Shownotes
In this Women's Room Legal Division podcast episode, Erica welcomes Tessa Khan, founder and CEO of Uplift. Tessa shares her inspiring journey from a commercial law solicitor to an international climate change lawyer and campaigner. She discusses her early influences, including her experiences with high school debating and meeting a human rights lawyer who significantly impacted her career direction. Tessa also talks about the establishment and mission of Uplift, a research and campaigning organisation focused on transitioning away from oil and gas production in the UK. She shares insights into climate litigation, the importance of addressing climate change from a human rights perspective, and her experience in various roles advocating for social and environmental justice. Tessa offers valuable advice on taking risks, staying true to one's values, and navigating public advocacy.
Chapters:
01:52 Tessa's Early Life and Path to Law
08:25 Initial Legal Career and Shift to Human Rights
14:53 Focus on Women's Rights and Climate Change
32:22 Reflecting on Career Transitions
34:38 The Role of Coaching in Career Decisions
37:45 Navigating Public Advocacy and Media
46:18 Thoughts on Climate Protests
51.47 Key strengths
55.13 3 pieces of advice to younger self
Link to Uplift
Link for Toastmasters
Links to The Women’s Room – Legal Division:
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Transcripts
and who during the course of her career has really found her passion and purpose and has pursued them so that today, although still operating in the legal space, she's also working proactively on the frontline to support major, major change in our society today. so Tessa, welcome. lovely to have you here.
Before we talk about the journey you've been on, how you started in law, how you ended up at Uplift or creating Uplift, could you just tell us a little bit, just a few lines about Uplift and what Uplift does?
[: [: [: [: [: [: [: [:But yeah, tell me a little bit about Getting into law, did you know you wanted to be a lawyer at school? where, where did you grow up? Like, yeah, how did you decide to, to become a solicitor initially?
[:because my dad was on his school debating team. But anyway, by the time I got to high school, I had some teachers who encouraged me to pry out for the state's debating team. So, in Australia, there's a sort of national competition and, Students from each state sort of participate in that competition and our school, which was a state school and in Australia, the high school sort of debating scene is very dominated by private schools, but our school happens to host.
a debate when the national competition was hosted in Perth, and I sort of watched these kids and I thought they're amazing. And I definitely thought it was well beyond anything I could do. But my, my English literature teacher at the time was like, why don't you just throw your hat in the ring and see, just show up to the auditions and the cryouts and see how you go.
And so anyway, I was lucky enough to get onto both the state team and then in a subsequent year, the national, the Australian schools debating team. every time. Having joined that, we had an amazing coach, a woman called Andrea Coomber, who is now the CEO of the Howard League for penal reform in the UK, formerly of Justice.
And she brought the team to India where she was living at the time to coach us for a couple of weeks before we went to the World Championships. And anyway, I mean, the sort of summary of that story is that Andrea was working as a human rights lawyer at the time. And she was working for an Indian human rights NGO.
And it was the 1st time that I had ever met anyone who worked as a human rights lawyer, who was using the law for good, I suppose, in a sort of social sense. And I, you know, my parents are immigrants and my dad was an academic in computer science and I didn't have anyone in my social network who was a lawyer.
and so all I knew about it was really sort of what you saw on TV and, and so I just had no idea, really, that you could use the law to engage in sort of social change.and so that was the inspiration, really, for me to become a lawyer. Of course, once you also, I mean, certainly in Australia, the high school debating scene is.
Dominated by people who end up being lawyers and that's, you know, competition sponsored by law firms and suddenly you have all this exposure. And anyway, so that sort of made it seem inevitable in a way that that was the path that I'd
[:How did you get on?
[: [: [:But yes, we weren't the first to go. Winning team that Andrea is close with.
[:I think in America, they're much better at it. And you can see that when you see, you know, American, you come across Americans working in the corporate world. So I, and, and public speaking is one of the things I get asked about a lot. People's So, I don't know if you can hear me, but, there's a lot of people who are struggling or feeling very nervous about public speaking.
