Super-complexity

• Professional practice is always rational

  • Relationality is more than the importance of interpersonal relations and communication and interactions and reflects something more profound about the intentionality of all sayings, doings, and relatings. When practitioners speak, they speak to, about, in response to, and in anticipation of, something and someone. Intentionality can occur across time and space, and even within the self.

• Professional practice has meaning and purpose

  • Meaning and purpose are attached to all the sayings, doings and relatings of veterinary practice; actively making meaning is an important professional activity.

• Professional knowledge and ethics are intertwined

  • Notions of what is good are at the heart of making decisions about what is right. Rich accounts of knowing and practice include practical reasoning which is “pragmatic, variable, context-dependent, and oriented toward action” [(84), p. 2].

• Professional practice is situated, temporal and embodied

  • Without abandoning abstract notions such as competence, evidence, or professionalism, a rich understanding of veterinary practice demands deliberate exploration of how actual people do tasks involving other people and animals in specific settings, with the time they have available, and using the tools they can muster.

• Sayings

  • or activities in the cultural-discursive domain: overt or unspoken understandings about knowledge, about how things are, or should be done, and how to understand and be understood.

• Doings

  • or activities in the material-economic domain: actions and relations involving human or non-human bodies, objects, physical artifacts like computers, surgical instruments or buildings, and abstract concepts like money.

• Relatings

  • or activities in the social-political domain: actions involving relationships with other people including clients, other individual veterinarians, communities of practice such as the profession collectively. Relationships are always mediated by power relations.

• Elements within vetmed professional identity

  • SELF

    • Inward-facing

    • In relation to others

  • Ethics

  • Responsibility

  • Trust

  • Character

• Super-complexity within vet med practice

• Why is this term used to describe your profession?

• What elements or components contribute to the super-complexity of the profession?

• How does the super-complexity of vet med practice contribute to professional identity development?

Purpose/morals/self-authorship

• Identity foreclosure

  • High: commitment towards the prospect of a new career identity

  • Low: explorative activity, having accepted the prospect of changing careers but unmotivated to start the process of job seeking

• Identity moratorium

  • Low: commitment to the prospect of a new career identity

  • High: level of engagement in exploring new opportunities so more knowledgable about possible options

• Identity diffusion

  • Low: commitment towards considering a new career

  • Low: motivation to explore new options, overwhelmed or unaware of number of possibilities so inertia sets in

• Identity achievement

  • High: commitment to a new career identity

  • High: exploration of possible new career options, accepting of a new career and taking positibe action to explore the job market

• Impact of purpose-driven identity

  • Purpose commitment associated with positive affect, hope, happiness and well-being

  • Purpose as mechanism through which stable identity contributes to well-being

  • Mediates relationship between identity and changes in daily +/- affect

• Self-authoring

  • Trust internal voice:

    • refine beliefs, values, identities and relationships

    • Shape reaction to manage external sources

  • Build internal foundation:

    • Craft commitments into philosophy guide for reacting to external sources

  • Secure internal commitments

    • Create the core

    • Live it

• Purpose: definition

• Differentiate between morals and ethics

• Apply self-authorship to vet med context

• Overall, consider professional identity development

Values in action

• Goleman’s five constructs of emotional intelligence

  • Self-Awareness: Knowing one’s internal states, preferences, resources, and intuitions.

  • Self-Management/Regulation: Managing one’s internal states & impulses. Being accountable.

  • Social Skills: Adeptness at inducing desirable responses in others.

  • Empathy: Awareness of others’ feelings, needs, concerns.

  • Motivation: Emotional tendencies that guide or facilitate reaching goals.

• Emotional Intelligence

  • Emotions

    • Short-term, fleeting, involuntary, reactive.

    • Associated with amygdala, autonomic nervous system.

    • Physiological state of arousal, a visceral reaction.

    • Basic emotions: anger, fear, sadness, happiness, disgust, surprise.

• Feelings

  • Feelings are a way for the body to let us know whether our needs have been met or not.

  • Originate in pre-frontal cortex.

  • Influenced by beliefs, memories, experiences, values.

  • Range of intensity and more than one at a time.

