Good evening everyone and welcome to tonight's webinar titled Mindfulness in a Veterinary practise. For anyone who knows the webinar vets, you'll know that we are huge advocates of mindfulness here. It's something that we're very passionate about and so we're delighted to be working alongside the Yorkshire Veterinary Society tonight to bring this webinar to you all.

We have a very, very good speaker tonight. We have Jan Mayer, who's on the line with us, and Jan gained her interest in mindfulness through a long history of working with people using a range of psychological approaches, including CBT. She's also has extensive experience in HR management and embedding cultural change in organisations.

Jan trained as a mindfulness teacher via the Mindfulness Association and University of Aberdeen, a teacher training pathway and is listed as a suit is listed on the UK Network for Mindfulness-based teacher trainers as having been assessed as meeting their stringent requirements for ongoing training and supervision. Jan's also the founder of Mend Consultancy. And she's recently completed a 4 year Master of Science in studies in mindfulness at the University of Aberdeen.

This is a unique academic qualification looking at the use of mindfulness in both clinical and business settings. It's given her an in-depth understanding of the underlying neuroscience of mindfulness interventions, the evidence base into its use, as well as a thorough practical training in delivering mindfulness-based interventions. For the past 2 years, Jan has been working closely with Twerwood vets to embed mindfulness as a central value in the organisation and to use it as a basis for 1 to 1 coaching relationships with all staff in the practise.

We're also very lucky tonight to have Brendon Clarke and Paul Rogers on the line with us. Brendan is the Yorkshire Veterinary Society president currently and is also working in the small animal practise in Leeds that we just mentioned. Paul Rogers is from the Veterinary Consultancy Services.

He's a veterinary practitioner from North Yorkshire with a particular interest in sheep, as well as welfare, ethics and law. So thank you both parties, and everyone involved for making this possible. I'll now hand over to Brendan, who's just gonna say a few words.

Hi, thank you very much, Paul. So this is a series that, Paul Rogers, set up with myself. It's his, invention effectively.

We, hope to continue a series of 5 webinars, which will stretch, through tonight and the 17th of July and then through September, October and November, next year. These are all in relation to, making sure that, vets in the region settle into their new jobs, are looked after, building mechanisms for mentorship and to, look at clinical review and how that works in practise and how that can be put into place on a day to day basis. So hopefully tonight, rather than mindfulness being seen as, some ideal that's not possible, in a normal day to day busy practise, hopefully you'll gain some tips and share some tips, from those people taking part tonight on ways to incorporate this.

We have alongside us, later on, this is going to be a short presentation initially by Jan, followed by, a panel discussion. And we kindly have, Vet Dynamics have put forward Tim Rayner, and Libby, Kemp and Thompson, to discuss from their, business consultancy side of things, alongside Sarah Campbell from Zuitis Business Consultancy, who also helped practises, develop, their teamwork within practise, to improve their business. So hopefully you'll get to hear from us all at a later stage.

For now, however, I'm gonna hand you over to Jan Mayer, and allow her to open tonight's proceedings. Thank you. Thanks Brendan, that's a really helpful introduction, and I hope I am gonna give you some practical tips about mindfulness.

Mindfulness is now firmly embedded within the practise of CBT, cognitive behavioural therapy, across the UK and indeed across the world. And I want to say at this point, because we'll come back to it later, that doesn't mean human psychologists have given up on stimulus response psychology. It's more about building on that.

What's really changed in psychology and has made mindfulness come to the top is perhaps surprising in that a lot of people think of it as a bit airy fairy, but actually the drive in psychological science has. From the growth in the use of functional MRI scans, looking at what is happening in the brain when people have all sorts of experiences, including when they practise mindfulness. So that's one of the things we'll talk about.

The presentation tonight, I'm gonna try and cover what mindfulness is, and given what I've just said about it can sometimes be seen as a fluffy thing. I'm gonna talk about what it isn't. I'm gonna give you a little bit about what the research says, particularly in how that might be relevant to use for vets or vets practises.

I want to give you a couple of caveats about using it in a vet's practise. And then I want to share with you my learning from working with Tarwood about what seems to have helped make it a successful approach in that practise. So let's start with what is mindfulness?

So the first thing to say about mindfulness is it is a skill. It is a trainable capacity. It's something we can get better at.

And I'm gonna give you a couple of definitions. I'll start with, the first one, which is from John Cabot Zinn, who is one of the. First people to really use mindfulness as a clinical approach.

He's an American and he started using it as a clinical approach in humans with chronic physical pain, and the side effect he discovered was that their mood improved massively. And his definition is, it is about paying attention in a particular way. On purpose, so choosing to pay attention to what's going on.

In this moment, so not getting caught up with worries about the past or worries about the future. And non-judgementally, so not giving into a a a a storyline about what the experience we're having is, but just noticing it. I want to see this idea of it as a skill.

It can also be seen as an innate human capacity. I was having a very interesting discussion before this, webinar started with Paul here about whether, that's a bit speciesist and whether other species might have the capacity as well. But at the moment in psychology, we generally talk about it as a human capacity.

And when I say an innate human capacity and why I've got a marathon runner on there is it's an innate human capacity like running is an innate human capacity. Most children will develop the ability to run. And just so, most humans will develop some mindfulness capacity.