So maybe, you know, doing more of it when you're younger, there is an amazing organization here called Toastmasters for anyone who's listening. I'd really recommend joining. There's loads of them all around the country that you can join and you can practice public speaking with them and in a way that doesn't feel daunting.
So if you're interested in that, and if you haven't yet won the world championships of debating, then try. Charlie Toastmasters. Okay. So then, so then you were like law, but did you, what did you know then? Cause I guess also seeing Andrea at the coalface of doing human rights related law in India, you actually saw what it looked like in practice.
Did, did you know that was the area you wanted to go into initially? Or were you just like, no, actually law looks good.
[:We spent summer holidays there, for example, and, you know, especially as a kid, I think you're so sensitive to the massive, inequalities that just looking at the way that people live and not really understanding why it is that, you know, you, despite sharing everything in common with my family, Bangladesh, like I happen to have a completely different lifestyle and quality of life and prospects, and it just didn't make any sense.
You know, it seemed incredibly unfair, but just by virtue of, you know, good luck on the part of my parents. I mean, they worked very hard,
but, There was no reason why my cousins were any less deserving of the opportunities that I have. and so I, yeah, I guess I was very sensitive to that sort of.
Injustice and quality from a pretty young age. And so I knew that that was what I wanted to ultimately work towards. Although, obviously, as a kid, you don't really have any idea what that looks like in practice and what. What careers might offer you the opportunity to do that. but then, yeah, meeting Andrea and saying that human rights law was something that allowed you to engage with those sorts of questions every day and really help to make people's lives better people who are really vulnerable.
and, you know, and, yeah, resolve that sort of injustice seemed like the path that I wanted to go down.
[: [:And also with the encouragement of people like Andrea, who also started her career at a commercial law firm in Australia. Yeah, everybody sort of said to me that regardless of what you do in the sort of medium to long term. Going into a big firm is a great place to get training and to sort of understand the nuts and bolts of legal practice.
And I also, I also saw it as an opportunity to earn some money, you know, given that I knew that I was then planning to leave. I always had a plan to leave after a couple of years and just see what else I could. Moving to, so, yeah, I don't I mean, I don't regret that at all. It was a great kind of training ground.
[: [:So, yeah, that was the,
[: [: [: [:And I've studied a number of the kind of human rights and public law courses. As part of that degree, and I then got a position, it was initially an internship at the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague, which, yeah, well, not strictly speaking human rights law remittance international humanitarian law, all the things that I was interested in.
Yeah, but I, yeah, and then I sort of got a full time consultancy position there after my internship was up. I, you know, I, it was interesting because I think if you had told my sort of 21 year old self that I would get to work in the office of the prosecutor for all crimes tribunal, you know, in the Hague, that would be a dream come true.
But I, I mean, there's, I have huge amounts of respect. I work with unbelievably bright and committed people, but I think I. I was a bit troubled maybe by the. Sort of politics of the institution, it sort of seems like, and I don't think this is a controversial thing to say, but, you know, it was ultimately an effort to create accountability for a conflict that the West had failed to prevent in the 1st place or to sort of.
Mobilize the resource to do something about and, you know, and I think I, I felt like I wanted to be involved in efforts to stop these conflicts from happening. To start with, and that the roots of these conflicts often are about inequality, whether that's social or economic inequality and. And human rights inequalities and so I moved on from, the international criminal tribunal, the former Yugoslavia to working in Washington, D.
C. for the American Bar Association's rule of law initiative, which is basically the American Bar Association is their big sort of legal professional association and they have a wing, the rule of law initiative that supports Lawyers to work to advance human rights and development efforts in other countries.
And so it was really through that. I spent a number of years doing that work and started to really understand the root causes of conflict, which, as I said, I think are often down to social and economic inequality and, you know, That was also when I first started to encounter and just grapple with the role that climate change is also playing in driving those inequalities and, and also actually conflict as well.
