The Unexpected Truth About Standing Up for Yourself

 How often do you say yes when you really feel no? It’s hard to stand up for yourself, isn’t it? And that’s why today we’re diving deep into the art and science of building a strong backbone that will allow you to finally assert yourself in your relationships, on the job, and in the world.

My guest is none other than Dr. Sunita Saa. She’s a physician, an award winning professor at Cornell University, and the author of Defy, The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes. Welcome, Dr. Saa. It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m so excited to talk with you. Your research is absolutely fascinating. And it has such an interesting focus, which seems to be understanding these forces that compel people to obey or go along with things that are really not in alignment with their values versus times when people feel empowered to defy, meaning that they can stand up for themselves and say, no, I’m not doing that.

Even when there can be a lot of pressure around them to comply. And so first of all, I’m just so curious to know how you became interested in this area of research because you’ve done all kinds of things. And so I’m wondering how you landed here. Is there a personal story here? Oh, so I have been fascinated by what the word defy means for a very long time.

And as a child, I was known for being an obedient daughter and student. And I remember asking my dad when I was quite young, what does my name Sunita mean? And he told me that my name in Sanskrit means good. And mostly I lived up to that. I did what I was told. I did my homework as expected. I Went to school on time.

I even had my hair cut the way my parents insisted And these were the messages that I received from my parents from the community from teachers is to be good To obey not make a scene Don’t question authority and we often teach our children these messages and With my career, I actually i’m in my third career right now And The reason being is that I did medicine first of all in the UK It’s a combined undergraduate and graduate degree.

So we had to decide at the age of 17 and I went to university medical school when I was 18 mainly due to expectations. I had the grades so my parents and my teachers Basically said what else would you want to do medicine is the best thing you can do And so I went to medical school But During that time, I took a year out to study psychology and I did an intercalated degree, which is now the norm if you do a medical school in the UK.

And so I did a year of psychology and I was fascinated by I loved thinking about people’s psychology, why they make decisions, and just the aspect of learning how things were different. once you take a psychological perspective versus a purely clinical medical perspective. And I was fascinated. So even when I returned to medicine as expected, I never forgot those psychology days.

Even when I was working as a doctor on the wards, I was really thinking about the psychological aspect of decision making. I also got the opportunity to do some consulting work with the pharmaceutical industry and how they influence. Positions, decision making prescribing, and ultimately how that then trickles down to affecting patients.

So I wanted to study that in more depth. So after doing some consulting work, I decided I wanted to look at these psychological processes of influence and advice, why we might take bad advice, and conflicts of interest. And when I spoke to a few professors in the UK, in London, they said to me, if you really want to look at conflicts of interest, if you really want to look at ethical dilemmas, you have to go to the US.

So I did. I went to the US. Wait, why? Why? Why can you not do that in the UK? Is there something I don’t know? I think it was like a tongue in cheek, there’s a lot more going on. Oh, I see. Okay. It’s a medical healthcare system. I see. Okay. All right. Okay. For this. There’s issues both in the UK and the U.

S., but there was already some work being done in my area in the U. S. So I came across and I wasn’t short of things to study, for sure, and I then, came over to do a Ph. D. in Organizational Behavior at Carnegie Mellon University, and that led me to where I am now, and I started to really look into advice and influence and why we go along with things when we don’t want to our level of compliance and I ended up just finding so many things that I wanted to explore in more detail I can give you some examples if you like So there was one study that found that nine out of ten health care workers many of them nurses do not feel comfortable speaking up when they see their colleagues making an error.

Really? That’s shocking. It’s shocking, right? Because this could be life and death situations. And another survey found that with over 1700 crew members on commercial airlines, only half of them felt comfortable speaking up when they noticed their superiors making a mistake. What? Yeah, I started to wonder, is it sometimes bad to be so good, the way that I was taught to be good, which is not to question authority, to obey, to be polite, and we start equating compliance with being good and defiance with being bad.

