This week on the podcast…
Dr. Andy Roark and Stephanie “Celebrate Good Times” Goss are having a party with y'all. That's right, we are celebrating our 200th episode of the podcast this week! It has been 200 weeks of good times diving into some awesome topics that we are all wrestling with on a regular basis in our practices. Andy and Stephanie both want to thank you, our listeners, for making the podcast magic with us over these past few years. We pulled together some of our favourite lessons discussed for you all. Cheers to the next 200 episodes. 🎉
You can also listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.
Got a question for the mailbag? Submit it here: unchartedvet.com/mailbag
Thank you to our sponsors! To learn more about this week's sponsor, GuardianVets, check out their website HERE.
Upcoming Events
Conflict Resolution Crash Course with Stephanie Goss
Let's be honest – the veterinary community is a conflict-averse group. But struggles are part of our daily journey whether we like them or not. Create some tools to help you thrive in the face of adversity, come together in the heat of challenges, and finally make hardship downright easy.
Date: November 9
Time: 7pm ET/4pm PT – 9pm ET/6pm PT
Price: $99/FREE for Uncharted Members
The Secret Sauce to Optimizing Workflow with Senani Ratnayake, RVT
Back by popular demand! It's time to take a look at the workflows that aren't working and come up with a plan to move forward with a strategy that makes sense.
Date: November 30
Time: 5:30pm ET/2:30pm PT – 7:30pm ET/4:30pm PT
All Uncharted Veterinary Community Workshops are LIVE! You will be able to ask the instructor questions that help you address your practice’s unique problems. This will not be 2 hours of silent screen time. Gear up for interactive, fun learning!
Episode Transcript
This podcast transcript is made possible thanks to a generous gift from Banfield Pet Hospital, which is striving to increase accessibility and inclusivity across the veterinary profession. Click here to learn more about Equity, Inclusion & Diversity at Banfield.
Stephanie:
Hey, everyone, I am Stephanie Goss and this is another episode of The Uncharted Podcast. Well, it's not just any other episode of the Uncharted Podcast. In fact, this is a very special episode of the Uncharted Podcast. I need a drum roll here, Dustin. Drum roll, please. This is actually our 200th episode. Everybody, I am so excited about this. I cannot believe that we have been doing this for 200 episodes. I just want to start this episode by saying thank you so very much from the bottom of mine and Andy's hearts to all of you for listening, for participating, for sending us letters in mail bag, for shooting us emails or texts or messages, letting us know, “Hey, these are things that we would love to talk about in the vet med community.” It means the world to us that we get to do this with you every single week.
Stephanie:
And so we put something together that is a little bit special for all of you today. Andy and I sat down and thought, “Let's talk about some of the best lessons or the most common lessons that we have learned over the course of doing these 200 episodes with you.” And so we picked out some of the things that we love talking about the most, and we are super excited to go through this with you. We really enjoyed putting this together for you and again, I just have to say thank you. Let's get into this.
Speaker 2:
And now the Uncharted Podcast.
Andy Roark:
And we are back. It's me, Dr. Andy Roark and Stephanie “She's Going the Distance” Goss, coming in on our 200th episode.
Stephanie:
Yeah, buddy.
Andy Roark:
Holy Moly.
Stephanie:
I'm so excited.
Andy Roark:
That's bonkers.
Stephanie:
It is.
Andy Roark:
200 episodes.
Stephanie:
It is really, really bonkers. It is completely mind-boggling to me still how long … We've been doing this now for three years together.
Andy Roark:
Three years and change, yeah.
Stephanie:
And it is still mind-boggling to me every single week that people actually tune in-
Andy Roark:
More and more people every week. It's amazing.
Stephanie:
… to listen to you and I BS with each other.
Andy Roark:
Yeah. It's amazing. It's one of those things of … I really enjoy doing this thing with you and that's the reason we got to … People are like, “How do you get 200?” I was like, “I enjoy doing it so you keep doing it,” because if it's a big slog, you're never going to make it. Yeah. It's just been one of those things, where we just started making the thing and we just keep backing it and here we are.
Stephanie:
Well, and I think one of the things that I love the most there, this is going to be not our traditional episode. Andy and I talked about, “What do we want to do for 200?” and we wanted to do something a little bit different. So we're probably going to talk about some head space in terms of individual things, but we're going to talk, just going to be more of a conversation, conversation between Stephanie and Andy kind of episode. But I think that's one of the things that I love about doing the podcast with you and why it feels so easy is that when we first started working together, we had a lot of times where we would be talking on the phone and we'd be talking about work stuff and we would have side conversations and we'd be talking about problems that practices were having or things I was struggling with in the practice or you were struggling with. Those conversations came so easily because we would just start and I would get so excited. And you guys, I have to say we've been doing this for three years and 200 episodes and it's still, every time we record, it feels like you and I are just having a phone conversation and it doesn't feel like work.
Andy Roark:
I really enjoy it. No, I agree. It's fun to have people ask you questions and they just get to unpack it and work on it and tinker around with it. No, I completely agree. Yeah, I've really enjoyed working with you on all these things and I have a pretty good idea of what you're going to say, I think, but sometimes I'm still surprised and that makes it fun. You know what I mean? If I knew exactly, I'm going to say this and she's going to say that, I think it would get really boring and I would lose interest really fast.
Andy Roark:
I think the dynamic nature of our relationship is fun. I also really like that we talk to each other about what's going on in our lives and I think that that's always fun. I really look forward to just chatting about what's been happening and things like that. It makes me laugh and, I don't know, it's something I look forward to every time we record these.
Stephanie:
I agree. And I think it's fun because we're not afraid to have … Clearly, anybody who listened to us knows we're not afraid to have differing opinions. We're not afraid to feel strongly, even, about those opinions. It's part of what I love about you because I love getting a different perspective and there are sometimes where I'm not expecting it. And like you said, I'm expecting you to go one way and you go a different way and I'm like, “That is exactly what I needed to hear.”