[: [:But I think that's part of, part of just what you have to be prepared to do if, you know, provided they're offering a decent salary. I think there's, the world of human rights is so massive and so diverse. Like, you just have a chance often if you, Can't get a role with a very well known organization, like a human rights watcher and embassy international.
You just got to go with what you. What's available.
[:Did it sort of.
[: [: [:and trying to kind of bring my analysis and my tools to bear on a situation that, you know, I really didn't actually know as well as I should have, because I was living in D. C. and so, yeah, so that's so then my sort of next move that I make was to Northern Thailand to work for a Regional women, right?
Women's rights network called the Asia Pacific Forum on Women and Law and Development.
[: [:And that was much more meaningful in a way, because I was working every day with colleagues who, you know, in countries, but where these inequalities were being experienced and Just feeling much like I had a lot more legitimacy in my involvement in those issues, but also working much more closely than I ever could with the people who are really at the front lines of those fights.
[: [: re was a process in the UN in: [: [:Ordinary citizens and their representatives, you know, being somewhere like the UN, where you can just walk up to your government delegation and have a conversation with them is. So, yeah, and then, and then, of course, those, those organizations would go back to their own countries with a much better understanding of what their governments have signed up to.
Therefore, what they can demand that they are accountable for in their own countries, in their own courts, or through the UN human rights mechanisms in Geneva or elsewhere.and so we would also support them to, for example, right. Complaints to to these international human rights mechanisms to say that their governments aren't abiding by the convention on the elimination of discrimination against women, for example, or the other international human rights instruments that are meant to protect women's rights.
[: [:and so I have always been conscious of. How present and serious a threat that is to people who live there, both in terms of, you know, climate change intensifies.the frequency and the severity of natural disasters like typhoons or cyclones that Bangladesh is often hit by and then there's also sea level rise.
So, you know, it's a very low lying country and climate change is driving, an increase in our sea level. So there's just much more regular kind of flooding and encroachment of salt water and drinking water supplies and that kind of thing. so there's that, I guess, quite personal connection and awareness.
And then also the people, the women that I worked with all over Asia, and certainly the Pacific, which is also very vulnerable to climate
[: [:Survival skills, all the way through to the fact that when, you know, when water becomes more scarce, when food becomes more scarce, when people lose their jobs, because, you know, when, you know, agriculture is a huge source of livelihoods for women, and, you know, when there are droughts or floods, those kinds of livelihoods are hardest hit, and women end up bearing the burden of increased child care, increased, you know, All kinds of, you know, domestic obligations, like collecting water, getting food, all of that falls on women and all of those things become harder in a world in a changing climate.
[: [:And I was hearing that from the women that we were working with as well.
[:So it's really, it's great to hear you sort of giving light to, this isn't just, it's not just a climate issue. It's a climate and, and human rights. Issue as well. Yeah.
[:So, I, I basically just came to the view that, you know, if I was serious about working on human rights, then climate change is the biggest systemic threat to our human rights globally. And so that was. Pretty much the beginning of a decision to focus more or less exclusively on that, but always from a human rights perspective.
[: [:So the Paris Agreement on climate change is the big sort of international treaty that was adopted. But, you know, and it's useful in a number of ways, but what it stops short of is creating accountability for how the steps that the government's take to address climate change at the national level. You know, there is no sanction for not doing what you promised to do, which is to keep climate change to a safe level of.
What's 1. 5 degrees of warming compared to sort of pre industrial level. That's the goal. It's in the Paris agreement, but there's no sanction if you don't contribute to reach the goal. And that's the limit of international law often, right, is that they just aren't the kind of accountability that's at the national level.
But I heard about in mid:and I was contacted by some lawyers in the Netherlands who were at the time, Responsible for a case against the Dutch government in which they argued on the basis of human rights law, as well as taught law and a few other laws under the Dutch framework that the Dutch government was acting unlawfully, not cutting the Netherlands greenhouse gas emissions faster.
