"I still forget that I am lying to some people”

In 2020, Piroska left her home country, Romania, and moved to England for good. Without much pre-planning, in the middle of COVID pandemic, two suitcases, and around £200 in her pocket. But she made it work - she found a place to live, friends, a partner she adores, finished her master’s degree in Organisational Psychology, and is currently in the early stages of building her consulting business alongside her full-time job.

I noticed Piroska on Substack. As someone who’s actively investigating how we can build companies where people can thrive and do meaningful work, I found her notes on the platform very relatable. I liked a few, then I liked more; eventually, she reached out to say hi, which, little by little, led me to ask her to answer some thought-provoking questions so I could share them all here, for everyone to see, in their rawest form.

If I followed you around for a normal day, what would I see?

If I am at work, my day looks like this: I wake up quite early and usually do some exercise. I try to do some yoga poses just for digestion. I do not do it every single day. Then I go up to my attic, sit down, and start to get ready. I am filming videos for social media, or, if I have to post something, I might just do that. I do my makeup, and once I am ready, I go down to the kitchen and make my breakfast. Even then, I am still thinking of ways to improve the business.

Once I have had a bit of breakfast, I go to work. At the moment, I work in employability. It is quite a tough sector. I didn’t think it would be so difficult, but I always choose jobs that aren’t the easiest. I am there for about seven hours. I leave the house around 7:50am and then get home around 6pm. After 6pm, it varies. When I come home, I will most likely have dinner with my partner, and after that, I sit down and just work on my business, whether that is generating another newsletter, posting on social media, making a LinkedIn post, or perfecting something on the website. I do something to get ahead in the business, and I always try to interact with people online as well.

You would see someone living two realities: one is the person who goes to work and does something they don’t mind but know isn’t the job they will do long-term. In the back of their mind, while they are at work, they are still thinking about the business and things they can improve because, ultimately, I am obsessed with human behaviour, and that is what I want to focus on.

Do you find this exhausting? How long do you think you can continue with this without burning out?

I’m doing therapy and coaching; both said that you have to find a way to make it manageable at work because you need the income. Unless you can find something to replace that income with, you don’t really have a choice. So right now, I don’t have any safety net, I don’t have savings, so I don’t have a choice. I found a way to manage my state at work, and I was offered a different position, which made it easier to be creative and have energy after work.

But I don’t know how long I can do this, to be honest. For now, I just want to be in the present and enjoy the journey. Because if I keep focusing on what’s going to happen or what might happen, then I’m gonna burn out a lot quicker. That’s why I need some days when I do absolutely nothing.

How many different “versions” of a career or life have you tried on?

I had 15 jobs (plus being a founder) in 13 years, and that is over 7 industries. I guess I have had over 7 different versions of a career or life that I tried, and this version of me in the present is the one that I am most proud of. All of the other careers that I have had gave me enough information so that I get to this point where I can actually use all that knowledge, all that resilience that I have learned, all the psychology that I have learned, and the human behaviour and body language. That is why this is my favourite one, because it will ultimately help me do something that I am incredibly passionate about.

Some of the industries that I have worked in include hospitality. That is how I started. My bachelor’s is actually in tourism and economics. Then I did some office work. In the office, I did customer service, but it was handling rejections for hotel rooms that hotels sent through for customers. Honestly, that was one of the coolest jobs in terms of character building, negotiation, and logistics. I always had to ensure losses were minimal for both our clients and the business. I feel like that was a really cool job to have while I was studying for my bachelor’s, and it shaped my career and my thinking a lot.

Another cool job I had was project manager for a solar company. I feel like that was also very interesting because I had to manage projects like pilots going on solar farms and different sites. From the job’s point of view, it was quite interesting and very unique. I have also done recruitment. I did not enjoy it. I thought I was not good at sales, but I realised the reason why I was not good at sales is that my values are different. I am a very honest person; I do not like lying, and sales is kind of lying in a way, depending on the industry. You have to kind of bend the truth sometimes, and in that specific industry, I had to, and that just did not match my values, so I was really bad at it. I never enjoyed it. Now I am an entrepreneur, but it has been difficult to accept this version of myself because I don’t think of myself as an entrepreneur, but I have to think of it because everything I have been doing in the past few months is pretty much what entrepreneurs do.

