How to Stand Up for Yourself (Without Being Aggressive)

Dr. Sah: Every time we bow our head to someone else, it takes a toll.

Dr. Lisa: There’s a lot going on in the world these days, and many things are coming up for a lot of people that just don’t sit well. We see in the news people being mistreated. We engage in conversations that don’t go well. It’s not uncommon to be in situations where you feel like you have to say yes even when you don’t want to.

Dr. Sah: If you are complying in your workforce over and over again, and you’re somewhere where you have to disregard your values, it takes a toll.

Dr. Lisa: And there is a real place in our culture for appropriate, intentional defiance that is values-aligned, where we have the opportunity to stand up for ourselves, stand up for others, and stand up for what we believe in.

Dr. Sah: When I explain what values are, simple but powerful terms as how you want to act, I get integrity, I get equality, I get justice, I get compassion, and they’re very powerful if only we learn how to connect with them and also have the skill set to align with our values with what we do on a day-to-day basis.

Dr. Lisa: Today’s guest is a very special one. One of my all-time favorite episodes, as a matter of fact, is with Dr. Sunita Sah, the author of Defy, and she has so graciously agreed to come back into the studio with us to talk about how her work and her perspective has evolved, and share some of her tips and insights so that you can practice intentional constructive defiance for the benefit of yourself, people you love, and maybe even the world. Dr. Sunita Sah, welcome back.

Dr. Sah: It’s wonderful to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me back. It’s such a pleasure.

Dr. Lisa: Well, thank you so much for your work. I loved your book, which our listeners here is now available on paperback, and you have been just doing such a phenomenal job of spreading this message of how to stand up and say no when the situation calls for it. You did a TED Talk on this topic not too long ago. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Dr. Sah: Well, people have been very interested in this topic, and it’s become quite timely. I would say it’s timeless and also timely that we need to be thinking about how to speak up when it really matters. And it’s really a skill set. And I’ve done two TEDx talks now, one that came out last year on why we remain silent in uncomfortable situations, and the one that came out recently in July, at the beginning of July, is about how to stand up for yourself and others. And it’s really about, actually I would say it’s more about why you don’t need to be loud to be defiant. You can be defiant in a quiet way, and as long as you are acting in alignment with your values, that is the important thing. So how do we get there, and how do we decide when and where to defy?

Dr. Lisa: Oh, well, and see, this is what I love about your work. The applications here are so broad, right? Because stuff like this happens all the time. It can happen in our intimate partnerships, in our families. It can happen in the workplace. But then I think, you know, we’ve all seen things happening in the world and our communities where there’s stuff going on that is not okay. And I mean, to be able to make decisions about where and when to step up and say something or do something is one of the requirements of being a citizen at this point, as far as I’m concerned. And so I’d love to spend some time with you today just, like, unpacking all of that. But maybe we just start at the core. I mean, at the heart of your work, step number one is figuring out who you are and what you care about and what your values are. That’s how we begin our defiance. Is that it?

Dr. Sah: That’s exactly right.

Dr. Sah: I have something I’ve created called the Defiance Compass which consists of three big questions that we can really ask ourselves. And the very first one is who am I? And that’s really about your values. What do you stand for? What is important to you? And to be able to do that, like this is work that we need to do before we’re ever caught in the moment, is to really know what our values are. And many of us don’t really know what our values are. We, you know, spend time sort of thinking about a lot of things, but not so much about our values. This is why I have my students, my executive students, my MBA students, I always have them start with a value exercise. Like, and to think about what are your values and why are they important to you?

Dr. Sah: And this is a really good exercise to do. You know, most people don’t want to do this, but the research really shows very clearly if you have clarity on your values, if you can write them down, you’re more likely to act in alignment with them. Which is great because my research has also shown me again and again that what someone believes their values to be is actually quite different from how they actually behave. And so writing them down gives you clarity. You’re more likely to act in alignment with them, and you also have a lower biological stress reaction. You’ve got lower cortisol if you know what your values are. And, you know, so let’s, one of the surveys I show my students is one that was done on high school students. So this starts at a very young age. So there’s a survey of over 20,000 high school students, and on that survey they reported several different activities, and what we found was that nearly two-thirds of these students confessed to cheating in an exam. Nearly one-third admitted that they’d stolen something from a store in the past year. This is quite shocking.

Dr. Lisa: Criminal masterminds. The next one. Your class is.

Dr. Lisa: Of them. Who knew? Cornell, all right.

Dr. Sah: These, these were actually not my students, not Cornell students. They were high school students. So before they’d even gone to university. So yeah, this was a national survey done of 20,000 high school students. And the last one, for anyone who has a high school student, it’s probably gonna break your heart, was that over 80% of them said that they had lied to their parent about something significant. And these estimates, right, are going to be on the lower side because even at the end, one in four students confessed that they had lied on one question in the survey.

