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

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."

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.

"Yes is also a choice," she says. "I'm not saying that we never say yes again. 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 Reclaiming Agency Actually Looks Like

The CORE Element framework 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.

That distinction matters because "setting limits" can become its own kind of avoidance. 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 where compassion fatigue and burnout rates consistently outpace other healthcare fields, 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.

What Practices Can Do

The outer game isn't only the individual's responsibility. The conditions 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.

What to Take Away

  • You are not responsible for others' emotional response to your reasonable limits. Choosing to let go of what you don't actually own is a clinical skill, not a personal failing.
  • Burnout in vet med is partly a culture problem. Practices that normalize impossible conditions don't lose bad employees. They lose good ones.
  • The CORE Element framework, available through Jennifer Edwards, DVM, offers structured coaching for vet professionals navigating these dynamics.
  • Practice leaders who create conditions where limits can exist retain more people, at higher performance levels.

Practices building the kind of culture where people can stay for the long term don't have to figure it out alone. Rally by Hound helps veterinary teams build engagement and retention from the inside out.