Join Dr. Matt Holland as he chats with Dr. Moriah McCauley about her path to veterinary medicine, and why her curiosity led her to start a podcast while in veterinary school in Scotland. Moriah shares what she has learned from the podcast thus far and why being flexible and giving herself grace has helped her not only in her podcast, but as a practicing veterinarian.
GUEST BIO:
Dr. Moriah McCauley
Dr. McCauley is a practicing small animal veterinarian who has always been deeply passionate about caring for those around her.
Through her veterinary studies in Scotland, she was given opportunities to learn from incredible veterinarians around her. Seeing the immense value in their stories she sought a way to share these opportunities with her colleagues, thus the podcast was created.
As Dr. McCauley transitioned from student to doctor she began to focus on the role these stories have in veterinary medicine and how storytelling can improve outcomes for clients and patients.
Each episode takes its listeners around the world to hear from inspiring veterinarians as they faced exciting and challenging situations in their jobs and teaches veterinary students and veterinarians how to become confident and engaging storytellers.
LINKS AND INFORMATION:
- That Vet Life podcast: https://soundcloud.com/thatvetlifepodcast
- The Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Medicine: https://www.ed.ac.uk/vet/studying
- Student Association of Veterinary Medicine (SAVMA): https://www.avma.org/membership/SAVMA
- I Want to be a Veterinarian: https://iwanttobeaveterinarian.org/
You may learn more about the VIN Foundation, on the website, or join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.
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TRANSCRIPT
Intro
Moriah McCauley, DVM: Stay curious, stay hungry, go down a road. Just pursue it with as much passion as you can. As you’re going down it you might decide, you know what, that’s not for me. I’m going to I want to do something else.
Jordan Benshea: That is Dr. Moriah McCauley, and this is the VIN Foundation’s Veterinarian Pulse podcast. I’m Jordan Benshea, Executive Director of the VIN Foundation. Join me and our cohost and VIN Foundation Board member, Dr. Matt Holland, as we talk with veterinary colleagues about critical topics and share stories. Stories that connect us as humans, as animals, as a veterinary community. This podcast is made possible by individual donors like you who donate to the VIN Foundation. Thank you. Please check the Episode Notes for Bios, links, and information mentioned.
Meeting Moriah McCauley, DVM
Matt Holland, DVM: Welcome, Moriah. Thanks for joining us.
Moriah McCauley, DVM: Hey, thanks for having me, Matt. This is a fun, fun conversation I’m looking forward to.
Matt Holland, DVM: A brief intro for how we met. We had been following each other on social media, lurking on each other’s spaces for a couple years. Out of the blue, I saw one of Moriah’s Instagram posts that was perfectly aligned with the Rising Leaders webinar a few weeks ago, and I thought, okay, I’ve been a fanboy for a while, why not take the leap and see if Moriah will answer my DM. With flying colors, did she answer my DM and we had a phone call. On the phone call, we were like, you should come on the podcast. So, now she’s on the podcast. Thanks for joining us.
Moriah McCauley, DVM: I know I feel like you are elevating me much higher than I really should be with that intro. But equally so, when I saw that you reached out, I was like what THE Matt Holland is messaging me? If anybody is familiar with SAVMA, which is the Student American Veterinary Medical Association, Matt has a history through there. I’ve also been through SAVMA, so he’s a little bit of a legend there. When he had messaged, I was like, oh my gosh, this is the human who was messaging me. So, it’s cool that we were both following each other for a while and then we finally connected on social media. But the power of what the New Age is and technology is it’s brought us here, so I’m really looking forward to this.
Matt Holland, DVM: Yes, and now I think you elevated me way too high, but my therapist says take you take the compliment and run.
Moriah McCauley, DVM: There we go. Just go with it.
Matt Holland, DVM: Thank you. I appreciate it. Let’s get right to it.
Moriah’s Journey to Veterinary Medicine
Matt Holland, DVM: So, how did you get to where you are? What’s your story?
Moriah McCauley, DVM: My story, let’s see how much time do we got here for this?
Matt Holland, DVM: As long as you want.