Dr. Sah: You know, it starts at a young age, and we continue as adults actually, because even though the students were saying all of these things, they were also saying they were quite content with their ethical conduct. And so I’ve learned that for many of us, the distance between who we think we are and what we actually do is enormous, and we probably come across this many times. We’ll say, “Oh, that wasn’t me.” You know? We’ll make an excuse for ourselves. That wasn’t me. And if you say it enough times, it’s like, well, actually, that is you, because how you act does become who you are. And a lot of what might be going on with the high school students is that they’re being influenced by other people as well. And so learning how to defy is really important in that. So knowing your values and learning how to defy is really important. But that first step in the Defiance Compass, who am I, is really important to know. And we can go on, and we can talk a little bit more about this step as well in terms of what do we mean by values. By values, I don’t mean goals. I don’t mean certain beliefs. I don’t mean something like, you know, what we might call a moral conviction like abortion is wrong or abortion is right. I don’t mean these stances that we take, because often when we take a stance there’s more than one answer, right? Some people will agree, some people will not agree, and it can be subjective in that way. But by values, what I mean is, like, simple things regarding how we want to enact our behavior on a day-to-day basis. And they come down to often single words that are really powerful. So people will say integrity. You know? Even the people that answered in this survey will still say integrity is really important to them. When I ask my executive students, and what I do ask the Cornell students, is to rate themselves on a scale of zero to 100 on how honest they think they are relative to other people in the room. And on a scale of zero to 100, zero means that you’re the least honest in the room, 100 means you’re the most honest in the room. What do you think most of my students are saying at this point?

Dr. Lisa: 100 and.

Dr. Sah: They’re all in the top end, right? So 90, yeah, all above here. And you can’t, right? If you’re rating yourself relative to other people in the room, the average has to be 50, which means, you know, half of the people have to be below 50, and nobody has ever given me an answer below 50 at all. You know, so it’s all around 85, 90, 95. People will rate themselves. But whether we can enact that on a day-to-day basis is a different thing. So if you rate your integrity as being really high, you want to enact that behavior. But when I ask my students, “What are your values?” When I explain what values are, simple but powerful terms as how you want to act, I get integrity, I get equality, I get justice, I get compassion. All of these things, they seem to come up year after year after year. They’re common values that a lot of people hold. And they’re very powerful if only we learn how to connect with them, and also have the skill set to align with our values with what we do on a day-to-day basis. And that’s what this book is really about, the work that I did on defiance and compliance is just simply saying yes to what aligns with our values and no to what doesn’t align with those values, so we can become our aspirational selves.

Dr. Lisa: Okay, can I ask you a curiosity question? This is just something that’s coming up for me as you’re talking, is that the other meta message that your research is showing both with high school students and those in your classroom. You know, a high school student is saying, “I value getting a good grade on this test more than I value doing it the honest way and not cheating,” or, “I value self-concept, right? Than I do in having you think I’m a bad person.” And similar themes here. And I can’t help but wonder if one of the primary obstacles even to defiance is that frequently people are prioritizing the value of how they are perceived by others over things like integrity, for example, or honesty. Have you found that?

Dr. Sah: So, with the way that you described it, there was more we’re having a value clash. That is, I would kind of push on that a little bit.

Dr. Lisa: Or a hierarchy, I should say.

Dr. Sah: So yeah. I mean, that sometimes there is a clash of values, for sure. But other times when we’re thinking about what are our values, you can list them. These are the values. Maybe you have three top values. They’re the most important to you. Maybe integrity, maybe compassion. A lot of people that take my healthcare leadership course, it is about compassion, right? So you can identify what’s really important to you, and then you have to think about, well, how do my actions align? Because to get a good grade at school is more of a goal. I wouldn’t say that this is a value of how we want to act on a day in, day out. So are we going to abandon our values for that goal? That’s the question that’s really clashing. And if you want to build character, this is all about, like, the character of the person. It’s not just about fulfilling goals and wishes but it’s about who am I? You know, this is how I want to act. Yes, I would love a fantastic grade. I would love to have these items from the store. But what am I going to give up to get that? And when we start to disregard our values, it really does take a toll on who we are, and it does change who we are as well. It changes our character.

Dr. Lisa: Well, and this is so important, and I can really understand how this compass that you’re talking about that’s really the heart of defiance does require a deep connection with the values that you are not just acknowledging, but really committed to expressing. Because I’ll just as an aside, I see this all the time, this discrepancy, even at work as a couples counselor. I mean, I’ll sit down with a couple and be like, “Okay, so let’s talk about your most important values,” and they’ll say, “Family, love, relationships, my children.” And then it’s, “Okay, so let’s take me into your day-to-day. What do you do with your time?” And it is, “I play, like, seven hours of video games a day,” and like, “We don’t talk to each other.” You know, like, there’s all this. So there’s, like, a deep disconnect between what you do and it sounds like some of your research uncovered this with your students. And so it seems like what you’re saying is this intentional work to get clear about who you are, what you stand for, but then how do you show up in the world in a way that is congruent with who you have decided to be?

Dr. Lisa: Is that the right way to say it?

Dr. Sah: That’s absolutely. This is what the Defiance Compass is all about. So that first question is who am I? And then once we have determined this, which requires some inner work beforehand to really determine, like, what’s important to me? What do I stand for? What are my values, and how did I come to them? Then the second question is you’re looking outside now. So not internal, you’re looking outside and you’re saying, “What type of situation is this?”

Dr. Sah: We can ask ourselves a couple of additional questions here. Is it safe? And is it effective for me to act in this situation? So here you’re assessing the situation because that is important too. Because there are costs for how we act. There are costs for remaining silent and not doing anything. There’s costs for all of these. There’s costs for compromising your values. There’s costs for acting in alignment with your values. So here we need to assess the external situation.