• Cognitive Fusion

  • Entangled with and pushed around by our thoughts

  • Focus on our mind rather than the experience of our 5 senses

  • Decisions and behavior based on internal experiences rather than what is really going on in our world

  • Our thoughts seem like the absolute truth

  • Thoughts serve as a command to obey or rule to follow

  • Fusion can occur from our past, future, self-concept, reasons

• Fusion with the Past

  • Dwelling on painful memories; rumination, regret

  • Hurt, loss, failure

  • Blame and resentment over past events

  • Idealizing the past

• Fusion with the Future

  • Worrying about events that haven’t occurred yet

  • Catastrophizing/predicting the worst scenario

  • Embracing hopelessness

  • Anticipating failure, rejection, hurt, etc.

• Fusion with Self-concept

• Negative self-judgement

  • I’m unlovable, bad, worthless, incompetent, broken

• Positive self-judgement

  • I’m always right, better, smarter

• Overidentification with a label

  • I’m a depressive, an alcoholic, diabetic, an addict

• Fusion with Reasons

  • Why I can’t, won’t, or shouldn’t
    • Too tired, anxious; too scary, too hard, pointless

  • Lurking bad outcomes; what might happen • Failure, rejection, fool of myself

  • It’s me, I am
    • Shy, a loser, incompetent

• Fusion with Rules & Judgements

  • How the world should be

  • Identified with “must,” ”have to,” “(un)fair,” “wrong,” “refuse to”

  • Positive or negative judgements or evaluations about

  • Past & future

  • Self and others (bodies, behaviors, lives)

  • Our own thoughts & feelings

  • The world, people, events

• Strategies to Defuse

  • Notice

    • Notice your thoughts; are they pictures or words, or more like a voice in your head?

  • Name

    • “I’m Having the Thought That...” or, “There goes ‘radio doom and gloom.’”

  • Normalize

    • Thoughts like this are normal. “These thoughts make perfect sense given what I’ve gone through; they’re a completely normal reaction.”

  • Purpose

    • Reframe in terms of the mind’s purpose, its attempt to protect us & meet our needs.

  • Workability

    • When you let these thoughts guide you, where do they take you? Towards the life you want, or away from it?

• Dropping anchor

  • To assist with handling difficult thoughts, feelings, emotions, memories, urges and sensations more effectively; to defuse and unhook from cognitive fusion.

  • Acknowledge your thoughts and feelings

  • Silently and kindly acknowledge whatever is ‘showing up’ inside you.

  • Be curious.

  • “I’m noticing...”
    And while continuing to acknowledge your thoughts and feelings, also ....

  • Connect with your body

  • Come back into and connect with your physical body.

  • Find your own way of doing this.

  • You are not trying to turn away from, escape, avoid or distract yourself from what is happening in your inner world. Aim is to remain aware of your thoughts and feelings, continue to acknowledge their presence .... and at the same time, come back into and connect with your body.
    And while acknowledging your thoughts and feelings, and connecting with your body, also ....

  • Engage in what you’re doing

    • Get a sense of where you are and refocus your attention on the activity you are doing.

• Values

  • Representations of one’s behavior/motivation, across cultures.

  • Deepest desires for how one wants to behave as a human.

  • Values provide structure/guidance for behavior change.

  • Values provide a “towards” move when stressed.

  • Decreased cortisol has been associated with values clarification.

• Goals

  • What you want to achieve or accomplish in your life

• Putting it together

  • EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

    • Self-Awareness: Paying attention to your body through all your senses: Walk barefoot, eat mindfully. Feelings: not the situation, but rather your experiences, thoughts, beliefs

    • Self-Management: Resist that urge to act impulsively. Take a pause. Breathing exerices.

  • COGNITIVE FUSION

    • Recognize when you’re fused.

    • Unhook from those thoughts, even the ones that tell you they’re true.

    • Your choice to move towards or away from your values

  • VALUES

    • The beliefs that are most important to you, how you want to live your life. Post them, inform others.

    • Bring these values to the forefront before or during stressful events.

    • Values help you find your way in the dark, that fill you with a feeling of purpose.

    • Help to rediscover meaning by taking a trip down “memory lane;” the values that brought you here, to this place.

