The sun begins to rise; the warmth cascades over the sheets while the light floods the room. It is 6:35am and your alarm wakes you. The day begins with scrolling your social media for updates. You get dressed and process your day’s schedule. With coffee in hand, you tackle emails that filtered in from the day before. It is 7am. First lesson is at 8. Breakfast on the go today. Walk your dogs – discuss with yourself your lesson plan while moving through your morning. It is 11am. Time to troubleshoot your fourth client problem or staff concern for just today. Breathe. It is 1:30pm. Don’t forget lunch, you remind yourself on the road between lessons. It is 4:30 pm. Gather yourself for group class and motivate your team (or yourself) for tomorrow on your way into group class. It is 7 pm. Play with your own personal dogs. Your family is at home waiting for you. It is 7:30 pm. Check your emails again from the day and respond with dinner by your side. It is 9 pm. Breathe. The sun has set. Darkness consumes your room. The warmth of your sheets awaits you. Your mind, body, and soul are ready to rest. You blindly scroll your social media to ensure you didn’t miss anything today, because we know this an important part of the day. It is 10pm – it is time to rest and recharge for another day. Does this sound familiar? When outlining logically our day, from start to finish, would it look similar to the above? Whether you are ready to admit that it does or does not, many professionals in the canine industry believe this routine is the fulfillment within our industry. But what if we began to question what we are truly only fulfilling? Could this only be our basic needs? Over 62% of canine professionals experience burnout, emotional and physical, and compassion fatigue within the first three years of working within the industry by only fulfillment of basic needs. Basic needs are only one-fifth of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (see appendix A). The first third in which we achieve creates societal expectations as well as survival in general society. This is categorized as Basic Needs including two subcategories. Let’s explore this.
So let’s delve a little deeper into the day of a canine professional and how these two categories are broken into their day. Basic needs is classified into two subcategories: safety needs and physiological needs. So a little deeper into the day in a life of a canine professional broken into these two categories and why they lead to burnout and compassion fatigue. Leading us to also explore why they lead to burnout and compassion fatigue. Within one specific day as we listed above, we can examine the emotional and logical drive. These two drives dictate our state of mind throughout one singular day. When compromised by our basic needs we are motivated by our emotional drive. When we are emotionally driven we become reactive, defensive, without regard or understanding that we may actually be experiencing a level of burnout or exhaustion. We may not logically make a good decision or well thought out decision due to our reaction of impulse. This results in poor social interactions, low energy level, fatigue, and lack of motivation within both professional and personal complexities.
Alternately, when working within logical drive, we have a clear state of mind. To have logistical drive over emotional drive builds mental and emotional toughness, working to proactively troubleshoot and problem solve. While we seek to emotionally regulate ourselves; logical thought is unable to be accomplished successfully during a state of burn out or fatigue as our body and mind compromise emotionally. We have all heard of the term spiraling and overthinking – this is the perfect example of our emotional state overriding logical thought. During this period of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Basic Needs, emotional drive creates an unhealthy instinct and our reactions will become a template to cope in the future. Thus, compassion fatigue and exhaustion surface and logical drive is suppressed.
In an article Vanessa Rohlf authored; the concept of compassion fatigue was first introduced in 1992 by Carla Joinson, who described the condition as a unique form of burnout affecting professional caregivers. According to Beth Hudnall Stamm, an industry leader in the veterinary field, compassion fatigue consists of two factors: secondary trauma and burnout. Secondary trauma can develop from helping those who have been directly exposed to trauma. Empathy contributes to secondary trauma. Some animal care professional can take on the trauma of those they work with, whether it be their colleagues, mentors, or clients.
Let’s circle back to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs where we find ourselves still within the basic needs teir : physiological and safety components. Safety needs are described as security and wellbeing within our environment. This includes our home and work environments. As a canine professional we work to ensure that we are placed in an environment that fosters safety as a priority and provides security both physically and financially.
