The Good Girl rebellion: How to stop caring if you’re likeable
Happy Place
Fearne Cotton
4.6 • 15.2K Ratings
🗓️ 30 May 2025
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Fearne’s been thinking a lot lately about how much of her life she’s spent people pleasing as a result of wanting to be liked. So today, how to break free from the ‘good girl’ your family, friends, colleagues, and society expect you to be...
In this episode –
-Louise Redknapp clarifies why being described as ‘nice’ isn’t a compliment and how she’s gone about making people see her as a multi-faceted human
-Paloma Faith pinpoints the ways women make themselves smaller in order to make others feel more comfortable
-Sophie Ellis-Bextor explains how she’s learnt to navigate mum guilt while not minimising the importance of her career
-Natasha Bedingfield talks about the powerful effects of physically speaking your truth and voicing your needs
-Afua Hirsch reflects on how colonisation in her native country Ghana has affected her notions of what it means to be good, pure woman
-Florence Given explores not letting outside opinion dictate who you are and how to stop feeling the need to defend or explain yourself
-Dawn French waxes lyrical about the joy of getting things wrong and embracing imperfection
-Emily Atack explains how online abuse almost broke her, but ultimately strengthened her resolve to be an even bolder version of herself
Listen to the full episodes here –
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and a massive welcome to Happy Place. |
| 0:03.8 | I'm Fern Cotton and today it's time for the good girls to rebel. |
| 0:08.9 | I call it my inner good girl that just wants everyone to understand her |
| 0:12.3 | and I just want to type back, no, please, I didn't mean that, please see me in this way. |
| 0:16.7 | I meet people and they either want to conquer me or tame the beast. |
| 0:23.9 | And I realised that I had been speaking about my work in a way that minimised it. |
| 0:28.7 | I didn't give it much status. |
| 0:30.5 | The word for myself was long suffering no longer because it's actually not good to just suffer through those things. |
| 0:35.8 | I can honestly say for the first time in my life, I'm doing everything for me. I've been thinking a lot recently about how much of my life |
| 0:43.7 | has been dictated by feeling a desperate need to be likable. To be the good girl, I think others |
| 0:51.1 | expect me to be. Oh my God. |
| 0:56.4 | I mean, I know so many of you will be nodding along, |
| 1:00.5 | but this one has been on my mind a hell of a lot recently. |
| 1:04.5 | I grew up in an industry from a very young age, |
| 1:08.6 | understanding that my likeability was a currency of its own, |
| 1:12.2 | and if I wasn't liked, I simply wouldn't have a job. |
| 1:17.5 | So at times, without sounding too melodramatic, it felt like survival to me. |
| 1:22.2 | But then I let that sort of seep into loads of different other areas of my life, |
| 1:25.8 | ones where it didn't need to be a currency, but it still felt like it. |
| 1:29.0 | And I think in my 40s, a lot of it has been about unpicking all of this unlearning it and looking at how much I've been conditioned. |
| 1:34.8 | I think it affects us much more than we care to believe. Not only does it impact how we act, |
| 1:40.6 | how we express ourselves, how we move through the world, but also, I believe, our |
... |
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