Dr. Lisa: Give us some examples. Like, what are we talking about right now?

Dr. Sah: So one thing I will say here is that some of the research I’ve done, for example, I did a big survey and interviews in a hospital, and I was asking nurses what keeps them from speaking up about medical errors. And what they would say here were those two reasons. So first of all, there was fear, right? There was some safety concern when they were thinking about, “Is it safe for me to speak up?” What I was hearing is that there’s concern. Am I going to keep my job? What are there going to be the consequences of this? So what are other people gonna think of me? So the social consequences, financial consequences if you lose your job, career consequences, all of these things, there was some aspect of safety going on here. And even if you’re not working, if you’re in a different situation, for example, I’ve interviewed a lot of people about getting stopped by the police and what we should do in that situation if you think that the police were wrong for stopping you in a traffic stop, for example, and the question you want to ask is it safe, you know, in that situation? It might not be safe in that situation to defy. And certainly for many people, and some groups more than others, it’s much more costly to defy than other groups.

Dr. Lisa: Oh, yeah. I mean, I hope it’s okay to say this out loud, but I think we’ve also seen examples, I mean, gosh, was it this past winter, standing in my kitchen watching this video of a young man getting shot on the street for, like, trying to defy and help somebody who was getting, you know, sprayed in the face by an ICE officer. And so, like, this struggle is real, and it can be quite dangerous and you need to think about, okay, do I want to take action in this moment to push back against oppressive forces, whatever, stand up for my values, or live to fight another day. It’s hard.

Dr. Sah: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s, I’m so sorry you had to see that. But this is happening in our world and knowing and being at least mentally prepared for some of this is important. And prior to this, I interviewed a lot of my students for the book, a lot of my MBA students and executive students, and a lot of the Black men in my class did come and talk to me about this. Like, you know, they want to comply because they want to live, and they want to go home at the end of the day. I do remember one student that said to me something harrowing. First of all, one student mentioned the costly dichotomy, right? There’s a cost if you defy because there could be a threat to physical safety as you know. And there’s also a cost if you comply. And this is what one of my other students told me was that when I asked him, “What would you advise people to do in this situation?” And he hesitated and he said, “Well, I know what we’re told to do in this situation. We’re told to comply because otherwise bad things will happen to us. But bad things are already happening to us, and every time we bow our head to someone else, it takes a toll. It takes a toll on us.” [Clinical content trimmed from transcript. Full discussion is in the audio.] And even the nurses, if you are complying in your workforce over and over again, and you’re somewhere where you have to disregard your values, it takes a toll. We know we lose sleep over it. [Clinical content trimmed from transcript. Full discussion is in the audio.]

Dr. Sah: So we shouldn’t neglect the costs of compliance as well. But we do need to ask, is it safe enough and will it be effective as well? Because some of the nurses were also saying to me that, “You know, I’m not scared of speaking up. I will speak up, but I’ve done it so many times, but nothing ever changes.” Right. Now, if you think about it, if you think about some of the really famous no’s in our history, for example, Rosa Parks saying no on that bus. If you think about those two questions with her, is it safe? It wasn’t safe for Rosa Parks to defy. In fact, she had death threats. She was unemployed for 10 years. For 10 years after that, you know, lots of health problems. Her marriage, there was tension. There was a lot going on, and I don’t say that to sort of worry people and think that they have to comply all the time. I just want the full human picture to be there in terms of when are you going to consciously comply in that situation because it’s not safe enough or it’s not effective enough, and when are you going to decide to defy? Even with all the costs, Rosa Parks said 10 years after the fact that if she had to do it again she would, because she was so aligned and connected to her value for equality. That was really important to her, and that’s what she wanted to do. It was also strategic to do it at that point because she did have backing. She could make this a movement, and it did indeed become a civil rights movement at that point. So it was effective. But some people will defy even when it’s not safe and even when they can’t even predict whether it will be effective or not because they’re so connected to their values. So it is a deeply personal decision, that cost calculus for us. It is a deeply personal one, but it’s one that we need to take. And I would just also caution between just asking those questions as rationalizations, because if you ask is it going to be safe, defiance is inherently risky. You’re gonna be waiting forever if you wait for it to be 100% safe. So I would ask, is it safe enough? Will it be effective enough? And then not comply forever. If you need to consciously comply in a situation because it’s very dangerous, of course comply. But then think about what you can do afterwards. So one of my students told me that he got stopped at a traffic light. No, he actually got stopped because it was, he was told it was a California stop. And which apparently, I didn’t know what one was either. He told me this type of stop is where you slow down, but you don’t actually completely stop.

Dr. Sah: That one I had not heard about it either, but he educated.

Dr. Lisa: Me on that. And then he told me that he was absolutely convinced.

Dr. Sah: That he.

