Mary's Cup of Tea: the Self Love Podcast for Women

If making friends feels hard, then this episode is for you.

You will learn...

Our guest, Kat Vellos, is a trusted expert on the power of cultivating meaningful friendships. She’s a speaker and author of the book, We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships. She’s also the creator of the Better than Small Talk conversation cards and the Better Conversations Calendar. Her work helps people transform disconnection and platonic longing into authentic connection and belonging.

In her former career as a user experience designer at Slack and Pandora, she helped millions of people find music they love and enjoy work a lot more. While working full-time at both of those iconic companies, Kat spent her free time researching and writing her debut book We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships. She couldn’t stop herself from writing this book because the thirty-something friendship desert is real and she refused to take “how about we meet up in six weeks?” for an answer. So she used her UX research-n-design superpowers to explore the question “how might we design a better experience of adult friendship and simultaneously put a sizable dent in the loneliness epidemic?” Thousands of readers use her book to improve their friendships every day and her writing is read in over 100 countries. She’s been interviewed by The New York Times, NPR, Communication Arts, The Good Life Project, and many more.

Sign up for Kat’s newsletter here and check out her course, Platonic Action Lab.

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Mentioned In This Episode...

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(Trigger Warning: Talk of EDs & Fatphobia)

Dear Mary,

How do I navigate friendship with a very fatphobic and generally-judgmental friend?

She is someone I met when I had anorexia. A lot of what we bonded over was the understanding of restrictive eating, because she had struggled with that as well. She is former military and has a lot of military influences to the way she views health and fitness, as well as having parents who engrained fatphobia into her. They would literally sit in the car outside grocery stores and make fun of fat people leaving(not to their faces). Her views and the vocalization of them hurt my soul, they are not an outlook on other people I have ever had, nor would want to have. She talks about these things pretty frequently. A lot of the things she says I would never want my younger sister hearing because I don't want those hurtful views in her head.

I know you wonder, this person sounds awful, why do you have this friend? She is in many ways a wonderful person and a good friend. She is thoughtful, she and I just click in many ways, she is giving and loving to the people close to her, I could go on about qualities I love. But lately my feelings toward her are not good. I don't want to be around her because inevitably she will end up saying some things that really bum me out. I want her to be a lifelong friend, I want to be there for her for anything, I want to babysit her kids...but I would never want her views to be shared with mine.

How do I talk to her about this? Though we challenge each other's views pretty often and are used to confrontation, she is not looking to change her mind on this. For months now I have been avoiding spending as much time around her. Neither of us have many other friends...she is a treasured person for me. What's your advice on keeping or losing a friend because of this?

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Get Mary’s self-love books:

The Gift of Self-Love, an interactive workbook that will help you build confidence, recognize your worth, and learn to finally love yourself.

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I went to Cuba knowing it wouldn’t be a typical vacation, but I wasn’t prepared for just how profoundly it would move me.

To every question I asked my tour guide, the answer was almost always, “It’s complicated.” They say you will leave Cuba with less answers and more questions— here are some of mine:

How can something be equal parts heartbreaking and heartwarming? Where is the boundary between suffering and resilience? How does history encapsulate both truth and fabrications? Why do we cling to binary thinking when life is a spectrum of endless complexities? How can humans be simultaneously broken and whole, like mosaics made of shattered multitudes?

Cuba was a lesson in coexistence—where beauty and struggle, joy and pain live side by side. It reminded me that we, too, are complex and layered, yet capable of holding contradictions within us. I hope you get to experience this beautiful island one day too.

Mentioned In This Episode...

Chen Lizra’s TEDx talk: “The power of seduction in our everyday lives”

Check out Heart of Travel, an ethical travel company that does tours all over Latin America and use code MARY150 for $150 off your next trip.

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Self-criticism is NOT a good long-term motivation strategy. Let’s talk about how to motivate yourself with self-compassion instead.

Tune in to learn...

Remember: You don’t need to wait until you’re perfectly motivated to start taking action. Imperfect, messy, reluctant action will often be enough to prove to yourself that you CAN do it, that you DO have it in you which creates a positive feedback loop. Micro steps matter.

If you enjoyed this episode, screenshot it and tag @maryspodcast on social media! And make sure to get Mary's book, The Gift of Self-Love. It’s a self-love workbook that will help you build confidence, recognize your worth, and learn to finally love yourself.

Mentioned In This Episode... 

Self-Compassion Researcher Dr. Kristin Neff on Mary's Cup of Tea  

The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity Research Study

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“My new years resolution is to get louder, more annoying, bitchier, and overall a bigger problem that previously thought.” ~@julesandthevibe on TikTok

This is not a soft self-love episode. This is an audacious one.

Because 2025 is the year of audacity.

