May 5, 2025 • 33 mins
Academic achievement, a lucrative career, and a beautiful family may sound like the American dream, but after reaching every milestone, Dr. Tiffany Moon still felt empty. Despite being a successful anesthesiologist, the Real Housewife of Dallas
was numb when it came to finding meaning in her life. In this episode, she talks about looking for joy in all the wrong places, and how she learned the hard way that happiness doesn't come from checking all the boxes.
Dr. Tiffany Moon offers her prescription for finding joy through connection, and reminds us to stop equating success with what is in our bank accounts and our closets. For more on her journey to joy, pick up a copy of her new book "Joy Prescriptions: How I Learned to Stop Chasing Perfection and Embrace Connection" out May 6th.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Let's Be Clear with Shannon Dohrney. Hi, Let's
be clear, listeners. My name is doctor Tiffany Moon. You
might know me from the Real Housewives of Dallas on
Bravo TV, but I'm also a board certified anesthesiologist, entrepreneur,
and mother of twins. I came to this country in
(00:22):
nineteen ninety at the ripe age of six, and I
remember sneak watching Beverly Hills nine oh two one zero
when my parents were running errands and I was home alone.
I remember watching Shannon, and like many of you, I
really admired how vocal she was about the things that
(00:43):
she believed in. And I'm very humbled to be hosting
this episode of Let's Be Clear. I hope that my
message connects with you in a meaningful way and then
I'm able to help you bring a little bit more
joy into your life. Today, I want to focus on
some thing that I'm passionate about, which is what joy
(01:03):
means to me, and how I stopped trying to live
a life that was perfect and by checking off all
the boxes, and instead live a life filled with gratitude, connection,
and laughter, which are the things that bring me joy.
I even wrote a book about my entire joy journey.
(01:25):
It's called Joy Prescriptions and is out on Bay six.
To start off, I want to give you guys a
little bit of background about myself because I think much
of what we think about the world, our mindset, and
the way we move throughout the world, is structured by
how our childhood was. For me, childhood was a turbulent
(01:47):
time because my parents left me in China when I
was three years old to come to America. Back then,
in communist nineteen eighties China, you basically couldn't get out
unless you had a student visa, and so because my
parents were both academically gifted, they were able to obtain
(02:09):
student visas to come and study in America, but both
going to school full time, they thought that having a
toddler in tow probably wasn't a good idea, so they
left me in China with my maternal grandparents. So from
the age of three until six, I didn't really know
(02:30):
my parents. Again, this was in the nineteen eighties. The
internet was not a thing. We didn't really even have
a telephone for me to hear my parent's voice. Twice
a year, an envelope would appear and inside would be
a printed out photo of my parents at the mall
standing in front of a Christmas tree. I had no
(02:51):
concept what that was. And one day, when I was
six years old, my grandma told me, your parents are
ready to accept you in America. And I thought, oh,
my parents, Oh yeah, those people. I kind of forgot
about them because when you're a child, you sort of
take every day for face value. You don't really worry
(03:14):
or have anxiety. That's part of the beauty of being
a child. And she said, well, your mom and dad
are ready for you to come to America now. So
we drove to the airport in Beijing, because we lived
in a small city outside of Beijing, and I got
put on an airplane by myself at the age of
(03:36):
six to go to JFK Airport, where when I got
off the plane, my mom and dad were waiting for
me at the gate. I knew they were my mom
and dad because I had seen multiple pictures of them,
and I had a slight recollection of these people, but
again I had not seen them since I was three
(03:57):
years old, which was half my life at that point.
So they took me back to their apartment in Queens
and put me in first grade in the middle of
the school year, and I knew not a lick of English,
like not even hello or Hi. I had never heard
(04:18):
anyone speak English ever before. It's not like now where
you travel internationally and even at the hotel in Beijing
or Shanghai, there's like a few American channels or something. No,
back then, there was nothing. So I don't want to
talk too much about my childhood, but the reason I
want to share this with you is that you know
(04:40):
I had a lot of abandonment issues as a child.
We continued to move every one or two years throughout
my childhood. Every time my mom or dad got a
slightly better job, we'd moved to a slightly nicer apartment.
I finally got my own room when I was ten
yearsyears old. So at the apartment, we'd always get a
(05:02):
one bedroom apartment and my parents would have the bedroom,
and my quote unquote room would in essence be the
living room where a mattress lay on the floor. That
was my room. But when we were ten years old,
my dad got a new job and we were able
to afford a home, a freestanding home with a two
(05:25):
car garage and a backyard and I got my own
room for the very first time. So that is like
one of my core memories throughout my childhood. I would
say the name of the game was about academic success, achievement, UIL,
math competitions, spelling bees, making a's. I distinctly remember bringing
(05:52):
home a ninety six on a math test, and I
remember being berated by my father for not getting one hundred.
I had missed I think two questions, and he went
and got the thick stack of math sheets that he
had for me and gave me ten extra sheets that night,
(06:15):
and he said, next time you have a question like this,
you're not going to miss it, because you're going to
do ten pages of it right now. That was the
environment I grew up in. I didn't know that you
could grow up differently. I started to make a few
friends in middle school, but again we moved every one
(06:38):
or two years, so it was hard to keep friends,
and I basically found solace in reading and doing extra
math worksheets. Because of this, I ended up finishing the
curriculum early and going to college at the age of fifteen.