Physiological needs are described as food, water, warmth, and rest. This is naturally created throughout as we progress through the day as we move. We wake, we eat, we rest, we sleep; the logical way of life. Much of this was dicated by how we were raised through society from the time we were born. As a human, we are taught the skills to survive. Logically, this makes perfect sense – but there is more to life than just surviving the day to wake up and repeat.
It’s time to learn how we can create a stable, balanced, and yes, fulfilling lifestyle, moving beyond just satisfying safety and physiological needs. We can work to build logical and emotionally driven mindsets. It can be scientifically determined that just living in such a state of survival through basic needs leads to increased amounts of burn out, exhaustion, loss of passion, motivation, work ethic, and simply put overall loss of our logical and emotional drive. When we further explore Maslow’s Heiracrhy we find that there are two more teirs that exist, psychological needs and self-fulfillment needs. The neglect of these teirs can be the root of exhaustion and burnout; while addressing these will promote a healthier lifestyle while decreasing the rate negative effects. During this time, the process in which we take to find our psychological needs as well as our self-esteem needs requires discipline and self motivation. Alongside this, we also seek to practice self worth, understanding, and forgiveness. These practices are common in our human nature to give to others, but over 70% of people struggle to provide themselves with self appreciation, kindness, and love. In recent studies only 6.5% of our population engage in healthy self-care and wellbeing for themselves. That is an astonishing fact! This really puts into perspective why our industry is flooded with professionals stuck in survival mode; lacking the desire to motivate themselves., living each day in basic needs. In addition to just survival of our basic needs the fostering of psychological needs and self-fulfillment needs allow our body, mind, and soul to fully reach a potential. We strive regulate logical and emotional drive beyond survival. The ability to develop creative problem solving, strong trouble shooting skills with a clearer head space subsequently leads far less burn out within our industry. The psychological needs and self-fulfillment needs allow a person to strip their very existence into it’s rawest form and become who they authentically are seeking to become. So how does one begin this process? Let’s develop a self care plan which will take time, creating a full rehabilitation of the mind, body, and soul.
Within Maslow’s psychological needs we find the desire to hold belongingness and love needs such as relationships and friends. We all know this can be difficult for us introverted canine professionals. Tapping into this emotional complexity need allows, for vulnerability, acceptance, and confidence in one self path. All of which we experience in our own clients both two and four-legged on a day-to-day basis.
Many canine professionals are known to be introverted, most also find themselves obsessed with their hobby and compassion for canines into a 7 day a week career. This quickly builds and fosters mental exhaustion. The second psychological need within this tier is esteem needs; a feeling of accomplishment. In our industry one of the leading areas that causes burnout and exhaustion is imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is the condition of feeling anxious and not experiencing success internally, despite high-performing in external, objective ways. This condition leads to many canine professionals terminating their career, their own businesses, or simply moving into a state of exhaustion and burnout. Without the assistance of positive resources for professionals to seek support and guidance for psychological needs, many professionals find themselves scrolling social platforms questioning their methods, their expertise; and attempting to be the best while keeping up with the next TikTok video.
This leads us to the top of our triangle of living a wholesome fulfilled life beyond our basic needs. Self-fulfillment needs; the most underated and if surveyed, forgotten area of our professional industry. What exactly does this encompass? Self-actualization, achieving one’s full potential through professional and creative activities. This pushes a professional to look internally and discover what they enjoy. We do this every day for everyone else in our industry. At the end of the day, we find the time to talk ourselves out of it. We are complacent pushing our own self-fulfillment to the side for the sake of our clients, our business, our family to ensure our basic needs our met first. This you guessed it, leads to further burnout, compassion fatigue, and further depletion of our wholeness and authenticity of who we are.