Contemporary issues: rural vet med perceptions and attitudes

• Identify and describe current conditions of vet med and how these conditions contribute to challenges within contemporary vet med

• Understand and apply how vet medical student perceptions about rural practice can evolve within vet med pre-clinical and clinical years

• The goal is not to pit SA v. LA or urban v. rural practice against one another—just to explore the role of one study within a greater context: depth over breadth for this session

• Current Climate within Vet Med

  • Increasing urbanization in society

  • Care of companion animals increases; animals as part of family

  • Specialists in larger cities

  • Can create disconnect with livestock: post-domestication

  • No connection to food animal production or experience related to farming practice

• Super-complexity of vet medical profession:

  • Climatic and environmental changes

  • Globalization of agricultural markets

  • Potential shortages in rural vet med

• Challenges in rural vet med: consider rural vet med identity on whole

  • discrepancies between a veterinarian's expectations of rural veterinary practice and the realities of practice in a rural community.

  • Caseload, workload, and level of mentorship increase rural vet med retention and also relate to why people leave rural vet med

  • Experience in the field during vet med clinical year can create increase in retention

• What connection can you make to professional identity?

  • Students may have had a change in professional goals:

    • move from diffusion, moratorium, and into steady decision

  • Supercomplexity of the profession:

    • if there is greater need for rural veterinarians, what is happening to the profession as a whole if decline in opportunities?

    • How does that tie to purpose of your work?

  • How do we support development of particular populations of veterinarians within rural vet med practice? How grief might hit? Isolation might feel?

Motivation and goal setting

• Goals

  • Identify, define, and apply internal factors related to motivation into professional identity development

  • Present model of motivation

  • Consider factors within vet med context

  • Understand multiple ways in which self-efficacy ties to motivational factors and contribute to behaviors

• Motivation

  • Internal processes that give behavior energy and direction

  • The “will”

  • Motivation vs. discipline

• Pintrich’s model of motivation

  • Socio-cultural: prior experience in education, socio-economic status, peers...

  • Classroom environment: instructional methods/behavior

  • Internal factors: perceptions and beliefs

• Relationship between Success and Failure: Motivational Factors

  • Success-orientated: high motive for success, low fear of failure

  • Failure avoider: desire to avoid failure outweighs success

  • Overstriver: high in both success and fear of failure

  • Failure acceptor: low in motives of success and low fear of failure: hopeless

  • Role of effort

• Internal factors influencing motivation

  • Values

    • Extrinsic/useful, intrinsic/enjoy, attainment/identity and interests

  • Fears

  • Possible selves

    • Future, orientation

  • Goals/goal setting

    • Mastery vs performance

  • Self-efficacy

  • Belief that one can complete task with success

  • Attributions

    • Beliefs about the cause of success or failure

• Mastery Goals: mastery goals indicate more motivation for learning

  • Learning as much as possible in a course or within profession for the purpose of self-improvement

  • Does not consider performance of others

  • Success=improvement, progress, creativity, innovation

  • Error=part of the learning process; informational

  • Ability viewed as developing through effort

• Performance Goals

  • Focuses on social comparisons, and competition with the main purpose of outperforming others on the task

    • Success=high grades, performance—praise from others

    • Error=failure

  • Ability is viewed as fixed

• Mastery vs. Performance Goals

  • Honestly consider and reflect on your approach to your profession

  • Consider the role of discomfort in your motivational dispositions at times in your academic career so far

• Relationship between Goals and Values

  • Analyzing your identity prior to setting a goal

  • Understanding your governing values is an integral part of setting effective goals

  • Identity Status Theory: one’s sense of identity as being determined largely by choices and commitments

• identifying values to accomplish goals

  • WHY: governing values and principals or beliefs

    • Help us develop long-range goals WHAT

  • HOW: we attain long-range goals through smaller, more intermediate goals

  • HOW: we attain intermediate goals from a series of specific, goal-orientated tasks

• Goal attainment

  • Goal attainment plays an important role in developing your identity and influences the nature of your adult lifestyle

• goal properties

  • specificity: specific performance standards to enhance motivation

  • proximity: claose at hand, result in greater motivation

  • difficulty: perception of difficulty influences amount of effort

• self-efficacy

  • The belief that one can successfully perform the task:

    • Previous performance

    • Observing others perform the same task

    • Verbal and social messages (feedback)

    • Physiological and emotional states

  • Increase self-efficacy:

    • Set goals

    • Learning different strategies

  • Monitoring self-efficacy helps predict your learning

• Determining efficacy judgements

  • Performance outcomes

    • Positive and negative outcomes influences performance

  • Vicarious experiences

    • High or low self-efficacy by watching other’s perform a task and comparing it to themselves

