Dr. Courtney gets a lot of questions about how a veterinarian finds herself studying jerks, toxic teams, and workplace conflict. Believe it or not, she feels becoming a veterinarian was the perfect preparation for studying conflict.

1. Working in medicine where lives are on the line is often high-stress and high conflict. It also showed her the high costs of destructive conflict. When teams don’t work well together, patients suffer.
2. She was able to translate the positive, proactive methods for treating animal aggression into approaches for preventing, triaging, and treating workplace conflict.
3. Helping clients consider difficult medical decisions taught her how to research solutions, create practical, evidence-based treatment plans, and communicate using a compelling combination of data and real-life stories.
4. She was inspired by the ways veterinarians collaborate across different fields of study. She believes we need a united approach to conflict – creating bridges between the related fields law, mediation, ethics, neuroscience, animal behavior, psychology, business, and the art of communication.

Learn more about how The Jerk Researcher® began.