Stephanie:
And it's funny because I will say that, I get asked a lot, How do you guys decide what you're going to talk about and I get the comment from people who say, “I listen to this week's episode and it was so timely. How do you know … You guys just seem to tackle the topic that I need to hear when I need to hear it.” And I will tell you all that it is part of what I love the most about my job because it is the same for me. I can't tell you how many times Andy and I have been recording an episode and we start talking about things and when we prep the episode and even when we're talking about it before we hit record, I'm thinking we're going to talk about this solely in the context of the clinic. We don't script this, as you can probably tell.
Stephanie:
Andy and I both, we have some points that we're going to talk about, but then we each just come at it from our own take. And when we start talking, there will be so many times where I'm like, “Dude, this completely applies to our team at Uncharted or it applies to what's going on in my personal life or Andy's personal life or whatever.” It's amazing to me how often we completely unintentionally talk about a topic that is exactly what needed to be talked about, given what's going on in our lives at that point in time.
Andy Roark:
Yeah. No, I think that's totally true. Everything seems to come in waves. It's amazing. People seem to run into problems, it feels like, together. The other thing that I think makes these things good to do is they're often topics I'm interested because I'm wrestling with them in one way, shape, or form. People say you write the book that you need to read. We make the podcast that we need to hear. I've found that to be true again and again and again.
Stephanie:
Yes. Tell everybody what we're going to do because we're going to do something different for our 200th episode.
Andy Roark:
Well, what we want to do here is just break down some of the most important lessons that we've learned, doing 200 episodes of Uncharted, meaning part of it is what's going on in our own life and the lessons that we've learned, just making our own past. And then a lot of them is, what do we see again and again in the mailbag? And I think piecing those things together is what I want to try to do. My idea really is we're all in this together and we're all making our way and we're all having similar challenges. And so I think of a lot of times when we look at things that we see in the mailbag that come up again, again or manifest in different ways, it's probably not hard for me and Stephanie need to find examples of those things manifesting in our own lives that we've had to deal with. We talked about it and the idea was, let's look back at all the things that we've done in the past and decide what are the lessons that we have run into again and again or that have been the most impactful for us and I just want to lay those out.
Stephanie:
Let's do it. I'm excited.
Andy Roark:
One of the things that I think is happening recently that I hear from a lot of people, and I hear in a lot of different ways, are things like this. I have a friend who is a wonderful doctor and leader and he has a great hospital and he works so hard on it and he works so hard on the culture and he's just been floored by people leaving recently. He's had a string of people leaving his hospital and he has felt horribly vulnerable about it and saying, “Am I doing something wrong? I work so hard to get this right and I work so hard to take care of my people.” None of it seems to be anything performance related. There's unfortunate things about people moving on, partners moving, things like that, but here he is and he's like, “I'm desperately shorthanded. I feel like I must be failing because I'm in this spot, even though I have invested so much time and energy to try to keep people happy so I wouldn't be here.”
Andy Roark:
And I have another friend who said, “I am having a hard time personally at home,” and she has a lot of sick pets that are very important to her. And she goes, “I'm just not my best and I'm really carrying this big burden and I feel like I must be doing something wrong or I'm missing something, but this just really weighs on me and I'm carrying this load.” And I think about those things and I hear again from people who are like, “We're terribly shorthanded and we're exhausted and there's no end in sight.”
Andy Roark:
I think that when I was in my 30s, I thought that if you were smart enough or you worked hard enough, you could get through anything relatively pain-free. I bought into this kind of BS idea that was put forward of, if you hustle hard enough or if you read the right books or you know the right things, you should be able to be happy along and along again and again and come out ahead. And if you're unhappy or you're really struggling though, you're probably doing something wrong. I think I had that. It took me into my 40s to really disabuse myself of that idea.
Andy Roark:
And so the first thing that I want to lay down is we have a lot less control than we like to think that we do and that's just been shown to me very clearly with the pandemic. My wife is dealing with breast cancer right now for no reason. She didn't do anything. We didn't make mistakes. It's just one of those crappy things that happens and we have to go through it.
Andy Roark:
And so that's the first thing I want to put down is there's a lot of things where we talk a lot about choose how you suffer and we talk a lot about picking your poison. I think I've really settled into that, as far as life is tough and it's always going to be tough. Running a business is tough and being a leader in a business is tough. Being a healthcare provider is tough and it's never going to be easy. That's a big lesson that hit me is, we're all climbing a spiral staircase and you're like, “Boy, if I could just get up to that next level, everything would be great.” And you get up there and then you turn the corner and you see another set of stairs. I don't mean it has to be morbid. I say this not to be down but to free people, and it's been very freeing for me just to say, “We have the power to choose how we struggle,” but we're always going to struggle. And if you just own that, I think it helps reset expectations and life gets a lot better.
Stephanie:
Yeah, I love that. I think similar to that, you talked about the spiral staircase. I remember starting out in practice and being a member of the CSR team and being frustrated when things didn't change or there were things that I wanted to be different about the practice that weren't. And I remember thinking if I could be a manager, then I could make it different, I could change things. I was really positive in that regard. I want to impact change. I want to make this a better place. I really care. And I became a manager and I did make change and I did make things positive and at the same time, had a whole new set of problems. And I remember being an early manager and just thinking, “Wow, this is some of what I expected, but also a whole lot of what I didn't expect and I didn't think about this when I was a CSR thinking ‘I would like to be a manager because then I would be able to solve a lot more things.'”
Stephanie:
And then as a manager, it was like, “Oh, my practice owner, they have more control. They have more control. They can solve more of these problems. The buck stops here and they're the decision makers.” And then I was like, “Okay, let's make that move from practice management to practice ownership.” And making that leap, I'll tell you guys, that came with a whole new set of problems and it was eye opening to me to realize that it really wasn't the control piece of it. Like you were talking about, Andy, it really was an illusion. It was that spiral staircase of yes, in some ways I might have more control as I moved through positions of power in the practice. But at the same time, every new position came with a whole new set of problems. And so I think that for me, that was a really, really powerful lesson.