Why did you change your jobs so many times?

I would say that it’s very few jobs that I had that I didn’t like because of the job. There are a lot of jobs that I absolutely adored, but I left because there was either no place for me to develop more or the culture was really toxic. And my biggest reason for leaving most jobs is a lack of flexibility. I cannot be boxed in.

Was there ever a career version that you desperately wanted to try but couldn’t?

Yes. The most recent one, when I finished my degree, and I was looking into what I could do as a job, and there’s something called organisational development. I was applying for those jobs, and I was just rejected for all of them because on paper, I don’t necessarily have the experience. And usually people are not willing to take a risk. And to be honest, I gave up very quickly. I’m not going to put my energy into something that might not have a return. So I didn’t apply for many jobs, maybe like 10 or 15, but it didn’t work out.

What are you mid-experiment with right now?

Building my consultancy so I can leave my full-time job, and it’s been such a conflicting feeling because, right now, with what I am doing at my job, it is actually okay. I am getting stimulated. I am learning something new, and I am around people who are really, really nice, so I cannot complain. The only thing I am complaining about is the salary. It’s absolutely baffling that we are having these salaries in 2026. But besides that, I cannot complain. Still, because of the salary, I am forced to do something else so I can actually afford to live.

That is why I have to experiment with business and social media and being online. I am getting over my fear of being visible, but I still have days when I doubt myself. It is extremely difficult to believe in myself.

Why do you think self-belief is so difficult for you?

I don’t believe in myself when it comes to achieving certain milestones. When I look at my whole life, I’ve been able to do many different things, but they were not necessarily related to money goals. But when it came to money goals, I was never able to achieve them. I do believe that I can achieve anything. I’ve always believed that. I’ve done some crazy things in my life, but this one thing.

If any parent is going to read this, I just really hope that they will tell their children that they can do anything. Because the worst thing you can do for a child is telling them that they cannot achieve things because of X, Y, Z.

What’s making you angry lately - about your work, the world, or yourself?

About my work - the money.

About the world - women, children, especially girls, getting hurt by bad people. I do not know how we are letting this happen, or why this is happening on such a big scale. The media is telling us of something horrific every single day, and that makes me very, very angry, and it makes me sad, and it makes me want to do something to contribute so that it reduces.

About myself - my health. I don’t take care of my health enough, and it shows. I feel like once you cross your 30s, you need to be even more aware of your health because there are lots of different problems that come up. Even though I have time to go to the gym or work out, I still don’t. I still choose comfort, and I make an excuse about working on my business instead of setting aside 30 minutes to work out.

What’s a fear that’s been steering your decisions lately?

Whether I should quit my job and go full-on with my business or stay a bit longer because I need the security and to try to make some money on the side. I am not someone who needs six months of emergency savings to quit. I am very much fine with having less and just going all in, and if it does not work, I can always get a different job. But right now, because we are not in the best financial place, I cannot really afford to quit. That means that I am in more of a comfort zone than I should be. While I am actively working on the business, I feel like it is not moving as fast as I would like. So it is just a fear around money, and that is something I am working on with my therapist and even with my coach.

Have you ever failed at something big?

The first thing that came to my mind is that year in my bachelor’s when I failed my dissertation; it was not accepted, and because of that, I had to wait one more year. My bachelor’s was supposed to be four years, but because I was working a lot in the first three years, I failed a lot of my exams and had to redo them. It took me longer than expected, and when my dissertation failed, I had to wait another year and redo it. So instead of four years, it took me six years.

At that point, I thought it was a massive failure because everyone around me was asking, “When are you finishing? Why is it taking so long?” There was a lot of pressure, even pressure from myself. I vividly remember how sad I was late at night when everyone in the house was sleeping. I was so angry. I wanted the feeling to go numb and to forget about it.

Failing at that age was very difficult, but putting myself back together wasn’t easy. I just had to keep going, and thankfully I had a supportive family who helped me through it. The next year, I finished my dissertation and graduated. Thanks to putting myself back together, I was able to do another degree and be here in a different country.

What do you want people to remember about how you lived, not just what you did?

