Vets centering pets: Express Yourself event at AAHA CON to showcase why storytelling is the best medicine

What makes for a good story? It’s not a question that veterinarians encounter on a vet school exam or in their practices—but knowing the answer can help veterinarians thrive.

Jessica Vogelsang, DVM, chief medical officer at the American Animal Hospital Association (AAHA), notes that storytelling is a crucial, but underestimated, tool for veterinary practitioners.

“The clinics that have had the most success with marketing have done a really good job of remembering you have to center the pet and the family in the story,” she explained on the Business of Story podcast, “and talk about why it was such a great outcome for that owner to trust you and come in, because look at the great thing that happened. That’s what people need to know.”

Express Yourself was created with this reality in mind: pet-centered storytelling is a vital tool that many veterinarians are unfamiliar with. Although it can be hard for veterinary professionals to lean into their creative sides, especially in high-stakes environments where pets’ lives are on the line, learning to do so offers a myriad of benefits beyond great marketing.

Vogelsang emphasizes that effectively telling stories as a part of one’s day-to-day clinic routine helps life-or-death situations run far more smoothly, which is one of the reasons Express Yourself became an AAHA CON event.

“Obviously when you’re in a surgery suite and you’ve got someone who is bleeding out, you don’t want someone who is thinking about storytelling and rattling off about ‘Well, back in my day,’” she explained. But, she added, using stories to build a relationship beforehand is a fantastic way to earn an owner’s trust.

The evidence behind storytelling

There’s legitimate science that supports the effectiveness of the art of storytelling. Scientists are discovering that listening to a compelling story releases chemicals like dopamine, cortisol, and oxytocin in the brain, which help regulate our emotional responses, assist in memory-building, keep us engaged, and enable us to form a connection with the storyteller.

In human healthcare, anecdotes help encourage behavior change in patients by making health advice personally important to the patient. So, a doctor telling a patient a story about a different patient who successfully adopted, say, an exercise regimen to manage heart disease, will likely be more influential than a doctor who lists statistics and studies about the health benefits of exercise for managing heart disease.

The Harvard Business Review describes storytelling as an “essential” asset to organizational culture because, at its core, storytelling is “about the exchange of ideas, about growth—and that’s learning.” On all counts, the same can be said in veterinary practices.

While storytelling is vital to building trust and maintaining relationships across medical fields, it can still be a daunting task for veterinarians who aren’t used to practicing the art of storytelling. But Vogelsang believes the skill is more innate than many in the veterinary world might believe—it just needs to be drawn out.

“I have yet to meet a vet who doesn’t, once they let their guard down, go into those stories,” she explained. “So they’re all in there. I think it’s just a matter of getting over that mental hurdle of thinking that storytelling and authenticity somehow diminishes your authoritativeness.”

This is part of the purpose of Express Yourself. During the event, attendees will be able to take an engaging class in medical storytelling to help mobilize their creativity by listening to the stories of others and learning how to present their own to colleagues, managers, and/or clients. The session is sponsored by the CareCredit health and pet care credit card, which offers financing options for pet owners, in their pursuit to support veterinary visionaries through collaborative efforts like storytelling.  Hosted by Park Howell, the founder of Business of Story, Express Yourself is an AAHA CON session designed to expose veterinarians to effective storytelling and empower them with the tools to tell impactful stories of their own in their practices.

Howell understands that data and hard facts are important in all medical fields, including veterinary medicine. But he also knows that emotion makes medicine more human, which is one of the driving forces behind Express Yourself.

“If you went to see a loved one in the emergency room something had happened, do you immediately go to the EKG and the charts and the graphs to see what their condition is?” Howell said. “Or do you go and grab their hand, and lean in and look right into their eyes, and say, ‘how are you doing? What’s going on?’”

Howell, a brand story strategist, keynote speaker, and TEDx speaker, first noticed the disconnect between the emotion of storytelling and the hard logic of science in a variety of different STEM fields early in his advertising and marketing career. Through sessions like Express Yourself, he strives to help practitioners make meaningful connections between the two themselves.