Moriah McCauley, DVM: As long as we got. Alright, so my name is Dr. Moriah McCauley. It’s still a little bit weird to call myself doctor because I’ve only been doing this for a little over nine months now that I’ve officially been a doctor. Most recently, I’ve been working as a small animal general practitioner in northern Virginia and loving what I’m doing there, absolutely loving it. Great mentorship, great practice, just all around amazing. Before working as a veterinarian, I was in vet school in Scotland. I did my last four years, my full four years of studies in Scotland in Edinburgh, and I graduated from the Royal Dick School of Veterinary studies back in 2020, in the middle of a pandemic. A lot has happened here recently, but that is my veterinary education in a nutshell. Before that, I was an upstate New York person. I went to undergrad there, I lived most of my life there, bar one teeny tiny little bit of seven months where I worked in Kentucky with racing thoroughbreds. Outside of that, really me in a nutshell there.
Matt Holland, DVM: That is funny, like the teeny tiny little bit of seven months. That’s almost exactly how long I departed from my roots, which are outside and inside Chicago. I moved to New York City for seven months to work for the Major League Baseball network. That was all in my pre-vet career, which brings me to a question I have about what you would tell pre-vets.
Advice for Pre-Vet Students
Matt Holland, DVM: What do you know now that you wish you would have known then when you were either a pre-vet, applying, or in that phase?
Moriah McCauley, DVM: Ooh, that’s a really good question. Let’s see here. What would I have told at least my pre-vet self, other than buckle up, you’re about to go on a really, really crazy roller coaster ride? I know for myself that going into veterinary medicine was something that growing up, it wasn’t like a defining moment, it was just literally everything I did pointed towards working with humans and working with animals in a medical setting, so I knew my trajectory was going to be veterinary medicine. If I could go back and tell myself something, or even any of the pre-vets, it would be do what you love, like literally find the thing, find the niche of what it is that you really love and latch on to that and not focus on what everyone else tells you the veterinary profession has to be because there are so many facets that you can go into, there are so many different trajectories you can take. As a pre vet you think, oh, I like animals and so I’m going to be a vet, when in fact, it’s so much more than that. Just making that awareness, so that the expectations and the realities can be different for pre-vets, that’s where I would go and probably tell myself, if I could go back in time.
Matt Holland, DVM: Yeah, I didn’t know about this resource when I was a pre-vet and what you just described, I like animals, so I’m going to be a vet reminds me of one of the VIN Foundation resources, “I Want to be a Veterinarian,” that helps navigate folks through that stage of their veterinary journey. So now, we’re just moving the window four or five years up, what would you tell yourself now that you didn’t know then about finding that niche, about finding that part of the profession that is the best fit, or maybe, a good fit? The reason I asked that question in particular is because you told me during our first conversation that you felt like you hit the jackpot with the clinic you found. So, how to help others kind of get that feeling too.
Moriah McCauley, DVM: Yeah, absolutely. I would say stay curious. That is the one thing that’s going to help you find where you’re supposed to be because, even for myself, when I started at school, I wanted to be an equine vet. That is what I was going to do. I was going to graduate. I was going to go back to Kentucky. I was going to work with racing thoroughbreds, and here I am working as a small animal general practitioner in Northern Virginia, and I’m not even done on my journey, guys. There are other things that I’m probably going to end up doing.
Matt Holland, DVM: No!
Moriah McCauley, DVM: Seriously whoa, love that! So yes, there’s so much more that’s going to happen for me. If I’m talking to first year veterinary students, what I would literally say is stay curious, stay hungry, and go down a road. Just pursue it with as much passion as you can. As you’re going down it you might decide, you know what, that’s not for me. I’m going to I want to do something else. Or maybe you stick with it for five or ten years, and then you say, “you know what, I want to add a little extra flavor to what I’m doing” and you just change. Knowing that you always have the opportunity to pivot, opens up so much freedom and allows yourself so much more grace when you’re going through things, because I think especially for vet students, they think I have to know what I’m going to do when I graduate. I have to know what it is, and if I change my mind then that looks bad on me and what everyone’s expecting of me. That in itself has a whole different range of psychological things that we could talk about. Just literally stay curious, because the more you look into something, the more you learn about it. You will either continue to love it and want to keep diving deeper and becoming more skilled in that area, or you’ll find what your true passion is, or at least one of your future true passions, of what it is if you just stay curious about it.