But like running a marathon. We still have to train to get the full benefits of mindfulness. So we can train our mindfulness like we can train our running.

And throwing in here, if you did the London Marathon this year, and you did a lot of training for it, and then you don't do any more training from this year through to next year, you won't be able to run next year's London Marathon. And it's the same with mindfulness, it's a, it's a habit we have to keep up if we're going to get the best benefits from it. So I'd like to give you a a another definition of mindfulness now.

This one is from a chap called Rob Nairn. And his definition is mindfulness is knowing what is happening while it is happening, no matter what it is. So it's quite similar to Kabatzin's definition.

It is knowing what is going on, and that means what is going on around me. So it might be the attention I am giving to the job that I'm doing right now. For a vet, that might be the attention you're giving to the consultation, to the person you're listening to, to the animal you're giving your full attention to.

But a crucial element of mindfulness is also knowing what is happening inside you as that is happening. So what are my thoughts about this? What kind of thoughts am I having?

What are the quality of my thoughts? What kind of emotional response am I having here? And what is going on in my body, which is often the one that, Western practitioners of mindfulness have to learn, to practise most.

We, we're we're we're taught to ignore our bodies, and actually we can learn a lot of useful things from them. And you notice that last bit of the definition, no matter what it is, I sometimes refer to that as without preference, that is tied to the idea in John Cavantzin's definition of non-judgmentally. So it's noticing, oh actually I'm feeling a bit anxious in this consult right now, but maybe not having to add to yourself, and I don't like feeling anxious, I need to get rid of this anxiety, but just accepting at this moment, I'm feeling a little bit anxious and that's the way it is, and that's OK.

I should say that in psychology, mindfulness is very much used as an umbrella term, and John Cabot Zin himself said, oh, I don't mean just mindfulness when I talk about mindfulness, I mean it as the whole umbrella of all the stuff that goes along with it. Which isn't very helpful. Another researcher, Christine Neff, has used the idea of the big M of mindfulness containing four little Ms that I want to introduce you to.

So the first one is the mindfulness. And the mindfulness is the paying attention, the choosing where to direct your consciousness at this moment and to give what you're choosing to give your attention, your full attention. The second element is the bit about non-judgementally or without preference, the whatever it is, and that's the idea of acceptance.

And you'll see a lot of the more modern cognitive behavioural therapies for human emotional distress are often called. Mindfulness and acceptance strategies, or they will say, incorporating mindfulness and acceptance strategies. The third little M in Neff's definition is compassion, and compassion is again a trainable capacity.

We can train people in in compassion. It is again, like mindfulness, it is a normal human. Trait, but that we can develop.

There's a lot of ideas in evolutionary psychology at the moment around the idea that in humans, maybe it's not so much survival of the fittest as survival of the kindest or survival of the best nurtured. So we know that emotional distress is much more common in people who had a bad attachment to their caregivers in the early part of life, particularly the 1st 5 years of life. So the better attached you are in early life, the, the better you are able to deal with the world when you're older.

And so this is part of this innate capacity for compassion, but that we can train and get better at. And the final one is insight. Oh, what do I mean by insight then, that sounds a bit big, but what I think NEF means is it's the ability to notice our own programming.

So I said we haven't let go of stimulus response and our habits of cognition, our habits of feeling, our behavioural tendencies. Are developed in largely a a a lot is developed through our attachment when we're children and also the experiences we have in life. I we would generally accept a lot of it is developed through stimulus response learning or associative learning, operant or or classical conditioning.

So in that sense, the current thinking in er psychology is we don't have free will. But what insight gives us is free wont. The ability to.

Pause and notice our programming and choose not to act on it. OK, so talking to vets gives me a cheap excuse for yet another dog picture. So there we are.

The key to meditation is learning to stay, and it's just staying still and watching what's going on in my own mind, body and feelings. And there's a lot of crossover between meditation and mindfulness, and people often use the words interchangeably. But actually, meditation is just one way to practise mindfulness.

And that might be one of the ways that can be a bit off-putting for people in the day to day, busyness of a vet's practise. But equally, we can learn mindful communication, mindful movement. And all sorts of informal mindfulness practises, and indeed compassion practises that might help us to get through the day.

So that's what it is. Let's have a quick look at what it isn't, or some of the myths about mindfulness. So the classic comment I get when I first try and teach people mindfulness is, ah, but I can't empty my mind.

Well, it's not about emptying the mind. It, as I've already indicated, mindfulness is not about emptying the mind, it's about watching the mind. And indeed what we quickly learn is it isn't possible to empty the mind.

Thoughts are the object of mind in the way that things in the outer world are objects of our sight. Next thing to say is mindfulness is not a quick fix, what we know from the research is it's practise, and it's something we get better at by doing. like I mentioned, it's like running a marathon, and you will lose the ability if you don't keep up the practise.

So it's something we have to keep up up doing. The next myth you'll see about mindfulness is it's a synonym for relaxation and chilling out. Oh, I, I am, I can't relax, I'm never very good, and I sitting still never helps me relax is another one I get.

