call.
I'm just going to have 5 minutes to have a sandwich. And nobody batted an eyelid. Nobody thought it was in the least bit strange.
The strange thing was that it took me 25 years of working as a vet before I realised I could give myself the permission to stop for a couple of minutes and just and just get in touch with my right brain. So, the busy you are, the more you should stop. My advice to you, if you don't think you can do it, is ask somebody to be your stock buddy.
So, if you've got a busy surgery this evening and clients wall to wall for 3 hours, just say to your stock buddy, I would like to stop for 2 minutes. Every hour. I would like to stop and just breathe and look out the window.
And when I say stop, you don't look at your phone, you don't check your emails, you don't check Facebook, you just stop, you just stop and bring your awareness back to your presence, back to the body, back to your body. So the the next superpower to talk to you about is curiosity. So the curiosity is a wonderful superpower for difficult clients, for clients who we might otherwise judge as being too stupid or too this or too that.
It's the ability to be able to discover what's going on for them in their busy lives without fear, without agenda, just to go really deep with them, be intensely fascinated. In what it is that they have to say, say, what is their story? What is their relation to to that animal?
And it's gonna massively help you curiosity, because You can find out so much more information about people and you'll be able to make much, much better open decisions and come to much better conclusions and actions from understanding the people that are in front of. And the best way to be curious from a right brain perspective is just to ask open questions, what, when, why, where, who? Just go really deep with people.
People really, really appreciate it. And the final superpower I want to tell you about is the superpower of navigate. Now, this aligns directly to the work that you did right at the beginning of this session about finding out your values, sorting out what truly matters to you and what doesn't matter to you.
Once you have your values, you can navigate forward with a deep sense of meaning and purpose. So your navigate superpower is critical for your purpose-driven life because it tells you exactly where your true north is. And to make sure that you're on the right path to navigate, you just ask yourself this one question.
At the end of my life looking back at this situation, what would appear important? Now, how many people would still send that email, would still send that text, would still snap at their colleague if they thought about it from the, from the perspective of navigate before they did it. At the end of my life, looking back at this situation, what would appear important?
Hmm, probably not send this email. So now that you've really, really got the whole concept of mental fitness in the right brain, we're going to pull it together and look at. Stress through a really, really, really sharp focus.
And I'm going to give you three facts about stress that you now already know. Fact one, stress is caused by your saboteurs, which are neural pathways living deep in your survival brain. Stress, fear, anxiety is all saboteur negative emotion causes.
If you spot the saboteur, you spot the cause of your anxiety. Fact 2, you can't think your way out of stress. Remember thinking is from the left brain.
If you start to think about things, you start to go forward in time, what happened backwards in time, what's going to happen. You start to analyse things, how can I get out of this? You start to try and rationalise things, you're gonna end up in a loop.
Your saboteurs will start to speak to you again, thinking you can't think your way out of stress, you're just going to get yourself in a bundle of more and more and more stress. To get out of stress, you have to access your right brain. Get yourself into the present.
Fact 3, stress is caused by attention to the past or attention to the future. There is no stress in the present moment. Take this beautiful picture of this person walking a dog at sunset.
The dog is certainly in the present. How about the person? Is she thinking about the day she's had, all the stresses and anxieties, who said what, or the worries about what's happening tomorrow?
Because the day that's had his past, the day tomorrow is tomorrow. At this moment, there's me and the dog, and the beautiful sunset, and the beautiful feeling of wet sand on my feet. There is no stress.
In the present moment. So your judge will carry on lying to you, and I just wanted to compare what the judge is telling you to the perspective that your right brain would take. Your judge will tell you, you need X to be happy.
You can insert X, whatever X is for you. You need this thing to be happy. You will feel stress if you can't guarantee this thing is gonna happen.
But your right brain has a different perspective. The right brain says, hmm, well, OK, this outcome X would be really nice if this happened, but if X doesn't happen and if Y happens instead, it is also a gift or an opportunity. So there's nothing to stress about.
So the advice to stress, identify the lie, identify the lie that the saboteur is telling you and bring it on. If the worst happens, what's the gift that at some point in the future may mean that you're actually better off with Y than if you got X? Give you a contemplation exercise.
To take away and think about. Think of a source of stress that's going on in your work or your life at the moment. Ask yourself, what is the bad outcome that your saboteurs are worrying you about?