Stephanie:
We see it again and again in the questions that you all ask. How can we have done 200 episodes and we've answered so many questions and yet, we get not the same questions but the same themes? The reason is because the questions are always different. There's something different about this new question, something that's different in each practice. That's part of what I love about vet med. But for me, it was taking that step back and realizing that we don't have the control. Even if you are the boss, even if the buck stops here, you don't have any more control in different ways than a member of your front desk team has. That was a painful lesson for me to learn because I didn't think that it would be pain-free, but I thought that it would be easier in a lot of ways.
Stephanie:
And what I didn't recognize, what I didn't have the perspective to recognize, is that there's a whole new set of problems that keep you up at night as a business owner. When I was at CSR, I remember there would be nights where I would be in bed thinking about, “Oh, I forgot to document this for this client or I forgot to do this for this patient.” There were worries that woke me up in the middle of the night or that I thought about while I was taking my morning shower like, “Oh, gosh. I have to do these things.” It's no different when you're a manager or practice owner. It's just the whole new set of problems.
Andy Roark:
Yeah, totally. It's just different problems. Yeah. No, I completely agree. One of the big things that settled on me was you don't control the past, the future, or other people. That's everything. It's not everything.
Stephanie:
It's true.
Andy Roark:
You can control yourself and you control what you do right now. I think we underestimate how powerful that is and we forget that we don't control the other things, so that's [inaudible 00:15:08]. The big analogy that I really am settled on right now is backpacking. What I would say is we're all backpacking and that's how this makes me feel. We're all making our way. We're all exploring the wilderness, we're all on different trails, going different places. I may have seen some of the trails that you haven't seen and you've seen some that I haven't seen and I that's why we can help ourselves.
Stephanie:
I will be on the easy, flat trail that walks by the beautiful lake because I don't do the backpacking.
Andy Roark:
You hope you'll be on the easy, flat trail, but here's the thing. So you want to be on the easy flat trail, but sometimes we don't have that choice. You know what I mean? Sometimes we have to walk through the swamp and sometimes the mosquitoes are bad and sometimes it just rains on us and that's okay, but know that there's nothing you can do about it. Sometimes you walk and you get rained on and you've got a couple options. You can sit down, you can stop, but you're just sitting in the rain, or you can put one foot in front of each other and you can keep going. I like the idea when I think about backpacking as what we do because rest is important. You've got to rest. You cannot just keep going and going and going.
Andy Roark:
You've got to rest, but there are some people that we know who sat down beside the trail and they never got up and they just stayed there. And there's other people who are like, “We have to go,” and they go and go until they break and their body breaks down or they get exhausted or whatever. We need to rest. We need to take a moment, rehydrate before we keep going on. I just think that that's a healthy way to look at it. When it rains on you, you can be miserable because it's raining or you can try to enjoy the hike, even though it's raining. If you can only enjoy beautiful views when there are no clouds in the sky, you're not going to have as good a hike as if you say, “Yeah, it's cloudy, but this is beautiful.” I think that that's really important.
Andy Roark:
I talked about a little bit earlier. My wife is dealing with breast cancer and the way that I think about it is it's raining on us and it's going to rain on us for six months. If we're lucky, it's just going to be six months of dealing with this but I'm going to walk with my buddy in the rain and we're not going to stop walking. We're going to walk and we'll get through it. I wish it wasn't raining, but wishing it's not raining doesn't actually change anything. And so we walk the dog and we hold hands and we talk about life and we watch TV together and we tell jokes and we still have a good hike, even though it's going to rain on us a little bit.
Andy Roark:
And to me, that's a powerful thing, is to say, “You're not doing anything wrong if you're getting rained on.” We're all going to get rained on. A lot of it is just, are you intentionally walking into the rain or are you doing your best, because you can choose the best paths possible. You're still going to get rained on. It's still going to get cold. Sometimes your pack's still going to be heavy. I don't know. For me, that's a beautiful way to think about this life and what we're doing, in a way that puts things in perspective where I go, “Yeah, I have great power. I'm the one who puts one foot in front of the other or doesn't. I'm the one who picks the path. I'm the one who knows that I want to go to the beautiful lake and that's where I'm going to try to head to. I have all that power. I still can't control the weather.”
Stephanie:
Okay, so we have less control than we think we do. That was a big one.
Andy Roark:
That's a big one.
Stephanie:
What else?
Andy Roark:
Well, okay. Let's go back to one that we say all the time in our podcast. If you were surprised by something again and again, at some point it's not a surprise. It's your business model. And we get these things in the mail bag all the time and I don't want to make people feel bad because we all feel that way. At some point, we confuse what is the weather with what is a fork in the trail. I see a lot of backpackers that hike in a circle and they come back to the same thing again and again and again and they're just hiking away and they're just going in a circle. And that, my friends, is this phenomenon where there's a problem, there's a headache, and we run into it and we don't resolve it. We just go on hoping we're not going to end up back here again and we are right back here again, strong hikers going in a circle. That's a problem.
Andy Roark:
We talked about clients being nasty at the front desk. They shouldn't do that and we should also have empathy for people because we don't know what they're going through. And at the same time, if you just keep going, you are going to keep having angry people again and again and again. And so at some point, figure out that this is not a surprise. It is a thing that happens and let's address it. That's the same thing for scheduling problems, as far as getting staff in, for how we make appointments, if we have headaches, for having angry clients. If you are doing something that makes the clients mad again and again and again and again, that's not the weather. That's the path that you're choosing and stop walking in circles. You have the power to recognize, “This feels real familiar. Let's get the map out and see if we need to make some changes so that we don't live this reality like Groundhog Day over and over again.” But goodness gracious, a lot of us are living these little annoyances again and again and again and we're not stopping and getting the map out and saying, “All right, how are we going to do this differently?”
