Dawn French: Shame, apologies, and being a twat
Happy Place
Fearne Cotton
4.6 • 15.2K Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2024
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Perfection has taken on a life of its own in recent years. Dawn French worries that the pursuit of perfection is stopping us from being who we are, and from making mistakes we can grow from.
In this chat, Fearne and Dawn explore why when we have low tolerance for others making mistakes, we’re likely judging ourselves for our mistakes too. So, in order to have more self-compassion, we have to talk about the cringey times we’ve held inside for fear for being shamed.
They also discuss the best ways to apologise when we’re in the wrong, and to allow space for robust debate that might just change our minds. Plus, why it’s so important to be able to say “I don’t know”.
Dawn’s book, The Twat Files, is out now.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Happy Place. I'm Fern Cotton and this is the show that encourages |
| 0:06.3 | curiosity and gentle growth. Today I'm catching up with Dawn French. We're all talking about inclusivity and you |
| 0:14.6 | know favoring difference and all the rest of it and that's all great I love the idea |
| 0:18.3 | of that but that's not how we're living we're massively intolerant and |
| 0:21.1 | bullying and trolling and stuff which has got nothing to do with |
| 0:25.1 | understanding how other human beings operate and yet we are human beings |
| 0:29.4 | we are people who know we make mistakes we know we have shortcomings we know all this stuff but because |
| 0:35.8 | we are expected to present ourselves as perfect it's just wiped out any margin for error. |
| 0:44.0 | Oh, I'm so excited to have Dawn back on the podcast. |
| 0:47.6 | As we discuss, she was one of the first people who ever said yes to being on the Happy Place Podcast when we first started and I am forever |
| 0:56.7 | grateful for that. We covered more of her wonderful life story in that episode so do listen to that if you'd like to scroll all the way |
| 1:04.6 | back but this time I wanted to talk about something else the horrible shame that can |
| 1:10.9 | come with making mistakes and I wanted to talk about it because I really, really |
| 1:15.8 | don't think it should be that way. We need space to be imperfect. Dawn's new book, The Twat Files, is a celebration of imperfection. |
| 1:25.2 | Dawn's put every cringe moment from her life in there, from flirting and on-screen crushes, |
| 1:31.6 | to Pony Club and Elton John. There are so many mishaps, so many |
| 1:37.4 | misunderstandings, basically loads of gorgeous messy humanness. It's laugh-out-loud funny, it's warm and it is so wise. |
| 1:47.0 | All things at this chat with Dawn Wars II, we talked about compassion, about apologizing, about how we're |
| 1:54.0 | how we're shaming each other into silence and about why it's so |
| 1:57.5 | incredibly powerful to say the words I don't know. |
| 2:01.3 | Now a huge thank you to the sponsors of this episode near Australia's |
| 2:06.4 | number one fashion travel brand. What kind of packer are you? I like to start |
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