Or again, a lot of people who've jumped onto the mindfulness bandwagon will use the terms together, mindfulness and relaxation. Well, actually, if you're doing mindfulness properly and you're actually learning to watch your own thoughts and feelings, trust me, it won't be that relaxing at least some of the time, you'll see some stuff you might not want to see initially. So it's not relaxation, but it is a skill that improves your performance.

In mindfulness we often say that what we're really teaching you is not to relax, but to fall awake, to come awake to this present moment. So the next myth is, you know, it's all very well for everyone else, but I can't do it. You know, they come on in a piece, I don't have all day.

Actually, what the research says is that people with low trait mindfulness seem to gain the most benefit. So we have a trait mindfulness that we, we grow up with, that we have a capacity for. And those people with low trait mindfulness can be trained in mindfulness and they get the most out of it.

They learn to tolerate emotional distress much better. They find all sorts of emotional problems, become less worrying to them. And that is part of the answers to the next question.

Why do you want to do mindfulness? So generally, why do we wanna do mindfulness with people? I said it's become a big part of human psychology, and if we look, this is from the American Mindfulness Research Association, and this is about published papers in peer reviewed journals.

And you can see the growth. 1998 was when John Cabotzin started talking about it. By 2010, there was a bit of interest growing, and if you look at the last two or three years, it's really gone through the roof, and as I say, almost all cognitive behavioural practitioners in the UK would now include some mindfulness and acceptance strategies in their approach.

So the evidence base is growing rapidly. And it's gone from a kind of fringe of human psychology to the mainstream. And it's led to some quite big changes.

One of the major changes in our approach is this idea that psychological pain is normal, it's important and everyone has it. So we've stopped trying to get rid of the symptoms of psychological pain, emotional distress, and indeed stress. And instead, what we want to do is help people accept it so that it causes less distress.

So you can have psychological distress without really suffering from it. So, one of the things we found, for instance, is that it's not stress that kills you. It's the belief that stress is bad for you that kills you.

Lots of evidence for that now in health psychology. And so what we're trying to do is change people's relationship with with their own emotional states, with their stress and their depression. Having said, everyone has psychological pain, I think we should just hear from one of the dogs again.

It does seem to be that vets suffer from more stress than other human beings. Research suggests that in this country, perhaps 4 times as many vets contemplate suicide as the general population. I've read in some journals in other countries it's even higher.

I think Canada won it 7 times more likely. They are vets some 10 times more likely to report emotional distress than other professions. And it does seem that the current demands where people are watching super vet on telly and they are reading up on the internet, means that maybe clients are more demanding.

There is we we're living through a a a a time of austerity and that means there's less money around. So stress is is perhaps a bigger issue than it. So why do humans particularly need to develop mindfulness?

One of the theories that's come up as we've been studying this is the idea that it's to do with our abilities with language and relational thinking that maybe make us a little bit different to other species, and I recognise I might be taking a risk saying that surrounded by that. So language and relational thinking makes human beings amazing. You know, no other species built the pyramids or got a rocket to the moon and all of those kind of things.

So language is obviously what I'm using now, the ability also to tell stories. And to have ideas, and that means we can think into the future and think back into the past, perhaps in a richer way than other species, possibly. What I mean by relational thinking is that look around you now and choose any two objects you can see, wherever you're sitting.

And I'm just gonna ask you to think very quickly, can you think of two ways in, one way in which those two objects are the same. And one way in which those two objects differ. My guess is you will be able to.

Most human beings can do that, and that is the skill of relational thinking that we think is at the bottom of human's problem solving and toolmaking ability. Now, there's a problem with that. It makes us suffer as well as making us be able to get to the moon.

Makes us suffer, let me tell you about the language, if you're looking at this slide, so if I didn't have language, I might just look at that sunset and think wow, what a beautiful sunset. But if I look at that sunset and I'm a bit down and my partner's just left me, and I think, oh, what a beautiful sunset. And then the next thought to come in is and isn't it a shame X isn't here to share it with me?

Well, actually, it's not a shame. I'm glad they left. I hate them.

And the story goes, and we make ourselves really unhappy looking at a sunset. And in terms of relational thinking, it's really simple. We are constantly comparing.

So it's constantly oh I'm more stupid than you, he's better at that than I am. I'm cleverer than he is, so therefore I should get more money, and so on. And all this relational thinking also makes us suffer.

OK, warning, the next slide is a little bit of an oversimplification of the autonomic nervous system. So the idea is that one of the things that happens because of language and relation. Compared to other.

Species, we end up spending more time in the sympathetic nervous system. So because I look at a sunset and rather than staying in that kind of nice soothing system of the parasympathetic nervous system, I am focusing on the threat of he shouldn't have left me, or I'm focusing on the drive of this is such a beautiful sunset, I'm gonna go and find a dozen people to share it with me. So I get caught up in stories that mean I'm in higher levels of arousal.

What mindfulness does, first and foremost, is help us to learn that is what we are doing. So it's that ability to intervene between the stimulus and the response, the response in this thought case being a pattern of thinking. And the compassion based practises that we throw in help us to stay in the soothing system far more.

So we develop our soothing system. In that sense, we can see because we can see real neuroplasticity and the brain can change its shape, which we see when people practise mindfulness regularly, it develops new wiring. One of the things we can see ourselves as doing by developing our soothing system is almost reparenting ourselves, but it does take practise.