Stephanie:
Here's the lesson that I have learned about this and this one, it's funny because it's a bit of a soapbox for me because anybody who's listened to the podcast knows how much I love policies and I love protocols and the business piece of it is important. And I think that for me, the answer to this piggyback is on the first thing that you talked about, Andy, which is we can always choose how we respond to a situation. When it comes to this being surprised again and again by something, it is our business model. This is an interesting one to me because it's amazing how many times I will talk to a fellow practice manager or a practice owner and they're telling me about the thing that is happening again and again and why they're surprised. I will talk through with them, “Here are some of the options and these are different paths that you could take to deal with this thing.”
Stephanie:
I'm amazed at how often we intentionally choose to ignore all of that and keep walking on the circular path because we think, for a whole myriad of reasons, we're too busy, I don't have the team, I don't have time to do this. That's part of why this is a soapbox for me because I think so many of us, and I say this because I have lived this life lesson so painfully, you all. This is a hard one. The lesson that I learned here is that there are going to be things that you are going to be surprised by again and again and again. And when it shows you who it is, and you're looking at it in the mirror, you need to believe it and you need to figure out, “How am I going to choose a different path?” And I think that that's one of the things that we too often don't make the time for.
Stephanie:
We know that it's a problem, We know that we need to solve it. I will deal with that later because it feels like there's more urgent things standing right in front of me. That's why it's a soapbox for me because I can't tell you how many times we would address problems with our teams and we would have team meetings and the CSRs would be crying because this thing is happening and they would say, “We need help,” and I would say, “I want to get you the help and we have these other things that we have to keep doing, so let's table this and we're going to circle back to it,” and then we don't. And so for me, doing it again and again, the lesson here for me is that if we don't take the time, if we don't make the time to work on our business and figure out what are the other path options and then intentionally choose a different path, we're always going to fail.
Stephanie:
I learned that lesson super, super painfully and I will tell you that my life changed radically when I worked in a practice environment where I had a leadership team and practice owners who were like, “Okay, let's do this.” Whether it means taking time for team meetings, whether it means doing business planning sessions together, whether it means doing things consistently like strategic planning, it looks different in every practice because every practice is in a different place in their journey. But taking that time to step back and say, “Okay, how do we actually look at them?” Like you said, Andy, we're going to pause. We're going to get some water. We're going to take our pack off for a minute. We're going to look at the map and we're going to figure out where the heck are we going and choose a different path. I think that that is a lesson that I have learned in working with you all and in hearing your questions, is I see so many of us who feel surprised and again and again because we're continuing to walk that circular path.
Andy Roark:
Yeah. I think there's two big drivers of this and I think you put your finger right on one. One is people working in the business instead of on the business. A lot of us came from the floor, We came from working, seeing animals, putting our head down, getting the work done. And so when there's a problem, we put our head down, we power through that problem, and continue on because that is what we've always done. Stepping out of working in the business and intentionally working on the business, those are muscles a lot of us don't use and we don't use them regularly and it feels foreign and it's just not how we think. It's thinking outside the box. Thinking inside the box, you go, “This is a problem and this is how I'm going to get through it.” Only by stepping back and going, “What if whole thing is wrong? What if there's a whole different way to do this?” Those are muscles that a lot of people don't have.
Andy Roark:
The other one is sort of behavioral psychology. It's called present bias, which is just our bias towards doing the thing that is going to give us the immediate gratification and just dealing with the angry person and going on is the fastest way to relieve tension. Let's just deal with this person and then we'll go on. Present bias is just let's power through, let's make this work right now, and go on versus stepping back, looking at it systemically and saying, “Okay, we're continuing to have problems there with client relations. We're continuing to have problems with team culture. We're continuing to have problems with people gossiping and bickering and the staff.” Let's stop talking to the individuals at the time of the fight and look at our clinic culture and make some significant changes here.
Andy Roark:
I think both of those are two big drivers, but I think a lot of people live their life that way of just, again, they're having the same thing again and again and they power through it. I see that over and over again as something I say, “Hey, let's take a second. Let's take a beat. Let's step away. Let's work on the business, not in the business and let's make some real changes.” And yes, it's probably going to take more effort to make a real change than it would to just be fixing the problem. But if you don't fix the problem, you're going to walk a circular trail end up right back here again another week.
Stephanie:
Yep. Yeah. Should we take a break here?
Andy Roark:
Yeah, let's do it.
Stephanie:
Okay. Hey, friends there is a workshop coming up that some of you are not going to want to miss. This last weekend was Uncharted Get Shit Done. There was a lot of conversation about workflow challenges in our practice and how a lot of us are struggling with things not working very well. Things feel pretty inefficient. We're all struggling to do more with less time, less people, less resources. And there was a lot of conversation about, how do we get more efficient and effective in our workflows? And so while a lot of you were there with us this weekend, not all of you were, and so I want to give you all an opportunity to join us. Coming up in November, November 30th at 5:30 Eastern, 2:30 Pacific, we are offering a two-hour workshop with my dear friend, Senani Ratnayake. Senani is an RVT, so she is a licensed technician, she is a general badass, she is a practice management consultant, and she loves talking about workflow. Senani has agreed to come back and lead a workshop that was voted one of our most popular in all of 2021 in Uncharted and that is The Secret Sauce to Optimizing Workflow.
Stephanie:
This two-hour workshop is here to help you and your team dissect your workflow so that you can get out of the place where everything feels inefficient and ineffective. And Senani's got four strategic steps that you and your team can use and then she helps you talk through what it will take to be able to get the whole team on board to lean into what your strengths are and address what your challenges are together as a team. So if you are struggling with efficiency and effectiveness in your practice, head on over to unchartedvet.com/events and sign up for the workshop. We would love to see you there. And now, back to the podcast.
Andy Roark:
What are those on your minds, lessons that you've learned, things that you've taken away from the first 200 episodes?
