Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Because once we take on a diagnosis, we become that diagnosis.

And once we become that diagnosis, and we take medications that are actually giving us that diagnosis, I'm gonna say it again, these medications often actually cause or induce or certainly secure the symptoms that are marketed to treat.

And that's why no doctor would ever take the medicine that he gives to his clients. In psychiatry, that happens a lot because they're scared of them because they know at some level that it could cause significant problems.

Welcome back to The Speaking and Communicating Podcast. I am your host Roberta Ndlela. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning in to.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development. And by the end of this episode, please log on to Apple and Spotify and leave us a rating and a review. Now let's get communicating.

Now let's get communicating with Dr. Fred Moss, joining us from California. He calls himself the Undoctor.

He's a psychiatrist, mental health advocate, author and fellow podcaster who has spent over four decades in this field. He's here to talk to us about how he helps others express their true selves and find their voice.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show. Hi, Dr. Fred.

Hi Roberta.

Great to be here. Nice to be with you. I look forward to our conversation.

I'm glad that you're here as well.

Welcome. Please introduce yourself to our audience.

Yeah. So my name is Dr. Fred.

And like what you said, you know, Fred Moss is my full name. And I've been in the mental health field for a little more than 45 straight years. I started in January of 1980.

And I started as a child care worker back in the day. And that was after dropping out of college for the second time and guaranteeing myself that I would never go back to college under any conditions.

But I got a job as a child care worker and began to work with these kids and realized that which I already knew when I was growing up, which is just like you said, communication and connection is at the heart of all the healing of all conditions, of

all types. And I knew that I've always known that if we're really honest with ourselves, all of us know that. So it's not very controversial in the end. It might be rare, but it's not controversial, meaning we're all after communication.

That's after all, why we're having this conversation.

The whole reason to have a podcast or to listen to a podcast or to be in a conversation or listen to any conversation is because we really long for a communication connection and being understood and seen for who we are and who we're not.

And so I began to do that when I started working with these kids as a child care worker. They call them kids, but they were only like five years younger than me. I met with them and what I finally realized was that I could get paid.

I could actually make a living communicating with other people. And that's what I really wanted to do. So I began to love that job.

I thought I was only going to stay for just a few weeks when I first took the job and wasn't looking forward to everything it meant to work with so-called mentally ill adolescent boys. I was like a scary crowd.

And by the fourth week after orientation, I began to really take on, you know, what would it take to be a great child care worker?

And over those next several years, I stayed as a child care worker in different capacities, eventually made it my business to go back to school one last time, this time in order to become a doctor. And the idea was that I would become a psychiatrist.

I didn't like the direction that psychiatry was taking. We already were headed in a direction of considering, you know, medications and diagnoses as a way of launching into how we help people. And I'm not sure that either of those things help people.

In the 40 years that I've had since then, I think I've become very convinced that diagnosing and medicating don't really help people. Ultimately, they don't help people.

They give people a sense of a reason for the things that they're doing, that they're not aligned with. For instance, you know, if you're distractible, then you might have ADD. If you don't meet your deadlines, you might have ADD.

If you're feeling sad about the future, you might have depression. If you're feeling anxious about the future, you might have an anxiety disorder. You might be afraid.

You might be awkward in a crowd. All of those things don't mean that there's anything wrong with you. This is a crazy world that we're living in, and none of us have a recipe book or a template for how to do this.

And so I really began to really realize that each and every one of us is just bumbling, stumbling, and tumbling through the world, trying to make sense of it all and trying to give ourselves a direction that can have us feel worthy and have us feel

valuable. So by the time I got spat out as a psychiatrist, having now gone to school another nine years, I was spat out and now being called on to be a diagnostician, to help people learn what their diagnosis were, and then to offer them treatments.

Typically, as a psychiatrist, that would be in the world of giving them medication prescriptions. But I never was very aligned with what these medications did. There's a big difference between what they say they do and what actually they do.

For your listeners who are really happy to have a diagnosis and really think their medications are helping, and wouldn't trade it for the world, all I can say to them is, more power to you, please keep that up. Really good for you.