Now in terms of the research in how does it help people like vets, well, there's not a lot directly peer reviewed journals on how it might be used to help vets, not a great deal out there, but there's masses on its use in doctors, nurses, and particularly interestingly, A&E nurses, there's a lot of research being done on A&E staff. And the research says that those healthcare staff who practise mindfulness have more job satisfaction. Better quality of life, more compassion, more satisfied clients, and better physical health, more resilience, which is the ability to bounce back from stress, better memory and more confidence.

A&E staff who were also trained in compassion, well, they compared those trained in compassion to those trained in empathy. The ones trained in empathy, their patients were more satisfied with the care they got, but the staff still burnt out. The ones trained in compassion got the same improvement in patient satisfaction, but they didn't burn out.

And that my suggestion to you is maybe this could be the same for vets and vet nurses. And lots of businesses have found that mindfulness benefits their business. So Google has developed its own mindfulness programme called Search Inside Yourself, and lots of other big companies have their own mindfulness programme.

And the kind of benefits my we find in business are improved performance. Better leadership, it's particularly good for leaders to develop their mindfulness, happier workplace, greater creativity, better customer relationships, and a no blame learning culture, which I think is particularly important in safety critical roles like vets. So a couple of caveats though before you run in there.

The first caveat is beware of Muck mindfulness. So there's a lot of people peddling mindfulness because it's become completely popular and those people might be people who don't really know what they're doing. So, the kind of people, for instance, who link mindfulness to relaxation probably don't know what they're talking about.

So one thing to look out for is make sure any teacher you're using makes meets the UK good practise guidelines. And remember there's a dosing effect. All the research says that a worn off workshop in mindfulness probably won't change your life, won't change your practise.

But if you can stick at it for the evidence suggests 8 weeks, then you start getting some longer term practise benefits. Second big caveat is mindfulness in times of emotional difficulty. Mindfulness really should be used more as a prophylactic than a treatment.

So NICE recommends one particular mindfulness based intervention, mindfulness based cognitive therapy for depression, but only when people are in remission. So, when people are really emotionally distressed, use your local mental health services, or encourage them to get involved in mindful movement and behavioural activation, which is a posh phrase for getting them to do something, some kind of positive behaviour seems to be more important than being quiet when somebody's depressed. So some quick thoughts about how to bring it to your veterinary practise.

First off, you can get some free reputable mindfulness training. It's an online course, this one. So I qualified through the Mindfulness association teacher training pathway, and the teacher training pathway is an a live course you learn in person.

But a lot of people start their training before they do live training with an online course, and so, this is one of the ones they're a teacher training organisation recognised by the UK register, so you know it's reputable and bizarrely enough, it's free, so yeah. Another really quick win for you is the idea of AOB. So this is combining a bit of mindfulness and a bit of compassion, a bit of self-compassion, triggering your soothing system and it's something you can use yourself or teach any of your staff.

And so the suggestion is align your posture, just feel your feet on the floor. Get your head up, put your shoulders back, pay attention to an upright strong back and a soft front, so open. And just putting your body in that posture will make you feel better and will make you more alert.

Then just do a quick check round, you can observe. If you think of it as head, heart, gut, thoughts, emotions and physical sensations. And then, I'm sorry about the type on this slide, but breathe.

So there's several ways we can use the breath to trigger the soothing system or the parasy pathetic nervous system. The key one is if we make our breath even and make our breath 5 breaths per minute. Then that seems to trigger the autonomic nervous system, the soothing system, the, parasympathetic system.

So also when you're aligning your posture, if you can hold your whole body from the head to the feet in mind. That visualisation of your own whole body also seems to trigger the parasympathetic nervous system. Another really simple tip for that is just rubbing your lip.

Rubbing your lip will actually soothe you. So, some quick tips then, hope those help. And finally, I wanted to just share a few lessons that I've learnt from working with Tarwood about bringing it into a practise.

So that's Brendan, who you heard from earlier, and we're gonna hear again. And I think my first lesson is to make sure it's led from the top, which of course in this case means Pippa. But Brendan as well, has been very committed to this.

Be willing to give it time. They've really given it time to bed in, it's not a quick fix, so they've kept at it, and they've kept relearning their mindfulness skills. We trained the staff together initially and that gave them a shared language to talk about what they were learning.

I think that was really useful. And it also gave the staff a message this was important, they were being given time for it. We now also induct all new staff, so they get the same, quick workshop to introduce the techniques.

Mindfulness is a core value at Tarwood, and I think that's an important element to making it run through the practise. And the final thing is my personalise it. So we do, I, I do mindfulness as a 1 to 1 intervention with most of the staff in Tarwood and we make it slightly different for each person so that it meets their personal needs.

So the ones who are not good at sitting still, we do more mindful movement, the ones who, take to it more. Meditation techniques. OK, so that's the input and I'm gonna hand you back to Brendan, who, there he is, picture of him on the screen, and he's gonna lead the panel.