Stephanie:
Well, so you were talking in the beginning about we have less control than we think that we do. You were talking about backpacking. You were sharing the experience that your family is going through right now and how you and Ally are approaching what you're dealing with right now. And I think for me, that leads to one of the things that's been, I don't know if it's the most important lesson, but for me, it has certainly been the most profound, which is that the people that we surround ourselves with matter. Who we choose to go on the walk with matters and by extension, the community that we make matters, potentially more than anything, because you could be walking on a trail in the rain by yourself and maybe sometimes that feels good. Maybe you want to be there by yourself and that's okay. But I would tell you 9 times out of 10, if I'm going to have to make a freaking hike in the rain, I don't want to be out there by myself.
Andy Roark:
Yeah, I completely agree. Sometimes you have to walk alone and sometimes we just have to put one foot in front of the other and sometimes you just have to get the work done. But a lot of the times, there are other people out there that are walking a pretty darn similar trail to you. There are people who have already made mistakes that you don't have to make if you can just ask them about it. They have seen the trail that you're on before and man, that saves a lot of time and effort and heartache and energy just to have someone else say, “Hey, I made mistake,” or “Let me tell you how I approached it and it worked out pretty well,” or “Let me tell you how I approached it and it did not work out well and this is what I've learned and what I would do differently.” I mean, that stuff is super powerful.
Andy Roark:
The other thing is just validation, just having someone say, “I see you there, buddy. I see you working hard. I see you climbing that mountain and let me just promise you, there's going to be a heck of a view when you get to the top.” Those things matter and we don't interface that way. In vet medicine, we all stay in our little practices. I work with two other doctors and those are the only people that I know and I talk to them and they're great, but they're not expanding my worldview or they don't aspire to do what I aspire to do. I've already heard their stories and we've walked together for a long time and I'm not getting new insight from them. Boy, that ability to surround yourself with other people who are doing interesting things and who are walking and who have climbed mountains …
Andy Roark:
Because you have the other thing, too, just staying in the backpacking metaphor, people who have seen a lot are generally happy to share what they've seen. You don't have to walk all those miles yourself. You just have to surround yourself with people who are out exploring and doing things and then you have to be vulnerable enough to ask questions and say, “This is what I'm struggling with,” or “Can you give me any advice on this?” or “This is where I'm trying to go. Can you tell me about blank?” Ask them a specific question. I think a lot of us just don't do that. We silo ourselves. We're afraid to ask. We don't know who to ask. We don't have those connections. We don't have that community.
Stephanie:
I think for me, the part of it is we're also, especially if you're trying to grow yourself as a leader and you're thinking about developing your skills and you're trying to grow, I think for me, there was a little bit of, “Am I going to be viewed as dumb if I ask these questions?” The answer is no. You should ask the questions. The only dumb questions are the ones we don't ask. And for me, I am thankful that I had communities along the way. It's funny because when I was thinking about this and I was thinking about it, obviously, where I am now in our Uncharted community is a huge part of that story. I think we both would talk about that, but when I look back at my career through veterinary medicine, each step, there was a different community that met the needs that I had at that point in time.
Stephanie:
When I was a CSR learning to become an assistant manager, we had a wonderful office manager in our practice who had a group of the ladies who lunch, and it was a small group of local managers and almost all of them were the practice owners' wives who were managing practices. They would get together every six weeks or so and have lunch and mostly catch up about kids and grandkids, but they would also talk about what was going on in the practices. And I remember the first time Gret invited me to go to lunch with these ladies and it was really eye opening experience because I had all these questions. And here was, between all of them, literally a hundred years of experience in veterinary medicine. I can ask all of these questions and no one ever made me feel dumb for asking the questions and they were just like, “Oh, yeah. I wish someone had asked that question for me when I was your age because I would've saved a lot of heartache.”
Stephanie:
They shared their stories and I grew so much from that and it gave me confidence to then make the next leap to, “Okay, how do I get a bigger group beyond my local set of practices?” because we were all pretty similar. They were all small husband and wife or solo doctor practices locally and I thought, “We're getting bigger. We were the only multi-doctor practice in town, so how do we grow bigger?” And I realized I needed to step beyond that pool and start talking to people who had bigger practices. I joined the VSPN community online, which was the support staffer VIN and started talking to all of these other practices. And every step of the way, that led me to VHMA and then I had a community and that, you guys, was the make or break for me because I learned so many lessons and I asked so many questions and every time, there was someone who was willing to put themselves out there and be vulnerable and brave and say, “This is how I did it right,” but also there were people willing to say, “This is how I did it wrong and save yourself the pain and heartache and listen to a piece of this and learn how I did it wrong.”
Stephanie:
And I think for me, that is part of what is so powerful about the Uncharted community is that that is an intentional culture, Andy, I don't know whether you intended to set out and make it that way or it just naturally happened, but getting together people who wanted veterinary medicine to be different led to this culture where we're not afraid to talk about the hard things. We love to talk about the good things and let's hold the trophy and be excited and celebrate. Let's also not be afraid to talk about the hard things and the things that really matter. And I think that's, honestly, a huge part of what I love the most about getting to do the podcast with you, is that I feel like neither of us is afraid to be honest about the really hard things and the things that we have screwed up so badly that we wish maybe we could hit a reset button on. And would I do it differently? Maybe I would.
Andy Roark:
That could be episode 300. It's things we screwed up badly. It'll be a 14-hour episode and it'll be part one. That'll be part one. Yeah. No, I hear you. I had this belief starting Uncharted that, and I believe it then and I believe it now. I don't have to believe it now. I know it now, but I believed it then that there is a group of quietly successful, happy veterinarians, veterinary managers, veterinary leaders out there who don't post on social media saying, “I'm loving it. Things are great.” They just quietly go on making their way, doing good by doing well and doing well by doing good, just enjoying our profession. I knew those people existed, guys. I met them. I was one of those people and I thought, “I know these people here. I want them to come together,” and then they did.
