The Project’s Sarah Harris’ candid interview: ‘Felt like I was failing at everything’

Nearly one year on from joining The Project desk, Sarah Harris has spoken candidly about the highs and lows of the job.

The Project’s Sarah Harris knows what it’s like to juggle.

Since January, the TV presenter, 42, has been navigating a high-profile role on Ten’s news panel program in Melbourne while parenting her Sydney-based sons, Paul, 7, and Harry, 4.

Opening up about the daunting reality of the situation to Stellar magazine this week, Harris admitted it had taken her “a few months to really find my feet” after “up-ending” her entire life.

“Sometimes if I think about it too deeply, it’s overwhelming. It’s pretty chaotic, my life,” she told the publication, detailing the routine which sees her fly between Sydney and Melbourne twice a week.

Sarah Harris’ Stellar magazine shoot. Picture: Sam Bisso for Stellar

Harris went on to explain that she used to try and “manage the chaos” but now she’s just “embracing it”.

“You have to be resilient and ready to roll with the punches, which I think I’m pretty good at. I do like my routine, so to up-end that and trying to parent, as well, it’s a lot. So you just take a big breath and you just do it day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute.”

While her routine works for the most part, Harris admitted to Stellar there were times when she was overcome with “mum guilt” and left feeling like she was “failing at everything”.

“The biggest critic of me taking this job and being away from the boys a couple of days a week … was me,” she said.

“It felt really hard to come to terms with that. I felt like I was failing at everything – failing at being a mum, failing with the show.”

However, Harris added, she realised she needed to “put that aside” because if she’d turned down the Project hosting role, she’d have “had resentment”.

“It was something that I really had to take some time to think about, and to give myself a pep talk about, because I love being a mum,” she explained.

“I try to get to as much as I possibly can, like every working parent, but there are times when you beat yourself up and you fall into the spiral of ‘I’m a terrible mother’. That’s just got to

stop. Because, for me, working makes me a better mum.”

Harris with her Project co-host Waleed Aly. Picture: Channel 10

Harris’ balance between work and home life is made easier by her co-parenting arrangement with Tom Ward, whom she married in 2014 but split from six years later.

“We’re in a really good spot,” she told the magazine of their current relationship.

However, three years on from her separation, Harris insisted she isn’t ready to start dating anyone new.

“I don’t have the time … when I’m in Sydney, I’m with my boys to the point of, they sleep in my bed with me,” she explained to Stellar.

“If I was to find anyone, I’d have to give up time with my kids, and that’s just not a sacrifice I want to make … So certainly not any time in the near future is anything happening like that.

Harris then joked: “It stresses me out to think about because it would mean I’d have to shave my legs and sort my bikini line out, and I don’t want to do that. I just don’t have the time.”

The TV presenter, who hosted Studio 10 for almost a decade before joining The Project, also opened up about the added scrutiny that comes with the job.

“Certainly at Studio 10 in the early days I would watch the ratings pretty closely but then you just realise you can’t control that and it’s actually not your job to, and it can affect how you perform on air,” Harris said, before describing a recent Project segment which helped a young mum battling leukaemia raise $85,000 for her charity.

“You have to change the way you measure your success … In a space of a week we had raised $85,000 for this woman which is, I think, like 80 per cent of her fundraising budget for the entire year. So that’s the difference we can make.”

Read the full interview in Stellar, available in News Corp’s The Sunday Telegraph (NSW), Sunday Herald Sun (Victoria), The Sunday Mail (Queensland), and Sunday Mail (SA)

Originally published as The Project’s Sarah Harris’ candid interview: ‘Felt like I was failing at everything’