That's a rare place to be inside of a lifetime. If you really obtain that, then I support you being there.

This is for the tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people who are pretty sure that the system is not treating them optimally, maybe over medicating or under medicating or over diagnosing or under diagnosing or misdiagnosing.

These are things that are real or serious problems inside of the Western world of psychiatry. These diagnoses are fairly arbitrary.

They're quite nebulous over time, and in any given moment, you might have a particular criteria met for a particular condition, and then you get given that condition, and now for the rest of your life, you have that condition.

There's something that's really scary about that and something that doesn't feel very equitable or very fair to be given a diagnosis and then have to keep it the rest of your life, but that's the way medical records really work.

I help people actually come off of their diagnosis and come off of their medications, and never have to come back to a mental health professional again, like actually learning tools and exercises that they can step into to give themself a sense that

maybe, just maybe, there was never anything wrong with them in the first place. And it's just a matter of recapturing yourself and re-rooting and re-grounding yourself so that you can find value inside of being you, even when you're doing things that

leave you uncomfortable. See, we have reached a point that if we're uncomfortable, we think we have a psychiatric illness.

I lived in the States for the last five years, and I found that a lot of the time, what we consider just a moment of sadness in America, somebody would say, I have depression, or this is just life and I'm uncomfortable, it's throwing darts at me,

this is going to pass. That's how we would look at it in South Africa, but in America, they start having all this terminology. And I've always wondered, is it the environment? Are people diagnosing themselves?

And going to the psychiatrist and going, I have anxiety, I have depression, I have this, I have that. Is it because of the environment, the culture? Because I've been to other countries as well, it's not as rampant as it is in America.

Yeah, I think that it is in other countries as well, unfortunately.

Maybe America is still number one in the level of psychiatric diagnoses, but Europe is caught up in any other Western cultures are caught up with the idea that there's such thing, for instance, as bipolar disorder, narcissistic personality disorder,

autistic spectrum disorder, major depression, generalized anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder. And when you say those words inside of these cultures, people think that there really is such thing and that they need to pay attention to it

and probably get treated for it by going to see a psychiatrist and probably being given some formal treatment plan, which may or may not, but likely does include medication, which then actually increases or induces or perpetuates or in some ways

causes, but certainly makes secure any diagnosis that led to it. So you take the medications and now you get the symptoms that were supposedly what was there before. The medications often induce the exact symptoms that they're marketed to treat.

I'm not saying that those conditions don't exist. They certainly do. But I just found in some...

It's not certain that they do.

Oh, my bad.

Because anybody listening, as I said, when I was in America, there was this danger of downplaying what people are going through because I'm not from the culture. And maybe I don't understand. I'm not a medical professional.

So I was very careful with my language and in not undermining what it is that they were going through. But as you say, there's so much to this conversation. Now, you say that some people just diagnose themselves.

No, I'm not saying that.

No, they come to a professional and they want to know what's wrong with them. They don't want to know if there's something wrong with them. They're already sure that there's something wrong with them.

And then they want a diagnosis. So I don't think they diagnose themselves.

I'm saying that when they get a diagnosis, they're happy to have one because then the diagnosis explains all the things that they're doing in their thinking or being in their life that they're not very proud of.

And they can say, that wasn't me, that was my ADHD. That wasn't me, that was my bipolar disorder. That wasn't me, that was my autistic spectrum disorder.

And you get to relinquish responsibility for your life, for the parts of your life that aren't working as well as you wish they were.

Instead of really realizing that there's a great deal of things that don't work as well as you think they should and that part of being human is that a good percentage of how you think things should go, they don't go that way.

Things go in surprising directions and it's okay to be very uncomfortable in this world. It doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with you.

Which brings me to the point of if the population just generally go in that direction, is it something along the lines of how they were brought up?

You know, like you're saying, not taking responsibility because you want to blame something else that's outside of you. You're saying it's my anxiety, it's my depression, I didn't do this, it did this.

You know, I think in formal education, we learned how to become somebody that we're not in order to protect the person that we are. We learned how to pretend to be someone that we weren't in order to protect the person that we were.