Andy Roark:
I know that there's positive people out there who fundamentally like what we do or who used to like what we do, and they want to get back to that. And by surrounding themselves with people who are doing it and who are happy and who see value and purpose in our work, it recharges you like nothing else. So I had that belief and I didn't know the culture would grow the way it has, which has just been a wonderful surprise beyond what I even hoped. But yeah, you don't have to do Uncharted. If you're a vet student, get involved with the VBMA or with the canine club or with a shelter club, whatever your jam is. And if you are a vet tech, get involved with the Vet Tech Association, right? Just get involved with your local vet med association.
Stephanie:
Find your people.
Andy Roark:
[inaudible 00:37:20] things as a doctor. You can put together a doctor lunch club that's just completely informal, off the books. “Hey, we got a couple vets from different hospitals. We get together, we just have lunch once a month just to commiserate and kick around ideas and validate each other, basically.” Man, people will do that. You just got to ask. Unchartered, this is one thing that we really do well. It's something that was baked into our DNA from the beginning, but you don't have to do Uncharted to have that type of connection, that type of community, but you should have some connection to some community. If you're out there walking alone, man, I want you to reach out and find some people.
Stephanie:
And I will tell you all, too, I love Uncharted. And I can't imagine now, there are people in our community who've become my very best friends that I can't imagine my life without our community in some way. And I will also tell you that my life is so much richer for finding my people in more than one way. I'm a technology nerd when it comes to vet med and you bet your butt that the groups that I'm in that are AVMA nerds or technology nerds, and we can talk about that specific passion together, that fills my cup as much as Uncharted fills my cup. And when I was a technician and we would do the local tech community meetings, that matters. And so I think it's really about celebrating the things that do make you really happy.
Stephanie:
If you are unhappy, and it's funny that you said that, Andy, that you knew that there were people out there who were happy and positive about vet med that you wanted to get them together, that's actually the opposite of how I got to Uncharted. I was not happy. I was miserable in my existing practice. I was really burnt out and I honestly was thinking about leaving veterinary medicine. But I found this group of people who, some of them were really happy, and there was also people who were like, “I'm not so happy, but I'm doing this for me and I'm going to figure out how to change it,” and that was key for me in that moment because it was like, “Oh, here are other people who feel the same way and they're not afraid to talk about it and they're not afraid to talk about what their plans are to figure it out,” and that was eye opening. So I think for me, the community aspect and the people that we choose to surround ourselves with matters a lot.
Andy Roark:
Yeah. No, I completely agree. One of the other things that I've taken away, and I keep coming back to this again and again, when I said I make this list, I thought a lot about the advice I found myself giving over and over and over again. One of the other ones I want to bring up is that your relationship with practice is just that. It's a relationship. I think that's a metaphor that has held up for me again and again. I see that so often when people talk about working with clients, they talk about working with staff, they talk about working with their direct boss. And generally, it's a question about where are the lines? Am I being taken advantage of? Am I taking advantage of someone else? And I just want to hammer this home and just say remember, that your relationship with practice is just that. It's a relationship and like any relationship, it should work for you and it should work for the other person. You don't want to be in a relationship where you're a parasite and the other person is getting taken advantage of, but you also don't want to be taken advantage of. I think any of us who have healthy relationships know that a healthy relationship is about giving as much as it is getting.
Andy Roark:
There's an Adam Grant book called Give and Take. You don't have to read it. I'm going to tell you the whole book right here. He divides people up into three types of people, into givers, takers, and matchers. Givers are people who give and takers are people who take and matchers are people who keep score and they say, “You did this for me, I'm going to do something for you.” And so then he looked at how he measured success. He looked at successful people and what he found is that givers were at the bottom and they were also at the top and so there's this bimodal distribution of givers. And so people who give are some of the happiest, most successful, but they're also at the bottom. And he found the difference between those two groups was the best strategy is to be a giver. Be the first person who steps up and who helps and who gives of yourself. And then switch to a matching strategy, meaning you should give and if you find that you are giving to someone who's a taker, then you should stop. You should match their strategy. You should stop. And the people who were givers who were at the bottom who were unhappy were people who generally didn't stop giving.
Stephanie:
Give, give, give.
Andy Roark:
They just give, give, and they found a taker who just bled them dry. The givers at the top were people who gave first and then watched to see what happened and adjusted their behavior based on what was coming back to them. And guys, I think that that is something, that's a beautiful thing that we should put forward with clients, is man, help first. Jump in and help and give. And then watch what happens and set your boundaries and adjust them as you find out who's a taker and who is appreciative and who's not appreciative and adjust it so that you have the energy to keep going. But guys, as I said, it's a relationship. There's a bunch of Ruth Bader Ginsburg quotes on marriage that I just love and one of them is, “Marriage is 60/40 both ways.” I say that to my wife all the time. “Did you know our marriage is 60/40 both ways?” The meaning being, in a good relationship, most of us feel like we're probably giving a little bit more than we're getting. If you're married, think about your marriage. You probably feel like you're 60/40. Well, your spouse feels the same way and they're not wrong and you're not wrong. I just put that in context of, “Yeah, if you feel like you're giving a little bit more than you're getting, you're probably doing it right.”
Stephanie:
It's so funny that you picked this one because I've been thinking about this a lot because this last week, there was a meme shared in one of the communities that I'm part of. Shout out to my VPMU friends. Somebody who shared this meme about as practice, as business owners, and there are practice owners who are also managers in the group, that you shouldn't expect your team to care more about your business than you do because it's your business and at the end of the day, it's not theirs. And someone from our team, actually Ron, as manager said, “On the flip side of that, as team members, as employees, when do we stop caring about the business more than our bosses?”
Stephanie:
And to your point, it goes both ways. And I think this was one of the most painful lessons for me to learn both as a business owner and as a employee because it is a relationship. You put your finger right on it, that it is a relationship and there has to be give and take on both sides. When we were thinking about this episode, I was thinking a lot about the questions that we get asked and we get asked a lot of questions about, “I know the answer, I can see it right in front of me, but I don't really want to accept that that's the reality, so I'm going to ask you for your opinion on it.”