In 2020, the canine professional industry saw an increase in a need for our services, but a large decline in customer appreciation, peer to peer appreciation, and in general community support for particular training methods. Over the last five years the consumer demand for quick fixes, method conflict has increased the divide among our industry professionals adding to the pressures to “fix” our community. It is at this time may professionals have also begun to experience a higher rate of imposter syndrome, social media anxiety, pressure to impress through influences outside of their control. All leads to a spike in industry burnout. It is time to reclaim our industry leading professionals, to lead strong fulfilled, and balanced lives that are filled with not just our basic needs of survival, but our psychological needs and self-fulfillment needs; supporting our core values while creating an enriched lifestyle. When one slows down to look introspectively who they are fully, only then can we begin to understand the earth our feet touch and the living beings we interact with. Only when we slow ourselves down to accept all of who we are, the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, can we fully work with the client in front of us completely.
Let’s break this down for our professionals to easily digest, to get on board with and for our industry leaders to start a movement to a healthier, more positive, supportive community of professionals that normalizes all areas of emotional drive, logical drive in addition to supporting Maslow’s five tiers of needs and the needs leading us to our individualized successes. Support will lead us to the healthiest most rawest areas of who we are for ourselves and our industry. Doing so also allows this industry to foster healthier professionals to take forth and foster the next generation of canine professionals.
Together each of us can determine our own core values to guide us to healthier decisions, leading to take action, and develop strong behaviors to be molded into a created and well-formed habit. When a habit becomes habitual our belief creates a balanced lifestyle within Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. A new habit can take over 66 days to begin habitual and curated into our day-to-day lifestyle. Statistically some people may take over 180 days to fully commit to a new habit. That is just shifting one behavior – this is all sounding oddly familiar now isn’t it.
So how can we formulate a movement that results in a solution for our canine professionals and industry leaders? I, first propose to work towards normalizing open conversation within burnout, compassion fatigue, and bringing awareness of the issue in our industry. Providing resources such as webinars, life coaches, and open forums for our community to participate in to allow one in this state of mind to feel less alone, to become motivated to seek assistance. Unfortunately, statistically over 40% of professionals feeling overwhelmed, burnout, compassion fatigue, or further negative mental exhaustion do not seek help before they have created a habit or unhealthy lifestyle within their own basic needs. Furthermore, many professionals within this 40% also suffer from other mental health concerns without treatment, reacting with emotional drive leading to self doubt and further imposter syndrome. With resources being available to professionals aside from their day-to-day operations, we can begin to foster a new habit. Aside from offering seminars, workshops, and life coaches; an opportunity to normalize and celebrate what makes ourselves unique. Becoming raw again; finding the most truest, authentic, rawest form of yourself. Becoming raw is the acceptance of who, as one singular person, we are. That perception in and of itself, allows us to let go of much emotional baggage that comes from burnout in our profession and work towards a stronger industry as a whole. Through building longer-term treatment plans for members to be a part of in addition to normalizing our industry and the complexities within it. This goes as far as education of what it is to be a canine professional. The vast responsibilities that is asked of us on a day to day basis and the varying trades we practice. Through strong mentorship programs involving the capacity to eliminate the pressures to exceed expectations to become the best canine professional, but rather to better understand who we are as a canine professional allows our industry professionals to succeed at any level. These levels of mentorship programs, educational opportunities, webinars, and programs shed light on all areas we focus on within our industry from professional pooper scoopers, client console through to professional canine trainer. That vast undertaking of our profession goes unspoken leading to a void. Professionals in our industry will typically quit or leave to find other jobs within 24-36 months due to the overwhelming pressures of other professionals, lack of education, or the thought of failure within their own skillset. This primary goal focusses on simplifying and supporting our authenticity of human nature within our own skillsets while also finding healthier creative outlets outside of our own professions.
Our industry deserves vulnerability, pureness, and acceptance, as well as the commitment to ourselves before we commit to our clients each day as well as each other within this industry. Through rehabilitation, we seek to return something or someone to it’s most natural state; to rehabilitate ourselves we must return ourselves to our rawest most natural form. Only we can determine this form. The sun begins to rise; the warmth cascades over the sheets while the light floods the room. It is 6:35am and my alarm wakes me. I embrace the day. I accept the challenges. I shine in the sunlight. I am raw and live fulfilled.
By Lora Bacharach, IACP – CDT, CDTA, PDTI | Member #P7203