So I left my parents' house. I went and moved
(07:01):
into a dorm with a roommate who remains my best
friend to this very day, even though she now lives
in Dubai. I started dating a boy that was college
aged even though I was fifteen, because I was in
college hanging out with college people, and it really was
like my life opened up. I had no idea that
(07:22):
other people didn't do ten sheets of math work a night.
I had never been on a sleepover in my entire life,
and now I was in the dorm like basically having
the sleepover that never ended. So it was I opening
in a lot of ways, not only academically, but I
feel like I'm matured a lot during that time. So
(07:46):
I ended up finishing college when I was nineteen. I
did not take a gap year. I asked my dad
if I could take a gap year to take a
little bit more time to study for the MCAT and
to do a semester abroad in Europe because there was
a program that Cornell had with another school and you
basically exchanged. And he said absolutely not. What could you
(08:10):
possibly learn in another country that you can't learn here?
And I was like, I think a lot, like different culture,
different people, you know. But I was like no, no, no, Daddy,
you're right. I'm sorry I asked. I was stupid. So
went through college, graduated from Cornell when I was nineteen,
went straight into medical school, graduated when I was twenty three,
went straight into residency. Was twenty eight years old when
(08:34):
I graduated from residency, got married the same year, had
about of infertility, and basically had my twins about two
years after I got married. So you're like, why is
she telling us her whole life story. I'm telling you
because it took me a really long time to realize
(08:57):
that life is not a series of checking off the boxes,
and that if, by chance, you happened to check off
everything on this arbitrary checklist, it still doesn't bring you joy.
I know this because I got to the point that
(09:21):
I thought I had checked off all the boxes that
I just listed for you, and I felt completely empty inside.
I did not know who I was, I did not
know what I liked. All I knew is that I
felt good when I helped other people. I felt good
(09:45):
when I was praised. I felt good when I was needed,
and that was generally when I felt good. I was
take the money that I earned from being a doctor
and buy lots of pretty, pretty things to soothe myself.
(10:09):
I have a affinity for luxury handbags, shoes, clothes, jewelry,
nice sparkly things. I think when you grow up in
an environment of scarcity and you really have nothing, I
mean my entire childhood, I remember all of our items
(10:30):
that we had were either from garage sales or from goodwill.
I never had any new clothes or shoes. My family
never took a vacation. I mean, we scrimped and saved.
And I think now that I have means, I'm still
never wasteful. You know, I still love a good deal.
(10:55):
I think, you know, when you grow up poor, there's
something inside you where you always remember what it's like
not to have. And so I thought that when I
had money and I was able to buy things and
go on vacation and buy a dress without even looking
(11:17):
at the price tag, I mean, I just thought that
that would be the epitome of what success meant. And
even though those things are nice, it didn't fulfill me.
I was looking for joy in all the wrong places,
because joy does not come from achievements and checking off
(11:42):
the boxes and Chanel handbags and burkins. It just doesn't.
But I think many people still think it does. And
the joy that we sometimes chase in our day to
day life is not the joy that I want to
(12:03):
encourage you to cultivate. So there's three things that I
did on my journey to joy that I'll share with
(12:23):
you and you can consider doing. This was about the
time that I went on Real Housewives because two of
the worst and best things happened to me all at
once in the year twenty twenty. COVID happened, and I
filmed for Real Housewives of Dallas. These are both wonderful things,
(12:46):
and they are both terrible things, but they both made
me grow a lot. COVID was the thing that kind
of drove my anxiety over the edge of the cliff.
As a baseline anxious person who jokes around that I
worry for a living, I chose a career in which
(13:12):
it's quite literally my job to worry about my patients.
And what I mean by that is every day I
go into the operating room at six forty five AM,
and I pull up a bunch of drugs and open
a bunch of equipment that I may or may not
use that day, but it's just in case. A lot
(13:34):
of my job is looking at a patient's comorbiditis, level
of risk, the type of surgery they're having, and then
trying to in my best guess see how they're going
to do and pull up the drugs according to what
I think might happen during surgery. For some patients who
(13:57):
are healthy and undergoing ankle or knee surgery, I do
not call for blood to be in the room. It's
likely not necessary. When I have a octagenarian who has
heart failure coming in for a vascular surgery, or they
have lung cancer and we're doing lung surgery, I most
(14:18):
likely do have blood in the room because there's a
high likelihood I'm going to be transfusing that patient. So
I'm an anxious person at baseline, my job rewards me
for my anxiety. And then COVID happened and I just
lost it. I thought if this might be the end
(14:42):
of the world, which in early twenty twenty it certainly
seemed like it could be. How have I lived my life? Like?
Where has my joy been? I've been such a good girl,
I've checked all the boxes. But why do I still
(15:02):
feel like a shell of a person or a zombie
just going through the motions and if this is the
end of the world, Did I do it right? And truthfully,
the answer was no. I wished that I had gone
back and made deeper connections with people. I wish that
(15:23):
I had gone to my friends. My best friend from
the college program, her name's Vanessa, who now lives in Dubai.
When she graduated from business school. I did not attend
her graduation because I was studying for finals for medical school.