Thank you very much, Jan, for a great, I think reflection on what what mindfulness is. I think there's a couple of good points in there that I'd just like to highlight. I think there's a very good, TED Talks for those people who know a bit about YouTube and TED Talks, by Kelly McGonagall talking about stress, which is a, a really good thing to have a look at if, you want to understand the, the how stress can affect you if you think it's a bad thing.

So it's a really good watch. It only takes you 14 minutes of your life to watch that, and it could change your life and give you years. So it's worth doing.

I think, it's so true that everyone gets stressed at points and how you reflect on that is really important. My staff sometimes come to me and they wonder how I cope with the day to day running of a practise from staff and from clients and dealing with patients, and, you know, if things go well, that's great. If things go badly, how you cope with those.

And I think ultimately, it's because I have coping mechanisms. I would absolutely declare, yes, I have bad times, but you have. Mechanisms which I've put in place with Jan's help, and, the training, and it's been really useful.

I think, naturally, to some degree, I was inducted into doing that. My mom was a great advocate of the gardening, the, the cutting the grass. And you can do that mindfully, all the way through to walking the dog.

I think that's the active stuff that Jan was talking about. walking in the countryside, just being able to not empty your mind. Although my loving wife, who I love dearly, would often say that I come home and probably do empty my brain, and then switch off and then fall asleep.

. But believe you me, that's not all I do. The, but I think, you know, just being able to, do things constructively that are outside of your normal work and work on that and not be thinking about what's gonna happen the next day. I mean, I do, some conservation work up in the Lake District, and, I find dry stone walling is a brilliant mechanism for being able to just concentrate on what's in front of you and forget everything else that's going on in the world, until it gets dark.

And then I get told by my wife that I should be packing it in. So, I'd like to now just open the floor up to our other panellists. I believe Paul is negotiating all of this, turning people's mics on and everything else.

So hopefully, Paul, if I can hand you back and just make sure that everybody introduces themselves, I have Paul Roger here beside me, myself, Brendon Clarke, and, Jan Mayer, so we'll be sharing a mic this end. So Paul, are you there? Yes, I'm here.

The panel is ready to go, everyone's unmuted, so we should be good for introductions. Tim, if you'd like to go first. Thank you, Brendan.

Yes, I've spent most of my working life in and around the veterinary practises, and run a number over the years and currently working with Alan Robinson and the Dynamics team helping practises develop their practises, not just financially but also with making the best use of their resources, i.e. The staff.

And Libby, if you're there too. Hi there. Yes, I am 10 years in the city before then, jumping the fence and deciding in my wisdom to retrain to be a vet.

So I had all the experience of what corporates do in the Big Smoke. I came into the veterinary world and realised not a lot of it has yet sort of made it in as, as mainstream. So I now work with Alan at Vet Dynamics and Tim, as a consultant helping practises lift to the next level with strategies based on neuroscience like mindfulness.

And Sarah, are you there too? Yeah, thank you very much. Yes, Sarah Campbell, I work with Zoettis as part of their business consulting team.

My background is in education and having, finally decided to leave school after many, many years being there, I lived with a huge performer and worked in learning development there. Focusing really on staff issues, on boarding, making sure people are comfortable in their environment, that they know what they're doing. I moved to the veterinary area about 8, 10 years ago now.

Have background in training and management and more recently working with Zoettis on. Not only working on the people skills, but also working and focusing on what practises need and want to support their development and support their profitability. OK.

So Paul, firstly, just to check, there's if there's any comments from anybody else outside of the panel, at this point. If they, if people want to make a comment, for us to answer, or their views on mindfulness, how to integrate it, it'd be great if you'd, pipe up and just let me know, Paul. Yeah, absolutely.

So to everyone who's listening, if you do have any questions or comments for the panel, if you hover your screen over the presentation, you should have a small black box here which will have a chat option and a Q&A option. Please feel free to submit any questions into the Q&A box or any comments into the chat box about the webinar, and we will see them this end and collate them. OK, and just to reiterate, I'm hoping this is, recorded so that this is a useful resource for people to introduce, mindfulness into practise, certainly for those practises within Yorkshire and through membership of the Yorkshire Veterinary Society, we'll have access to this as a useful resource alongside the other, webinars that we're hosting.

So, I'd like to just pop, a question to our panel. you've seen Jan present on how we've introduced mindfulness. I feel successfully, doesn't stop our staff getting stressed, but it's, it's certainly there is a, a helping hand, .

I know Tim, for example, you, deal with a lot of mentoring practise owners, and that side of things. How's, do you generally find those practise owners are, looking at mindfulness and, and, and are they actually considering introducing it or do they just see it as an ideal? I think a lot of them think of it as an ideal to start off with, and a lot of them have issues around how to actually introduce it and how the staff will take it, but when it is introduced and the owners actually believe in what they're doing, we actually get some very good results.

Certainly the help of profiling using the likes of Talent dynamics also helps. With moving things on as well. So Libby, would you say, cos I know that you, you feel specialised, is there anything that you'd like to add to how Jan's presented tonight as to other thoughts of how you approach introducing it to practises that you help?

Sure. I think the, the biggest thing with what came across really strongly from Jan's presentation, I see a lot. With the practises that we coach is that concept of, it's actually the people who are least good at this as a trait that get the most benefit.