And I started to wonder, what do we actually sacrifice by being so compliant? Is it sometimes bad to be so good? Because even if it’s not life and death situations, keeping silent when you feel something is wrong can actually be soul destroying over time. And I often felt quite drained and muted, and that inspired a lot of my work and research.

Amazing. Taking your personal experience, I love how evocatively you said that, feeling drained, feeling muted, but then really getting curious around why do we do this and exploring it to find the answer. Truly shocking situations. A plane could fall out of the sky. Somebody could die in the hospital if somebody doesn’t say something.

And yet still most people in those situations do not speak up. So let’s just go there. Why is it so hard for people to stand up for themselves, even when they know that saying something. Saying no would be the right thing to do. Yeah. So there’s many reasons why there’s a lot of when we resist being defiant, and I will tell you that this is my definition of defiance.

So the old definition is that to defy is to challenge the power of someone else. I did boldly and openly. Whereas my definition of defiance is that to defy is simply to act in accordance with your values when there is pressure to do otherwise. I love that. It’s really important and it substantially changed how I think because we’ve misunderstood what it means to

If we think that compliance equals good and defiance equals bad, it keeps us mute, it keeps us quiet. But if you reframe defiance as good, a proactive positive force in society, because if you think about it, all our individual acts of dissent and consent build up to the society that we live in.

And that’s why we need to really be passionate about thinking about that. What are we consenting to? What are we dissenting to? Because it affects our lives, our communities, our workplaces. It affects other people if we don’t speak up when we should. And there are numerous reasons why we don’t, because we have that understanding.

We also have enormous pressure at times to go along with what other people want from us. Another reason is that we don’t understand exactly what compliance and defiance are. And then the last reason is once we decide to defy, we often don’t know how to do it. We don’t know what the skill is, the practices to get to the final no, right?

We might feel some tension to begin with. But we don’t know how to get from that to actually saying, no, this does not feel right for me. Or speaking up when you see something is wrong. Yeah. I love this. So we’ve been socialized to believe that defiance is bad and that compliance is good. But with this new definition, if I’m saying this correctly, because it’s so beautiful, I think it bears repeating that defiance is speaking up.

for your values, what you know to be true, even when there is pressure to stay quiet, and that it is very difficult for people to do for a variety of reasons. Okay, and this is just a curiosity question. And so speaking as a, so a background psychologist, also a family therapist, and one of the things that I often reflect on is how people are socialized from a very early age in childhood as maybe you were because for parents of young children, it’s really much easier for everybody when these little kids are compliant, right?

When they’re going along with what their parents want, and we can frame kid behavior in those terms, whereas defiant kids or ones that sort of put up a fight or no, I don’t want that or have a million reasons or ask a bunch of questions. We are oftentimes swiftly and for some kids, sometimes forcibly socialized out of that by the time we’re three, by the time we’re five, between our parents and the school system, we’re like, okay, whatever you say.

Has any of your research looked at those socialization factors around are there differences in the way people were raised, parenting styles that contribute to tendencies towards compliance or a comfort approach. with defiance? That was a long winded question. I’m just, I can’t help but knowing. Yeah.

It’s so important what we learn when we’re young, because our brain gets wired in a particular way. So if compliance is continually rewarded, you get to learn that, oh, I get good things if I comply, I get the love and I get what I need. And then If defiance brings punishment or other aspects, those neurons don’t connect as well or they underdevelop.

Yeah. And or we start to feel fear. Yeah. If defiance is consequential. Like a trauma. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. And so the way that you’re socialized. When you’re young is really important and many people I’ve spoken to have told me about Incidences when they were young that made a difference to them especially if it was out of the ordinary and I was brought up as I said, right master class in compliance really and But I do remember one incident really well that stayed with me over the years When I was walking back home from the grocery store, I was about six or seven with my mum, and we were walking back, and it was quite a long walk back home, and she was pulling along this rickety shopping cart, just like what we might have as luggage that we take to the airport on two wheels and we decided to go through what we call a Snicket in Yorkshire in the UK, which is just a very narrow path almost like an alleyway pedestrian path And as we were walking through that path, we were confronted by about six or seven teenage boys and they blocked our path and they started shouting out some racist comments and going back home.