What is the worst case scenario? Of this stress in your work or your life. Now, think of 3 ways that eventually, at some point in the future, not necessarily in this exact moment, but eventually.
This outcome could be converted into a gift or an opportunity. Three ways that you could eventually convert the bad outcome into a gift or an opportunity. So you will, of course, do your best to make sure that the thing that you want, the good outcome will happen.
But remember, if the bad outcome happens, you will be just fine and other good things will happen because of that. So I just want to finish by talking about the biggest problem that my team talked about and that our industry faces and how we can use the mental fitness model for this. We're really short of fences.
I know that practise is inherently stressful at the moment. There's a lot of saboteur voices going on. And a lot of those are judging from the survival brain, judging the circumstances, oh my God, this is such a stressful circumstance.
We never have enough vets. We got, we have too much work. The clients are so demanding.
The people I work with don't work fast enough. Oh goodness, somebody's on holiday. Look at them having a holiday.
The leadership team is not proactive. They can't get us a locum. The profession is going to the dogs, everybody's leaving.
It's a terrible place to work in. If you start listening to these saboteur voices in your survival brain, you will get yourself absolutely stuck in negative emotions. You will feel a victim of the circumstances, you will feel that you have no power.
All of these feelings are just overwhelming. Which perspective is true? The one that you believe to be true.
If you start the day feeling like this, you are going to end up having a bad day. Stop. You are listening to the negative voice of the saboteurs.
Take a few minutes, find the present moment. Remember the sage perspective, every situation is a gift or an opportunity. We're short of effects.
What could be the gift? What could be the gift in the day? Is there a gift of teamwork, the gift of connections that we can work strongly together and get to know each other?
Or perhaps we can generate one of the sage superpowers, the superpower of empathy. Today, I'm going to really, really connect with every client I see to really, really understand them and their bond with their animal, and the problems that Going through, or I'm going to stop for 5 minutes every hour and just have empathy for myself, or I'm gonna make sure I have one real conversation over my lunch break. There's that person I really want to know how they're doing, genuinely how they're doing.
I'm really, really gonna to genuinely ask. Or perhaps the gift is around navigate. How does what I'm doing today fit with what's really important to me, my vision and my value?
At the end of my life looking back at this day, what would appear important about how I conduct myself during this busy day? So that's it from me. Here's a summary.
We can be the change we want to be in the world, but we have to start with ourselves. And to start with with ourselves, I genuinely mean we can rewire the brain patterns inside our heads to start listening to the survival voices, the saboteur voices in the survival brain, and start getting ourselves into our sage of our right brain. And the best place to start with is with what's our vision for fulfilling life and our future, and what's important to us, what do we really value?
And then start to think about mental fitness as a muscle that we can work on. Your saboteurs in your survival brain will keep you reacting with fear and stress and your judge is the ringleader. Stop.
Stop listening to those voices. Stop listening to the mind chatter that keeps telling you. To go around recycling in these problems.
Get in the present, access your right brain. Ask yourself, what's the gift in this situation? The gift might be empathy, it might be curiosity, it might be to navigate in line with your visions and values, but more than anything, please stay in the present.
There is no stress in the present. So that's me up to date from the love of this wonderful cat when I was a little boy to now. This is my lovely team who I work with and, and, and, have fantastic fun with.
I wish all of the good things to happen to our, to our industry. Very happy to take any questions you have, or very happy to, for you to share any insights you might have gained from the presentation on the Q&A. Just really happy to hear.
Any feedback that you might have for me. Thank you for listening. That was great, Mark, very, very well done.
I, your, your voice as well, I've got to say, you've you've transfixed me. It's so relaxing. I was just so involved in what you were saying, I think I need you to do one of those apps that will just help me relax in the evening, a mindfulness app maybe.
I'm just gonna give everyone a few minutes just to, by any questions they may have in the Q&A box. We have had a, a couple of comments coming through already. People just say, thanks, Mark, really super presentation, quite moving from my place as both a clinical behaviourist and psychotherapist.
So horses and people. So great to see you too. Ex Springfield Farm livery here.
So, that's probably somebody that knows you. Was used to your wonderful voice. All got awesome, great advice, amazing.