And that's what's really frustrating for us as, mentors and coaches, because we can sometimes see it clear as day, but they won't engage with it because they feel they'll fail at it. Because maybe they've tried meditating and their, their mind wasn't empty. So I, I love what Jan had to say about, you know, it's not emptying it, it's observing it, it's watching what you're doing.

And one of the biggest effects we can have at a, a business is sort of taking people by the hand and helping them come to this understanding that it starts with you. It starts with what's in your head. So what you've done is obviously lead from the top, and I, I think that's really critical, and that has to be the starting place, but the frustrating thing is those people that are least self-aware often think they're the most self-aware.

So that's one of our challenges to try and help them through that change. Great, thank you. Sarah, we, we were having a chat earlier today, and I was listening very interested to your talk on, the whole life cycle of, staff, within practise and, looking at, specifically introducing some of these mechanisms, with your onboarding and that side of things.

Are there any sort of pointers that you would say to, people coming to join, rather from the other side of the fence from where we discussed today, which is very much about business leading the, the approach, that you would say to younger members of the profession, you know, how to cope with that, how to maybe introduce it into their working life. Yeah, thank you. I think sometimes we tend to, Almost externalise this and expect things to come to us, and I would encourage people to be very aware of this, that the need for mindfulness, the need for the focus, because of the benefits to them personally, but also the benefits to them professionally and not to be afraid of it.

I think we need to take ownership of that and not expect it to be delivered to us. So obviously, Tar wood, you've embraced it as a practise, and it's a common language. It might not be a common language in the place you're going to work, but you could be the catalyst for that.

And just because somebody else doesn't necessarily understand it doesn't mean that you need to ignore it. So look after yourself, become more self-aware in every manner, but also, take ownership, but project that ownership onto it as well. Great, thank you.

Paul, anything that you'd like to add as in Paul Rodgers? Yes, a number of things that I think have come up with this. One is the, the, the language that we use, the language that we use in talking about mindfulness and and about human behaviour, very similar to the language we use when we're describing animal behaviour.

And I'm particularly interested in the, in the term suffering and what that means. I, I, I, I, I also think that we're identifying something that should be a natural part of practise life because we talk about reflective practise and looking at, clinical audit, for example, and, and how that is involved and how that evolves within practise and we address those, those issues and to me that seems that. Mindfulness is, is a, a core part of that.

and that we need to recognise that we need to develop our, young vets, and already we're talking about, training and compassion and empathy in, in veterinary schools, and this must then be reflected in what we . In practise, and how we manage to support our young vets and and consolidate them within our profession, so that we don't get the kind of attrition rates that we seem to get present 5 or 6 years out. Thank you, Paul.

Paul, who's hosting this for us, with Webinar vets, thank you very much. Have, is there any comments coming in at all, from outside at this point? There've been no questions or comments submitted so far, no.

So, could I just say to any of our panellists, you know, from tonight, is there something else that they may think is a, a great introduction into, practise, of, communicating these things, the mindfulness and, and how to talk to their colleagues about that? If I can perhaps just pick up on something that lovely Tim mentioned earlier, there's something that they do a lot in the city, which is psychometric profiling. I found it almost non-existent in the veterinary market when I came into it.

The power of knowing who you are is huge, and we've now started routinely profiling all our clients with the tool that Tim mentioned, which is called Talent Dynamics. There are others. There's things like disc and PRISM and HBDI.

But what we've found is that as soon as somebody knows their neurology, knows how they work. They're much quicker to, firstly, understand themselves and then extrapolate that outwards and understand others. So we use it as a team tool for building that team harmony, which dramatically lessens the stress of practise life when you've got a, a unit that works well with itself.

And what we use is the phrase, mind like water. You know, you have an appropriate response to the stimulus given. And sometimes that's, that's the opposite of mindfulness, isn't it?

Where you have 12 clients say brilliant things about you. One client makes a complaint and your stressometer just goes off the scale because that means more to you than the 5 bunches of flowers you've got today. So we start there with that, you know, understand yourself and then.

Sort of work it out, if that makes sense. Yeah, I think that's something certainly as a vet for over 2025 years. You, you do always find staff generally.

Have that overbearing concentration on the one thing that didn't go right today. And actually, you know, there was 100 plus things that did go right and went wonderfully and we, we have a, a wonderful way as a profession of seeming to overlook that, that success rate that we truly have. I think that's a consequence of the age that we're living in though, because of the unfortunate effect of the Facebook plague where you do one thing wrong.

And you can get absolutely killed online, you know, and that gets shared. People are much quicker to to log in and write a horrible reviews than they are to write a good one. And we see that creating so much stress in our, in our clients.

And and so the idea of promoting non-blame review is a really important part of, of mindfulness, I think. Yeah, I, I, I agree that modern life has made it worse, but we have a, a phrase I use quite a lot in Tower which comes from a neurologist called Rick Hansen, who says the human mind is like Velcro for bad stuff and Teflon for good stuff, you know, that's the way we're hardwired, and I think it's about then putting in practises that help us to notice what we've done well. So one of the things that we do at Tarwood, for instance, is just asking people to pay attention to one thing that they're proud of, that they've done well, and asking managers to notice that about the people we manage as well.