And my reaction to that as a child was instant. I grabbed my mom’s arm and I averted my eyes. I just looked at the ground and I just wanted to maneuver as fast as possible through that ticket to get home. And my mom, I’d always put compliance and defiance in two different boxes. I saw them as binary and what my research has shown that’s not actually entirely true.

And if you do think about compliance and defiance in that way, I’d very neatly put my mom in the compliance box because she served the family so well. She did all the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry. She looked after our needs in a country that was new to her and the language was new to her.

And she, at that time, she was in the Snicket. She’s very small. She’s petite, about four foot ten. She was wearing her blue sari. She had her hair neatly tied back in a plait and a braid at the back and What she did Surprised me because she didn’t do what I actually had felt like I’d been taught to do She stopped and she looked at the boys Directly in the eyes and she said what do you mean?

And my heart started racing at this point and I grabbed her arm even tighter and I whispered to her. Come on, Ma And she shook me off. She said, no. And she put the shopping cart upright. She put one hand on her hip and she looked back at the boys and she said, no, what do you mean? And the boys didn’t say a word to her.

And she looked at them and she said, oh, you think you’re such strong boys, right? Big, tough boys. And they didn’t answer her back at all. And they started to look at each other. And one of them just said, let’s go. And they dispersed. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. And my mom grabbed the shopping cart and she started walking really fast through the Snicket.

And I just stood there thinking, what happened? And then I ran to catch her up. And the reason that moment stayed with me for so long is that it taught me so many things about defiance. First of all, it showed me that defiance is a practice, not a personality. So you can be defiant one day and compliant the next.

It’s the skill set that you learn and you can choose whether you utilize it or not. And even though compliance might be our default, for many of us, it is not our destiny. We can defy if we want to. And the other thing I learned is that one person’s defiance can make such a difference because it affected me.

Not only did it affect her, I’m sure, but it affected me just observing that defiance. And that’s why that moment has stayed with me for so long. So unexpected and I saw that even someone I had basically put into the compliance box can be defiant at times when we most need it. Yeah. Absolutely. Gosh, your mother must have been like a hero to you in that moment.

I can only imagine. Just seeing the strength come out of her and a very protective force. And I think that goes back to what you’re saying. If we don’t have the ability to defy, we lose that ability to be protective or to stand up for what is wrong or to prevent something really bad from happening.

And so that’s why we need to develop this. And I love, as you say, like this is a practice, this is a skill. We can work on this. And I wanna talk about that in a minute because I know that in your work you’ve really come up with a rubric, a process of defiance and how to develop these abilities.

But in my experience of, and I, say this as a therapist, oftentimes what will. get in the way of people being able to do the things that they want is not really having full visibility into the internal obstacles that make it hard for us to do what we want to do. So it’s doing the things we want, but also like we need to manage the inner obstructionist things that will get in our way.

And I’d love to go into this just a little bit more because when compliance happens, even if we know that no, I need to stand up for myself. And yet we don’t. I want to understand what is under the hood there. Like in your research, you bring up something called insinuation anxiety, that there’s a very specific type of anxiety that people are vulnerable to in that.

Can you just say a little bit more about that? Or also if in, in your experience are there larger internal obstacles that are even more powerful than that one? Insinuation anxiety is really pervasive. I didn’t know the term for it when I was younger. I didn’t have the language for it.

But this was the thing that was holding me back so much. So let me explain what it is. So insinuation anxiety is the anxiety that we experience when we don’t want to give a negative evaluation of another person to that person. We don’t want to signal to that person that we don’t trust them, for example, that they’re not who they should be.

And I first encountered this process, even though I’d felt it many times before in my actual research, I was looking at medical decisions and patients and conflict of interest disclosures. So you can imagine that, say, your doctor has a conflict of interest in that they are going to get a referral fee if you enter a clinical trial.