And they were trying to use a national court to enforce that accountability and I replied and I thought it was super interesting and I wish them luck and I assumed that I'd never hear from them again. Or never hear about again, because what they were trying to do was unprecedented. But then they won that case.
ns by a certain percentage by:because of the human rights harms, basically, that climate change will cause, including in the Netherlands. And, yeah, I just thought that that was such a powerful new way of compelling government action on climate change. So I. Basically, got back in touch with these Dutch lawyers and I said to them, you know, I would be happy to quit my job to work with you to both defend your case against the inevitable appeal that the Dutch government's going to file.
But also to help you work with lawyers and campaigners in other countries to help them do what you've done, but in their own jurisdictions.
[: [:And we supported case, a case that won in the Supreme Court of Ireland. We won in the Netherlands in the Supreme Court ultimately as well. we supported a case in South Korea that was just in the last couple of weeks also successful in their constitutional court.and in the last 6 years, I mean, climate litigation has exploded as a field, not just because of our efforts, but lots of different organizations and individuals who are looking to use national laws to create more incentives and accountability for governments to take climate change seriously.
[: [:You know, and I said to them, that's fine. You know, I'll like, we're trying to create an organization. Someone's got a fundraise for that. And that includes for my position. So I'm happy to take that responsibility on and until I can do that, I'll work as a consultant, you know, just do stuff in my spare time to earn money.
was when I left in, you know,: [:So how was it, did you work through a process, like how did you get, what did, how were you comfortable? Did you have coaching? What, what was it that enabled you to make that decision? Did you do pro and con lists? Like, was there anything or were you just like, I'm like, I'm doing this, I don't care, you know?
[: [: [: [: [: [: [:To an issue that I care extremely deeply about. And I'm pretty sure I'm not going to end up on the street if it goes wrong.
[: [: [:that they've, they're like, look, I'm going to try this out. I'll give myself a year or so. And if it doesn't work, but I think the difference is, is this confidence around. Look, I'll be able to get some sort of job, whereas I think a lot of people are like, I'm on this career trajectory. If I step off, it's like they feel like they're stepping into a black hole.
And that can happen. So if you might lose a few years or you might end up in the going in a slightly different direction. It's that like. Coming off this ordered path, I guess that a lot of people find very hard. Yeah.
[:And and also, I think generally. And certainly someone who now is responsible for recruiting and I've recruited loads of people in the last 10 years. I look very favorably upon people taking risks, and even if it doesn't work out, you know, I, I think that that's good for your safety.
[: [: [: [:To feel safe and to provide safety and then that's a good device. I think.
[: [: [: [: a little while longer, but by:And I, I felt confident that. Value that I was bringing to the organization. was no longer as clear as when I started it, because I had brilliant colleagues who had great strategic instincts and the organization itself was just kind of up and running and ticking along. And so I felt ready to do the next thing and this felt like more of a risk, partly because, you know, when I set up the Climate Litigation Network, I did it with a co founder, my Dutch colleague.
At the time, and there's some sort of safety in that, I suppose. Yeah, but in setting up uplift, which was, you know, born of both the fact that I was by that point living in the UK, and I was very interested in going back to combining. Legal advocacy with other kinds of advocacy. I really believe that the scale of political change that we need.
And economic and industrial change that we need to address the climate crisis. You're not going to achieve that through courts alone. Courts aren't set up to come up with complex policy solutions. You need to engage in political advocacy. You need to change the way the media talks about these issues.
You need to change people's minds. and so I was interested in, in working with all of those tools and I thought that in the UK, it was very interesting that as a country, the UK, Has in many ways shown a lot of leadership on climate change as an issue, but we still have a very large domestic oil and gas industry.
We extract a million barrels of oil and gas a day from the North Sea, and we're at a point where the science is clear that you can't open any new oil and gas fields. We can't add any more oil and gas to existing reserves if we're going to stay within the safe climate limits. And so the UK is. Actions are totally at odds with what's required in that regard.
