Beating Burnout as an Animal Therapist

Working with animals in any capacity can be hugely rewarding. Being a professional who helps animals return to health after an injury or illness can be one of the most fulfilling careers, especially if you have a deep love for animals. Many go into work with animals to escape the rat race and forge a career that satisfies something deeper. However, in any profession, there is the risk of saying yes to everything and overdoing it. 

Burnout is possible in any career, even one that you thoroughly enjoy and find rewarding. Therapeutics come with physical and emotional demand which can wear away your reserve if you do not properly look after yourself too. Ensuring that you have the right tools and strategies in place to avoid burnout will support your professional longevity and personal wellbeing.

What Is Burnout — and Why Does It Hit Animal Professionals Hard?

Of course we can all relate to the feeling of fatigue and exhaustion from work and even personal commitments. But burnout becomes a more profound issue from prolonged stress, overexertion and emotional investment. In the principles of Osteopathy, we often talk about the vital reserve that each person has, imagine this reserve depleted to a point that normal functioning becomes far more difficult.

The work that you love may leave you feeling conflicted as you come home numb and exhausted. You might begin questioning your choices and feeling detached from your clientele. Some people suffering burnout will become irritable and snappy, lose enthusiasm for the work they once found enjoyable or feel total fatigue that simply won’t improve with rest.

Energy will get depleted with work even when we love it. It becomes a problem when we are not recharging and protecting ourselves. Self care is not only sensible but becomes essential in a career with animals as it allows you to actually keep going. Your investment emotionally and financially in an animal career can be saved.

The Physical Demands Animal Therapists Often Underestimate

Many animal professionals don’t realise how physically demanding the work can become because they are so used to it. Those who work with horses or larger farm animals for example, will sometimes ignore how intense the work can be; heavy lifting, handling large animals, stable or land management, all contributing to burning out. An animal therapist who specialises in horses will certainly know how heavy it can be moving limbs around, working with animals who are many times your own weight. Physical exhaustion and injury from this kind of work can clearly limit your earning potential and will also affect your actual effectiveness.

Isolation, Solo Working, and the Weight of Running Your Own Business

Some professionals will also suffer from isolation and loneliness in their work. The trend amongst many animal professions (particularly therapists) is to work solo. We have spoken in previous articles about forming a good professional network which can help avoid loneliness. There is often a large amount of travelling from patient to patient where you really are by yourself. As I write this, I can almost hear people saying “great, I enjoy my own company”. But, this can become difficult over time, especially when you might want to bounce ideas or discuss a tricky case.

With the majority of animal therapists being self employed, there is also the burden of running a business yourself. This will include marketing, tax, cashflow, general administration and communications. It is actually very liberating to run your own business and “escape the rat race” but it won’t just fall into your lap, it takes some work. Any knock backs in your business can be demoralising and contribute to the burnout sensation. Knock backs are inevitable in any business, what matters is how you get back up.

How to Prevent Burnout in an Animal Therapy Career

So, all of that can make it sound pretty scary but my intention here is not to put anyone off a career with animals. In fact many of the things that can create burnout are factors that make working with animals so exciting. The key is how to manage your work life so as to enjoy those factors without letting any one of them overwhelm you. In Osteopathy, we often talk about what makes a stress a stress. You make the stress a stress, it's how you react to it. A career with animals is not inherently stressful if you manage the work sensibly and take appropriate care of yourself.

Define Your Workload

Too much of the time, self employed sole practitioners feel that they need to say yes to everything. Of course it is prudent business practice to make suitable availability for your potential clients but equally important that this doesn’t creep into the rest of your time. Your actual effectiveness in your practice depends on how much you can realistically achieve in a day. How many animals can you realistically see in a day? How many days of the week do you want to be working? What is your preferred travel distance? 

It can feel difficult to say no to people when they fall outside those boundaries but it’s your boundaries that will protect you enough to be able to provide the best service to your most preferred clientele. You can still offer services to those that fall outside the boundaries but you just need to make it clear that it’s a special arrangement and may either cost more or not be available as often. This actually raises people’s perception of your services as they can see that you value your time and efforts highly.