Yeah. Now, it’s already so hard to say no to your doctor because of that difference in knowledge is one aspect, but also the dynamics, the power dynamics and the fear and the worry about our health and the doctor knows best all those things. But what I found is that once the doctor discloses their conflict of interest and discloses, that disclosure is one of the most common ways to deal with conflicts of interest is that they tell you that they’re going to receive a referral fee because having told you, you should be able to take that into account.

But what I found is that it can actually make things worse because even though you trust the advice less, Now that the disclosure has become salient, Oh, the doctor has a conflict of interest. I wonder whether their ulterior motive is influencing whether I go in this trial or not. Once that becomes salient between you and the doctor, it’s harder to say no.

Because saying no is more likely to be interpreted that it is because of the disclosure that I see. And that signals distrust. That insinuates that the doctor could be biased by the conflict of interest, that corrupt, that they could be incompetent. It signals a lot of things. And there’s many situations now that I found that insinuation anxiety arises.

Thanks. You can imagine if you’re at work and your boss suggests that you do something and you don’t think it’s right, maybe you don’t want to insinuate that your boss is incompetent. And there was one particular situation, that I read in a book by Michelle Lamont, where she was talking about how professors think or how professors behave.

And she described a situation where there was a group of academics, and most of them were senior, but there was one junior person, a woman of color, and they were assessing the grant applications to see who would qualify for the grant. And there was one situation where this woman was saying that She felt the decision was being made on gossip rather than the quality of the application.

And she wanted to say something about that, but she ended up not saying anything. And what she said was the one thing that she really wanted to do was the one thing she couldn’t do. Because having met these people for the first time, she didn’t want to question their integrity or that they were doing something wrong.

And so she ended up being silent in that situation where she really wished she had spoken up. that insinuation anxiety is so powerful That it could explain why the health care workers the nurses don’t speak up when they see an error Why co pilots don’t speak up to their pilots when they see a mistake happening?

And it could also mean why we don’t tell our hairdresser that we don’t like the cut that they had just given us And we end up tipping them and leaving It arises in small situations large situations, and it’s something that we should really be aware of because if we are aware of it, and we can name it.

It really helps us clarify what’s going on and makes it easier for us to clarify our own values, too, on what we would like to do. Yeah. Absolutely. Being able to say to oneself, I am feeling. this anxiety is very helpful and just recognizing it. But okay, so let me ask you another question. So we’re talking about insinuation, anxiety, and this apprehension that people feel when they could slash should defy, but they are apprehensive about the consequences to the relationship, if they

So if I defy my doctrine if I say something to my new colleagues right now, they are going to think less of me. This could damage my long term relationships. And so I’m also curious to know if in your research if you have explored that at all, the actual consequences of defying in terms of their damage to relationships I’m curious to know if there’s something there or if by and large it’s baseless, that the things that people are worried about don’t actually happen.

So there are costs for defiance. And often these things are very prominent in our mind because that’s the thing that holds us back sometimes is thinking about these costs. Are we going to lose a relationship or we might lose, we might lose our friends. And Certainly at times, those costs are real.

But what people don’t understand is that there’s also costs for complying. If you continuously disregard your values, it affects us. emotionally, spiritually, psychologically, it can have a toll on our health and being if we’re constantly putting aside our values and going along with what other people want.

So we need to think about both sides and we do need to make an assessment of the costs and the consequences. And the way that we can do that is think about, first of all, is this situation going to have positive impact. And I always recommend asking those two questions before defying, but some people, the positive impact is not as important as just standing up for what they believe in.

But I do very much recommend looking for the most effective time to defy it. There are times when we need to, what I call, consciously comply. Maybe the costs are too great. I need this job. I’ve got kids right now. maybe I can’t speak up right now. I’m hoping somebody else will.

