3 Easy Ways to Assess Current and Future Veterinary Burnout

The Veterinary Burnout Blog tip of the week is to Cultivate Self-Awareness Around Your Burnout Levels.

Having awareness around your level of burnout should be a part of every veterinary professionals self-care/wellbeing plan!

In this brief article, you will find 3 great ways to know how you are doing right now and will likely fare in the future as it relates to burnout as a vet professional!

The truth is that veterinary burnout is real, but it doesn't have to be your reality!

You may feel burnt out right now, and/or maybe you know someone (friend, team member, family member, etc) that is burnt out.

If that's you, I can totally relate! I've been severely burnt out before, and I know it can be beyond rough.

More importantly, it can create a sense of career resentment. Severe burnout can totally make you second guess your career choice.?

Burnout... career resentment... career doubt...

These things are not what we signed up for as veterinary professionals, and many of us have invested and dedicated lots of time, money, energy (and probably blood sweat and tears) into this career.

So it can be very scary when you start having thoughts of:

"Is this career choice still right for me?"

"Am I still cut out for this?"

"Should I leave vet med?"

"Is it time to call it quits?"

Fear not, if you're in vet med, and if you believe that this is your purpose and passion driven calling (or if you just really like vet med), then I think you've made a fine career choice!

However, your work isn't done by simply coming into vet med and developing your clinical and technical abilities! The cold hard truth is that there's more to having an enjoyable vet career than that.

When I was practicing in my state of exhaustion and discontent, I didn't have awareness around whether or not I was burnt out. I'm not even sure the word 'burnout' had any real significance or meaning to me.

It was when I was honest with myself and started prioritizing my wellbeing that things changed drastically! And here I stand today, 18 years in, with no desire to leave vet med!

The good news is that there are lots of practical and tactical things that you can do to quickly turn things around without having to leave the veterinary profession and, potentially, without having to leave your current place of employment!

It begins with assessing your current and future burnout!

3 Ways to Assess Your Level of Veterinary Burnout

Here are 3 great ways to assess your current and future veterinary burnout.

Method #1: Take a Quantitative Assessment (Measure Your Burnout)

The survey that we use for veterinary professionals who are enrolled in our Veterinary Burnout P.R.E.P. certification program is the ProQOL survey. ProQOL stands for "Professional Quality of Life".

There are many others, but this is the one that we like to use for our burnout certification program.

It assess 5 important measures: Compassion Satisfaction, Perceived Support, Burnout, Secondary Traumatic Stress, and Moral Distress.

We recommend our program participants take this assessment at the beginning of the program as a baseline, and then again at the end after earning their CVBP (certificate of veterinary burnout preparedness).

The ProQOL survey is totally free. You don't even need to give them your email to get it! You can find the survey here !

You can go straight to the bottom of the page and download and print the assessment, or you can do it digitally right there on the website!

Method #2: Do a Qualitative Assessment of How You Feel Based on the Definition of Burnout

How do you feel?

Do you feel like you're burnt out based off of one of the definitions of burnout?

The definition we like is:

"a state of emotional, mental, and often physical exhaustion brought on by prolonged or repeated stress. Though it’s most often caused by problems at work, it can also appear in other areas of life, such as parenting, caretaking, or romantic relationships."

I like this definition because it acknowledges that it's not just work that can contribute to your burnout.

If this definition (or any other definition of burnout that you find) resonates with you and you feel like you're burnt out based off of this, then that's a great measure of self-awareness, and you should consider yourself burnt out!

From there, make sure you take action towards decreasing your burnout and increasing your wellbeing!

Try taking courses on burnout, reading books on burnout, or getting professional help from a mental health professional or coach.

We've had over 1,100 veterinary professionals who have applied to be in our program which includes 19 hours of RACE-approved content and 50+ hours of non-RACE approved, veterinary specific, burnout and wellbeing courses!

Method #3: Assess Your Level of Burnout Preparedness

One of the BEST things you can to to assess your burnout is to predict what your future levels of burnout will be!

You can make certain to do all that you can do to 'burnout-proof' your life and veterinary career, which is what we recommend and what many veterinary professional like you are already doing!

So here's the BIG question (and some smaller but also important ones lol):

Are you taking a proactive approach to making sure that burnout and career resentment aren't issues for you?

What does your burnout prevention plan look like?

What measures do you have in place for making sure that the challenges of life and vet med don't ruin or end your veterinary experience?

It is our (Get MotiVETed's) mission to make burnout a thing of the past for the entire global veterinary community. We help veterinary professionals and teams prevent and overcome veterinary burnout by getting them to go "All-in" on veterinary burnout preparedness by going from intent to training to impact!

We define veterinary burnout preparedness as:

"The measures taken by veterinary professionals and organizations to prepare for and reduce the effects of the mental, physical, and emotional challenges that life and veterinary medicine can bring."

There will likely always be challenges in our amazing profession, but that doesn't mean that your veterinary experience will have to suck.

We focus on preparedness because (like for natural disasters and foreign animal diseases) we can prepare ourselves to thrive despite the inevitable.

But we didn't just stop at defining the problem...

We also created the world's first veterinary specific burnout certification program and the world's first school of wellbeing to help any member of the veterinary community to obtain a level of veterinary burnout preparedness that they can be confident in!

If you feel that you need to increase your level of burnout preparedness, and if you're looking for a great place to begin your journey of making burnout a thing of the past for you and/or your team, then I highly recommend that you check out the Veterinary Burnout P.R.E.P. certification program! You can learn more about that program here !?

Summary:

It is vitally important to know where you stand and to know where you want to stand in the future as it relates to veterinary burnout.

Use 1 or all of the methods above to assess and predict your future levels of burnout!

Make a decision and choose to be a veterinary professional that will be burnout free!?

From there, take massive action towards making that your reality, and I'm sure that you'll be happy with the final result!

Remember that life is always changing, so you may need to assess your level of burnout multiple times a year.

And as always, thank you for all that you do as a veterinary professional and as a human! We appreciate you, and I'm sure the animals and humans that you serve do as well!

And last but not least, remember that veterinary burnout is REAL, but it doesn't have to be your REALity!