So turning the attention. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead.

Sorry, thank you, Libby. I think that that's really, really powerful. I mean, as we said at the beginning, we, we all have the capability to be mindful as little ones we are.

We tend to grow out of it a little bit. And I think accepting the feeling and recognising it, but not dwelling on it, you know, don't, don't beat yourself up. And the whole process of, of recognising good stuff.

But also recognising the bad stuff, but actually managing with it and coping with it and finding a way through it. And if you can't take it somewhere else, don't dwell on it, because dwelling can be profitable, but. It can also be destructive.

So. Recognise it, own it, feel it, but don't dwell on it and share it. Sharing, I can't emphasise sharing more in the workplace.

Gotta do it, really gotta do it. Yeah, those are brilliant things to, to raise. And hopefully, from this series, we're gonna touch on a few things that have been raised this evening, in a bit more detail.

So, from, different colours of people's constitutions, you might say disc profiling, I think. No word on your approach shortly from Vet Dynamics, through which will be next time and that's how to develop, that relationships within a practise in within team members and also understand where clients may be coming from. And also this non-blame culture and the clinical review stuff, will come in the autumn so that we can, understand a little bit better about mentorship and, you know, we've certainly benefited as a practise doing a, a clinical meeting, you know, between 9:30 and 10 every morning.

It's amazing how easily it is to slot that in. And that's about that sharing, sharing of experiences. And I think learning how to learn from those things, is, is really important.

But it just becomes a better community that we can sometimes, you know, woe is me, altogether, or, it's a case of, no, actually, if you reflect on that, what have we learned from it? How could we have made it better? There may be no way of making it better, and it was just going to happen.

So I think there's all sorts of really important lessons to to go through in this series that we've got planned, and hopefully you'll be able to join us for some of those, going forward too. I'm gonna pass over to Paul, he's got to. I'd just like to say that that actually we also have to say that everybody within a practise has a voice, and we have to give that.

Time to air as well, so that it's not just the vets leading the other vets, but it's actually the totality of the the practise staff working together to go through these ideas. If I can back up what he's saying there because that's a really, really brilliant point and it's, we actually teach a whole module on that in our platin programme and, and we go and deliver a set piece of training called Shared vision because it's true if they don't write the plan, they fight the plan and everyone's got to feel heard that, you know, and I think we forget as well that if you are the practise principal, you. Got that autonomy, which you just don't have if you're a nurse or a kennel maid or perhaps a receptionist in the same building.

So one of the really great tools that we use is a winds board, where you have really simple a whiteboard with a stack of Post-it notes. But before you go home, you scribble around one good thing about your day and you slap it on the board. And then every week, all those winds are collected up into a jar.

And then equally, you have crap times jar. And then you look at the difference between them, you know, and usually it's a very tiny amount of bad things that have happened and a huge amount of great things that we haven't perhaps necessarily focused on. I love that idea.

I, I, I want to introduce that. Get on it. As long as they only put bits of Post-it notes into the crap jar, that's all right.

Very true. Tim, did you want a little word, the vet dynamics view on this profiling for a moment, just so that people may be aware of what that is? Well, it's actually talent dynamics, and what it is, is looking at how you work best in flow, and that's what it's all about, just trying to find your flow so that.

You go down the path of least resistance and you understand what you like to do, how you like to do it, and why you like to do it. And then if you understand how you work and you understand how your colleagues work, then it makes for a more harmonious organisation. That, that, that's it in a, in a nutshell.

Perfect nutshell. That's great. And, and Sarah, from your point from Zoitis, and that side of things, how have you found, you know, I asked you to, to reflect on new grads coming in, but, obviously you do a wide range of, aspects, not just this mindfulness and, that relationship building, but sort of like on and through onboarding, etc.

Are there certain aspects that you think are really important, maybe keynotes to, to give to our practises in the Yorkshire region for, that relationship building? Yeah, thank you, I think. Communication, the biggest, biggest, advantage we have in any environment is our ability to communicate.

The biggest barrier we have in any environment is our inability to communicate. And I think that that comes up time and time and time again when I work with practises, they like to think they have a great communication structure, but when people are feeling it, when they're down. When they are under stress, that communication can fail.

So keep the communication open, everybody has responsibility for that, own that responsibility. And you know, call it out if you need to. If somebody's not actually giving you the time, call it, make the time.

And that comes at every single level. So, Sometimes we would talk about moaning a moment ago, and I was smiling because a great moan is wonderful. Oh, good moan, it's wonderful, as long as you come out of it at the other end with a positive positive outlook.

And it's either we can fix it, and this is how we're gonna fix it, or do you know what? That's gone. We can't deal with that.

It's gone. We'll learn from it. But keep the communication open and everybody has the responsibility to initiate communication as well.

Yeah, I, I love that idea of that's absolutely fine. If you've got an issue, that's brilliant, raise it. But also bring a resolution of, you know, a good way to resolve that, you know, what could we do positively to overcome that, that issue?

I think it's a really good. Input. And I love something that somebody said today, at the meeting that we had, which was, she just couldn't understand why people, as she marched down the corridor, didn't just get what she meant as she walked down the corridor.