So we learned how to not talk or how to talk when we know that we should, like we'd not talk when we should talk or we talk when we shouldn't talk. And we often become dishonest to our true, honest, authentic, real self.

And we take it on for ourselves, like when things don't go well, we do our best and things don't go well, we then think, oh, there must be something wrong with me.

We've been told and we've been thought that there's something there and that there is something wrong with you. You might have a mental health condition.

And then people flock to get their mental health condition diagnosed because in the end, then that gives them some comfort that now they can see what's wrong with them.

Instead of realizing that every minute you get to make new decisions about how you look at the world, you start realizing that you have a deficit or you have a syndrome or you have an affliction or you have an affection or you have an illness or

something. You have whatever you have and that's what's preventing you from being the very best human you are. So it tends to be very restrictive.

Once I realize that I can't do something because I have a so-called diagnosis, then I no longer even consider doing it anymore because I have this particular diagnosis.

But what if I was to rid myself of the diagnosis and just realize the whole time I'm just being human and part of being human is to get stuck like every single day and that's just part of being a human, healthy or not, and that there's things we can

do to become stuck less often. There's practices and tools and strategies inside of human connection, inside of taking care of our basic self, inside of mindfulness and gratitude and nutrition and hydration and nature and service work and

spirituality and creativity and sleep hygiene. If you start doing these things, instead of whatever you're doing, like really watching what you eat, really watching the people that you're around, watching how much time you spend on a screen, whether

that's a TV or your cell phone or your laptop, if you really start looking at that and start realizing that you have more agency and more sovereignty than you ever thought you did, and that's the good news. Maybe you don't have a psychiatric

diagnosis, even if someone gave you one and then you agreed to have it. Like I know your diagnosis.

Mine?

Yeah.

Oh, please share.

You're Roberta. That's it.

Oh, I thought we were talking about the mental health illnesses.

Your mental health diagnosis is that you're Roberta. You've lived in a unique life in Roberta's shoes. And in order to become Roberta, this is what it took for you to be Roberta.

You've lived what you've lived in order to be Roberta. That's your total diagnosis. There's nothing wrong with you.

You don't have a psychiatric condition.

Okay. Does that mean that every single person who comes in contact with you, that's the same message that you bring to them?

Ultimately, all they really are is somebody who has been them for the whole time that they've been alive and they're still them, and they're going to be them. And that's all they have. They don't have a psychiatric condition.

That's right. I really think that psychiatric conditions are very vague and don't usually land and don't do any good. There's nothing good about saying, I have bipolar disorder.

I am ADD. I'm on the spectrum because it tends to be very limiting and then self-defining.

And, you know, whatever thoughts we had about what it's like to have major depression, you say, oh, I have major depression and it's the same condition my mom had. Now, all of a sudden, you start acting like your mom. Or I had bipolar disorder.

That's the same condition my brother had. And now you start acting like your bipolar disorder instead of realizing that you have sovereignty and agency and a capacity to say, be and do someone different any given minute. That's just the truth.

Like you say, you empower people to express their true selves.

But exactly, they continue to use these labels, then their true selves will not show up.

That's right. So when you continue to use these labels, now you have become the labels. When you don't really become the labels, you become what you think the labels are.

Because the labels are not very real. The labels were made up over time. They're very arbitrary.

They don't work across cultures. For instance, what might be called schizophrenia in the United States might be called something totally different in South Africa. It might be called something totally different in Singapore.

It might be called something totally different in Reykjavik. It might be. It might be just different.

But you see, that's why these conditions are culturally transient, they're culturally specific, and they're temporarily specific as well. So if you have a broken arm and you go to Singapore, you still have a broken arm.

If you have a broken arm and you go to South Africa, you got a broken arm. That's right.

You do.

If you have a bipolar disorder in California, you might not even have bipolar disorder with the next doctor you see. You might not have a next bipolar disorder if you went to London, they might call it a gift or they might call it a special tool.

