This edition of Working Hard was originally sent on 21/07/26
Hello!! Hope you’re having a good start to your week.
Firstly, I’d like to formally announce that at the weekend I won my local pub quiz. And yes, I’ll be taking congratulations for the foreseeable future.
We also had the loveliest baby shower at the TALA office. There are currently five of us all expecting babies; Tiny TALA is going to have quite the next generation.
Can I also just say... thank you to whoever turned the thermostat down this week. I don’t think I’ve ever been so grateful for grey skies. Being heavily pregnant during that heatwave really made me appreciate that classic British summer weather isn’t always something to complain about.
Speaking of things that completely changed how I think, this week’s podcast is with Nir Eyal, and it’s all about why we self-sabotage our habits. I think we often assume people who stick to good habits just have more discipline than everyone else, but that’s really not what the research says.
Anyway, hope you all have a great week!
In the episode with Nir, he tells the fascinating story of Curt Richter’s famous experiment on hope, and I genuinely haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
He wanted to see how long rats could swim before they gave up. In the first part of the experiment, the rats survived for around 15 minutes before giving up.
Then the researchers changed just one thing... can you guess how long they kept swimming after that?
The answer is honestly wild, and it’s such a brilliant reminder that when we believe there’s a chance things can get better, we’re capable of so much more than we think.
If you haven’t watched the full episode yet, I’ve dropped it below.
Somewhere along the way, you’ve learnt that setting boundaries means you’re being selfish or unkind. I don’t actually think the boundary is the problem; I think the story you’ve been telling yourself about the boundary is.
The other thing is, you’ve made this huge life change by moving away, but your brain is still catching up. It doesn’t just rewrite years of conditioning overnight. Healing is annoyingly slow like that. You set the boundary, you feel guilty, you keep the boundary anyway, and eventually your brain realises, “Oh... I’m actually allowed to do this.” That’s how it gets easier.
And please remember, feeling guilty doesn’t automatically mean you’ve done something wrong. Those are two completely different things. You’re allowed to build a life that feels healthy for you. You’re allowed to make decisions that other people don’t love. This is your life, not anyone else’s, and you’re the one who gets to decide how you live it.
This might sound completely insufferable, but I’m asked a lot online how I found my husband.
And I think the honest answer is that it had a lot less to do with luck or timing, and a lot more to do with some very specific things I had to learn and unlearn about dating, and so I wanted to do an episode on exactly that…
I hope you have a wonderful week & I’ll see you very soon,