So anyway, I was like, I would like to work on that and I'd like to do it with all of those tools. And so that's what I was sort of thinking. And ultimately, that's what does that. But starting as another organization and doing it on my own. Yeah, again, a big risk because was a very comfortable place to be at that point.
And we were celebrating for the work that we were doing and it was all going really well and I started working with a coach and that was partly to really think through. Yeah, whether or not that was something I could do, and if I did it, like, how I needed mostly just to equip myself to get comfortable with a huge amount of uncertainty that that would bring.
[:I presume they weren't mentoring you through it. It was you sort of needing to, you know, almost have a twin so you could hear yourself and work through it. Is that what you were doing in the coaching?
[:And, and I think it was really helpful because, you know, my own biases towards not seeing my strengths or underestimating what I'm or overstating risks, you know, all of that very helpful to have someone to just. Who's who also knows what you've done in the past to help remind you what you're actually capable of.
[: [:People who give you 2 million US dollars.
[: [: [:Clearly you were lucky. I mean, obviously it was very fortuitous that you won an award that had money attached, but yeah, it wasn't luck, was it? It was all about your strengths and your achievements. Yeah.
[:But I, yeah, I mean, I'd already been working with the coach at that point because I was also just working through the challenges of leaving my own organization and having the confidence to do that and not feel guilty about doing that because I wanted to move on to the next thing. You know, everything else is just to have the confidence.
That process. yeah, so I had some funding, but I didn't have enough funding to certainly now that we're in year 4. I mean, I, I kind of worked my way through that funding pretty quickly. So I did need to from day 1 go out and continue to
[:So dealing with the media, dealing with senior politicians, like how have you, how have you found that both in terms of confidence and in terms of being a woman? How's that been?
[:thing.
[: [:And I'm constantly banging on about how the UK government needs to do X, Y, Z and, you know, what legitimacy do I have to do that? But I, so I, I was really nervous when I started, you know, my first interview on the BBC or on channel 4 or, you know, it. Those, those are set up to be intimidating
[: [:I, I just had to, I think, I think I did what a lot of women do initially, which is
[: [:I think 6 or 7 interviews in a day. And I, I did 1, 7 minutes after I got off the train. I really am quite and it's just I think I know now that I can do it. And I also know that. Even when I think it's gone badly, I've massively amplified in my own name, and other people don't tend to notice. And even if they do, they don't think twice about it after they've listened to it, you know.
Like, just how much do you overestimate what other people think and how long they should care about?
[:I mean, that's, I, that is brilliant. And I, I'm about to record. Podcasts where I'm talking about the voice in your head. And I, I talk about something called the chimp paradox a lot, which is this, you know, this emotional bit of your brain, the worries a lot about risk. And I often think that our chimps that are there to protect us from risk and alert us to risk, they think there's a black hole.
They think they're going to die. But if you really spend a bit of time analyzing, like how bad could it possibly be, And then how likely is that to happen? You're right. You're not going to die. And then obviously you've shown the more you do it, the more practice you have, the easier and less scary it becomes.
So, yeah, I think that's, that's an amazing, amazing example. And do you get like, I presume, because again, this is quite a controversial area. Do you get negative reactions sometimes? How, how do you deal with that?
[: [: [:Mm-Hmm. or there are certainly, I don't think they're controversial, but they're very powerful interests defending the status quo.and I, yeah, I mean, I'm good at, I think depersonalizing it. So if someone's attacking me, I know they're attacking my argument.
[: [: [:But it's interesting because this, this specific area that you're working in, you can say, I know I'm right. That is amazing as a shield to that sort of, that sort of thing that can really throw you off. Yeah. Yeah.
[: [:And therefore, whatever happens around me with things going wrong, people criticizing me, actually, I'm fine. You've got that in spades with this specific issue, because you're like, I'm right, and we have to do this. So it's, it's a really interesting sort of mirror of a lot of what I work on around. And do you, and you, and you find people bring up the fact you're a woman that comes up, does it, in terms of the negative, the negative stuff that you get?
