166: It's Not Burnout. It's Fear. Dr Sarah Golding on vet burnout, imposter syndrome and getting your confidence back
The Vet Vault: Veterinary Career, Clinical Skills & Wellbeing · Aug 26, 2026 · 1:10:55
The Vet Vault: Veterinary Career, Clinical Skills & Wellbeing
The Vet Vault: Veterinary Career, Clinical Skills & Wellbeing · Aug 26, 2026 · 1:10:55
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Everyone says burnout. But Dr Sarah Golding thinks a lot of us are misdiagnosing ourselves.
When vets come to her ready to walk away from the profession, they arrive with a vocabulary: burnt out, overwhelmed, imposter syndrome. Not one of them opens with the word Sarah reckons is often actually doing the damage:
Fear.
Fear of failing. Fear of the money conversation. Fear of the board, the Facebook post, the Monday morning debrief. And the big one, the one that shows up in almost every list she asks vets to write: fear of criticism, mostly from each other.
Every fear you carry into a consult room was handed to you somewhere along your path - often by someone with good intentions - a teacher, a mentor, a friend.
So we get into what to do about it. How to run a debrief that lets someone put a mistake down instead of carrying it for a decade. Why "don't worry about it, mate" is just as unhelpful as shouting. The difference between practising defensively and practising to help, and why clients can sense which one you are within seconds. Sarah's "debrief and dump it" process, complete with the literal bucket in her clinic that gets burnt at the Christmas party. And a small structural fix for the money conversation that has all but ended adult tantrums at her front desk.
Dr Sarah Golding is a mixed practice vet in her second decade, principal practitioner and co-manager at Gowrie Vet Clinic in NSW, and this year a finalist in the NSW/ACT AgriFutures Rural Women's Award for her mentoring work through The Vet Mind Mentor.
Somewhere in your career there's a case that wrote a rule about what you're good at, and what you avoid. This episode is about going back and reading that rule properly.
Resources and links
Topics and time stamps
03:01 - Fear in veterinary practice
06:23 - What feeling are we chasing?
09:28 - Guilt, disconnect and early burnout
11:58 - The six categories of fear
13:33 - Where our fears come from
14:30 - Mid-roll: Vet Vault updates
16:05 - How we gift our fears to colleagues
20:02 - System failure vs personal failure
21:55 - The itty bitty shitty committee
23:16 - Healthy caution vs paralysing fear
26:22 - The debrief and dump it process
28:24 - Accountability without shame
34:56 - Imposter syndrome as hidden fear
36:11 - Are vets more scared today?
38:22 - You don't need all the answers
40:02 - Defensive medicine vs helping
46:03 - Consult room formula and money conversations
54:45 - The changing fear behaviour activity
1:01:57 - Schedule anxiety and work-life balance
1:03:20 - Wrap-up: podcast picks and final thoughts
1:08:22 - Advice for the new grads of 2026
Episodes: The Vet Vault: Veterinary Career, Clinical Skills & Wellbeing