They might say that you have a healthy handling of wide range of moods, let's say. We don't even know what normal is. If we can't even define normal, where do we get off to finding abnormal?

Yeah, what's the benchmark?

There's no benchmark because we don't even know what normal is.

What the real truth is is that when I'm interviewing you and I'm a clinician and you're a client or a patient or a customer or a resident or whatever you are, it's up to me.

If I think you're outside the range of what I think is okay, then I get to give you a diagnosis, you get to agree, it goes into your chart and it stays there forever. That's really how it works. I don't like that.

I'm not aligned with that.

Right. Do you think some of the other doctors, obviously they might not be vocal, but some doctors as well who've gone through the same academic experience, do they also question the same way that you do or they just think it's part of the job?

I was told this helps people.

Look, I'm not saying anything even controversial. I haven't said anything controversial. Just because it's rare doesn't make it controversial.

What would be the objection to what I'm saying? I'm just saying on any given moment, we all have a choice of saying, doing or being whoever someone knew.

I don't get defined by whether or not a previous clinician gave me some random psychiatric diagnosis.

Now, once I have that diagnosis, it's here with me forever and then I build myself into it, and I become that which I think that diagnosis allows me to become.

If I have been given a diagnosis of ADD and I'm late on my next deadline, I'm like, there you go, there's my ADD again.

Not that you just didn't wake up on time.

Yeah, just maybe you didn't wake up on time. That's exactly right. That's what happened to me this morning.

I missed a podcast this morning because I woke up too late. So yeah, exactly how that goes.

You know, we start really being able to look freely and honestly and genuinely and authentically about what it means to be a human in the present day and age and what it really means to take on a diagnosis because once we take on a diagnosis, we

become that diagnosis. And once we become that diagnosis and we take medications that are actually giving us that diagnosis, I'm going to say it again, these medications often actually cause or induce or certainly secure the symptoms are marketed to

treat. And that's why no doctor would ever take the medicine that he gives to his clients. Doctors do know not to take the medicines that they give to their clients.

In psychiatry, that happens a lot because they're scared of them because they know at some level that it could cause significant problems.

But we think just because we gave somebody a particular label that it's going to affect them differently than it affects us. But not at all. You know, these medicines do cause problems as do all the treatments and all the diagnoses.

So in the end, it's a matter of really unloading this idea of judging, assessing, and evaluating people and calling them less than.

When we start realizing that people are not less than other people, you think that person is crazy, that person is depressed, that person has a mood disorder, or that person is narcissistic or on the spectrum.

Once we start realizing that they already have picked up whatever identity that they have picked up and they can theoretically become someone new, starting right now, we all can start saying things that we've never said before.

That's really important. We can say things, be things, and do things that we've never said, been, or done before. And that's what makes the whole idea of psychiatric diagnosis so nefarious.

And there's a powerlessness that people feel once they get given these labels and the medications to go along with it as well.

It comes with some form of powerlessness. And you think I cannot function without the medications now that I have this label.

You call it powerlessness. There's some powerlessness, but there's some power in being powerless because you can then say, that wasn't me, that was my condition. I'm powerless over my condition.

I have bipolar disorder or I have anxiety disorder. And this is just how I act because I have this condition. So in that powerlessness, they get to relinquish responsibility for what they say and do.

So that can be power producing by saying, I don't have anything to say about who I am because I've got this alphabet soup of a diagnosis that's actually dictating who I be.

Now you talk about communication and connection. I remember when I first got there, like you don't greet anybody in the elevator or down the street when you walk past them, which is what we do in South Africa.

I remember I just came back home and this kid who had just came back from school as we're about to meet, she looks at me in the eye, she smiles and then she says, hello. And I thought, oh my goodness, I'm back home.

I've forgotten what it's like to just greet a stranger as if you've known them and you see them. Because when I started doing that America, it looks stupid because that's not the culture.

But I find that a lot of people just felt like they were not being seen. There's a loneliness epidemic as well. I wonder how much of that contributes to what we're talking about today.

Yeah, I think that again, connecting with someone is what we're really here to do.

