Wired to say yes—Part 2: The outer game

Knowing one should say no is one thing. Actually doing it—when someone is standing right in front of a person expecting a yes—is something else entirely. In Part 2 of this miniseries by The Resilient Vet: Mind & Body Strategies for Success, cohosts Jennifer Edwards, DVM, ACC, CPC, ELI-MP, and Aaron Shaw, OTR/L, CHT, CSCS, use Edwards’s CORE Element framework—a framework for intentional life and leadership—to explore what reclaimed agency actually looks like in practice. From understanding what one is truly responsible for to holding a parameter without it becoming a confrontation, this episode is about moving from awareness into action.

• Listen to Part 1: The inner game

Jennifer Edwards, DVM, ACC, CPC, ELI-MP: Yes is also a choice. I'm not saying that we never say yes again, of course. We're here to work as a team and to take care of animals, but understanding that you are not responsible for other people's emotional response to your no, if no is what's right for you. What each one of us is responsible for is to be clear, to be fair, to be reasonable, to accommodate sometimes, to compromise, to play as a team, but not to continually manage other people's upset at the expense of ourselves.

I have an example of this with one of my coaching clients. This particular client worked in a very busy environment: minimal staff, her and 2 or 3 other people, 20 patients, most critical, several waiting for surgery, a dog literally needing CPR [cardiopulmonary resuscitation], animals in oxygen cages. And despite getting through all of that, they get sat down on Monday morning and get spoken to because there was a point in time when no one answered the phone. It is literally impossible conditions.

You cannot be doing CPR and answering a phone. Given the 2 situations, you obviously choose the more important one, which is saving a life. But it didn't matter; no matter what they did, they were wrong. What was happening is that she was doing this dance of constantly trying to prevent leadership from getting upset. She watched everything she said, she couldn't focus on her work, and what she finally realized is, “I'm not responsible for them getting upset about a situation that they created. If they want the phone answered, then they can staff a receptionist.” Choosing to let go of what we don't really have to own is key, because when we start to fully take ownership for other people's reactions, especially in circumstances like that that they created, then we're actually abandoning ourselves.