You know. Her commencement in May was the week before
(15:47):
my finals of third year of medical school. And I
didn't go because I needed to study so that I
could get an A, so that I could graduate with honors,
so that I I could get into the best antithesiology
residency program in the country. And I missed my best
friend's graduation from business school. Like that is so shitty.
(16:09):
Like I wish I had gone, but I didn't, you know.
I wished that I didn't listen to my dad and
I had gone to Europe and studied abroad for a
semester and taken a foreign lover, you know, Like I
wished I did all those things, but I didn't because
I was like one track mind. In my book, I
(16:33):
tell the story of going to the Kentucky Derby with
a girlfriend of mine, and I don't know anything about
horses or horse racing, nor do I now, but I
thought it was a good event. I could wear a
cute outfit and buy one of those super huge hats
that you wear, so I went for the fashion. And
(16:54):
she pointed out to me that the horses during the
race were these things on its head called blinders, and
the purpose of the blinders is to prevent the horse
from looking peripherally for even a tenth of a millisecond
so that it maintains its eyesight on the finish line
(17:17):
and wins the Kentucky Derby. And when she told me
this story and we were drinking our mint jewel ups,
I just in that second I was like, Oh my god,
it's It's a metaphor for my life. Like I'm one
of these race horses that has blinders on, and I've
literally been so singularly focused on the finish line that
(17:42):
i haven't had a chance to look around and to
smell the proverbial roses, so to speak. So COVID happened,
Real Housewives happened. I became an accidental social media influencer
that was not planned, and all of these things I
believe would not have happened if I didn't hit that
(18:07):
rock bottom time during early COVID, when I thought that
the world was ending and I had not lived my
life fully. I love doctor Brene Brown. She's a fellow
Texas girl like me. She does a lot of research
about shame and vulnerability and leading courageously. And in one
(18:34):
of her books she talks about foreboding joy and I
was like, what the hell does that mean? Foreboding joy is, basically,
how do I say it, not being able to live
in the present moment and enjoy the abundance of everything
(18:57):
your life has to offer because you're afraid of what
might happen in the future. And she I think she
was on OPRAH, and she was talking about a client
patient of hers, an older gentleman, and he had been
(19:18):
practicing foreboding joy because his wife had been ill or
something like that, and he didn't want to feel too
deeply with her because she was going to pass, and
so he, I guess, kept his distance and then she
did pass, and he said it did absolutely nothing for me.
(19:44):
Dress rehearsing tragedy when it actually happened did absolutely nothing
for me. So what I learned from that is, don't
do it, don't dress rehearse tragedy, like live your life
to the fullest. Yes, there are bad things going on
in the world. Yes people can be incredibly cruel and unkind,
(20:08):
but you don't have to subscribe to that. Like we
can all do our little part on this earth to
try to make an impact in someone else's day. And generally,
when I'm leaving the hospital at the end of a day,
(20:28):
I know that I made a difference in someone else's life,
for sure. But on days that I wasn't in the hospital,
I felt a little bit lost because all my life
I had been equating my worthiness with achievement and success
(20:48):
and subsequently then earning money. And you know, I bought
my parents a car, I bought my parents a house.
I would pay for dinner every time we went out.
And that's how how I felt my worthiness as a human,
as a doctor, as a daughter. And slowly, over the
(21:09):
last few years, I've had to peel away my worthiness
from achievement because, like my friend doctor Judith Joseph says, Tiffany,
we are human beings, we are not human doings. She said,
(21:31):
tell me this. Do you love your dogs, do you
love your children? Do you love your husband? I said,
of course, these are like my inner circle, Like you know,
if I had a time capsule and could preserve these people,
like for all eternity, these are the people I would
want to always be with. And she said, do you
love them all because they do so much for you?
(21:53):
And I was like, well, no, the dogs don't do
much of anything except the one that's a protection dog.
The other two like literally do nothing all day. My
husband does things for me, but that's not why I
love him. I love him because he's kind and generous
and funny and allows me to be my crazy self.
And of course I love my children because they're sweet
(22:13):
and curious and creative and crazy. And she was like, right,
so why is it that you love people because of
you know, all the things that you just said, But
you only let people love you because of what you
can do for them. And I was like, uh, like,
(22:35):
I don't know, I just I feel, you know. She's like,
do you think your friends like you because of what
you do for them? And I said some of them actually, yes, yes,
And she's like, well, you need to get rid of
those friends. I said, Okay, yes, I understand, but by
and large, I guess what I'm trying to share with
(22:57):
you all is that the people in your life who
truly love you love you for you, because you're kind,
because you're curious, because you're funny, because you're thoughtful, and
they just want to spend time with you. And I
think as a society we've lost touch with joy. I
(23:20):
think there is a cultural war on joy because of
what we see on TV, because of what we see
on social media. Everyone is in this terrible game of
compare and despair, looking at everyone else's social media feed
(23:43):
and thinking that, you know, why is everyone out there
celebrating on vacation, getting a new house, getting a new car,
you know, and I'm sitting here worried about my bills.
My relationship is on the rocks, you know. It's you know,
social media. Despite my self being a very prevalent user,
you have to know in your heart that it's not real.