Dr. Sah: Stopped. And, like, when he stopped, you know, he had been told what to do by his father, what to do in this type of situation. Just keep calm, keep his hands on the wheel, sort of tell the police officer exactly what you’re doing. “I’m just going to reach for my license.” He had been coached by that, which was, you know, he had received messages on what to do. And what he decided, he was looking around to see if there was any cameras that could dispute what the police officer’s interpretation was, but he couldn’t see any, and he decided in that situation that was not the time to defy, so he complied with everything. And he said the officers were quite nice. They were quite pleasant. They handed him back his license. They wrote up a ticket for him, and then they said, “Have a good day.” And he was still shaking when he got home from that encounter. And he decided to challenge it later on in court rather than on the streets. That was him deferring defiance to another day. And so we might be able to do those things. We consciously comply because it’s not safe enough until a day that we can actually enact our defiance in a safe and more effective way. So that’s the second question. Is it safe, and is it going to be effective?

Dr. Lisa: This is such an important consideration, and what you’re talking about is really truly informed decision-making and a lot of intentionality that is going into these moments, where this can look like a lot of different things. But before we move on, I just want to amplify something that you said sort of in passing, is the personal consequences that can also come when you don’t defy or say something or try at least to do something. [Clinical content trimmed from transcript. Full discussion is in the audio.] So I just wanna say to anybody listening, if you’re thinking, “Well, the easier way is just to kinda, like, go along and it’ll be fine,” yes and no, right? I mean.

Dr. Sah: It’s expensive.

Dr. Sah: And some of my research on a smaller scale, we probably recognize in ourselves, I call it the kicking yourself syndrome, where we predict that if we follow the advice of another person that we are going to feel less regret, that we can blame the advisor if something goes wrong. Like it’s their responsibility. We’re passing on our responsibility. But what I actually found in the studies that I ran was when you go against your better judgment and follow the advice of someone else, and even if you might know, like, this doesn’t sound great, you know, even if you know it’s obviously bad advice, it actually leads to more regret. You actually feel more responsible. You have more self-blame than before. So the things that you forecast beforehand, that if I follow what somebody else is doing, they can take responsibility, I can blame them, I’m putting it on them. We don’t find that happens. We find the opposite, actually. That you blame yourself more, and you have more rumination about it. And this is because you’re asking yourself these questions. You have this haunting feeling of what could have been, you know, is the what if, what we call the counterfactual. What if I had just done this or said this or have just rejected that advice? And it can happen in the situations that you’re talking about, those really big situations, and also with the nurses in hospitals or physicians, but it can also happen in more mundane situations. You know? Like, my co-author on this paper was telling me that just a really mundane situation where her husband had told her to not bother taking her coat out, and she had thought her better judgment was that she should have taken her coat out, and then she very much followed his advice and regretted it. And we’re probably all very familiar with this type of feeling. You know? And if we follow advice that we know goes against our better judgment or a suggestion, then we are going to actually feel worse even though we predict that we won’t.

Dr. Lisa: Well, and I think nine out of 10 dentists would agree that of all the dark emotions we can experience, just what you said there, regret is often the worst. I mean, that’s where it gets hard.

Dr. Lisa: It stays with you.

Dr. Sah: It stays with you.

Dr. Lisa: Dr. Sah, there are so many really good reasons to be very intentional about all of this, starting by getting clear on your values and figuring out in advance what you stand for, what you are actually willing to fight for in the moment, but then also some decision-making, that compass, if you will, that helps you make good decisions around, is this going to put me in danger? Is this going to be effective? Defiance can look like a lot of different things in a life, but the goal is to have some agency ideally over outcomes, and at the end of the day, walk out of that feeling like you did the right thing. You stood up for what you believed in. You have more respect for yourself.

Dr. Sah: And I do write about this in depth in the book because so many people use it, and we can explain many of the moments of defiance and compliance by using it. And it has three main questions. So we’ve covered the first one, who am I? And the second one, which is, what type of situation is this? And with that external one, we might also wanna ask some additional questions such as, is it safe? Is it effective? Then once we’ve done that internal, who am I, and then the external, what type of situation is this, then that last question that we ask ourselves is, what does a person like me do in a situation such as this? Now, this is a really powerful one, and it’s actually really good to ask this in the third person because we can think about our aspirational selves. So whereas the first question is all about values, the second question is about safety and impact, this question is about our responsibilities and also our ability to act. We need to have the ability to defy, right?

Dr. Sah: If we’ve never done it before, we’re gonna struggle. So that’s where the practice element comes in, and we can talk a lot more about how to practice that. But what does a person like me do in a situation like this is all about tapping into our aspirational selves. Who do we want to be? What is our responsibility? Rather than abdicating it, how can we take responsibility for this situation? That goes back to connecting with our values because how we act here is gonna go right back to who am I.

Dr. Lisa: It supports it. There’s an identity component, right? I am the kind of person who. And this is really powerful. It’s, I mean, values alignment, but a definition of self that exists through these actions.

Dr. Sah: What does a person like me with these values, integrity, fairness, compassion, what does a person like me do in a situation like this? So that brings us back to who we are and who we want to be, and that’s why it’s such a powerful question to act in the end, and something that we can use when we’re stuck in those ways. In those difficult moments, this is gonna help guide you.

Dr. Lisa: That’s fantastic. And just out of curiosity, and maybe this is getting too nitty-gritty here, but I guess, you know, stepping back to say I’m sure you go into a lot of this in your book, so the whole framework is there. But for the benefit of our friends who are here with us in this conversation, I’m wondering if there are activities or things that you would suggest that can help people get their arms around some of these questions, because these are things that require a lot of thought and intentionality. I mean, if you asked me any of these questions, I’d have to sit here for a little while and, like, talk through what I think. What do you advise?