Matt Holland, DVM: I love that. I think it closely describes what happened to me, and I hadn’t even really thought about it that way. I thought I was going to be, like you thought you’re going to be an equine vet, and I thought I was going to be the next James Herriot and have a clinic out of my truck and drive through the countryside. In school, I took those courses, and the professor who taught those courses also taught public health and policy. You’d say staying curious, I think he would call it staying annoying. I always stayed after class and asked extra questions and bothered him and emailed him on the weekends and stuff. Because I felt like a bond with him. I really liked him, and I kept picking his brain. The long story short is that I didn’t end up going into that kind of practice or any practice after school, I went into policy and government work. I think it was through staying curious. So yeah, I love that. You also mentioned in that answer, maybe part of finding your niche is adding a bit of extra flavor, which is like a perfect segue into what I want to ask about.
The Birth of ‘That Vet Life’ Podcast
Matt Holland, DVM: During your veterinary student part of the journey, is a little bit of extra flavor on the side in the form of your own podcast.
Moriah McCauley, DVM: Oh, yeah, that little, tiny thing I do on the side that you just mentioned that there? Yeah, so the podcast is called That Vet Life, and I’ve been running it for a little over three-ish, almost four years now, I think. I’ve lost track, honestly, but yes, that was a little one of the little extra bits of flavor I added when I was a veterinary student. Some people might call it a stupid decision to do in the middle of everything else that was happening, because I was one of those people that just had to have my fingers in a bunch of different pots or whatever metaphor you want to use, spinning a bunch of plates, is how I operated the best, and the one extra thing I wanted to add was a little bit of podcasting on the side. That was partly because I had always had an interest in media and marketing. I had dabbled in making a couple really crappy videos when I was younger and just trying different things. So, when the opportunity arose, essentially there was a grant that was available, I applied, I got it, and I was like, hey, okay, so what am I going to do with this thing? I guess I’m going to make a podcast with it, and that was that’s kind of how it all happened. The fuel behind that was, I had been learning from so many different veterinarians from all over, like all over the world, literally and I wanted to be able to share those stories and share those lessons learned with my colleagues and with my peers. I figured doing a podcast was a great way to share those stories. It also would allow me to work on my communication skills, and storytelling skills in general, which is where the podcast has morphed into. Initially, it literally was just me talking to veterinarians about the cool things that they’ve done in their life. Then eventually, actually, what was it? Oh, my goodness, just about a year ago is when it made the transition. I took a little time off to finish school, and then the pandemic happened. I was like, oh, what’s a better time to completely revamp the podcast, then a pandemic? I have all this time on my hands, apparently, so I’ll just revamp it. So that’s what I did. I decided to, basically, just do a little baby pivot off of what I had been doing and focus on, not the stories themselves, per se, but the actual art of the storytelling. As someone who was going into general practice, I knew there was a ton of opportunity for communication skills, but I didn’t want to call it communication skills, because that was boring. I wanted to call it storytelling skills. I started doing general episodes about storytelling. Then I also dove a little bit deeper, and I started doing shorter episodes called Skill Set, where I would talk with veterinarians about my specific skill. I think one of the first ones I did was with Dr. Tannetje Crocker, and we talked about the first time you meet a client in the consult room. Hah, little did I know we would still be in a pandemic doing curbside and I haven’t actually met with a client in a room in ever! That episode is still there for the day that we do go back to in-person consults. Other episodes I’ve done have to do with euthanasia, dental work, different little bits, or, oh yeah, being a female young doctor and how do you respond to clients that way? I did that episode with Kirsten Ronngren at Vet Redefined and so I have a ton of different episodes that are about that, but that’s where the podcast has morphed. To go back to your original question, why did I want to do this? At that time, I didn’t know that I wanted to do it because I loved storytelling. I knew that I liked sharing stories and hearing from other people. So, that’s one of those cases where I just stayed curious about it. I started to learn a lot more about the podcast. So yeah, go for it. Go for it.
Matt Holland, DVM: That’s what I was going to say, that you stayed curious. You stole my line!
Moriah McCauley, DVM: Stole it, used it, oh, we both use it. There you go. Yes, it all came out of this initial curiosity of wanting to do something more and not just do veterinary medicine as the medicine side of things. I wanted to continue to grow and learn, and that’s honestly the truth of where the podcast came out of.