(24:06):
It is real, but it's also not real, meaning that
you're only seeing the parts of people that they want
you to see, and you cannot compare someone else's greatest
hits with your every day It's simply not a fair comparison,
and the more you do it, the more you will lose.
(24:41):
I talked a little bit about friends, but I think
every adult, at least every few years in life needs
to do a friend audit. This is not meant to
be mean, This is not meant to cut anyone out
of our life lives. But as we move through different
(25:03):
stages of our lives, there are different people for different stages,
and some of your friends from previous stages of your
life may not be suitable to accompany you to the
next stage of your life. And that's okay. My maid
(25:23):
of honor at my wedding, I love her dearly. She
was my best friend when we were in our teens
and early twenties, but we've grown apart. She lives in
the far Northeast. She does not have children. She decided
by choice not to have children, and so we don't
(25:44):
have a lot to talk about right now, and that's okay.
I wish her the best. Maybe she'll come back in
my life at another time. But I think sometimes we
hold on to friendships for the sake of nostalgia, or
you know, just the fact that we've known someone for
twenty years and they used to be our BFF, and
(26:05):
we used to, you know, be on the phone for
hours at a time when we were fifteen years old,
but sometimes that no longer works. And the worst kind
of friend, if you can call them, that is the
kind that tries to compete with you, or is jealous
of you, or uses you. And I've had all of those.
(26:30):
I have had friends that have straight up used me
for money, promotion, academic advancement. And it feels terrible when
you kind of figure out that you've been used. But
(26:51):
I caution you against building your walls so high that
it never happens to you again, because that's not good either. There.
It's like I say to my you know, supervisor, I
would rather write a prescription for someone who fooled me
and doesn't actually need the pain pills than to be
(27:14):
so hard that I'm not writing the prescriptions to people
who actually need them, you know, like you're fooling me,
and that lies on you. But I, in good faith
believe you, so when the truth comes to light, that
is on you. It's not on me, right, But I
encourage you guys to do a friend audit every couple
(27:36):
of years because time is a limited resource and I
want you to be spending time with the people that
uplift you and empower you and inspire you to do
bigger and better things, and not people who are bringing
you down. So I want to wrap up with negativity
(28:01):
because it's a question that I get asked often on
social media, and also when I do speaking engagements. It's
funny because I give a lot of keynotes, or I'll
be on a panel for either a medical conference or
a non medical conference, and there's always, you know, questions
at the end, and then there's the questions after the questions,
(28:22):
which is when you get off stage or you're mingling
at the cocktail hour afterwards and someone comes up and says,
you know, I really enjoyed your talk, but can I
ask you this? And one of the frequent questions that
I get is how do you deal with the negativity
that you get? And this is my answer. Be glad
(28:43):
that people are talking about you, even if sometimes it's negative.
And I want you to imagine it like this. Say
you're Joshmo, You're not very well known, you're not on
social media, you have kids that go to school, you
have friends, maybe you have a church community, so your
sphere of influence is like one hundred people. You know,
(29:06):
about one hundred people come into a regular interaction with you,
and five of them just do not like you. They
don't like your fashion sense, they think your voice is annoying,
they don't think you're an effective leader. I don't care. Whatever,
five of them don't like you. It's five percent. Right now.
(29:26):
You create a business, you're an entrepreneur, You go on
social media, you're posting about your business, maybe you decide
to run for PTA president whatever. You are putting yourself
out there in one way or another, and now it
(29:47):
seems like all of these people don't like you, don't
like your ideas. You hear them talking stuff behind your back,
and you're just feeling terrible about yourself because you're like, man,
I must really suck. I should not put myself out
there anymore because I'm getting all this negative feedback. The
fact is that we as humans have a proclivity towards
(30:13):
negative thoughts and negative feedback because back when we were cavemen,
it behooved us to know if someone in the tribe
was upset with us, so we didn't get kicked out
and have no protection. Right, we need to stay inside
the cave when the wooly mammoth run through. Right, So
(30:35):
we have a proclivity towards not upsetting the status quo
and being very hyper sensitive to negative feedback. Okay, then
what happens when you're an entrepreneur. You're trying to put
yourself out there, you go on social media, you're getting
this hate. I want you to realize it is likely
the same percentage of people who don't like you, but
(30:57):
because you're putting yourself out there and your sphere of
influence has now increased from say one hundred people to
one thousand people, fifty of them don't like you, and
they're vocal about it versus the old five. So you
are getting more negative feedback in an absolute sense, you are,
(31:22):
but it's only because you're putting yourself out there and
your sphere of influence is growing. So I want you
guys to realize that. And I always tell my coaching
clients if someone is out there imitating you, talking about you,
or throwing shade at you, honey, it means you are
doing something right. Because if you were basic and doing
(31:45):
nothing and not putting yourself out there and you had
no new ideas, who would be talking about you. No
one right, So don't let the negativity keep you from
doing what it is is you want to do. You
must work through it. Okay. I just want to give you,
(32:06):
guys that little pearl because it comes up a lot
with my coaching clients and when I speak. So we're
going to wrap up here. Thank you for listening to
this episode of Let's be clear. If you've enjoyed this
episode or if you want to hear more about my
personal journey to joy, I want to encourage you to
(32:28):
pick up my book, Joy Prescriptions, How I learned to
stop chasing perfection and embrace connection. You can find it
at Joyprescriptions dot com or anywhere that books are sold,
and you can follow me across all of the social
media platforms at Tiffany Moon MD. I really hope that
each of you are able to find more authenticity and joy.