Stephanie:
So we get asked a lot of questions of people who are like, “Are they treating me badly enough? Should I actually leave this practice?” And it's funny and I have empathy and appreciation every single time we get one of those messages because I will tell you, that that was me when I was working in the practice that I was at before I came to Uncharted. I was in a practice where I learned the lesson very painfully that when people who show you who they are, you should believe them. And the reality is, it is a relationship and if the people that you're in the relationship with, whether it's your teammates, whether it's your boss, the practice owner, whether it's your corporate owners, whatever it is, whether you're the boss and it's your team that you're struggling with, when you're in a relationship and someone is showing you who they are, you need to believe them and you are in control of what you do with that.
Stephanie:
And so in that clinic that I was in, I had said, “Okay, these are things that I need.” I was trying really hard, “These are my boundaries.” I had the whole hard conversation. I set a timeline. I was like, “I'm willing to put in the work,” because it is a relationship and it goes both ways. “And here's my timeline and in year, I need things to be different than they are now.” And I gave and gave and gave. I worked at it, worked at it, worked at it. And then I had some stuff happen in my personal life. And it was one of the darkest times that I've ever gone through in my personal life, and I was expecting people that I was in a relationship with to show up for me and they didn't.
Stephanie:
And I was like, “The year isn't up. I still need to keep giving.” And I remember having a conversation with you and it was unintentional, but you basically gave me my own advice back. And you were like, “When people show you who they are, you need to believe them.” And it was the painful moment for me because it was like, “I want this to be different, but sometimes, it's okay to call a spade a spade and sometimes it's okay to leave a relationship.” If it's not working for you and it isn't meeting your needs, it is okay to walk away.
Stephanie:
That was one of the most painful lessons for me to learn, but I will also tell you all that it was the best lesson that I could have learned because man, it feels really good at night to go to bed and feel good about the relationships and the boundaries that I'm setting and it is hard ass work. I'm not lying to you. It will be hard. You and I both talk about this really candidly. A lot of how I have come to this is I got a therapist and I got a really good one and I go a lot and I work through my stuff because it is. It's hard work and I will also tell you that that has made a big difference, recognizing that it is a relationship and it is okay to have boundaries and it is okay to walk away if your needs are not being met.
Andy Roark:
Well, the hardest thing in my life, as far as leaving jobs or parting ways with people who are employees and things like that, is this idea of how it should be and how it could be if people were just different than they are. You know what I mean? God, this should be great.
Stephanie:
If everything different.
Andy Roark:
All I need is for this other person to stop treating me this way and this would be fine or for this person to realize this thing. There's a lot of us out there right now who are not making a change because it bothers them how close it is to working and how it should work if this other person just behaved differently, if they just felt this way, if I could just accept this thing that I can't accept. If I could just accept it, then this would work, but you can't accept it and it doesn't matter what you should or shouldn't do it. It is what is. What is the relationship, it's got to work for you and it's got to work for them. And the relationship with your job, it's got to work for them, it's got to work for you. I see that a lot. If you're in a relationship where you genuinely don't want to give anymore, you shouldn't be in that relationship and if you're in a relationship where you feel like you are just being taken, you shouldn't be in that relationship.
Andy Roark:
I tell you this and I swear it to be true. Anyone who doesn't immediately believe me, I swear it to be true. Man, this profession is so full of good people who genuinely just want to give you a good place to work and to have a happy place to work themselves and to do good in this world. It is full of those people and you can find those people and they genuinely want to make a good job for you. It's going to take some work and they have needs in the relationship as well and you're going to have to be flexible and you're going to have to give as well as receive because if you don't give, you're just a parasite and that's not what you are, but those people are out there.
Andy Roark:
That brings me to the last point that I want to make in all of this. The primary job of a leader is balance. I found this again and again and again. It's not about getting what you want. It's not about getting the team to do what you want them to do. It's not about giving Sarah or Dave what they're asking for. Your job is not to fix somebody else's problem. It is to find the balance between Sarah and David and the front desk staff and the techs and the pet owners and the practice and you. I see a lot of people who are like, “I have to fix this person's problem,” and they put everything else aside. You don't have to fix their problem. You have to balance the needs of everyone and that means that Donna's not going to make $1.6 million a year working 20 hours a week because that doesn't meet anybody else's needs, including pet owners. It doesn't.
Andy Roark:
I know that someone wants a different schedule and this does not mean I'm not going to give it to them, but I also have to have an acceptable schedule for everybody else. And so that person may not get exactly what they want, but it also doesn't mean I'm going to dismiss them out of hand. I want to try to balance their needs with everybody else. I know that that vet medicine is expensive and I know that my staff deserves to get higher pay than they get now. It's not my job to do any of those things. It's my job to find the best balance that I can find to make pet care affordable and to take care of our team and to run a profitable hospital that can make payroll and pay the utilities and that can continue to provide continuing education for people and that can continue to invest into new medical technology so we're practicing a standard of care that our core values necessitate that we practice. It's always that.
Andy Roark:
I think a lot of people look and say, “I didn't make this person happy so I failed,” or “The pet owner is mad so I failed.” I go, “You know what? Sometimes a single pet doesn't get what they want because the balance of the needs of the team are much greater and you say, ‘Nope, I'm sorry. I'm balancing your request against the needs of my team. And my team is going home. They're taking their time off and the doctor is not going to get your message on her day off because I understand your desire, but I also understand her needs and I'm going to balance those things.'”
Stephanie:
I think you did such a good job with this and it is probably the most profound lesson that you can learn as leader. I will also tell you that this is probably the one that I screwed up the most and I will tell you that anybody who knows me knows that balance is really hard for me. I don't do things by half. And for a long time I thought that finding the balance … I imagine now, I imagine balance as a teeter-totter. Walk with me for a second. There's board and there's a triangle in the middle and it helps things tip from one side to the other. And for a long, long time, the only way that I saw to finding balance as a leader was for me to be the triangle in the middle and to help it balance one way or the other and to tip it back and forth.