[: [: [: [: [:Evidence to parliamentary committees and done other things that, as I said, in the past, I thought I would die if I didn't. They sounded so intimidating. Having done those and also watched a lot of other people do those things, I also know that Most people who are on the media are very average. What I mean, like, they're not, it's not that the world is just full of these really exceptional people.
And they're the ones who end up dominating our public lives. Actually, lots of politicians are pretty mediocre and lots of people who get interviewed on the press and lots of journalists, you know, aren't that impressive. And I, you know, and I think that's the other thing I, you know, I just think if they can do it.
I can do it really. And I often, you know, I think when I started doing lots of media, I would have a lot of trouble listening back to myself and I would get my husband to listen back with headphones on and I would just watch his facial expressions. I understand how well I did, but invariably, and often I am on a panel in these interviews with someone from the oil and gas industry.
And, you know, what my husband would always say to me is how much better I was than the other person. And that's partly because I was really well prepared, but partly because, you know, we just overestimate, I think, always how good you have to be to deserve to be in a public space or, or speaking or exercising your voice.
Yeah. Okay.
[:And so, I mean, it's, it's quite amazing when they try it out, just have a go, see what it feels like, and then people are like, Oh, actually it was actually pretty good. So yeah, it's a, it's an amazing. Message to send out there. I mean on in just in terms of because it's it's so regularly in the news in terms of climate protests from Just Stop Oil or Extinction Rebellion.
I mean, what are your and it's a contract again. It is a controversial topic that comes up when roads are disrupted. And what are your thoughts on that? Thoughts around that when you're asked to ask about it, is it the right thing to be doing? yeah, what are your thoughts around that?
[:The 1st is that I really, I really understand the desperation that is at the root of those actions. I understand having spent the last sort of 10 years day and day out reading the climate science and reading.reporting about the impacts of climate change, you know, we are really in, it's hard to overstate how high the stakes are for us, I think, for all of us and how far off track we are, I mean, you know, which is it to say that it's not possible to get back on track, but.
We need to take, we need to treat this like it's an emergency, which is why people call it an emergency. So I think if you really appreciate those stakes, it can seem completely baffling that this isn't the primary preoccupation of our governments and everyone in power. And, I think that if you have tried to elect the right politicians, if you've written to your MPs, if you've done all of the other things that are the normal ways in a democracy, that we try to persuade our governments to do the right thing, and none of those have worked, if you feel like none of those have worked, then I completely understand why you would turn to doing something disruptive, just out of that sense of desperation.
but then I also think that from a sort of strategy perspective, it's also true that disruptive protest, unlawful protest, violent, you know, civil disobedience, those have all been part of the way that social change has happened, both in this country, but also globally. And we often sanitize, I think, in retrospect.
How social big social milestones, including suffrage for women have been achieved. But, you know, the suffragettes were very unpopular at the time and they did things that were violent and they destroyed property. And, and that was part of what made them as high profile and got the attention that they got.
It's also part of how, you know, the ANC in South Africa fought apartheid. You know, we, I think are very happy to just remember that. Parts of those movements that accord with what we think social movements should look like.
[: [:But, you know, as I said, the climate movement, what uplift does is we use all sorts of different labels, including mobilizing people on the streets and protests. And also we take the government to court and we talk to journalists and we talk to politicians, you know, and we talk to the media. We're doing all of this and we do a lot of policy analysis and we have a lot of expertise and we engage with the industry.
We do all of those things and that is what's needed. To shift a problem that is as entrenched and that has as powerful a set of interests behind it as climate change does.
[: [:That's been driven by our dependency on gas in particular. The UK has had the highest household energy bills in Western Europe because we use gas to heat our homes and to generate our electricity in large part. And we know what the alternative to that is, and it's renewable energy, which is It's cheaper.