Dr. Sah: Numerous things I advise, right? So, I mean, the first thing that we can do is figure out our values as we’ve spoken about.

Dr. Sah: But the thing that really disables defiance is surprise. Often, if we are surprised in a situation.

Dr. Lisa: Looking through, I was watching the video about what happened as something that I wasn’t, thank goodness, seeing it through my window. That would be a whole different therapy session, Dr. Sah. But I mean, it was overwhelming.

Dr. Sah: But often if we’re surprised in a situation, it disables defiance, right? It’s harder for us. So the thing that we need to do is really anticipate these situations. So the first time we might comply, right? I also describe in my book, and we spoke about it on the last podcast a little bit, if listeners want to go back to that, about how, you know, I was advised to take a particular scan that was unnecessary for me, and the first time I complied with it because it was a surprise to me, and then I thought about it. And this aspect, we can often anticipate the situations that require defiance. Why? Because we’ve seen it either through a video, we’ve read about it, or we’ve experienced it ourselves. And we’ve complied and maybe regretted it, and that’s the key.

Dr. Lisa: Personal share. I thought of you. I honestly, it was probably a couple of months ago. I was at the dentist office doing a routine cleaning, and they’re like, “Oh, it’s time to update your X-rays,” blah, blah. My teeth are fine. And they started taking all these X-rays, and I got through, like, X-ray number seven, and then I actually thought of our conversation. Was like, “And we’re done? If you have a reason to believe there’s something wrong with my teeth, sure, we could take some X-rays, but I’m not.” And I was like, “How many X-rays is this?” They’re like, “24.” I’m like, “No. I’m not participating in this.” And I felt great about it, and so thank you for inspiring me. And that would be one small example of, you know, having that agency to say no.

Dr. Sah: And you know, it’s great because as you said, like, you felt good about it after you’ve done it. And often when we comply, we have that tension, right, which tells us, it’s that signal for us to defy. You know, it’s actually a strength, but we try to get rid of it. We try to think we have to push through, the other person knows better. But actually when we know this is our better judgment and we act in alignment with it, that tension dissipates and we feel so much better. So definitely we can think about the times that we complied and anticipate what’s going to happen. So for example, I know at work in a faculty meeting somebody is going to say something that’s very inappropriate about somebody not in the room. How do I know this? Because it’s happened every single faculty meeting.

Dr. Lisa: Really? Good to know.

Dr. Sah: So you know that person, yes, that person is going to say this, you know? And it’s gonna be problematic. And nobody says anything, everybody’s too uncomfortable, and we all smile, and we try to get on with things. And so we can basically anticipate those situations. And we can visualize it, which is really helpful. And then we can start to practice what we wish we had said. And this role-playing and scripting is actually quite important, you know? You see children doing it all the time in their rooms. But we don’t do it so much as adults, and it’s really important, especially if you have been socialized to be compliant. And those neurons aren’t firing. Of course, your politeness neurons are all well built in. You’ve been rewarded for compliance. It’s very hard to get the other ones to fire because maybe you have been punished for saying no in the past.

Dr. Lisa: I was just thinking about trauma survivors can really struggle with this. Even in neutral situations where it would be fine, there’s this, something awful is gonna happen feeling.

Dr. Sah: So exactly. So how do we get our agency back? We need to get used to thinking about what we would have liked or said, and what we would have liked to have done. And it doesn’t even need to be confrontational a lot of the time. We could just ask, you know, I could ask the colleague, the faculty member in the meeting, “What do you mean by that?” And it just gets a pause in it. It raises the volume on the situation, just asking for some clarity. Will it change that? I don’t know. The person might change, might not change. But just putting it out there, you’ve changed the water in which everybody else is swimming, and maybe that person will think twice before saying it in front of you again. Maybe they won’t say it again when other people are there. Maybe other people will be also inspired to say something. So you’ve just created a ripple effect. And what you need to do is have some of those scripts in your back pocket that are natural to you, you know? It could be what do you mean by that? It could be other things, and there’s many different stories in the book regarding how people manage this. But just knowing what’s natural for you to say in that situation that means that you’re not going along with it. And practice it, because then your mouth gets used to saying the words, your ears get used to hearing it, and that strengthens those neural pathways. That’s the thing about practice. That’s really important, and why I always say defiance isn’t a personality trait. It’s not that that person is defiant because they’re loud and aggressive and violent. That’s just a myth of what defiance has to look like. It can be completely different. You don’t need to be superhuman. You don’t need to have a large personality. You can be yourself and be defiant. Just practice the words that are the most natural to you.

Dr. Lisa: Really good advice, and I love that you’re advocating this. And even in therapy and coaching, frequently we’ll do role plays of challenging conversations or moments where we set boundaries, but you’re saying, too, like acts of defiance because you’re saying especially if there are repeat offenders or moments in your life where you have that feeling of regret afterwards that, “Oh, I should have done something or said something.” We can actually use these opportunities in a really constructive way to say, “Okay, if I had to do that over again,” ’cause likely I will be in a similar situation, “here’s how I would like to handle that differently.” Maybe write it down, say it out loud a few times because that’s gonna make it easier for you to do that in the moment. That’s great advice.

