“Give people pleasing the finger!” Fearne’s no longer trying to be liked
Happy Place
Fearne Cotton
4.7 • 15.6K Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2026
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Are you a bit of a people pleaser? Wish you could care a little less what people think about you? To celebrate her new book, Likeable: How I Broke Free From The Need To Please, Fearne’s looking at all the ways she sacrificed her needs and self-expression in order to be more palatable to others...
In this chat, Fearne covers:
-The real personal impact of people pleasing
-How exhausting it is showing up as a performative version of yourself
-Catching yourself feeling like a saintly martyr when you’re putting others’ needs first
-Peer pressure making you change yourself to fit in
-Why differing opinions don’t have to mean conflict
-How to be both kind and boundaried
-Prioritising and voicing your own needs
-Being ok with some people not liking you
Fearne’s new book, Likeable, is out now!
Want to join the chat? Send us a voicenote, DM, or comment on Instagram @happyplaceofficial!
Listen to Fearne and Friends Christmas special
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Where do I begin? |
| 0:02.0 | Of course they didn't see my needs. |
| 0:04.0 | I wasn't telling anyone I had any. |
| 0:06.0 | For all of us, there were people out there that don't like us. |
| 0:09.0 | There might even be people out there that really fucking hate us. |
| 0:12.0 | I've learned to live alongside being disliked without turning on myself. |
| 0:18.0 | If I want to put 80 love hearts after a text, I'm going to do it. |
| 0:22.5 | You're too loud, you're too quiet, too shy. |
| 0:24.7 | I don't care if you think I'm too keen, too loving, too much. |
| 0:28.4 | I don't give a shit. |
| 0:29.0 | It doesn't mitigate the fact that you're going to piss people off. |
| 0:32.2 | You probably will. |
| 0:33.0 | Let's give people pleasing their finger. |
| 0:35.8 | It can fuck right off. And we ditch people pleasing, we get to be |
| 0:40.2 | ourselves. Hi everyone, I hope you're doing well. It's Fern here and this is a little solo episode |
| 0:48.3 | of Happy Place. And I want to really dive in to the subject of people pleasing today, if that's all right with you. |
| 0:56.8 | I've got my new book out, likable, and well, you can see from the tagline how I broke free from |
| 1:03.4 | the need to please. I'm very much still a work in progress with that. It's an everyday thing, |
| 1:09.6 | but my God, am I better at it than I used to be? |
| 1:13.7 | And that's what I want to really drill in on today. So normally on these episodes, we look at |
| 1:19.0 | what's making us happy and what's making us unhappy. Me and the whole of the happy place team. |
| 1:24.5 | And if you lovely listeners have any feedback or things that you want to chat |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Fearne Cotton, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Fearne Cotton and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.