I want people to remember how I contributed to society. I feel like humanity just destroys itself. That is what we have learned in the past, and I don’t think we are any different in the 21st century. I want people to think that I was happy, that I genuinely achieved a sense of happiness because I chose to be happy every day. Our decisions are a choice; what we do in life, we choose. I do not want anyone to think that I was miserable or that I was not helping. I want people to remember me as someone who would be there for them and was doing everything.

What’s a role you’ve played so well, for so long, that you’ve started to forget you’re playing it?

Showing different faces to the people around me. I don’t think I am alone in this; everyone does. When you are ambitious but around people who aren’t always ambitious, you have to dumb it down and be very cautious about what you say and what you share. I think that I have been doing this for a very long time. I have been very calculative with certain people about how I talk to them and what I share about my life because I have learned over the years that if I have a dream that is really big and there is someone with a closed mindset, they are either going to make fun of it or say that it is not achievable. This happened before.

Now there are some friends who don’t even know that I want to start a business or that I’m already doing one. Some friends don’t even know I quit my previous job. My family does not actually know that I quit my previous job and now have a new job. Sometimes I forget about it. Thankfully, it is the same industry, so it is not that difficult to hide, but I still forget that I am lying to some people. This is quite contradictory because I said that one of my values is honesty, but unfortunately, as much as I want to be honest, I feel like in my work I need to have integrity, but in my personal life I cannot share every single detail of myself because it would be exhausting having to explain it over and over again.

What did you inherit from your family that you’ve spent your whole life trying to put down?

All the money beliefs. I inherited the worst money beliefs from my family, and to this day it haunts me. Having this limiting belief that I do not deserve more money has been very difficult. That is probably why I have been stuck in life, why I have a lot of debt, and why I made a lot of bad financial choices. I am not good with finances, and I also feel like I have not been able to really pivot in my career because I thought that I did not deserve more money.

So even when it came to going to new jobs, I was always afraid to ask for more. Women are usually afraid to ask for more; that is nothing new. But for me personally, I know that this came from my family. Just hearing things like money does not grow on trees or that things like that are not possible for people like us. The reason why I do not say a lot of things about myself to my family is that they would not believe it. There is no point in me saying now that, “oh, I am doing a business and I know I am going to become a millionaire.” This is something they will not accept or believe because they will again say that these things do not happen to people like us.

I did not grow up around business-minded people. I didn’t grow up around many people who made a lot of money. Even in my adult life, I haven’t been around many successful people. That saying really goes to show that if you are around millionaires, you are going to become one as well. But if you are around people who are struggling with finances, you are most likely going to struggle with finances as well. That is very, very true for me. It is something that, at nearly 32, I am still trying to figure out, but I feel like I am getting closer to it.

What’s a thought you actively avoid thinking about?

The thought I avoid is that I am not going to have enough money in the next few months. Every time I think about it, I know it is because of the belief that I grew up with. So instead of thinking about it, I just redirect it and say that I am doing all the right things right now, my life is changing, and I am in a very privileged position to be in a country where I can earn money, where I am independent, I have an amazing partner, and I have people and family that support me. Before I actively worked on changing these thoughts, I would just keep them. If I would think how will I be able to pay my rent in the next few months, I would just think of all the possibilities that it would not happen, that could go wrong, whereas now I am thinking of all the possibilities that can go right.

What are the inner demons that stop you from doing or being everything you want?

Before, it was the fear of being visible, and I would make myself feel very small and not really be out there; I wouldn’t be opinionated, which is very sad because I used to be very opinionated. Then after a while, my confidence just got very low, and it took some time to rebuild. So I think it was a lot of fear around being visible and posting online, and then I realised that actually nothing happens when you do. The reason why it is scary to do it is that when it is related to a job, or to income, then you feel that you can lose that. That it may limit how much money I can earn, whether I can earn money at all, or whether I could be fired from my job.

Have you ever hurt someone and never really apologised, but it still haunts you today because you feel you should?

There is a friend that I have known for a very long time. I haven’t been talking to that friend because every time I talked to them, they were really, really negative, and I got tired of listening to that negativity. Actually, they have beliefs about money very similar to my parents’. They have a scarcity mindset, and not just about that, but even about what other people are doing. They have always been more jealous. I just did not want to live with that. I don’t want to live around people who aren’t happy with what I am doing or what others are doing. So naturally, I have been hiding parts of myself because I felt like I had to. Literally, everything I have to tell is a lie. It is haunting me, and I know that I have to break the ice and actually explain why I am ignoring them and not talking to them.