Dr. Sah: It becomes more natural. And the more that we do it, then that starts becoming our default, that we will automatically ask, you know, what do you mean by that? You know? So we’ll automatically be doing that rather than our previous automatic response, which might be just to smile and say yes, or just remain quiet. So just having that pause and, you know, those questions that’s more natural to us is really very important. There’s also a very nice quote, if I can remember the quote, that it’s often said that Bruce Lee had this quote, but it was actually a Greek poet, and it’s like, “Under duress, we don’t rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our practice.” And so this is what we need to do. We need to practice.

Dr. Lisa: So welcome back. We’re with our very special guest, Dr. Sunita Sah. She’s a professor at Cornell and the author of the book Defy, here to share her insights on how to stand up in the face of injustices so that you can protect yourself and people that you care about. So Dr. Sah, before we roll into some of the relational considerations I’m hoping we could speak to, or maybe even this is part of it, you bring up some really good points in your work about the difference between compliance and consent. Can you unpack that for us?

Dr. Sah: So one of the things that we don’t really understand is these definitions of compliance, consent, and defiance. So just very quickly about defiance, since it’s essential that we understand, most people have a negative connotation of defiance. They think it’s loud, aggressive, bold, and as I’ve been talking about, it’s actually not. My definition of defiance is simply acting in accordance with your values, especially when there is pressure to do otherwise. So we take something that’s often seen as negative, and we reframe it as something positive and meaningful and even pro-social. Now, we also have problems sometimes with the definitions of compliance and consent, and people often conflate the two. They think they’re interchangeable. So compliance is something external. It’s going along with an order, a suggestion, maybe even expectations from society. It’s something that’s externally imposed and something that we go along with. Consent is radically different. Consent is something that’s coming from within and it’s coming from our values.

Dr. Sah: So the way that I define consent, or what I call your true yes in the book, is I take the definition of informed consent from medicine and we can apply that same framework to other decisions that we make in our lives. So to have consent, you need five elements, and this is what doctors do when they’re assessing patients for a medical treatment. When you’re giving your informed consent, do you have the capacity? So do you have the mental capacity to be able to make that decision? You’re not under the influence of drugs or alcohol or you’re not too sick. So capacity is the first one. The next one is knowledge. You need to have accurate information about the decision you’re about to make. So you need to be given that information. But it’s not enough just to have the information. The third element is understanding. You need a really good grasp of the risks, the benefits, and the alternatives. Then the fourth element is the freedom to say no, because if you don’t have the freedom to say no, then that’s merely compliance, it’s not consent. So you need the freedom to say no. So if you have just those four elements, the capacity, the knowledge, the understanding, the freedom to say no, then the fifth element is your authorization. It’s your considered, thoroughly considered authorization. That’s an active expression of your values. So if you want to say yes, that’s your true yes, that’s your consent. If you want to say no, that’s your informed refusal, your defiance.

Dr. Lisa: And so how does this concept and awareness of what consent really is help us make better decisions when it comes to moments where we can defy or comply?

Dr. Sah: It’s really useful to have because we often think about defiance as being a knee-jerk reaction like an emotion coming up. But it requires the same five elements as consent requires. So we need to make sure that we have particularly the knowledge and the understanding, right? Because often if we’re saying yes or no without those things, you could just say, “I need more information.” This is why we’re asking for clarity, so we have a good knowledge and understanding of the situation. And then, yeah, the second thing is really thinking about, like, is our default response to comply that we’re not even thinking about whether we have all of those elements because we’re so worried about the other person and our relationship perhaps with the other person that we’re just gonna say yes because that’s become automatic or we’ve been socialized to say yes and please others, and we’re not really thinking through, does saying yes here compromise any of my values? And that is a question that we can ask.

Dr. Lisa: No, that makes a lot of sense. And so, you know, when we agree with, go along, say yes to something, it really does need to be a thoughtful decision. And you’ve just provided a beautiful framework. Do I have enough information to know what I’m saying yes to? Like, what does that even mean? But at the same time if I am refusing something, on what is that based? And to use that same framework to be able to make good decisions there as well. Particularly, I’m guessing this would not be a knee-jerk, you know, I need to do something in the moment, but I’m almost imagining like that workplace situation or if there are looping patterns in a relationship that keep coming up over and over again, as this can help you, I would think, make a decision one way or the other that you feel really good about. Is that right?

Dr. Sah: Yeah. So both your true yes and true no are coming from within and they’re coming from our deeply held values. Compliance is external, so we’re going along with something. I do have a concept I call conscious compliance where all the elements are present. We do have understanding, and we have the knowledge and understanding. We perhaps maybe have the freedom to say no, but it’s gonna be very costly or ineffective. So it’s going back to that Defiance Compass where, oh, I’m gonna have to consciously comply. But the key word is conscious, right? We know that we’re doing it. We’d rather be doing something else, but we’re going to go along with it for now until it’s safer or more effective to defy later.