(32:50):
Thanks so much for listening. M
This is Let's Be Clear with Shannon Dohrney. Hi, Let's
be clear, listeners. My name is doctor Tiffany Moon. You
might know me from the Real Housewives of Dallas on
Bravo TV, but I'm also a board certified anesthesiologist, entrepreneur,
and mother of twins. I came to this country in
(00:22):
nineteen ninety at the ripe age of six, and I
remember sneak watching Beverly Hills nine oh two one zero
when my parents were running errands and I was home alone.
I remember watching Shannon, and like many of you, I
really admired how vocal she was about the things that
(00:43):
she believed in. And I'm very humbled to be hosting
this episode of Let's Be Clear. I hope that my
message connects with you in a meaningful way and then
I'm able to help you bring a little bit more
joy into your life. Today, I want to focus on
some thing that I'm passionate about, which is what joy
(01:03):
means to me, and how I stopped trying to live
a life that was perfect and by checking off all
the boxes, and instead live a life filled with gratitude, connection,
and laughter, which are the things that bring me joy.
I even wrote a book about my entire joy journey.
(01:25):
It's called Joy Prescriptions and is out on Bay six.
To start off, I want to give you guys a
little bit of background about myself because I think much
of what we think about the world, our mindset, and
the way we move throughout the world, is structured by
how our childhood was. For me, childhood was a turbulent
(01:47):
time because my parents left me in China when I
was three years old to come to America. Back then,
in communist nineteen eighties China, you basically couldn't get out
unless you had a student visa, and so because my
parents were both academically gifted, they were able to obtain
(02:09):
student visas to come and study in America, but both
going to school full time, they thought that having a
toddler in tow probably wasn't a good idea, so they
left me in China with my maternal grandparents. So from
the age of three until six, I didn't really know
(02:30):
my parents. Again, this was in the nineteen eighties. The
internet was not a thing. We didn't really even have
a telephone for me to hear my parent's voice. Twice
a year, an envelope would appear and inside would be
a printed out photo of my parents at the mall
standing in front of a Christmas tree. I had no
(02:51):
concept what that was. And one day, when I was
six years old, my grandma told me, your parents are
ready to accept you in America. And I thought, oh,
my parents, Oh yeah, those people. I kind of forgot
about them because when you're a child, you sort of
take every day for face value. You don't really worry
(03:14):
or have anxiety. That's part of the beauty of being
a child. And she said, well, your mom and dad
are ready for you to come to America now. So
we drove to the airport in Beijing, because we lived
in a small city outside of Beijing, and I got
put on an airplane by myself at the age of
(03:36):
six to go to JFK Airport, where when I got
off the plane, my mom and dad were waiting for
me at the gate. I knew they were my mom
and dad because I had seen multiple pictures of them,
and I had a slight recollection of these people, but
again I had not seen them since I was three
(03:57):
years old, which was half my life at that point.
So they took me back to their apartment in Queens
and put me in first grade in the middle of
the school year, and I knew not a lick of English,
like not even hello or Hi. I had never heard
(04:18):
anyone speak English ever before. It's not like now where
you travel internationally and even at the hotel in Beijing
or Shanghai, there's like a few American channels or something. No,
back then, there was nothing. So I don't want to
talk too much about my childhood, but the reason I
want to share this with you is that you know
(04:40):
I had a lot of abandonment issues as a child.
We continued to move every one or two years throughout
my childhood. Every time my mom or dad got a
slightly better job, we'd moved to a slightly nicer apartment.
I finally got my own room when I was ten
yearsyears old. So at the apartment, we'd always get a
(05:02):
one bedroom apartment and my parents would have the bedroom,
and my quote unquote room would in essence be the
living room where a mattress lay on the floor. That
was my room. But when we were ten years old,
my dad got a new job and we were able
to afford a home, a freestanding home with a two
(05:25):
car garage and a backyard and I got my own
room for the very first time. So that is like
one of my core memories throughout my childhood. I would
say the name of the game was about academic success, achievement, UIL,
math competitions, spelling bees, making a's. I distinctly remember bringing
(05:52):
home a ninety six on a math test, and I
remember being berated by my father for not getting one hundred.
I had missed I think two questions, and he went
and got the thick stack of math sheets that he
had for me and gave me ten extra sheets that night,
(06:15):
and he said, next time you have a question like this,
you're not going to miss it, because you're going to
do ten pages of it right now. That was the
environment I grew up in. I didn't know that you
could grow up differently. I started to make a few
friends in middle school, but again we moved every one
(06:38):
or two years, so it was hard to keep friends,
and I basically found solace in reading and doing extra
math worksheets. Because of this, I ended up finishing the
curriculum early and going to college at the age of fifteen.
So I left my parents' house. I went and moved
(07:01):
into a dorm with a roommate who remains my best
friend to this very day, even though she now lives
in Dubai. I started dating a boy that was college
aged even though I was fifteen, because I was in
college hanging out with college people, and it really was
like my life opened up. I had no idea that
(07:22):
other people didn't do ten sheets of math work a night.