Balancing Vet School and Extracurriculars
Matt Holland, DVM: Talking about how you’re spinning so many different plates, you’re also involved with SAVMA. Do you think it was ever too much? Was it the other way, where staying busy helped the vet school experience? How did that go?
Moriah McCauley, DVM: I think for myself, it did help the vet school experience just because it forced me to stay doing things, stay out there, meeting new people, networking, and working on different skills. Otherwise, if I wasn’t doing all these things, I can 100% bet that I would have been staying in my room, studying all the time, probably hating what I was doing, and burning out a little bit. So, for me, I needed to stay busy. I needed to be a part of SAVMA. I needed to be a part of the BVA, which is the British Veterinary Association. I needed to be on the rugby team. I needed to be training for half marathons. I needed to be doing a podcast. I needed to be involved in my church that was there. I needed to be doing all of these different things, and it wasn’t like I’m so anxious, and I need to be doing something, or else I don’t know what to do with myself. It was that I had so much passion and interest in all these different areas, and I don’t want to miss out on this. This is four years of awesomeness. I don’t want to let it go to waste, because I know this is also time to practice how I handle balancing all of these different things and working on a symbiosis between my work and my life, or my work and the rest of my life before I go out into practice.
Matt Holland, DVM: Yeah. How like being a veterinary student is not being a student of only veterinary related topics, you’re also a student of self. It sounds like you really have a good relationship with yourself, and you know yourself and you know what kind of balance you need to strike to feel like you’re doing the right things, I guess.
Moriah McCauley, DVM: I like that. I like the way you said that as a student of self. Yes, I needed to learn what my boundaries were and learn what it looked like for me to approach those boundaries or push past my comfort zone. Because if I didn’t do it then, in vet school, where I had the safety bubble of life, then trying to do all of that now probably would have been a bit more difficult, not impossible, but definitely more difficult. That’s not to say I did it perfectly, I stretched myself thin more than I should have probably in those first couple years, but again, that was part of the learning opportunity. I had to stretch myself that far in order to know maybe you really need to hand off that extra task, or you need to delegate a bit better, but again, that that’s just part of the learning process.
Matt Holland, DVM: Yes, it’s like you don’t know what being stretched too thin feels like until you feel it at least once.
Moriah McCauley, DVM: Exactly.
Matt Holland, DVM: You have to know for navigating the rest of life. Also, to bring it back to the podcast, I wonder how you feel about that in relationship to your life after school? Is it more or less the same, like it kind of fits into your life? Or is it something you’re thinking about, you said you will do other things one day, do you ever have a vision about how that’s your main job?
Moriah McCauley, DVM: My dreams are very big right now. I have very varied dreams and goals and expectations for myself. So, I’m trying to keep them within reason. Okay, here’s my plan for my first year which is literally just become a really good general practitioner, learn how to better communicate with my clients and take care of them as a whole, and my patients and take care of my team members. Once I’m able to figure out those pieces, then I can say, “Okay, what do the next five years of my life look like? What are the things that I want to achieve?” Part of it includes the podcast and growing that and seeing where it goes. The other part is the practicing medicine side. I definitely see myself practicing medicine, most likely at the same practice that I am at, at least for the next five years, if not more. I also want to be adding in a little bit of flavor of other things, here and there. Whether that means going and doing more mission type work, or maybe dabbling a bit more in mixed animal practice because I have a deep passion for sheep and horses. Trying to figure out a way to combine those in my future life is all part of the grand plan, but the podcast definitely fits in there.
Matt Holland, DVM: I was going to ask but you just answered, if you’re thinking about horses, since that was once the love, but it sounds like yeah, maybe you are.
Moriah McCauley, DVM: Maybe it’s not working with them on a medicine side of things, but maybe I’m working with them with like a youth program or again, with any kind of mission work. There are so many different opportunities where I could still be doing that, but maybe not the medicine side for that specific species.
Matt Holland, DVM: Well, that leads into one other question I had. There are so many things you could do. There are too many things to do with just one lifetime.
Moriah McCauley, DVM: Yeah, there’s literally too many.
Matt Holland, DVM: You’ve probably heard of a lot of them. How many episodes would you estimate you’ve recorded?
