At some point, most veterinary professionals have done the math in their heads: say yes, keep the peace, get through the day. The math feels rational in the moment. Over time, it isn't. Jennifer Edwards, DVM, ACC, CPC, has spent years coaching veterinary professionals through exactly this dynamic, and her core argument is that the problem runs deeper than individual choices. The profession selects for people who are wired to comply.
Part 2 of her miniseries on The Resilient Vet: Mind and Body Strategies for Success, co-hosted with occupational therapist Aaron Shaw, OTR/L, picks up where the inner work leaves off. You can understand why you say yes compulsively and still freeze when someone is standing in front of you expecting agreement. The outer game is what you actually do when the moment arrives.
You Are Not Responsible for Their Reaction
Dr. Edwards's central argument is one many vet professionals need to hear more than once: you are not responsible for how someone else responds to your reasonable no.
She describes a coaching client working in a critical care environment: minimal staff, twenty critical patients, animals in oxygen cages, a dog needing CPR. On Monday morning, the team is called into a meeting because someone didn't answer the phone. The client had been managing herself carefully, watching what she said, trying to prevent leadership from getting upset. What she finally understood: "I'm not responsible for them getting upset about a situation that they created."
Dr. Edwards frames this as the real cost of carrying too much ownership. When you manage someone else's emotional reactions, especially in conditions they created, you abandon yourself in the process. The energy that should go into clinical care, into focus, into actual decision-making, gets redirected into managing the feelings of people around you.
What Reclaiming Agency Actually Looks Like
The CORE Element framework Dr. Edwards uses in coaching isn't about building willpower or becoming a different kind of person. It's about clarity: understanding what you're genuinely responsible for, what falls outside that scope, and where a limit stops being self-preservation and starts being abdication.
The line between the two matters because "setting limits" can become its own kind of avoidance. Dr. Edwards isn't arguing for withdrawal from team responsibilities. She's arguing for precision: being clear, being fair, being reasonable, accommodating sometimes, compromising, playing as a team. The goal is to stop managing others' upset at the expense of your own functioning.
In a profession with well-documented compassion fatigue and burnout, this distinction has practical consequences. Practitioners who can't protect their own cognitive and emotional resources burn out faster. Practices that normalize conditions where limits can't exist retain fewer people, and the ones who stay are depleted. Building the kind of self-care practices that actually hold up under clinical pressure starts with exactly this kind of boundary-setting.
What Practices Can Do
The outer game isn't only the individual's responsibility. The conditions Dr. Edwards describes, where a vet doing CPR gets called out for not answering a phone, exist because practice leadership either doesn't see the impossible math or hasn't changed it. Building a culture where people can set limits without social cost isn't soft management. It's how you keep your best clinicians.
That means making staffing decisions that match patient volume, naming impossible conditions when they exist, and building systems where no one person carries responsibilities that require three. It means treating a team member's "I can't do that right now" as information rather than as a failure to comply.
The outer work of protecting wellbeing is partly individual. And partly, it belongs to the organization.
Dr. Edwards's CORE Element framework gives individual practitioners a structured way to practice this skill, but it works best paired with leadership that has already done its own version of the outer work: matching staffing to patient volume, naming impossible conditions out loud, and treating a team member's "I can't do that right now" as useful information rather than a problem to manage. Neither half fixes the other on its own. A clinician who has learned to set limits still needs a workplace where doing so doesn't carry a social cost, and a practice that builds that culture still needs people on staff who know how to use it.