Stephanie:
And so I would put myself in that middle, whether it was the CSR who had just been screamed at and I thought, “Okay, the only way for me to find balance here is to step in and solve this for them and make that pain go away because I care about them. I don't want the client to not be happy, but I also want them to know that this is not okay so I'm going to step in and I'm going to create the balance here.” And I spent so long trying to be the balance myself that I forgot a very important part of what you said when you started this chunk, which is that you also matter in the balance. And I see so many of my fellow leaders, managers, practice owners, medical directors, who, we try to become the thing that makes the balance when in reality, the lesson that I learned is that the best place that you can be as a leader is standing 10 feet away from that teeter totter and seeing it go from side to side and helping call out directions. “Hey, let's tip it back a little bit to the left. Let's tip it to the right.”
Stephanie:
It was years of painful lessons to learn that and be able to step away from trying to be the balance myself and solve all the problems. “A tech called out? Great. I'll jump in on the floor. I'll be in surgery today. Somebody needs help at the front desk. Great. I'll do the thing.” That is great, to your point about present bias, that solves the problem and is probably the path of least resistance right the second but in the long run, it doesn't do anybody any good. And it leads me to a path of burnout and frustration and anger and that was where I was at when I was thinking about leaving vet med.
Stephanie:
I feel so beat up, but I did it to myself, and that was probably the most painful, painful lesson for me to learn and lots of therapeutic process because I thought I was doing the right thing and I was doing it with the best of intentions, but what I couldn't see was how badly it was affecting me and how I also wasn't empowering anyone else in the situation to learn how to tip the scale one way or the other. I was just fixing it for them. And so when you were talking about your surprise again and again, it's your business model, I kept thinking about the fact that, even my last practice, and so this is the last thing for me when it comes to the balance, was learning the lessons that being a leader means being brave and it means making hard decisions and it means that you're going to screw things up.
Stephanie:
It also means that you don't have to know everything. Sometimes you don't even know anything and it's okay to say, “I don't have all the answers. I'll figure it out and I'll help us get there but right this second, I don't actually know the answer to that.” And I spent a long time thinking, “I had to have all the answers and I'm going to fake it till I make it.” And I will tell you that the thing that helped me find that balance was starting to say to my team, “I don't actually know. What do you think we should do?” Because some of the most powerful lessons I learned was where I was thinking about going totally might have worked, but where they were thinking about going was a way better path to get there.
Andy Roark:
No, I think that's great. Yeah, I think that's fantastic. No, thanks for sharing that. I couldn't agree more. Yeah. I think a lot of us have this belief that as the leader, as the manager, decision maker, we're supposed to have the answers and we just don't and that's okay. It's okay to not have the answers. And going back to balance for a second, the biggest way that I see people fail this is not by overgiving to pet owners or overgiving to the staff.
Andy Roark:
The most common way they fail it is by not balancing it for them. And they're like, “Oh, it works for everybody else and it's worse for me, but it works for everybody else.” And then they let it go and then they burn out and they leave the profession in two and a half years. And I go, “I know that you thought you were being kind when you gave beyond the point of what was reasonable for you. You were not kind because you set your practice up to lose you in two and a half years and you set yourself up to burnout and you put your family through that as well because they're watching you burn out at work.” And so I would say that was a failure of balance and it was a failure of kindness because again, the way I look at balance sometimes is what is most kind for everyone, and that includes you, and you were not kind to yourself. And so I would say that is the balance failure that I see most often.
Stephanie:
Yes. And that's what I loved about Ron's response to the meme because we each have a personal responsibility here. Yes, as business owners, we want teams who care, who love what they're doing, and who are going to think with an entrepreneurial mind. That's great, but also as employees, to your point about relationships, at the end of the day, it is a job. And if we care more than everybody else, we're also just setting ourselves up for failure. And so I think it is about remembering that you have a personal responsibility. This doesn't just happen to you and that was the thing when I was in therapy and talking with my therapist about the disaster that I had created in regards to balance in my own life.
Stephanie:
The really powerful lesson was I have to stand here in front of the mirror and realize I did this to myself. I chose to jump in and save when somebody was out sick, I chose to jump in and save the day and the consequence of that was that my poor kids spent 12 hours at the clinic with me or I missed getting to on a field trip or there were consequences, but I chose those consequences. And so I was mad at the world because I was miserable because it felt all out of balance. But when I held up the mirror and I looked at myself, I did that, and it was really painful, but it is something that was a very powerful lesson for me to learn because I think now the way that I approach things, it is still my gut reaction to say, “How can I jump under this teeter totter and how can I help hold it up from both sides?” And now I have to ask myself, “How can I stand over here and help everybody?” and that was the best lesson that I ever could have learned.
Andy Roark:
Yeah. No, I hear that. Well, thank you, thank you, thank you for doing 200 episodes with me, Stephanie Goss.
Stephanie:
Thank you, Andy Roark. I love spending time with you and I love everything that we get to talk about. I obviously love and cherish our time together, we both do. And at the same time, I also want to say thank you to our listeners and thank you all to those of you who send us stuff in the mail bag and for those of you who are in our communities and who share with us the personal, the vulnerable, the brave from your practices and say, “Hey, would you guys talk about this, because I would love to hear some different perspectives.” You know all make this podcast and we do it for each other and for the time that we get to spend. But more than that, we do it for everybody else because we really enjoy being able to engage with all of you in that way and so thank you.
Andy Roark:
Yeah. Thanks, guys. All right, everybody, take care of yourselves. Have a good rest of your week and we'll see you back for episode 201.
Stephanie:
201, baby. Well, gang, that's a wrap on another episode of the podcast. And as always, this was so fun to dive into the mail bag and answer this question. And I would really love to see more things like this come through the mail bag. If there is something that you would love to have us talk about on the podcast or a question that you are hoping that we might be able to help with, feel free to reach out and send us a message. You can always find the mail bag at the website. The address is unchartedvet.com/mailbag or you can email us at podcast@unchartedvet.com. Take care, everybody, and have a great week. We'll see you again next time.
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