Moriah McCauley, DVM: Oh, Nellie. At this point, I am easily over the 100 mark, if not a little bit more. I don’t keep track as well as I should, but I think last time we talked you estimated a number for me, and it was a little over 100, I think.
Matt Holland, DVM: Okay, if you could, I mean this is impossible, but I’m going to ask you anyway, if you could distill all of those down into a message to the listeners out there, what have you learned from talking to so many different people in this profession around the world?
Moriah McCauley, DVM: Oh, gosh, you really put me on the spot about that one. I would say that what I’ve learned from these years of doing podcasting and talking to people about their stories is that you, as an individual, have a story to tell. It is immensely valuable, not just only to yourself, but to the people around you. And the most important thing that you can do is to stay true to that and to continue to tell your story, because regardless of how boring or how terrible you think it is, it has value, and it has purpose in our own life and in the lives of others. So, keep telling your story.
Matt Holland, DVM: I could not agree more, it reminds me of an axiom that is used in the policy world a lot. I think it’s used outside the policy world, but that’s where I heard it and used it a whole bunch – is “Think global, act local.”
Moriah McCauley, DVM: I like that!
Matt Holland, DVM: Telling your story to the people around you, whether that’s the people you live with, people at work, people you hang out with on social media, keep telling your story because it is immensely valuable. And yes, exactly what you said, no matter how boring or terrible you think it is, it matters, and it also matters to tell it, the act of telling your story matters. So yes, totally agree.
Moriah McCauley, DVM: Also, keep inspiring other people to tell their story. I guess that’s the three tenants that I have for my podcast is that I hope that it inspires, encourages, and challenges other people. That’s what I hope to do in my own daily life is to inspire, encourage, and the more difficult part of things, to challenge people in an edifying manner, which is not easy to do, it takes practice and challenging myself.
Matt Holland, DVM: I might put you on the spot with this one again.
Moriah McCauley, DVM: Oh, dear! Here we go.
Matt Holland, DVM: Right, you just said that the challenging one is challenging in an edifying manner, which makes sense. What are some tips? How do you challenge people in a way that feels productive and effective?
Moriah McCauley, DVM: That, again, is something that I’m continuing to learn, but when it comes to when you want to challenge someone to do better in their own life, or to become a better version of themselves, you’re not doing it in a way that says, “Oh, you’re a terrible person, you’re just a bad person, you shouldn’t do that kind of thing.” Whereas instead, you could be saying, “I think there’s so much more potential in you. Why are you doing this?” That’s the most extreme version I can think of, but even if it’s something like say a veterinary student, a first year veterinary student, where they just aren’t doing well on their grades, they feel like they’re not able to balance everything, [you can’t balance things, you can symbios things, but use that word], but to encourage them and challenge them to work on their on their skills, to work on the things outside of just the grades, because you believe in them, because you know they have potential. So, you’re challenging them to do better in their grades, to do better in their balance of things, but you’re doing it in a way that says, “You can keep doing this, you have potential.” It’s not challenging them and saying, “Oh, you’re just a bad student.” I’m not doing a very good job of explaining this, but the edifying manner is something that is not easy for us to do. It’s very easy for us to challenge someone in a way that’s putting them down rather than lifting them up. I guess that’s the simplistic way of saying it. It definitely came out a lot more fluent than the first time I tried to explain that.
Matt Holland, DVM: Yes. You said you didn’t think you were doing a good job of explaining it, but it reminded me, how you were saying it before, totally reminded me of an experience I had earlier today. I was editing a document for someone, and I put on track changes and leave a comment. My first comment I made on the sentence was ‘this is poorly worded’, and I was looking at that and I do feel that way, it is true, but is that going to help as much as it could if I said it a different way? So, I sat and thought, and I decided to reference a different part of the document and say, “This part was really good.” Like, I know that you’re capable of writing this way, and I think this sentence could be more like that one. I don’t know if it made a difference in that person’s experience, but I thought what you just described is like trying to be uplifting instead of putting someone down.