Protect Your Downtime

Never look at rest time as wasted. When working hard, recovery is just as important as time spent earning. Rest doesn’t need to just be remaining sedentary (although that can be lovely), it can include socialising, exercising, doing hobbies and spending time in nature to recharge. It can help to think of your work like being an athlete, all successful athletes understand the importance of rest. So while there are business things that need doing alongside the actual animal work (administration, marketing etc), time completely away from the work must be protected. Once clients realise that your calendar is defined and your personal time is sacred, they will fit around you.

Diversify Your Skills and Income

Many animal professionals have a huge amount of useful knowledge and experience that isn’t used to its fullest. There are ways to utilise every part of your skills and understanding that can provide alternative earning routes. Variety afterall is the spice of life. Maybe you are a therapist and can teach owner workshops to educate animal lovers about their pets health and wellbeing. You might have enjoyed the writing part of your training and can produce high quality educational materials or interesting blogs and articles. 

There are options for both passive income and semi-passive income built around essentially selling your knowledge. Not only can this provide higher earning potential and therefore taking the strain off the day to day clinical work, but it also increases your professional exposure and acts as marketing. Personally I have become heavily involved in course development and industry regulation which has offered me a pathway to a rewarding facet of my career that I hadn’t really considered in the past. After working on these other projects, one often feels reinvigorated when getting back to face to face work.

For those wondering whether professional longevity in animal osteopathy is a realistic prospect, the continued growth of the field itself is genuinely encouraging.

Build a Professional Network

Don’t let yourself feel like everything is your responsibility. Building a group of colleagues that understand what you do and that you can form a team with is essential. Joining a good professional association related to your discipline can provide a ready made support network and often the association will organise events you can attend.

It is however just as important to build a local network too as this allows you to refer when needed and to ensure that clients know you are connected to the wider world. Animal owners will very often go on word of mouth recommendation for their practitioners and if you have built their trust then they will likely use your colleagues. This ends up working both ways as you will find your network provides the same service for you.

It can also be a very smart move to find a mentor, or mentors. Someone with a style you vibe with and principles you appreciate can help you develop into the practitioner you want to be. It can be a very useful endeavour to organise a regular mentoring session and it will work both ways as the mentor/mentors will gain valuable information and reflection from it too. I personally found having an Osteopathic mentor to be one of the most valuable things to my career; finding problems along the way is to be expected but if you have contact with someone who has already negotiated these issues, then you will overcome much more quickly.

Find Your Purpose in Practice

I once heard a great phrase “if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything…” This stuck with me and it makes complete sense when practicing in a discipline of therapy or a particular animal training method. Essentially, if you keep feeling inspired by your discipline, you are more likely to enjoy the work and feel that what you are doing is meaningful. 

A purpose in life can guide your ethics and give you a sense of belonging. Of course, we should always question and be open minded as no model has all the answers. The ego should never overshadow your inquisitive mind. But by standing by your principles, you can show a real clarity to your clients and even help support the profession at large.

A great way of remaining driven by purpose is to read deeply into the philosophy of what you do, A T Still (Founder of Osteopathy) said “keep digging”, never stop learning. This ties in well with the professional network, speak with those you respect and ask questions. You can also deepen your dedication to purpose by journaling and reflecting on why you chose this career, action plans to reinvigorate your passion.

A Final Thought

I suppose the most important thing to take away from this is that you are the business, so caring for the business means caring for yourself. A practitioner of animal therapy, training or care needs that vital reserve of energy to use and recharging that energy is actually investing in your business! Self care, boundaries and a professional purpose increase your value, they support your effectiveness and ensure sustainability. The learning doesn’t end when you graduate a course, if anything, that is just the beginning. While there is significant effort involved in creating an animal career for yourself, there is incredible freedom and satisfaction to be had as a result of it.

If you’re at the stage of building that career from scratch, it’s worth understanding what an animal osteopathy career actually involves before the harder questions of workload and sustainability come into play. You are never out there alone, network, talk, read and never carry the weight of the world yourself.

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