What’s a version of your life you gave up on that you still grieve?

I have given up on moving back to my home country. Sometimes it makes me sad because I am away from my family, and I do not have the luxury of just calling my mom and going over anytime. I can call her, of course, but I cannot just see her. That is probably why I wanted to become financially free, because then I would have the freedom to go see my family anytime. It would not be a problem with the money and the cost of the tickets or the trip, but it would also give me the possibility to bring them here to England to visit.

I often wonder what would have happened if I had just stayed at one of the companies where I was quite a successful employee, but I decided to quit because it was becoming toxic. I see people who are still working at that company, and they have been there for like 10 years. I cannot even imagine being somewhere for 10 years. The longest I have ever worked for a company was close to three years, and that was the job in Romania that I really loved. I often wonder what my life would have looked like if I stayed there, but honestly, I would not change a thing. I do think about what would happen, but I do not grieve it at all. I am happy that I decided to do this and that I get to be here.

If you knew you only had six months left to live, how would you spend them, and how different would that be from the life you’re actually living right now?

If I only had six months to live, I would 100 per cent just be an advocate for women. There’s nothing that makes me more angry than seeing how many women are hurt purely because of violence and often male violence. I don’t care how many people would shut me down and say that you’re overreacting, that’s not true, and it’s not all men, and all these things, but it doesn’t matter because it still happens. My empathetic side is talking, and it breaks my heart into a million pieces that I have to see horror stories every single day of how women are hurt, and there are more and more of them being hurt every day. We are not even talking about the other countries where women don’t even have rights. I feel like if I only had six months, I would go all in.

A few years ago, I started to talk about this on my TikTok, and I was getting some traction, but then I stopped because I was too afraid to keep pushing this agenda. Now I can see that there are more women who need to speak up about it and more men who need to speak up about it. I would definitely educate and just be the voice of women who don’t know how to speak up for themselves or don’t have the resources to speak up for themselves. I would definitely even try to get some men on my side who can advocate for women as well. I have already implemented that into my business. I always try to write a piece about it and do more research on it.

What annoys or irritates you in other people that you suspect is actually a reflection of your own experience or your own shortcomings?

Lost potential. When I see someone having potential and they are blocking themselves from it. I recognise myself in this, because I think I block a lot of things myself, or at least I used to, and I am not living life to the fullest. It takes a tremendous amount of mindset and mental resilience to change your behaviour and limiting beliefs. Now that I am getting the hang of it, I find it annoying when I see someone who doesn’t think they can do anything in life.

I remember when I was visiting my hometown, and I was out with a friend. There was a bartender—a girl—and she was in a different class but the same school. I was shocked that she was still working there. Not that there’s anything wrong with bartending, but I always thought of her as someone very beautiful. I was thinking, why is she here? Doesn’t she want anything more for herself? Now I realise the reason why I was thinking this is because my biggest fear is settling down. I’m not talking about settling down as in buying a house and being settled in one place. I mean not wanting to evolve as a human. That’s my biggest fear.

That is why it really annoys me when I see some people who clearly have potential but put so many blockages in front of them that they don’t know how to get out of them. I’m probably annoyed because I see my past self in them, and I want these things to happen to me, so I naturally want them to happen to others. I want others to win, too. That’s why it really irritates me.

Have you ever felt pity for yourself, even when you knew it was a bit silly?

I can’t say I had an easy life, but compared to many others, I probably did. Still, I feel pity when I think about how so many things happened that were difficult to process, and I feel like I am not getting a break. If something is going right for a while, it will definitely go bad soon after, and then I have to start all over again. So I fell into the trap of feeling sorry for myself, of being frustrated and angry about why things are not working out.

I also feel pity for my younger self. When I think back on my childhood, I remember that I was told by teachers that I wasn’t particularly smart. Which is really fascinating to think about, because when I look at myself now, I wouldn’t say I’m book smart, but I would definitely call myself intelligent in the sense that I think in a logical way. I would say I can have intelligent conversations, I educate myself a lot, and I can retain things that interest me. So this whole thing that I think of myself—that I wasn’t smart—probably comes from the fact that some of my teachers didn’t think that I was. As a child, I feel tremendous pity for myself because of how others treated me, and they didn’t realise that I just maybe needed a different way of learning things, and I would have been... okay.