I had never been on a sleepover in my entire life,
and now I was in the dorm like basically having
the sleepover that never ended. So it was I opening
in a lot of ways, not only academically, but I
feel like I'm matured a lot during that time. So
(07:46):
I ended up finishing college when I was nineteen. I
did not take a gap year. I asked my dad
if I could take a gap year to take a
little bit more time to study for the MCAT and
to do a semester abroad in Europe because there was
a program that Cornell had with another school and you
basically exchanged. And he said absolutely not. What could you
(08:10):
possibly learn in another country that you can't learn here?
And I was like, I think a lot, like different culture,
different people, you know. But I was like no, no, no, Daddy,
you're right. I'm sorry I asked. I was stupid. So
went through college, graduated from Cornell when I was nineteen,
went straight into medical school, graduated when I was twenty three,
went straight into residency. Was twenty eight years old when
(08:34):
I graduated from residency, got married the same year, had
about of infertility, and basically had my twins about two
years after I got married. So you're like, why is
she telling us her whole life story. I'm telling you
because it took me a really long time to realize
(08:57):
that life is not a series of checking off the boxes,
and that if, by chance, you happened to check off
everything on this arbitrary checklist, it still doesn't bring you joy.
I know this because I got to the point that
(09:21):
I thought I had checked off all the boxes that
I just listed for you, and I felt completely empty inside.
I did not know who I was, I did not
know what I liked. All I knew is that I
felt good when I helped other people. I felt good
(09:45):
when I was praised. I felt good when I was needed,
and that was generally when I felt good. I was
take the money that I earned from being a doctor
and buy lots of pretty, pretty things to soothe myself.
(10:09):
I have a affinity for luxury handbags, shoes, clothes, jewelry,
nice sparkly things. I think when you grow up in
an environment of scarcity and you really have nothing, I
mean my entire childhood, I remember all of our items
(10:30):
that we had were either from garage sales or from goodwill.
I never had any new clothes or shoes. My family
never took a vacation. I mean, we scrimped and saved.
And I think now that I have means, I'm still
never wasteful. You know, I still love a good deal.
(10:55):
I think, you know, when you grow up poor, there's
something inside you where you always remember what it's like
not to have. And so I thought that when I
had money and I was able to buy things and
go on vacation and buy a dress without even looking
(11:17):
at the price tag, I mean, I just thought that
that would be the epitome of what success meant. And
even though those things are nice, it didn't fulfill me.
I was looking for joy in all the wrong places,
because joy does not come from achievements and checking off
(11:42):
the boxes and Chanel handbags and burkins. It just doesn't.
But I think many people still think it does. And
the joy that we sometimes chase in our day to
day life is not the joy that I want to
(12:03):
encourage you to cultivate. So there's three things that I
did on my journey to joy that I'll share with
(12:23):
you and you can consider doing. This was about the
time that I went on Real Housewives because two of
the worst and best things happened to me all at
once in the year twenty twenty. COVID happened, and I
filmed for Real Housewives of Dallas. These are both wonderful things,
(12:46):
and they are both terrible things, but they both made
me grow a lot. COVID was the thing that kind
of drove my anxiety over the edge of the cliff.
As a baseline anxious person who jokes around that I
worry for a living, I chose a career in which
(13:12):
it's quite literally my job to worry about my patients.
And what I mean by that is every day I
go into the operating room at six forty five AM,
and I pull up a bunch of drugs and open
a bunch of equipment that I may or may not
use that day, but it's just in case. A lot
(13:34):
of my job is looking at a patient's comorbiditis, level
of risk, the type of surgery they're having, and then
trying to in my best guess see how they're going
to do and pull up the drugs according to what
I think might happen during surgery. For some patients who
(13:57):
are healthy and undergoing ankle or knee surgery, I do
not call for blood to be in the room. It's
likely not necessary. When I have a octagenarian who has
heart failure coming in for a vascular surgery, or they
have lung cancer and we're doing lung surgery, I most
(14:18):
likely do have blood in the room because there's a
high likelihood I'm going to be transfusing that patient. So
I'm an anxious person at baseline, my job rewards me
for my anxiety. And then COVID happened and I just
lost it. I thought if this might be the end
(14:42):
of the world, which in early twenty twenty it certainly
seemed like it could be. How have I lived my life? Like?
Where has my joy been? I've been such a good girl,
I've checked all the boxes. But why do I still
(15:02):
feel like a shell of a person or a zombie
just going through the motions and if this is the
end of the world, Did I do it right? And truthfully,
the answer was no. I wished that I had gone
back and made deeper connections with people. I wish that
(15:23):
I had gone to my friends. My best friend from
the college program, her name's Vanessa, who now lives in Dubai.
When she graduated from business school. I did not attend
her graduation because I was studying for finals for medical school.
You know. Her commencement in May was the week before
(15:47):
my finals of third year of medical school. And I
didn't go because I needed to study so that I
could get an A, so that I could graduate with honors,
so that I I could get into the best antithesiology
residency program in the country. And I missed my best
friend's graduation from business school. Like that is so shitty.
(16:09):
Like I wish I had gone, but I didn't, you know.