Dr. Lisa: Absolutely, that the math, you know, tips in one direction or the other. Now, before I let you go, Dr. Sah, I must get your thoughts on a situation that in my mind can be complex. And so where I’m coming at this as a psychologist, marriage and family therapist, working with people a lot around relational issues. And one of the things that I have seen emerge more prominently in our culture, for understandable reasons, but particularly over the last few years, is that people can have very strong, well-developed opinions that might be values-based on the way things should be. It could be attached to political belief systems. I mean, I’ve seen people get into it around AI. Is this a good idea or not? Like, there’s a lot of stuff to fight about these days, right? And a lot of the stuff feels like it is deeply connected to core values. I believe in the environment, therefore, you know, I will defy anybody who’s into AI pilled, and I’m gonna tell them how I feel. But what I see in practice is that sometimes what can feel like defiance is oftentimes obstructing a pathway to understanding other people’s perspective, that, you know, nobody’s actually trying to do anything to you right now, but there is a combativeness that can get in the way of relationships. And so I had the great pleasure of speaking with one of my personal heroes, Dr. Bill Doherty, on this podcast about how even, you know, holding different political beliefs or, you know, how should the world work kind of stances can create these deep divides in relationships to the point where people are cutting each other off. And he is part of a nonprofit movement that I have so much respect for called Braver Angels. One of the core missions is to actually put people with different points of view into a room and help them have conversations, not for the purpose of changing anybody’s mind, of course, but for the purpose of just starting to generate understanding of where the other person is coming from, which I believe is so important in this day and age. But so what would you say to someone who has done a lot of values alignment work, and this is what I stand for, but feels now that it is intolerable to be in a relationship with someone who has a different set of values? What do you do with that?

Dr. Sah: We want to be aligned in values, and we often surround ourselves with people who have similar values to us, right? So when we come across people who have different values, then that knowledge and understanding becomes very important, and having conversations to understand is really essential. But what I also want.

Dr. Lisa: I just wanna say so, but maybe I also didn’t state this, is that what I have seen is that people feel that in order to be congruent with their values and stand up for what they believe, they need to have a fairly aggressive stance or even reject people, like actively reject people who are different than them, I guess. And it feels, I think, in the moment, like I am defying what this person stands for. But that in reality it’s. Right. Okay, sorry. I just wanted to say that.

Dr. Sah: I think there’s a few things that’s going on here. So first of all, when I talk about compliance and defiance and consent, it’s to do with your individual actions. It’s not about changing anybody else’s mind. It’s not about when I say, “Let’s speak up in this meeting,” am I doing it with the hopes of educating the other person? I’m actually doing it as how do we change the situation? Maybe we can a little bit, right? But maybe we can’t. We can’t control what the other person thinks. And there’s a few things here in terms of, like, the values that we’re talking about. If we start talking about moral convictions, they can feel very strong. So people can, moral convictions are such that we have such an understanding of our belief that, like, maybe abortion is wrong or abortion is right, or that homosexuality is wrong or homosexuality is right. We can have such strong beliefs on this that we view it as a fact. And because we view it as a fact, we’re right and somebody else is wrong, and this can lead to sort of this aggression that I need to stand by what I believe in. I’m going back to sort of values as not being about any kind of objective fact, which actually turns out to be subjective, right? Some people will say yes, some people will say no, some people will be on the fence. I’m going back to how is it you want to act, right? Do you wanna act with compassion? Is that an important value to you, as how we treat other people? Do you wanna act with integrity? Do you have benevolence? What are those values that this is how we should be? Not that it’s different with some people versus other people, but what are our values? And maybe people will differ in those values, too. You know, no doubt that they will. But we need to act in alignment with what’s right to us, and it’s not about, if we do defiance, if we think of defiance as trying to alter somebody else’s mind or tell.

Dr. Sah: If we think of defiance as trying to alter somebody else’s mind, or tell them that they are wrong, it often comes to what I call false defiance, that it’s done for performative reasons. This is not to get more likes on social media or to aggressively cut someone out or cancel them. It could be that you want to say something at the dinner table if there’s a sexist or racist remark, but there’s ways of doing it that are not confrontational. And really false defiance, it might look like the real thing. It might be loud and confrontational, but unless it’s coming from our core values the way I define values, it isn’t real in that sense. An example could be even going to attend a political protest because all your friends are going and not because you care about that cause, right? Or confronting another person on social media whose politics you disagree with. It’s not out of really a genuine desire to change their mind, ’cause social media is not the platform to really do that. It could be the Braver Angels platform, that might be better. But if you’re doing that simply to score likes and clout, I would call that false defiance, also sort of getting swept up in the crowd. Here’s another way to think about it as well in terms of some of the systems you use, right? So there is a term that’s often applied to children, like oppositional defiant disorder. It has defiant in there. That’s not seen as a positive thing. It’s seen as a negative thing. I think the key word there is oppositional. So we’ve all experienced this with, if you have kids, right, with toddlers or even teenagers, right? My teenager went through a particular phase of doing the exact opposite of what I wanted him to do. And I remember it very clearly that, you know, after school he would be playing some video games, and I would be like, “Are you gonna do your homework?” And then he would be, “Well, I was going to do my homework, but now that you’ve told me to, I’m not going to.”

Dr. Lisa: Literally my kid said, “Well, I would have, but then you told me to and now I don’t want to anymore.”

Dr. Lisa: My God.