“In medicine, science, engineering anything where you’ve got a lot of big thinkers involved, they will tend to lead with logic and reason and data and numbers with the patient or the owner of that patient,” he explained. “But when they’re getting a cat or dog checked up on, or there’s a surgery, or they’ve got a major problem going on, they’re driven by emotion, and when we don’t connect with people on that emotional level initially and set the context for what’s going on with the emotion, we will lose that audience.”

In other words, the stakes of storytelling are high. But luckily for Express Yourself participants, there’s no experience required to learn how to implement strong storytelling practices into their clinics.

“You do not have to be an experienced storyteller,” Vogelsang said of the Express Yourself event. “It’s probably more fun if you’re not.”

Additionally, by teaching Howell’s industry-tested story building structures, Express Yourself helps vets compete against new forms of competition to build trust and maintain relationships: social media.

It used to be that the doctor was automatically the trusted guide; all they needed to do is show up, Vogelsang said. But social media has changed that, and now, veterinarians need to do more to show they’re the ones who deserve to be trusted.

For Howell, effective storytelling helps logic and emotion work together, rather than against each other, to ensure the vet remains the trusted guide.

“I think of stories as the software that drives the motherboard hardware of our survival brain,” he said. “That’s where all of our decision making is being made. And it’s all survival based: I’ve got a problem. Help me understand what the solution is.”

Veterinary storytelling in action

Express Yourself is about the power of storytelling in action and over the course of her career, Vogelsang experienced this impact plenty of times. She learned that at its best, storytelling can be an effective tool during arguably the worst part of being a pet owner: having to put a pet down.

Those final moments can be hard for vets, too, Vogelsang found when she was practicing in-home hospice and euthanasia for pets earlier in her career. And it was made even more challenging by the fact that she was often going to the homes of people she’d never met, and she only had half an hour to make a connection that allowed the pet owners to trust her with an incredibly profound moment.

Thirty minutes isn’t a long time in the grand scheme of things, but the time it takes for a vet to deliver a sedative before they can administer euthanasia can feel like a lifetime. Vogelsang noticed that pet owners were often looking for ways to pass the time, which is when she put her passion for storytelling to good use.

“I’d say, ‘Tell me about your pet. Tell me about Rocky, and why was he so special?’”

In this vein, storytelling functions as something far greater than a means to share information. For Vogelsang, storytelling in a pet’s final moments functioned as a profound way to connect with owners and learn more about their pet’s life.

“The relationship you have with your pet oftentimes is just between you and your pet,” she explained. “The rest of the world doesn’t know. So I would hear these stories about ‘this is the pet that got me through my divorce’ or ‘this was the pet that got me through my cancer treatment,’ or ‘this was my best friend when I was in a deep depression.’”

Vogelsang’s experiences highlight the myriad of ways storytelling can function in veterinary practice and why it’s an essential skill for vets to master.  Yes, storytelling can help save a pet’s life by fostering trust with owners. But in the final moments of a pet’s life, storytelling can also help honor the pet as well.

In other words, storytelling can be a priceless gift vets can offer both their patients and themselves, even in dark times.

“That was the most rewarding experience of my career,” Vogelsang said, recalling the stories she heard from owners in need of a spark of light.

AAHA CON and Express Yourself: How to get involved

Express Yourself: Heroic Tales of Vet Med will take place during AAHA CON on September 12^th from 5:00-6:00 PM at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland. Participants are welcome to partake in a happy hour with speakers and hosts after the event. Register for AAHA CON and find more information here.

AAHA thanks CareCredit for its generous sponsorship of this event.

Photo credit: © AAHA marketing

Disclaimer: The views expressed, and topics discussed, in any NEWStat column or article are intended to inform, educate, or entertain, and do not represent an official position by the American Animal Hospital Association (AAHA) or its Board of Directors.