I wished that I didn't listen to my dad and
I had gone to Europe and studied abroad for a
semester and taken a foreign lover, you know, Like I
wished I did all those things, but I didn't because
I was like one track mind. In my book, I
(16:33):
tell the story of going to the Kentucky Derby with
a girlfriend of mine, and I don't know anything about
horses or horse racing, nor do I now, but I
thought it was a good event. I could wear a
cute outfit and buy one of those super huge hats
that you wear, so I went for the fashion. And
(16:54):
she pointed out to me that the horses during the
race were these things on its head called blinders, and
the purpose of the blinders is to prevent the horse
from looking peripherally for even a tenth of a millisecond
so that it maintains its eyesight on the finish line
(17:17):
and wins the Kentucky Derby. And when she told me
this story and we were drinking our mint jewel ups,
I just in that second I was like, Oh my god,
it's It's a metaphor for my life. Like I'm one
of these race horses that has blinders on, and I've
literally been so singularly focused on the finish line that
(17:42):
i haven't had a chance to look around and to
smell the proverbial roses, so to speak. So COVID happened,
Real Housewives happened. I became an accidental social media influencer
that was not planned, and all of these things I
believe would not have happened if I didn't hit that
(18:07):
rock bottom time during early COVID, when I thought that
the world was ending and I had not lived my
life fully. I love doctor Brene Brown. She's a fellow
Texas girl like me. She does a lot of research
about shame and vulnerability and leading courageously. And in one
(18:34):
of her books she talks about foreboding joy and I
was like, what the hell does that mean? Foreboding joy is, basically,
how do I say it, not being able to live
in the present moment and enjoy the abundance of everything
(18:57):
your life has to offer because you're afraid of what
might happen in the future. And she I think she
was on OPRAH, and she was talking about a client
patient of hers, an older gentleman, and he had been
(19:18):
practicing foreboding joy because his wife had been ill or
something like that, and he didn't want to feel too
deeply with her because she was going to pass, and
so he, I guess, kept his distance and then she
did pass, and he said it did absolutely nothing for me.
(19:44):
Dress rehearsing tragedy when it actually happened did absolutely nothing
for me. So what I learned from that is, don't
do it, don't dress rehearse tragedy, like live your life
to the fullest. Yes, there are bad things going on
in the world. Yes people can be incredibly cruel and unkind,
(20:08):
but you don't have to subscribe to that. Like we
can all do our little part on this earth to
try to make an impact in someone else's day. And generally,
when I'm leaving the hospital at the end of a day,
(20:28):
I know that I made a difference in someone else's life,
for sure. But on days that I wasn't in the hospital,
I felt a little bit lost because all my life
I had been equating my worthiness with achievement and success
(20:48):
and subsequently then earning money. And you know, I bought
my parents a car, I bought my parents a house.
I would pay for dinner every time we went out.
And that's how how I felt my worthiness as a human,
as a doctor, as a daughter. And slowly, over the
(21:09):
last few years, I've had to peel away my worthiness
from achievement because, like my friend doctor Judith Joseph says, Tiffany,
we are human beings, we are not human doings. She said,
(21:31):
tell me this. Do you love your dogs, do you
love your children? Do you love your husband? I said,
of course, these are like my inner circle, Like you know,
if I had a time capsule and could preserve these people,
like for all eternity, these are the people I would
want to always be with. And she said, do you
love them all because they do so much for you?
(21:53):
And I was like, well, no, the dogs don't do
much of anything except the one that's a protection dog.
The other two like literally do nothing all day. My
husband does things for me, but that's not why I
love him. I love him because he's kind and generous
and funny and allows me to be my crazy self.
And of course I love my children because they're sweet
(22:13):
and curious and creative and crazy. And she was like, right,
so why is it that you love people because of
you know, all the things that you just said, But
you only let people love you because of what you
can do for them. And I was like, uh, like,
(22:35):
I don't know, I just I feel, you know. She's like,
do you think your friends like you because of what
you do for them? And I said some of them actually, yes, yes,
And she's like, well, you need to get rid of
those friends. I said, Okay, yes, I understand, but by
and large, I guess what I'm trying to share with
(22:57):
you all is that the people in your life who
truly love you love you for you, because you're kind,
because you're curious, because you're funny, because you're thoughtful, and
they just want to spend time with you. And I
think as a society we've lost touch with joy. I
(23:20):
think there is a cultural war on joy because of
what we see on TV, because of what we see
on social media. Everyone is in this terrible game of
compare and despair, looking at everyone else's social media feed
(23:43):
and thinking that, you know, why is everyone out there
celebrating on vacation, getting a new house, getting a new car,
you know, and I'm sitting here worried about my bills.
My relationship is on the rocks, you know. It's you know,
social media. Despite my self being a very prevalent user,
you have to know in your heart that it's not real.
(24:06):
It is real, but it's also not real, meaning that
you're only seeing the parts of people that they want
you to see, and you cannot compare someone else's greatest
hits with your every day It's simply not a fair comparison,
and the more you do it, the more you will lose.
