The power of self-awareness.

This week I had the distinct privilege to work with a group of young Michigan veterinarians and veterinary students as a mentor for the Power of Ten Leadership Academy.  I have been a supporter of this program for years and for the past two classes have been one of their two veterinary mentors.  The program is filled with fresh veterinary faces eager to improve their skills as leaders in the veterinary profession. Speakers are brought in each quarter to challenge us in new ways to develop ourselves into better leaders and better humans.  I love the program because each session I learn something new from the speakers and from the students that I mentor. 

The program that we attended on Friday and Saturday revolved around leadership development through self-awareness. Self-awareness is defined as, “conscious knowledge of one's own character, feelings, motives, and desires.”  Working to become a better leader starts with looking inward.

Dr. Travis Bradberry, author of Emotional Intelligence 2.0, describes self-awareness as the core component of emotional intelligence.  He defines emotional intelligence as the ability to recognize and understand emotions in yourself and others, and the ability to manage those emotions. 

How do you create more self-awareness and learn to manage your emotions?

The first step that we took was to work through a personality assessment.  I love personality profiling systems as tools to get to know myself better and to learn more about others.  We used the DISC profiling system, taught to us brilliantly by John, our MVMA CEO.  The DISC system helps identify our preferred behavioral styles by looking at a combination of the four DISC styles.  Whether you use DISC, Meyer’s Briggs, Enneagram or The Big Five Personality tests, getting to know yourself on a deeper level will help you understand how you react to situations, and help you to understand the people that you lead. 

Self-awareness requires that you to understand your emotions.  Learning that your emotions are created by your thinking and learning not to fear your emotions, is a key step in developing leadership maturity.  Staying on your toes with regards to self examination in your response to all circumstances will allow you to change and grow in the areas of your greatest emotional strengths.

Self-awareness requires you to stay curious.  One of the primary attributes of a good leader is a healthy curiosity and thirst for life long learning. Looking to other strong leaders to learn from their experiences will open up your mind to ideas that will help you develop your leadership skills.  The Power of Ten Leadership Academy is a group filled with healthy curiosity. 

If you work to understand yourself, learn to feel your emotions, and remain curious you will embody the power of leadership self-awareness. Knowing yourself well is the most important step in becoming an authentic powerful leader.

Dr. Julie Cappel

“Strong people have a strong sense of self-worth and self-awareness; they don’t need the approval of others.” ― Roy T. Bennett 

Is there anything good about pain?

A friend of mine came to me yesterday and asked me about her pain.  She asked what I thought that she should do about the pain that she was having in her hip that was so excruciating it was keeping her from sleeping at night.  What would I do if it were my hip pain?  Go to urgent care, visit an emergency room, schedule an orthopedic appointment possibly weeks in the future, or tough it out and just take some Motrin?

This conversation got me to thinking about pain in general and the amount of pain that the people of this country and even the world are experiencing right now.  The Covid-19 pandemic, political upheaval in many of our cities, and overall fear of the future.  Our beautiful world is falling into so much unrest and pain right now, I wonder if we will ever recover.

Is there anything good about pain?

“Pain is a guarantee that you will be changed.”, says John Maxwell.  

There is no one that is untouched by pain in life.  Our response to painful experiences is what determines how that pain will change and mold us.  Will you cave to the pressure to respond in weakness, or will you rise up and fight for something better?  Will you develop into a better person, or will you slide into bitterness and hate?

Tony Robbins says, “we do things for one of two reasons, to seek pleasure or avoid pain.”  Our pain does not have to be physical, in fact most change in our life is created by emotional pain.  When we experience negative emotion, we are motivated to look inward.  We will be motivated to change more by pain than by any success.  Pain changes our overall perspective.  

We need pain in order to protect ourselves.  It is a warning that something physically or emotionally has gone wrong and we are motivated to change it. Pain changes us for the better or worse.  We can change our attitude, perspective, habits, and principles in order to work for good.

Rather than looking at pain as a punishment, we can choose to see it as a signal that we need to change course ever so slightly to reduce the pain, thus keeping us on a path to betterment and strength.

Pain is just life experience that you may use to become a better human.  Let’s choose better.

Dr. Julie Cappel

 “ Pain nourishes courage. You can’t be brave if you’ve only had wonderful things happen to you.” – Mary Tyler Moore

” Sometimes you must hurt in order to know, fall in order to grow, lose in order to gain, because life’s greatest lessons are learnt through pain.” –Nagato

Join me on the Podcast!  
The Veterinary Life Coach Podcast with Dr. Julie Cappel

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-veterinary-life-coach-podcast-with-dr-julie-cappel/id1451549730

5 Ways to Get Over Your Pity Party.

We all have those moments in life where it feels as if we are hit hard and knocked down by our circumstance.   We are cruising along doing pretty well for ourselves and all at once, something happens that takes us down and stops our forward momentum.   We hit a wall in our business, experience a health issue, or have a personal relationship failure.  Something happens that causes us to slide into negative thinking and feeling. 

What can we do to get ourselves out of this negative life space and avoid the pity party?

Live in the truth for a short time.  Give yourself a bit of time to feel bad or mourn your loss.  When you feel let down by someone, or something that didn’t happen for you, it is OK to acknowledge those bad feelings and really feel them.  If you avoid the bad feelings and try to push them away, they will become more powerful than they actually are. Give yourself a short time to feel negative emotion about the lost dreams.  Once you have felt the negative feelings all the way through, it will be easier to let go of them and move on.

Avoid a victim mentality.  Feeling like a victim for example, when a client yells at you for something beyond your control, destroys your self-confidence and removes your sense of empowerment over the circumstance. The more you dwell in disappointment and worry about that client’s feelings, the more difficult it will be to get into problem solving mode and overcome the difficulty.  Self-pity or victimhood can be destructive if you choose to dwell there. 

Get a little perspective.  We often feel sad or disappointed about something that we will not really remember in a month or so.  Think about the big picture.  Let your mind go to a place several months in the future and think about whether this disappointment will be relevant then.  Are there other more important things that you can think about now to move on?  Realizing that many of the things we experience in life will not be important months or years in the future, will help you to gain perspective about the issue at hand.

Remember that success does not always equal happiness.  Successes often feel great in the moment, but that happiness is not sustained over the long term.  Studies of lottery winners show that they are no happier one year after their lottery win than they were before the money.  Life has a tendency to even out with levels of negative and positive emotion.  There are times when a good failure is more important to your long-term success than an instant win.  You can choose to be happy with each moment regardless of the circumstance.

Identify your next opportunity. Focusing on the lessons that a failure brings will allow you to envision future successes. Knowing that each day offers renewed opportunity to try again will allow your brain to get beyond the self-pity and move on to future possibility. Focusing on your next move will help you let go of the current problem and use the lessons learned to propel you forward. 

When things don’t work out the way you originally planned, realize that nothing has gone terribly wrong.   Failure and disappointment are difficult for all of us to deal with, but you can face it with dignity and grace if you follow these five steps.  Treat yourself with compassion and see what you can learn from the situation.  Try not to judge yourself so you do not get stuck in a downward spiral of the prolonged pity party.  Let it go and move on.

Dr. Julie Cappel

Join me on the Podcast!

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-veterinary-life-coach-podcast-with-dr-julie-cappel/id1451549730

“It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.” - Epictetus

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do.” ― H. Jackson Brown Jr.