It's cleaner. It's better for our health, better for the climate. You know, there are so many reasons to move away from fossil fuels like oil and gas, including, you know, as I said, Our affordability of energy as well as climate change. And I think the other thing is that we have an opportunity in the UK with amazing offshore wind resources in particular to be at the forefront globally of building an industry that employs tens of thousands of people that can ensure that we don't just lose jobs in the oil and gas industry.
We can help those people transition into jobs that have a much longer term future. So it's a massive opportunity for this country. Do the right thing on climate, do the right thing nationally, and also show leadership globally. and so I would just say that anything people can do to encourage their friends, their networks, but certainly, you know, your MPs and the government to reinforce that the right thing to do is to move away from oil and gas and not double down on it is really crucial at this moment.
[:Often, when I ask women to talk through their strengths, they're quite slow to tell me them. And often I get two of them out before they start then going, Oh, but, but, and then, but then I don't do this very well. So they'll tell me a strength and then they'll immediately negate it with something they don't do well.
So I would love to hear from you. What are your greatest strengths, do you think? Okay.
[: [: [:You know, I really value that in my colleagues who are lawyers, but I think, I think it's, you know, I often say, you know, when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail, like, it's good to be able to just take a step back and that's something that I think I'm good at doing and seeing where the real gaps are, like, if we really look at what our goal is.
You know, what is it that's missing and what is it that we're doing well and doing that kind of evaluation from a sort of 30, 000 foot perspective is something that I, yeah, that I enjoy doing. And, yeah, and I think I'm good at it.
[: [: [: [:Giving other people credit. Okay.I think, I think you can do amazing things if you are comfortable with giving other people credit.
[: [:And in general, I believe that you create social change. Through movements, not a single organization, not a single person, but, you know, it's going to take a lot of us and that really requires you being comfortable giving away the power and. And I'm quite good at that, I think.
[:This is what happens every time. I think quite the qualifier. So, that's one of the things I work with people on. Now, clearly, look, you're incredibly eloquent. You know, you are passionate and have pursued what you're passionate about in terms of You know, taking personal risk, you know, there are many, many strengths that I could list now that I know people will see.
So I'd encourage everyone out there, just think about what your strengths are, own them and get rid of, I think, and quite, yeah. And then lastly, can I just ask you, like, what, what would your three pieces of advice be to younger self sort of looking back? What would you. What would your piece of advice be that then everyone else can take away with them?
[:Yeah, there's a sort of cognitive bias that. Where, you know, and it's, it's sort of about attachment to your status quo and that seeming like most comfortable place to be and don't. I'm very good at actually weighing up how massive the opportunities on the other side of the risk might be.
[:Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah,
[: [: [: [: [:I think is excellent advice, which is to run your own race, you know, and to not compare yourself to other people. I think women struggle with a huge amount, partly because socially we're set up with all of these milestones and expectations around what we should be doing at a certain point in our lives.
And what success looks like. And I, and I still struggle with that, but I think it's, yeah, it's 1 piece of advice that I come back to again and again, which is not just, you know, it's not just that you never have. Complete information about other people, you know, the sort of information environments we're in are always very incomplete, like, whether it's on Instagram or.
Looking at someone's CV or whatever, but even leaving that aside, it's just so. Damaging, I think, to compare yourself to other people, and it distracts you from being clear on what's important to you as well. And then I think the 3rd thing, which is related to that is to be very clear about and to be led by your values.
[: [:Unhappy is often because they're acting in conflict with their values.
[:If your values are about helping other people. I think I think it's a great stabilizer and a great motivator to come back to what are your. What are your values and how can you live according to those values? Yeah. So amazing pieces of advice. So look, thank you so much Tessa for taking the time to talk to us today.
Please do go and follow Tessa on social media. I will put links into, the podcast so you can, so you can see what she's saying and all the advocacy that, and work that Uplift are doing. And yeah, thank you so much for your time. It's been a real pleasure to talk to you today and a inspiration. Thank you.
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