Go With the Flow

Recognizing signs of physical, emotional and mental exhaustion is the first step in returning to your natural flow state.

Are you having fun in your work and life? If not, you might be on a path toward burnout. Anyone who’s spent time camping in the woods will likely recognize Smokey Bear’s admonition: “Only you can prevent wildfires.” As the incidence of burnout rises steadily in our profession, it’s important that we learn to become more […]

Self-esteem can leave you when you need it most, so try building more self-compassion into your daily experiences.

“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.” — Buddha If you had to choose between feeling good about yourself or forgiving yourself and accepting yourself completely, exactly as you are, which would you choose? Would you rather feel good about yourself or have compassion for yourself? Would […]

Compassion, curiosity and courage are a potent antidote to the common fears that can paralyze us as human beings.

We’ve been focusing lately on the first two components of emotional agility: compassion and curiosity. Now, we turn our attention to the final component, courage. “Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” — Maya Angelou As Maya Angelou suggests, courage is an essential […]

When we are sincerely curious, we unlock new fields of possibilities.

Our most recent column [“Wholeness and Self-Compassion,” February/March 2019] explored the importance of acknowledging our wholeness as a first step to finding peace in the present moment. While presenting on the topic of wholeness at VMX 2019, what became clearer to us than ever before was that members of the veterinary profession struggle with the […]

Finding peace in the present means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.

What does it mean to be fully present, both at work and at home? How does the quality of our presence impact our happiness, our relationships, our resilience and our sense of peace? These are incredibly important questions for us to be asking. That’s because, based on our experience and what we’re continually learning about […]

Being able to see any situation from a calmer and more balanced vantage point is one rung on the ladder to achieving flow.

This column has focused on exploring flow, that state of complete clarity and awareness in which you feel most enlivened and operate from a state of relaxed ease and, even, bliss. This time, let’s look at the role of centering as a step in achieving flow. Centering is a way to calm the mind and […]

The experience of presence is a doorway into both personal growth and professional development.

We love the veterinary profession. It attracts some of the most passionate, caring and down-to-earth people — people with servant hearts who will give you the shirt off their back and who don’t suffer from superinflated egos. You can’t get much better than that. If you’re reading this, we’re talking about you! It’s also true […]

Meditation can help reduce anxiety, enhance creativity and improve relationships. Getting there might require only 10 minutes a day.

For the record, all the articles published with this column are lessons in what the authors recognize they need to learn and embody. This month’s topic is certainly no exception. In recent years, meditation has expanded into the secular mainstream, even among business leaders seeking to find ways for themselves and their teams to be […]

It’s important to distinguish between the Downward Spiral and Radiating Possibility.

In their national best-seller “The Art of Possibility,” authors Ben and Rosamund Zander describe two worlds that are completely different in nature: the Downward Spiral and Radiating Possibility. Because of our natural bias toward negativity, the Downward Spiral is the world that we ordinarily inhabit. Conversations (internal or external) that stem from this point of […]

When a difficult situation arises, you can change it, remove yourself or accept it.

Difficult or unwanted situations invariably arise almost daily as busy professionals seek to balance work, family, friends and other passions. So, the question naturally arises: How should we navigate our more challenging moments? While we don’t want to pretend to be psychologists or psychiatrists, we have observed some approaches that are useful for dealing with […]