How comfortable are you with pissing people off? If you're anything like us, the answer is: not very. And it's the same for Fearne Cotton, who shared on the latest episode of her podcast, Happy Place, that she is one of many women who struggles with a need to people-please.
Well, less so these days. The presenter and author revealed that one thing has made a real difference to her need to keep everyone happy: entering her 40s.
Chatting with Tom Read Wilson at the Happy Place Festival, Fearne got on to the topic of confrontation. While Tom said he's 'terrible' at all forms of confrontation, Fearne has 'got much better at it over the years'.
'I definitely was a grade A people-pleaser for a long time,' said Fearne. 'As long as everybody around me seemed to be OK with what I was saying, doing, how I was acting... I was like, I'm on the right path.' Things started to change for Fearne when all that people-pleasing left her feeling 'resentful'.
She continued: 'When I hit 40, very incrementally, I started to think maybe I could play around with this and say a few things that I'm genuinely feeling and see what happens. What I realised – and I still am five years into this experiment – is when you start really saying what you mean [...] I think you do end up pissing people off and that's the bit that you then have to sort of live with.'
Fearne went on to make a very good point about how resisting the urge to people-please is a skill you have to build. And that the process of doing this is not particularly fun. [You have to] be OK in the discomfort of not everyone is happy with me right now, or what I've said, or my decisions, or how I'm living my life. That's the bit you have to practice. It's not the confrontation bit. It's the aftermath.'
The good news is that staying true to yourself does seem to become a little easier as time goes on. While Fearne said she had a breakthrough at 40, she went on to note that she's looking forward to getting older. 'I've got friends in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and they're like "you wait. It only gets better."