But that doesn’t mean that we’re going to do that forever. Because there are so many costs for conscious compliance. It’s just deferring defiance to a time when we know it’s going to be safer and more effective. Because you started to talk about this, but I would love to go into this a bit more deeply. So you say that When we are faced with a situation where we need to comply or defy, there’s a lot of mental slash emotional slash relational algebra that goes into that, right? What are my circumstances?

What is the consequence of this relationship? And then on the other side, what is the consequence in reality is a patient going to die? Is a plane going to crash? But also this, probably, I’m guessing, hidden reality of what is the long term consequence to me if I keep saying yes when I really feel no.

And I think that I would imagine one of the hidden obstacles for people is not being fully aware of the long term consequences to themselves in the moment. Like that’s something certainly that I would not think about in that moment, even though in a more abstract sense, I could totally agree with what you’re saying.

So can you take us? into this just a little bit more deeply. Like, why is it so important for all of us to become more comfortable with defiance? What does it change for our relationships? What does it change for our mental and emotional well being? Like, I know you have a lot of stories in your new book.

Is there one of them that comes to mind about somebody who had maybe a history of complying? And experienced the consequences of that before they developed the skill. Yeah, I can certainly talk about myself as an example there in that I was hugely compliant. I felt insinuation anxiety sometimes all day, every day.

And I talk about the situation in the book where even as a trained doctor, when I moved to the U. S., I had some quite severe chest pain one day and I went to the emergency room because I was worried about it. I hadn’t experienced pain like this before and they did an electrocardiogram and some other tests and I was okay.

My heart was fine and the pain was starting to subside. So I thought they were about to discharge me and then before they did Doctor said well before you go I want you to have a CT scan like a contrast CT scan and I was like why and they said oh We want to make sure you don’t have a pulmonary embolism and that’s like a blood clot in the lungs.

Yeah, and I actually worked as a respiratory doctor or a pulmonary doctor, as you say, in the us and I knew that I didn’t have the typical pain that comes with a pe, a pulmonary embolism. We call that pleuritic chest pain where it catches your breath when you breathe in and breathe out. It’s very sharp and it’s distinctive.

And that was not the type of pain that I had. So I was very low risk of this. And so I had the knowledge and I do recommend that people have the knowledge before defying, right? That so it is having the knowledge and the understanding is critical. But as a doctor myself, I could not define that situation as they said, you need a CT scan.

I didn’t want the scan at all, and it would expose me to ionizing radiation, just a small amount, but much more than an x ray, and we know that radiation can cause cancer in years to come, so why take the risk? So I didn’t want it, I didn’t need it, and yet I complied with them telling me I needed the CT scan.

Why? So simply because they told me to and I hadn’t worked through the stages of defiance to be able to say no, I questioned it a little bit, but I didn’t stick to that and say, I’m not comfortable with this. And so I really regretted that aspect. And I thought about it because My values as well in medicine is patient autonomy and not doing harm and to have the choice.

And in that situation, I felt like I didn’t have the choice that I really wanted to. I couldn’t enact it. And I wish I had done something. Then after thinking about this for a while and thinking about my research and insinuation anxiety and all the other forces that keep us compliant, About a year later, I was in a similar situation where I had some pain in my shoulder and I wanted to get some physical therapy for it, and I needed to go and see a doctor to get that referral for physical therapy.

And as I sat there in the outpatient clinic waiting for the doctor, there was all these forms and things that you fill out. And then I saw someone came along and started walking me towards this sign that said x ray. And I said, Are we going to see the doctor? And she said, No, we’re going to get your x ray first.

And I said how do we know that I need an x ray? Oh, all new patients have an x ray. Whether you need one or not. And They were so stumped. They were confused. They looked more uncomfortable than me. What is she doing? I know. And I completely disrupted the efficiency of their clinic that the doctor, when I eventually got to see him, told me off about that.

He told me this is how we practice medicine here. And I was like the way that I was taught medicine is that you do a history and an examination and then you do tests. to distinguish what’s the differential diagnosis? How can we distinguish between them to get to a real diagnosis? He did not like me saying that.