It’s time to stop apologizing for taking up space, to say the weird thing, and to bet on yourself—even when it feels clunky, messy, or downright scary. From trying new things to dressing a little less “perfect” and a lot more “you,” this episode is all about stepping into bold, unapologetic self-expression.

You’ll feel inspired to:

Let’s kick off 2025 with more audacity, more weirdness, and a whole lot more FAFO energy. You in?

Grab my Feeling Lost Guide to turn uncertainty into SELFISH SELF-DISCOVERY.

If you enjoyed this episode, share and tag @maryspodcast on social media!

Buy Mary’s books:

Mentioned In This Episode...

“My New Years resolution is to get louder” Viral TikTok video

Ep. 231 with my bestie DahliArchitectural Digest video with David Netto:

Ep. 201: Tips for Thrifting and Vintage Shopping with Virginia Chamlee

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A special in-person recording where Mary has a heart-to-heart with her best friend Dahli! You can watch the video version on Spotify or YouTube.

Tune in to hear…

Remember: live, laugh, love!!!

Connect with Dahli on IG: @imdahlidurley

If you enjoyed this episode, share and tag @maryscupofteaa and @imdahlidurley on social media!

Get Mary’s self-love books:

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In some ways, women are known as being the connectors, the party hosts, the drivers of relationships. A byproduct of spending centuries constrained to child-rearing and home-making is that many of us have this bio-cultural skill of building community. Why is it then that many of us feel intimidated by other women, lacking in our female friendships, and worrying if our friends truly like us? And as soon as we get over that, finally let someone close to us, they sometimes end up breaking our heart and with it, the friendship. Best friend break-ups involve as much grief as romantic break-ups and yet, we don’t have as many tools to deal with them. Luckily, Danielle Bayard Jackson is here to help us build strong friendships, especially those with fellow women.

Danielle Bayard Jackson is a female friendship coach and educator who speaks nationally about the science of women’s platonic connections. She is also the author of the book Fighting for Our Friendships (May 2024).

Danielle’s coaching business, Friend Forward, is dedicated to teaching women how to create and maintain better female friendships, and her expertise has been featured in The New York Times, NBC News, Psychology Today, Wall Street Journal, Oprah Magazine, Good Morning America, and a host of other media outlets. A former high school teacher, Danielle now uses her teaching skills and leverages her background to study what the latest research has to say about women’s cooperation, communication, and conflict.

You will learn about...

Remember: self-love begs us to have a balance between independence and dependence.

Follow Danielle on Instagram

And if you enjoyed this episode, screenshot it and share it on social media! Make sure to tag @maryspodcast and @daniellebayardjackson

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In this week’s episode, Mary discusses the importance of self-trust and how it plays a role in developing a deeper, more authentic relationship with yourself. She shares how trusting yourself means letting go of control over outcomes and embracing the process, especially when things don’t go as planned.

Remember: Trust the process, release the result.

If you enjoyed this episode, share and tag @maryspodcast on social media!

Get Mary’s self-love books:

Mentioned In This Episode...

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Dear Mary,

I would love some of your wisdom in relation to my ex.

Things fell apart for reasons that are complicated and awful. But we tried to remain friends. I feel I made an effort, I kept messaging, I asked him about his life, I organized a catch up. I still had lots of feelings to process but I put them aside because I wanted to maintain a friendship.

I backed off a bit while he was on holidays and when he came back and messaged me, I was in a bad place mentally. It took a week or so for me to respond and I told him the truth - that I wasn’t doing well. His response had no empathy. He didn’t ask what was going on or if I wanted to catch up.

Do I tell him how I’m feeling or do I accept he can’t meet my emotional needs and let the friendship go?

Love from,

If you enjoyed this episode, share and tag @maryspodcast on social media!

Get Mary’s self-love books:

Mentioned In This Episode...

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This was supposed to be a well-thought-out, polished interview with artist and author Carissa Potter, better known as @peopleiveloved on Instagram. Instead, this turned out to be a vulnerable conversation about parents, religion, narcissism, and overall, our human-ness.

Our guest today, or perhaps more accurately our co-host Carissa has over 800,000 followers on social media but the first sentence on her website says that “Carissa Potter is a human longing for connection.” She writes books, makes art & public commissions, and hosts the series Bad At Keeping Secrets (one of Substack’s featured newsletter of 2022) where she talks to other humans doing really interesting things. Carissa is the founder of People I’ve Loved, her platform and stationary line that bridges the gaps between people by helping them have authentic and sometimes difficult conversations. She was named one of Cosmopolitan’s 24 People (Genuinely) Making the World a Better Place and I couldn’t agree more.

This is an extraordinarily raw and real conversation about...

Remember: humans are complex creatures but at our core, all we want is connection with other humans.

Follow Carissa on Instagram: @peopleiveloved

And if you enjoyed this episode, screenshot it and share it on social media! Make sure to tag @maryspodcast and @peopleiveloved

Mentioned In This Episode...

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