  • Verbal persuasion

    • Encouragement or discouragement based on one’s performance

  • Physiological feedback

    • Sensations from one’s body and how they perceive their emotional arousal influences self-efficacy

• Attribution theory

  • Attribution: an individual’s perception of the causes of his or her own success or failure: why do individuals respond differently to the same outcomes

    • I did well because I studies really hard, I did well because I am intelligent

    • I did poorly because I was tired

    • I got the job because I was lucky

  • How individuals perceive the causes of their prior successes and failures is the most important determining factor to how they will approach a particular tasks and how long they will persist

Greif, loss, stress

• Loss

  • A threat to our sense of safety, mastery and control

  • Disrupts our assumptions that the world is safe, kind, just, and meaningful

  • Leaves us forever transformed. We don’t “get over it” and instead we integrate the loss into our lives. Leads us to modify our personal meaning and assumptions of the world.

  • Less predictability leads to more fear of financial, social, relational and health conditions.

  • Can lead to angst and despair.

  • There is a predictability that can help lead us to an increased ability to cope, even with these negative life conditions.

  • Provides opportunities for personal growth.

  • A bond is created for those experiencing loss: “We’re in this together”

• Grief

  • The emotional responses to a loss including sadness, anger, guilt, despair, and hopelessness.

  • A necessary and normal process.

  • Consider the impact of previous losses to grief in the present.

• Types of grief around a loss

  • Anticipatory grief

    • Owners imagine and feel what their lives will be like after that pet/animal dies.

    • Roller coaster of emotions before the death of their pet, especially if there is a prolonged period of time consisting of good days and bad days.

  • Disenfranchised grief

    • Owners still go through their grieving process, but often times feeling alone and not understood.

    • Outside of societal norms only because one is mourning the loss of a pet.

    • Feelings not validated by family, community members.

    • May be hesitant to seek out grief support for fear of not being understood

  • Echoing grief

    • One’s grief is often the culmination of past experiences acquired throughout their life.

    • Memories elicited from a previous experience of a pet’s death, generally as it relates to euthanasia.

    • May bring back memories of the death of a previous human relationship

  • Grieving

    • Not about taking away the pain, but rather holding space for one who is aching

  • Elisabeth Kubler-Ross model of grieving

    • Denial

    • Anger

    • Bargaining

    • Depression

    • Acceptance

    • Hope

  • Dual process model

    • Respecting disorder and confusion vs. Imposing logic and order.

    • Searching for and finding joy as we work through our sorrow and pain.

    • Vacillating between engaging and avoiding grief work is a fundamental component to grieving.

    • Finding the benefits from our loss: character growth, closer relationships with others, gaining a different perspective.

    • Cultivating core values and the experiences of our human-animal bond to seek and pursue personal growth while honoring pet.

  • Duel process model

    • Restorative Phase/Orientation

      • Time spent in new activities

      • Finding distractions for their grief

      • Continues engaging with friends and family

      • Establishing new roles and/or relationships

      • Continues to walk, perhaps same route as with their pet

      • Consider or has obtained a new pet (puppy/dog,

      • kitten/cat)

      • Plans on or has organized a suitable memorial to honor their pet

    • Loss Phase/Orientation

      • Processing their grief

      • Being overcome by grief as it intrudes their life

      • Holding on to past roles or relationships

      • Avoiding any concept of restorative change

      • Denying any hope for recovery

      • Withdrawing from family or friends

      • Never getting another pet

      • Feeling lost or abandoned; spending time alone in some of the areas once frequented with their pet

Mindfulness/meditation

• mindfulness meditation

• spiritual meditation

• focused meditation

• movement meditation

• mantra meditation

• transcendental meditation

• progressive relaxation

• loving-kindness (metta) meditation

• visualization meditation

Sleep/exercise/nutrition

• Exercise = neurogenesis

• Neurotransmitters

  • Glutamate: stimulator that serves to amp activity in the brain and relates to signaling; primes the pump for neurons to communicate with each other

  • GABA: clamps down on activity between neurons; shuts the gate

  • Serotonin:controls/polices mood, impulsivity, anger and aggressiveness

  • Norepinephrine: amplifies signals that influence attention, perception, motivation and arousal

  • Dopamine: the reward center; considered to calm the brain and has other primary functions