So we move ourselves out of the way and we listen carefully for what is that person trying to communicate in their words, in their actions, in between their words. What are they really trying to say? What are they trying to share with me?

And who can I be to share with them? How can we create what I like to call a harmonic resonance with another person so that we can relate directly with their humanity? And that's what happens.

We all have a certain frequency. We all share one thing, all of us, and that is generally all of us are human beings. Now there's some controversy about that, I suppose.

And here comes AI with bots that make it look like they're human beings too, but they're not.

But the one thing that we have is that we're all human beings and we can relate to each other, even if we disagree diametrically opposed about a particular divisive issue, we still can relate that there's a human over there if we choose to.

And ultimately, what we're really hoping to do is communicate effectively and then actually connect through conversation or through being with another so that we understand, so that we hear them, so that we get them, so that we resonate with them,

and so that we harmonize with them. And the only way we're going to do that is being able to listen carefully to what others are trying to say. And then to speak very cleanly about what it is that we're trying to say.

That's what everybody is certainly looking for. Now, the third C, so we've talked about communication and connection. You say that creativity is very important when it comes to this.

Why is that?

Well, it turns out we're all being very creative every single second. You think you're not being creative, but you're actually picking and choosing in any given second what you're going to say, what you're going to think, what you're going to do.

You have to keep things in order just to make the next brush stroke, just to hit the next piano key of life. So you're being creative all the time. And I say that because some people think I'm not very creative.

Yes, you are. If you've made it this far in life, you've been very creative every single second on how you're going to do whatever you're going to do, how you're going to say what you're going to be, all of those things your whole life.

What I've learned about creativity, however, is in the form of visual arts or performing arts, like art, music, dancing, singing, drama, cooking, writing, gardening, those performing or visual arts.

When we're being creative, our conditions or our symptoms or our discomforts tend to go away during the creative act while we're blowing on a horn or while we're painting on a canvas, or while we're dancing on a dance floor, our troubles tend to

float away. And when we're done with dancing or done with a canvas or done with a horn, we have a choice at that moment, whether we want to go back and get depressed again, go back and be anxious again, go back and feel awkward again, go back and be

afraid again, or not, because we've been released from it after the creative act. I mean, there we are, we're not being depressed or afraid or anxious or awkward.

And when we stop doing those things, people think, okay, automatically I'm now have depression again, here it comes again. But really, you've been released and you get to choose what direction you go to from here.

Even after just a minute or two of creativity, you can then choose a different path because you've now been released from feeling like you had to be depressed or you had to be anxious, you had to be afraid.

Speaking of creativity, here's the thing, because I'm almost 50, so I compare this generation to mine. Do they struggle with boredom? Because we didn't have video games and no cell phones at all.

We were bored and we would be okay being bored and just doing nothing sometimes. Does this generation struggle with boredom? And then during those moments, do they then start to think, is something wrong with me?

And then it leads to another one and another thought and another thought, and it just becomes this downward spiral.

Yeah, you know, I think this idea of people thinking there's something wrong with them, there comes in a lot of different flavors. Boredom is very powerful and is an inside job.

There's always a gazillion things happening in any given moment, but sometimes it seems like nothing's happening. Seems like we're just walking through life, same old, same old, same thing as yesterday, da da da da da. It's not really true.

There's actually a gazillion things going on in the world at any given moment that I could attach myself to. But boredom is a sense that I'm not being entertained enough by the life that I have.

And when you start realizing that, oh, well, maybe you can make some changes, how you're seeing the world or what you're doing in the world to alter your sense of being bored. So it's still pretty boring to play video games.

It's still pretty boring to doom scroll. It's still pretty boring to watch YouTube. Potentially, I mean, all you're doing is looking in a box.

Boredom is not like a real item. It's a self-made item by us, by somehow washing things down and thinking that I'm not being entertained enough by the life that I have.

And in fact, we could alter the ingredients of what the life is and fix boredom in a split second if we wanted to. But boredom itself can cause a real problem because we want to act emergently to feel alive again.

