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239: Resilience and Compassion Fatigue with Colleen Pelar

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“Self care is the best business plan.” That’s Colleen Pelar’s philosophy that she shares with pet care professionals in her private community and on her Unleashed podcast.

By nature of being heart-centered givers and animal-lovers, those who care for our furry friends are often at risk for compassion fatigue. On top of that, the last few months have challenged all of us to develop greater resilience — and find much-needed pockets of rest amidst ongoing unrest.

Big thanks to Momentum member Regina for the introduction—I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did about how to take care of ourselves, and secret superpowers animal whisperers can bring into their businesses.

View show notes and resources mentioned from this episode at http://pivotmethod.com/239 »

More About Colleen Pelar

Colleen is a passionate educator with a great presentation style that's engaging, relatable, and fun. She started training dogs professionally over 25 years ago while pregnant with her oldest child. She spent that nine months concurrently reading everything I could about dog training and child rearing and was struck by the similarities between the best of both.

During her dog training career she was a sought-after conference speaker and published three books about building safe, happy relationships between kids and dogs. She continues to share advice for multi-species families through her website LivingWithKidsAndDogs.com.

These days, Colleen primarily works with veterinarians, vet techs, and other pet professionals to help them stay happy, healthy, and energized to do their best work. She does this through her free community, Resilient Pet Pros, her private Unleashed Resilience community for pet professionals, and her podcast Unleashed (at work & home).

Topics Covered

  • The differences between burnout and compassion fatigue

  • If you don’t have enough time, money, resources you may have compassion fatigue; feelings of hopelessness or helplessness

  • Veterinary suicide crisis: 1 in 6 vets have had suicidal ideation

  • "Self-care is the best business plan” - particularly for giving-related careers

  • Positive emotions are where your creativity and your genius lie 

  • Need to be able to pull back and see many solutions to a given problem 

  • Pet professionals are always creatively problem-solving 

  • The distinction between being grounded (present in this moment, aware of this moment) and centered (values, integrity, who you want to be and how you want to be)

  • Pandemic and resilience fatigue: what do you do when you’re just OVER IT??

  • Gratitude doesn’t change the fact that each of us is in a tough spot right now; we may be exhausted 

  • What animal-whispering skills make pet professionals great entrepreneurs?

  • Trusting your inner knowing of what is right

  • Aggression is almost always fear-based: look at what may be making the animal fearful and minimize that

  • Tendency is to push for behavior; go for emotional shift first

  • Safe, comfortable, and relaxed is a learning mode - not heightened and aware

  • Why power struggles don’t work; find a way to be a team instead - there’s no enemy here, create choice

  • "You deserve to show up as your whole self in every area of your life. Your life and happiness are as valuable as that of the animals you serve.”

Resources Mentioned

Check out other episodes of the Pivot Podcast here. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen, and if you enjoy the show I would be very grateful for a rating and/or review! Sign-up for my weekly(ish) #PivotList newsletter to receive curated round-ups of what I’m reading, watching, listening to, and new tools I’m geeking out on.