Moriah McCauley, DVM: Yeah, and it’s not something that we’re very attuned to doing in the human race essentially, but when you choose the more edifying option of challenging someone, the end result is that they then go on to think more positively about themselves, they act more positively, and they influence people more positively. So, it has a knock-on effect, and that’s honestly, even today, I was reading a book by Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, but it talked about that a little bit, and I was like, “hot thing right there in the book!” I was excited to see something that I’ve been thinking about just pop up in the book. It’s not an easy thing to do, and I know I’ve not done it well in the past, which is why I’m working on improving it. That’s part of the reason that it’s a daily practice, and it’s something that I feel everybody should be instigating for themselves, not only because it impacts themselves, but it then impacts the people that are around them.
Matt Holland, DVM: I really agree with that, and I’m glad you brought that up. I wasn’t expecting to talk about challenging people in an edifying way. I like the way you put that.
Work-Life Symbiosis
Matt Holland, DVM: You also said there’s, I think this is how you phrased it, there’s no balance. You can’t balance things, you can only symbios things.
Moriah McCauley, DVM: Yeah.
Matt Holland, DVM: Alright, so there’s got to be some more behind that.
Moriah McCauley, DVM: Yes. I’m trying to remember if that’s entirely my own thing, or if I somewhat stole/snatched that from someone else. One of my own mentors, Dr. Gary Marshall, he’s on Instagram at It Might Get Weird. He’s an absolutely fantastic, phenomenal, inspiring, encouraging, and challenging person in the veterinary profession who’s continually looking to uplift the up-and-coming veterinarians of the profession. If you haven’t checked him out on Instagram, go and do that.
Matt Holland, DVM: I can confirm, a solid human being.
Moriah McCauley, DVM: I think it was around the same time we both came up, we must have been watching or listening to the same influences, but we came to the point where one of us said, “You can’t balance something, there is no work-life balance, there is work-life symbiosis.” It’s essentially this idea. It’s not like a proven theory or any wishy-washy stuff.
Matt Holland, DVM: I demand proof!
Moriah McCauley, DVM: You demand proof, okay, so I’ll work on that for you, Matt. I’ll work on some research for you there. The core of it is that when you try to perfectly balance your work and your life, you will fail, and you will fail spectacularly. That will lead to a little bit more of a burnout situation, because you’ll be struggling to try and balance things when you actually can’t. What you can do, is you could find a symbiosis between the two. If we look at the basics of biology, you have a symbiosis system where the two areas, or at least in a basic model there’s two systems and each of them work to positively impact the other. In that way, your work and your life can positively impact each other. In that your work works to support your life and your life is there to support your work, and vice versa. You’ll also then realize that because there is no perfect balance, like even if you tried to put the two things on a balancing scale, some days your work will tip more towards that and other days the scale will tilt more towards your life. So, you’ll constantly be going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. It’s this back-and-forth tipping action that provides the energy to keep going from one to the other. So, that’s the symbiosis. That’s the idea. I have to give some of the credit to Gary on that one for coming up with it, or I honestly don’t even remember who came up with it at this point, but credit does not matter at this point. So, that’s the whole thing behind symbiosis. Where were we going with that? I forgot!
Matt Holland, DVM: Ah, I don’t know, but it reminded me of how creating expectations also increases the chance of failure. If you think well, my days are going to look like this because I have achieved work-life balance, then you’re playing a risky game there, because the minute they don’t look like what your vision was, then you’ve failed, like you said, and failed spectacularly. You’ll feel like you messed up when maybe all that needed to change was the vision, which is exactly what you described. Some days it’ll look like this, and some days it’ll look like that. Not only is that okay, but it can feed off of itself. If you put a bunch of energy into work, and you have a supportive work culture, which is like an entirely separate discussion, but hopefully you do, then you can take time in the next wave and put a whole bunch of energy into life. Then the vision was always going to be changing anyway, and you can’t really fail that vision. You know, maybe that’s just my unbridled optimism speaking.
Moriah McCauley, DVM: No, no, no, keep going with that. I think you definitely have something there.
Matt Holland, DVM: Well, we’ll have to find a way to prove it. You need some evidence-based discussion on this one.
Moriah McCauley, DVM: Yes, need some EBVM there.
Matt Holland, DVM: All right. I am wondering if you have a favorite quote, or two, or maybe a handful.