When we're bored, we don't feel as alive. And so one of the things we end up doing is we end up spurting, like we end up doing impulsive things. You know, we end up like eating or drinking or sometimes sex or sometimes doom scrolling, something.

We got to do something to alleviate our boredom.

Yeah, the entertainment, as you say, your life must constantly entertain you.

Exactly. That's what we think. That's a silly thought.

It's been drilled into us at some point, rather than getting that sometimes, you know, just sitting, just being still, just thinking or just writing or resting or all of those things that are quite okay, quite okay things to do for being a human.

Any last words of wisdom for someone who's listening to you and thinking, but Dr. Fred, my depression or my anxiety is real, and I'm not happy with how I felt that you downplayed it during this conversation. What would you say to them?

Well, I'm not downplaying it.

It's very real. It's very real. Your depression is very real.

Your anxiety, it's not an abnormality. It's not an illness. If me and you wanted to find a hundred reasons to be depressed, how long would it take us?

Like four minutes?

We'll write them down. We'll find them.

Like four minutes. Yeah. What if we had to come up with a hundred reasons to be anxious?

We'll find them.

Four minutes.

How about how long it would take us to find a hundred reasons to be terrified?

Oh, yeah.

No problem. Right?

Yes.

How about if we were to find a hundred reasons to feel awkward in the world?

I can think of some.

Okay. So since the reasons are there all the time, it's very real. I'm not suggesting that the experience isn't real.

What I'm suggesting is it's not pathology. There's nothing wrong with you for feeling the discomforts of life. It's very uncomfortable being alive.

It's very challenging being alive. Depression and anxiety are real. They're just not abnormal conditions.

They're part of what it means to be Fred, to be Roberta, is that I can expect since I'm alive, to have points of time, maybe even hours or even days for which I feel lousy.

Points of time, not that it's a permanent state.

You're not at the effect of your mood. You can shift these things. That's right.

You can make it permanent. All you have to do is don't try to be underpressed. Like just stay depressed the whole time.

If you want, there is plenty of fuel to stay as depressed as you want for the rest of your life. Plenty. No problem.

And if you latch on to some of the things that are going on in the world, it's really supported.

Like all of a sudden, if you want to be depressed about, let's say, Israel, Gaza, or you want to be depressed about Russia, Ukraine, or you want to be depressed about sex trafficking, if you want to be depressed about racism, if you want to be

depressed about climate change, if you wanted to be depressed about the present government, if you want to latch yourself on to all that, you have every right to do that. And you can stay depressed the rest of your life if you choose to, because you

could say it's more important that I think about these things than to take care of my own sense of mood. But you don't have to be depressed. And even if you do, it's not because there's something wrong with you.

You see, we all think there's something wrong with us, but maybe that's just a condition of being human, is that we think there's something wrong with us. And what I would say to your listeners, maybe there's nothing wrong with you.

Maybe it's okay to be as uncomfortable as you are.

And it's okay to sit in the discomfort for that little bit of time, because it will pass.

It might pass or it might not pass. You're gonna need to make it pass. It's not just gonna come and go, and now you're happy.

You're gonna have to put into place some of the things we talked about. Meditation, gratitude, nutrition, hydration, nature, creativity, spirituality, service, sleep hygiene, being with other people, having authentic conversations.

When you start doing those things, now you're gonna get the value of life again. You're gonna be steady. You're gonna be grounded.

You're gonna feel safe. You're gonna feel purposeful.

Those are the kinds of things that bring us out of depression, out of discomfort, out of boredom, out of anxiety, out of fear, and into the magic, if you will, of what it is to be alive even while we're facing these super uncomfortable experiences.

What it is to be alive. Now, please share with us your two podcasts and where people can tune in in order to listen to them.

I've had three podcasts, really, but my marketing says two. But one of them is called Welcome to Humanity. That was the first one I did.

And that's the name of my brand. I think I dropped about 120 episodes there. That was a weekly show.

It was super cool. Super great interviews. So Welcome to Humanity can be found everywhere.

Spotify, Apple, everywhere like that. Lipsyn based.