Dr. Sah: So it’s definitely oppositional. But yeah, if we think about what’s really going on here, if they are doing the exact opposite of what you’re asking them to do, then they’re actually listening very intently to what you want, and that is something that’s coming from the outside. It’s actually being very compliant just in opposition. So this is what I call false defiance. It looks like defiance. It’s just oppositional, and it’s a reaction to what you want. So is it consent, how I mentioned, deeply with the held value? Is it defiance, also the five elements and deeply held value? It’s not coming from internal. It’s coming from external. So that is false defiance, and we need to be very careful about it because sometimes this confrontational, loud, aggressive opposition can seem like true defiance, but it’s actually false if it’s not coming from your values the way that I’m, you know, defining what values are, and distinguishing from moral conviction. Which can be very dangerous. Like, if we have very strong moral convictions, it can get to a point of the means justify the ends. That’s a line that we would never have crossed that we feel justified to do.

Dr. Lisa: We are.

Dr. Sah: Come up with rationalizations for why they were the right thing to do, and that’s why it’s really important to do that values exercise to begin with and actually think about what is a line that I will not cross? This is some of the work I’m doing actually with high school students and with middle school students, it’s around the Defiance Compass, is to really adapt that for younger audiences and other types of audiences. You know, that what is a line that I will not cross? What is something that I’ve regretted doing that I wish I would’ve behaved differently? So really getting people to connect with their values is really important. And yes, schools are asking for this, domestic violence organizations, cults. How do we get back our agency? This is all about our agency and the freedom to act in alignment with what we value.

Dr. Lisa: This is an important discussion and one that needs to be had far and wide because I think what you’re also opening the door to is how difficult it can be to sort through what is a values-aligned stance versus what is a moral conviction versus what is a strong opinion. And I also just wanna say something that might be very shocking but I think needs to be said in this moment. So as a psychologist, I will tell you that every person who has done something profoundly cruel, inhumane, illegal, criminal even, if there’s any forethought at all, like not a heat-of-the-moment situation, they had very well-developed reasons that supported their justification for whatever behavior they engaged in. And it can be extremely difficult to get visibility into when we are doing that ourselves. And so to your point, Dr. Sah, to be able to say not just what I’m telling myself I believe, I mean, certainly to stay connected with values, but like when I engage in this action, what value am I actually expressing? And so I don’t know, if we had a 13-year-old kid, they might say, “Well, I’m expressing my value of independence,” right? “Against your jurisdiction over telling me what to do.” Versus, you know, I think another framework for this is there’s a rupture to this relationship that’s happening right now. And to be able to kind of take a 30,000-foot view and say, “What am I actually doing? What is happening when I take this stance and behave in this way? I am damaging a relationship. I am damaging trust. I am damaging my value of curiosity and connection perhaps,” right? And to open up options for there being a number of ways to handle this. And going back to one of your beautiful questions from the compass exercise you walked us through, that what kind of person am I? People like me.

Dr. Lisa: What does a person like me do this, right?

Dr. Sah: Right. What does a person like me do in a situation like this? And this is such a powerful question on, like, that relationship level that you said, but also on a societal level, right? That, you know, like if you think about it, if we think about what happened, you know, with the Nazis in World War II, you can identify the people that committed the crimes and did all those illegal things, the things that you were saying, as just a very small percentage of the population. It was the 90% of bystanders that didn’t do anything that really sort of contributed as well. And, you know, we might not be the type of person to march, right? We might not be the type of person to protest in a particular way, and this is what my work is about, right? It’s like especially for those of us who are socialized to be compliant, have a self-concept of that, we don’t need to do that. We can all help in different ways. We can help by, you know, even making a cup of tea for someone. We can help by writing a letter. We can help by making a phone call. In situations where we think values are being compromised, that’s what we can do, and we can all do it in a way that we are comfortable with and that aligns with something that’s right for us. So that’s why it goes from that individual to organizations and to society. We’re asking ourselves the same questions and connecting with the same values. What does a person like me do in a situation such as this?

Dr. Lisa: Yeah, absolutely. Well, with do being the operant word here, I mean, I think that’s my big takeaway. I mean, Dr. Sah, we’ve talked about so many different things today, but that, you know, defiance, that is a verb. That is connected to an action, and that can look like so many different things. Thank you so much for spending this time with us today. These are such important ideas and ones that we all need to be thinking about. And I know listeners of this are like, “I would like to hear more.” And so tell us where people can find your book, your TED Talks now, and anything else you have going on.

Dr. Sah: Oh, absolutely. So you can find a lot of information on my website, which is at sunitasah.com. So that’s N, like the sun in the sky. H. com. And you can find my newsletter where I write about some of these things on Substack. It’s called Defiant by Design. And also books are sold wherever books are sold. It’s called Defy. The paperback edition is How to Speak Up When It Matters. And the TEDx talks we can link hopefully in your show notes. And yes, there’s two. The first one was called Why Do We Stay Silent in Uncomfortable Situations? That came out last year. And the one that came out at the beginning of July, which is a lot about the Defiance Compass for people that want to sort of look at that in a bit more detail, is how to stand up for yourself and others.

Dr. Lisa: Amazing. Well, thank you again so much for your time today. Fascinating conversation.

Dr. Sah: Thank you so much. It’s wonderful to be here again. Thank you for inviting me back.

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