(24:41):
I talked a little bit about friends, but I think
every adult, at least every few years in life needs
to do a friend audit. This is not meant to
be mean, This is not meant to cut anyone out
of our life lives. But as we move through different
(25:03):
stages of our lives, there are different people for different stages,
and some of your friends from previous stages of your
life may not be suitable to accompany you to the
next stage of your life. And that's okay. My maid
(25:23):
of honor at my wedding, I love her dearly. She
was my best friend when we were in our teens
and early twenties, but we've grown apart. She lives in
the far Northeast. She does not have children. She decided
by choice not to have children, and so we don't
(25:44):
have a lot to talk about right now, and that's okay.
I wish her the best. Maybe she'll come back in
my life at another time. But I think sometimes we
hold on to friendships for the sake of nostalgia, or
you know, just the fact that we've known someone for
twenty years and they used to be our BFF, and
(26:05):
we used to, you know, be on the phone for
hours at a time when we were fifteen years old,
but sometimes that no longer works. And the worst kind
of friend, if you can call them, that is the
kind that tries to compete with you, or is jealous
of you, or uses you. And I've had all of those.
(26:30):
I have had friends that have straight up used me
for money, promotion, academic advancement. And it feels terrible when
you kind of figure out that you've been used. But
(26:51):
I caution you against building your walls so high that
it never happens to you again, because that's not good either. There.
It's like I say to my you know, supervisor, I
would rather write a prescription for someone who fooled me
and doesn't actually need the pain pills than to be
(27:14):
so hard that I'm not writing the prescriptions to people
who actually need them, you know, like you're fooling me,
and that lies on you. But I, in good faith
believe you, so when the truth comes to light, that
is on you. It's not on me, right, But I
encourage you guys to do a friend audit every couple
(27:36):
of years because time is a limited resource and I
want you to be spending time with the people that
uplift you and empower you and inspire you to do
bigger and better things, and not people who are bringing
you down. So I want to wrap up with negativity
(28:01):
because it's a question that I get asked often on
social media, and also when I do speaking engagements. It's
funny because I give a lot of keynotes, or I'll
be on a panel for either a medical conference or
a non medical conference, and there's always, you know, questions
at the end, and then there's the questions after the questions,
(28:22):
which is when you get off stage or you're mingling
at the cocktail hour afterwards and someone comes up and says,
you know, I really enjoyed your talk, but can I
ask you this? And one of the frequent questions that
I get is how do you deal with the negativity
that you get? And this is my answer. Be glad
(28:43):
that people are talking about you, even if sometimes it's negative.
And I want you to imagine it like this. Say
you're Joshmo, You're not very well known, you're not on
social media, you have kids that go to school, you
have friends, maybe you have a church community, so your
sphere of influence is like one hundred people. You know,
(29:06):
about one hundred people come into a regular interaction with you,
and five of them just do not like you. They
don't like your fashion sense, they think your voice is annoying,
they don't think you're an effective leader. I don't care. Whatever,
five of them don't like you. It's five percent. Right now.
(29:26):
You create a business, you're an entrepreneur, You go on
social media, you're posting about your business, maybe you decide
to run for PTA president whatever. You are putting yourself
out there in one way or another, and now it
(29:47):
seems like all of these people don't like you, don't
like your ideas. You hear them talking stuff behind your back,
and you're just feeling terrible about yourself because you're like, man,
I must really suck. I should not put myself out
there anymore because I'm getting all this negative feedback. The
fact is that we as humans have a proclivity towards
(30:13):
negative thoughts and negative feedback because back when we were cavemen,
it behooved us to know if someone in the tribe
was upset with us, so we didn't get kicked out
and have no protection. Right, we need to stay inside
the cave when the wooly mammoth run through. Right, So
(30:35):
we have a proclivity towards not upsetting the status quo
and being very hyper sensitive to negative feedback. Okay, then
what happens when you're an entrepreneur. You're trying to put
yourself out there, you go on social media, you're getting
this hate. I want you to realize it is likely
the same percentage of people who don't like you, but
(30:57):
because you're putting yourself out there and your sphere of
influence has now increased from say one hundred people to
one thousand people, fifty of them don't like you, and
they're vocal about it versus the old five. So you
are getting more negative feedback in an absolute sense, you are,
(31:22):
but it's only because you're putting yourself out there and
your sphere of influence is growing. So I want you
guys to realize that. And I always tell my coaching
clients if someone is out there imitating you, talking about you,
or throwing shade at you, honey, it means you are
doing something right. Because if you were basic and doing
(31:45):
nothing and not putting yourself out there and you had
no new ideas, who would be talking about you. No
one right, So don't let the negativity keep you from
doing what it is is you want to do. You
must work through it. Okay. I just want to give you,
(32:06):
guys that little pearl because it comes up a lot
with my coaching clients and when I speak. So we're
going to wrap up here. Thank you for listening to
this episode of Let's be clear. If you've enjoyed this
episode or if you want to hear more about my
personal journey to joy, I want to encourage you to
(32:28):
pick up my book, Joy Prescriptions, How I learned to
stop chasing perfection and embrace connection. You can find it
at Joyprescriptions dot com or anywhere that books are sold,
and you can follow me across all of the social
media platforms at Tiffany Moon MD. I really hope that
each of you are able to find more authenticity and joy.
(32:50):
Thanks so much for listening. M
Host
Shannen Doherty
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