What’s one weakness you have that makes your life harder than it should be?

The overthinking. I find it difficult at times to be in the present. I constantly think of the future and want to be in the future. When I think of my past, I’ve achieved most of what I wanted. So it makes no sense to keep wishing for a future and struggling to understand why it’s not happening when it actually is happening. How does one even start to be present? It’s another conscious effort you have to make, where you constantly tell your brain that you are happy and grateful. The world keeps trying to make you feel that you need more, you need to achieve more, you need to be this more, you have to do more and more and more.

There are days when I’m better at it, but there are definitely days when I’m really, really bad at it, and I’m thinking, I wish my brain would just stop. And obviously, we know that if you go out in nature or if you do something with your hands, your brain starts to quiet down. I think that’s also one of the biggest reasons why it’s more difficult for me, because I work in places where I’m not always mentally stimulated, so I try to escape that reality.

If you could exchange one of your qualities with someone else, what would you give away, and what would you take?

I would exchange having less empathy and sensitivity. While I feel grateful to be able to connect with humans on a deeper level, it has also held me back several times from achieving things or being at peace with certain things. I would love to experience having a brain that isn’t affected by noise, light, and people’s energies/feelings. Growing up, I never understood what was wrong with me; I only learned a few years ago that there is something called hypersensitivity. It is not something that is taught in school. It’s not a recognised medical condition, yet it can affect someone’s life deeply. It affected mine multiple times throughout my life, when I felt like I didn’t belong, or I was overreacting, too aggressive, too soft, too sensitive, too emotional, too much. At 31, I give myself more grace and forgiveness, because I didn’t know better.

I would take the quality of an action taker. I am too much in my head sometimes, partially because of my empathy and sense of morality, so I would like to take the quality of someone who just thinks about something and takes action, and they are fine with it. I lost a lot of my years not taking action because I was too afraid of what someone might think about me and my life. That is once again something I had to unlearn and just stop giving a damn. Some days it works better than others.

Is there a specific section in a song, movie, or book that you keep coming back to because you feel that it changed the trajectory of your life? Curious about what exactly changed.

When I was in school, maybe about 12-13 years old, I had a private maths tutor. She gave me a book called Pollyanna - it was a book about gratitude. About a little girl who lost both parents and ended up at an auntie’s house who did not like children. But her dad taught her how to look at the bright side of everything and find the good in every bad. That had a massive impact on my life. I always think about this book and what a big impact it made in my life, as well as the tutor at that time. Teaching such a young girl about what is actually important in life is something I will be forever grateful for.

I do have to mention the second book called The Tragedy of Man by Imre Madách (1861). I read it when I was in school, maybe around 15 years old. It already made a difference in my life then. It follows Adam and Lucifer through different periods of human history, as humanity repeatedly searches for the ideal system—power, democracy, religion, science, revolution, capitalism, and ultimately technology.

Each experiment reveals new contradictions and failures, leaving Adam questioning whether human existence has any meaning at all. Yet the conclusion is ultimately hopeful: we may never know where humanity is heading or whether our efforts will succeed, but we should “strive and have faith.” From an organisational psychology perspective, I find this fascinating because Madach was able to predict human behaviour. He didn’t predict the future, but he predicted how humans will behave regardless of what they are achieving. That couldn’t be more true in a world full of greed, power, religion, and capitalism. It is scary because once you understand philosophy and you continuously question the meaning of life and what you should do or shouldn’t do, you can get a bit mental. So I would say I have to treat reading these types of books and analysing them with care.

Mid-Experiment is a series of long-form interviews with people who are building their lives intentionally rather than defaulting into them. Career switchers, job quitters, life experimenters, and people who want to see what else is out there for them.

Designing a life is mostly guesswork done in private, and these interviews are here to make someone else’s guesswork and uncertainties about building the life they want visible. If you’re able to relate, resonate, or get useful insights into someone else’s messy middle, then the series achieved its goal.

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