I think, you know, that's what a lot of practise owners, tend to do is to march around, see things, think something, but not say anything. Absolutely, absolutely. Sometimes we seem to, we forget.

You, you wanna find yourself thinking, did I just say that out loud in the most inappropriate moment? Well, sometimes we do need to say something out loud and internalise it. But be conscious of the fact that either you're communicating or your lack of communication is having on other people.

Because by not communicating, by not bringing it forward, that can be detrimental, just as much as occasionally having a blowout. But be aware of what it is you're saying, when you're saying it, and why you need to say it. And as I said before, have a moan, it's lovely, but have some way of looking forward from it.

Come out of that moan, it's critical. Great. I'm just gonna pass back to er to Paul, how, how long do we have Paul left?

It is 9 o'clock. I mean, it, it's up to you guys how long you want to go on for. OK.

Jan, do you want to just have a sort of close up, some key things that you would take, as easy practises for people thinking about mindfulness? Yeah, so some quick. I'd echo what everybody said here that mindfulness really links with reflective practise and getting to know yourself, and it will really improve your business as well as your staff wellbeing.

But some really quick wins for from the kind of improving your wellbeing is this idea of just feeling your feet on the ground, if nothing else, throwing your shoulders back and breathing, . If you haven't time to breathe a full minute, then just if in doubt, breathe out, is my one tip, cause that will immediately relax you. And if you have got time to breathe for a minute, then the way to get that even 5 breaths per minute is to maybe just a phrase in your mind, breathing in, I know I'm breathing in, breathing out, I know I'm breathing out.

And the feet on the floor, just connecting with now is a really good little tip. So I hope there will be something you can use from this webinar in your own practise. That's great, Jan, thank you very much.

Thank you to all of our, panellists tonight as well, Tim, and Libby from Vet Dynamics for giving up their time, as well as Sarah from Zuitis for giving up their, her time. Absolutely brilliant. Thank you very much for joining us tonight.

. Thank you, Paul, as well, Paul Roger, for giving us his time and, webinar vet for helping us host, tonight's, useful resource, going forward. A last, a little bit from, us as the Yorkshire Veterinary Society, we do have, a commitment to, helping practises within the Yorkshire region. If you have any comments, please join our Facebook page.

Join the website that's been developed, tweeters, all of those things are available. It's useful feedback, . Bent, in with mindfulness in mind, which is a little bit of exercise, for those people wanting to find out a little bit more about how beautiful Yorkshire is.

So there's the Yorkshire Dale Three Peaks Challenge, that's going ahead this Saturday. So it's a nice early start because it's about, it's a nice day's walk, across the Three Peaks. So if you wish to join us, we'll be setting off, from 7 o'clock, .

I'll let Paul say the various options that there are that are outside the Three Peaks because we've got a waterfalls walk through Ingleton and we'd hope to see you there. Paul, do you want to just say the alternative walks? Yes, we, we're meeting quite early at the cafe in Horton in Ribblesdale, for a 7 o'clock start, and I, I'm going to lead, a much gentler walk around the waterfalls in Ingleton, which is an ideal place to stop and stare and to practise your mindfulness as you walk around.

So that's great, great thoughts, great family day out if you want to bring the family, and, if you want to wear out your dogs, then by all means bring them on the, Three Peaks walk. So, thanks again to our panellists. Any parting thoughts from, anybody else before we say goodbye?

The silence is deafening. That's, that's brilliant. So thanks again, Tim, do you have anything to say?

No, just, we're all here to help and we all have our own specialities and can help practises in a number of different ways, so please help, ask for help if you need it. Brilliant, thank you, Tim. Er Libby, anything that you'd like to add at the end?

I just think it's a subject that needs so much more attention than it's it's got up to now. It's great to see those figures going up of people being aware of it, because the, the work that I've done on looking at the power of what you can do to your brain, you know, it's all the evidence is there that this stuff works. So yeah, do it.

If you're even thinking about it, get on it. Brilliant, thank you Libby. Er and Sarah, lastly, I think I'd echoed both of those comments really.

I think we've made a start tonight, it might be the first exposure you've had to this. It might be part of the journey you're on, go away, think about it. Don't lose that muscle, work it and do something because it's to you for your benefit at the end, and we are all here to help.

We all have different ways of doing it. We can all help in practise, we can all help individually, and Brendan has all our contact details. That's right, that's brilliant, thank you.

And lastly but not least, Jan, thank you very much for your presentation tonight. really brilliant presentation, a fresh view, from this. I think we've seen a fair amount already, but I think there's a lot more to be said, on how to improve, mental health within veterinary practise.

We are also supporting, vet. Life.org, which is the BVA, charity, useful resource for, mental well-being in the veterinary industry, for everybody, from nurses and vets, and also our reception team and admin teams all have free access to that helpline, that they provide, and I think a really useful resource, .

If you are feeling that you need something else, some other help, mindfulness is not always the first place to start. If you're feeling stressed, there are other helps out there, and they are a really good resource to, to be talking to. So thank you all for listening tonight.

For those who are listening to us, at a later stage, we hope you've, gained a lot from, this evening's webinar. And thank you Webinar vet. Thank you, Paul.

Thank you very much everyone and hopefully see everyone on a webinar soon.