Moriah McCauley, DVM: Okay, I think that it’s not really the greatest quote on the face of the earth, but it kind of works well for being a new grad vet or even just any kind of vet at this point. It’s basically, do what you can with what you got, and the rest of it will go from there. Even just thinking about what I did with the podcast, or going through vet school, there’s so much that you could sit there and say, “I can’t do it because I don’t have or this won’t happen, or I won’t be able to do this, because I don’t have XYZ”, then you’re going to put yourself in a lot of sticky situations. If you’ve ever had the opportunity to work with a mixed animal vet, or any kind of farm vet, you’ll learn that they go hard with this quote. They literally do exactly what they can with anything that they have. It’s such a good way to learn from and carry on with whatever you do in life, because you could sit there and say, “Oh, I don’t have this fancy bit of equipment that we had in vet school, in the ivory tower of vet school, but I have this.” You can certainly make things happen. Whether that’s in veterinary medicine, or just in your own dreams, your own goals, if you start with what you have, and what you have doesn’t have to be a physical thing or monetary value, it could even be the network that you have. If you start with a network of people that are around you, the skills that you have in your hands, and whatever happens to be sitting around you physically, you can make something happen. From there, it’ll continue to grow and continue to grow. Eventually, it may take a very long time, mind you, but eventually you will be able to achieve whatever goal that you have. Keeping that little bit of information where it might take a lot longer than you expect but keeping that in the back of your mind will certainly help with whatever goal you are trying to achieve.
Matt Holland, DVM: Yeah, yeah. My wife and I moved from Washington, DC, to my parents’ house outside of Chicago a month before the pandemic started. Our plan was to use this place as a home base to look for a place to live in the city. Then the pandemic hit, and we were still living at my parents’ house. The do what you can with what you got was….my bike was in storage, and I love biking. It’s almost as therapeutic as writing Haiku is for me, and I was like, I don’t have my bike, what am I supposed to do? I can’t go buy a bike. It’s a global pandemic. I can’t go inside. I have my legs, and I also had my wife who likes walking. Now we’ve got this great daily walking habit that we never had in DC.
Moriah McCauley, DVM: That’s awesome.
Matt Holland, DVM: I think we’re going to keep it indefinitely. Yeah, do what you can with what you got. I like that.
Moriah McCauley, DVM: No, that’s a good example of using it. In my mind, I was trying to come up with some medical example of using it, and I was like, I’m blanking here, but you came up with the perfect one there where literally you saw an opportunity that was around you, and you took it up. Look at the flip side, you’ve come out with a wonderful habit as a result. That’s something that can be used in anybody’s life.
Matt Holland, DVM: Yeah. You started that with underselling it, saying it’s maybe not the greatest quote on the face of the earth.
Moriah McCauley, DVM: It doesn’t have big fancy words in it. It’s not very long. It doesn’t have fancy words, people don’t usually think that constitutes a good quote, but I like mine.
Matt Holland, DVM: Yeah, we should come up with a grading matrix for what makes a good quote.
Final Thoughts and Outro
Matt Holland, DVM: If you could leave the audience with anything, again, it doesn’t have to be just one thing, but what would it be?
Moriah McCauley, DVM: Choices here.
Matt Holland, DVM: Now I’m asking you to make up your own quote.
Moriah McCauley, DVM: Oh, no. I would say just be mindful of where you are in life right now. There are a lot of opportunities that lie ahead that you may think that every single door is getting closed, getting slammed in your face, but the reality is that you’re just waiting for the one door that will open. If you’re mindful of what’s happening in your life right now and not living in the future, there’s so much opportunity that will come to you and that you’ll be able to make come to fruition. So short and sweet, but that’s what I would leave everybody with.
Matt Holland, DVM: All right. Well, thank you again so much for joining us, and hopefully there’s a next time.
Moriah McCauley, DVM: Oh, I think there will be a next time but thank you so much for having me. It’s been a fun conversation and thanks for putting up with my random bunny trails of thought that go along with having me on as a guest.
Matt Holland, DVM: Happy to.
Jordan Benshea: Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Veterinary Pulse. Please check the Episode Notes for additional information referenced in the podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast, please follow, subscribe, and share a review. We welcome feedback and hope you will tune in again. You can find out more about the VIN Foundation through our website, VINFoundation.org, and our social media channels. Thank you for being here. Be well.