Thanks very much. Great lunchtime, feel better already, which, I mean, well, you can't ask for more than that, kind of, if people are already taking so much from it. And I think, you know, that, those last few slides, you, you really hit the nail on the head for me, you know, when I'm, I'm speaking to these practises at the moment, and everybody's saying, as, as you quite rightly pointed out, you know, we're, we're short of bets.
Everybody's overworked and You know, really stressed to the max, you know, those, those saboteurs are in full force at the moment, aren't they? And I think, you know, anything that we can do to help each other and just to, to get things back under control, at least mentally, if we can't change the industry at the moment, let's at least like say look after ourselves. And I think the key one for me was that you're too busy not to stop.
I mean, that's definitely my take home. Cause I know, I, I'm, I'm not even in practise anymore, and I'm still a sucker for that one. I don't give myself enough, you know, breaks and lunch breaks and things like that, and I don't even have the excuse of all the patients to treat, which are demanding my attention.
So, you know, a full respect to everybody in practise at the moment, trying to juggle that. But I do think, yeah, like I say, just 22 minutes, an hour, just to say, that's. Let's just stop, let's recollect ourselves, so you're not working in that brain fog, you know, it's almost like panic mode, isn't it, really?
What boss wouldn't say, you know, what leader in any practise isn't gonna say, yeah, that's a great thing. And what client's not gonna say, yeah, please, take 2 minutes. Yeah, yeah, they only, maybe that's what they need to actually realise, you know, that you haven't had lunch, you know, because I think clients' expectations of people at the moment as well are higher than ever, aren't they?
And I think for them to actually appreciate how much the. Our, our veterinary colleagues are actually doing for them and how much they put themselves out for the benefit of their pets. Maybe realising that you haven't had a break, you know.
And just, just to ask of them, would you mind if I just have a bite of my sandwich? You know, it's 5 o'clock in the afternoon, please, can I have some lunch before I see your pets? I'm sure, yeah, they might be a little bit more understanding then.
So yeah, we've got some more comments coming through, all very yogic. Yeah, I love that. As a vet and a yoga teacher, I absolutely agree with everything you've said.
Thank you. This has been very inspiring. I have a new grad vet starting today, and I've been appointed.
As her mentor, thank you for the tips about stopping the saboteur, especially when they begin to do surgery and get them to stop and connect with Sage. So, yeah, everybody's just loving it. There's, there's no questions coming through.
Everyone's just seeing your praises, Mark. But I think that's a sign of a, a talk, well done. If anyone does have questions, they can, they can find me, can't they, on LinkedIn or, or, or through that website link, yeah.
That's it, absolutely, and I'm, I'm sure you will probably be inundated with people wanting more of your. Your beautiful tones to, to put them at ease and to help them guide themselves through. But, I mean, it's been, it has been brilliant.
So, I, I can only assume that's why there's no questions coming through because everyone's just sitting in awe of what we've just learned from you. Thank you so, so much. I think it's lovely to have, you know, this is a message that our industry needs to hear, right?
And, and there is not that easy to know where you can find this information. It's always been sort of kept on the sidelines because, you know, fixing animals is so important, but. This stuff is more important, I think.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely it is, you know, and it's that age old saying, isn't it? If, if you always do what you've always done, then you always get what you've always got, you know, and if we keep working ourselves to the grindstone, the, the way we do, you know, everybody's going to have this kind of mass burnout and the industry's not going to recover from the situation it's currently in if we're all absolutely frazzled, lying in a heap.
So, you know, we need to look after ourselves and. And I think this has been an excellent tool to, to enable us to do that. Thank you ever so much.
So, to, to everyone that's joined today, thank you so, so much for your time. I really do hope that you've enjoyed the session as much as I have and found it valuable and take all these tools and tips away with you and, and change things. All for the better for, for yourselves and for your team.
We do have another in the series, kindly sponsored by the Mind Matters Initiative, which is on tomorrow, and that's Street betting, the power of Pets and companionship with Speaker Jade Stat. The link for this, it should be being put in the chat box for you now by, by wonderful Kyle behind the scenes, who's been making sure everything runs smoothly today. So many thanks to you as well, Kyle.
And most importantly, I can't say enough, thank you so much, Mark, for really thought provoking afternoon webinar. It's been wonderful and I'm sure we'll, we'll have to get you back to do another one sometime soon. Thank you.
Yeah, you're very welcome. So have a great afternoon, everybody, and we will see you again soon on another webinar. Take care.
Bye.

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