And the second one was called The Healthy Healer, where I interviewed people who had gone into particular fields and then dropped out of the fields or were disappointed with what they were learned, disenchanted, disillusioned with what they had

learned in the academic aspect of becoming a social worker, becoming a nurse, becoming a therapist, becoming a doctor, becoming a psychologist, becoming some form of healing professional. And then realizing when they got out that it didn't look very

much like what it had looked like before, or what they had hoped that it would look like. And then they designed and developed their own way to be a healer. And that also can be found in the same places.

There's 150 episodes of those, and that's called The Healthy Healer. And then the third one I did was with my friend, Sam, and a little bit more raucousy, a little bit more irreverent. That one was called Insanity.

That was two words, insanity. So being insanity. We had some good interviews, but we only, I think we only dropped about 16 or 20 episodes of that.

But those are more fun than the other two. And great conversations. All three of them are really fun.

I'm really appreciated being a host.

And we appreciate it. And we will look those up. I'll put those three podcasts on the show notes.

Now, one last thing, Dr. Fred, you say that you help people find their true voice. So based on what we talked about, how would that play out?

Well, I do have a book called Find Your True Voice, and I have another book called The Healing Through Creativity and Self-Expression.

We've already talked about the creativity. So what Find Your True Voice is goes a little bit to what we talked about before, which is, you know, early on in school, we were told that we were not welcome to say what it is we wanted to say.

We weren't welcome to bring our true voice into the first grade classroom. I know for me, I was so interested in communication that when I got into elementary school, I just talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked.

And there was no elementary school teacher who forgot having Fred as a student. I'm pretty sure about that because I really did light up the room.

And I was a little bit too smart and a little bit too experienced because I had two older brothers who taught me things before I should probably have learned them.

The idea here is that we lose our true voice early on in life because we're told to sit down, be quiet, and just do what the teacher says to do and do it like her or him. And if you do that, then we'll pass you with high grades.

But that's not open discourse. That's not opening up a communication. So what we do over time is that the crack in the cement gets larger and larger.

We never actually fix it. And then we end up saying and being someone that we're not. We end up pretending to be somebody that we're not in order to protect that tender self that's there.

And we end up saying things we don't mean or not saying things when we should. And then we go to our graves with our songs still in us.

I think it was Henry David Thoreau who said, you know, most men live their lives of quiet desperation and go to their graves with their songs still in them. That really happens, and probably nothing more tragic than that.

So what I ask people to do is move the things out of the way that are in the way of you being in touch with that clear and honest, authentic, genuine core self that's living inside of you, that's been there the whole time, and start communicating

from that point, from your heart. Because when you can do that, that's when you can really start finding your true voice. And you'll know somebody who has found their true voice because they're no longer having to think very hard when they speak.

They're just saying what's so, you know, they're not trying to muster up a certain presentation or be someone that they're not.

They're actually speaking authentically and genuinely by moving this stuff out of the way that was in a way of actually being your authentic true self.

Start communicating from the heart, words of wisdom from Dr. Fred Moss, the un-doctor, psychiatrist, mental health advocate, author and podcaster. Thank you so much for joining us today.

We've learned so much from you.

Thank you for having me.

My absolute pleasure. Thank you, Dr. Fred.

Before you go, do you have a website where we can reach you?

Sure. My website, I have a couple of places. Number one, Dr.

Fred, drfred360.com. Dr. fred360.com is a cool website that overrides all the other places.

I hang out on social media just like everyone, I Facebook and LinkedIn every so often. Another place is I'm a wealth builder. So I help people actually get their stability and get organized around the way their money works.

And believe it or not, it's more effective than any kind of medicine that I've ever given to anybody to give people a sense of well-being. So I also help people in that way as well.

And I'd be glad to speak with your listeners about any of those things. And you can get a discovery call with me. You can hit the button that says contact me at drfred360.com.

And I'll be glad to have a conversation with any of your listeners.

drfred360.com. I'll put that on the show notes. Thank you so much, Dr.

Fred.

You're welcome. Thank you.

My pleasure. Don't forget to subscribe, leave a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify. And stay tuned for more episodes to come.