And I ended up defining and saying, no, I don’t want, an x ray because it’s most likely I know I had an injection and I think this is What caused the inflammation? I just want the referral for physical therapy and he was trying to say This is just how we practice medicine here and I realized it’s a fee for service a profit clinic So the more tests that they do They get and I didn’t think that was a good enough reason So I was able to defy because the time between the two episodes for me is I thought about what is it that I really wanted to do in that situation.

I was in the privileged position of having knowledge in this particular situation, but in many other situations, people do have knowledge, you can predict them. So I’m sure that my mom had encountered those boys before, and perhaps not before. said anything and then wish she had. We predict, for example, oh this person is bound to make a sexist remark in a work meeting and we’ve let it go many times before.

So once we’re in a situation where we can anticipate that we might need to defy, that helps us because it’s surprise that often disables defiance when we’re surprised about something and we don’t know how to act. We go back for a while. I could see that. So if we can visualize this, anticipate this situation is likely to occur, then we can visualize it and we can start practicing.

What is it I wish I had said? And that’s what I’ve done for the last year. Why did I find it so difficult to just say, no, I’d rather not have that test, that unnecessary test. And so I started practicing it. And so in the situation, it was easier for me to define. And if we can use that as a practice, okay.

then that really does help us. But we do need to increase our ability and confidence to defy that type of practice. Gosh. And thank you. The benefits of that is that if we can live a life aligned with our values, then It is a more honest life. it unburdens us, it gives us more joy. So we often think so much about the costs of defiance, but what about the benefits of defiance and allowing us to be ourselves, our aspirational selves, not live with regret that we wish we had said something or lived differently.

So it’s a more honest, more authentic life. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that story and I personally can relate. There have been so many times where, I’ve gone through things and I didn’t speak up and I went along and then afterwards, I think I’m hearing this in your story, you speak up.

it does take a toll. But I love what you’re saying is here is an amazing growth opportunity. when you live through that, you do not let it beat you down or shame you. You use this as a chance to be like, okay, the next time I’m in this situation, here’s what I want to do.

And you’re saying that long term, it really contributes to your success. to your well being and your joy. I hope this isn’t too personal of a question to ask you. You stop me if it is. But how did you feel emotionally after the second situation when you said to that doctor actually, no because he was not happy with me.

And this was your medical provider. How did you experience that personally when you stood up for yourself? It is difficult, especially for someone who has been trained to be so compliant And being rewarded for being compliant. So in the actual situation, I did feel that tension.

I did feel, oh, I’m being the difficult patient here. That’s the label that’s the judgment that they’re going to make of me. ’cause this is the thing, yeah. I’m gonna be the difficult one and it’s hard. But in medicine we have these guidelines for patients to what they call choosing wisely, where all the information and you choose.

What happens when it’s so difficult to choose because they’re telling you to go. in a certain direction and you feel pressure to go along with that because you want to be the compliant patient doctors are busy they don’t have time and so many people have spoken to me about how difficult it is to ask their doctors questions and maybe get a second opinion so i did in that moment feel uncomfortable but then i Was able to stick to saying no.

Yeah, even though it was difficult The really amazing thing was that all that tension that I initially had just evaporated Right and I was able to walk out there with my physical Therapy referral and I said I’ll come back in six weeks if the pain hasn’t gone and then you can take my x ray but also proud of myself for doing that and knowing that I could do that and that I had some agency I had a choice And in this situation, it seems like quite a small thing and a very personal thing.

But the thing is often these injustices are not that small. And when I started to tell people about my experience, they said, you should write about this. And so I did. I wrote an article And it got accepted in a top medical journal in JAMA, and then my inbox was flooded with emails and lots of physicians were writing to me, some to say that they agreed with me that the system is really difficult to change.

Others said, We need to do this. This is for profit clinic. There was many different reactions, but it had a ripple effect. And even though we can hope I can hope maybe my questioning the doctor would make him think a little bit more afterwards. Maybe, right? Maybe he becomes a little bit more introspective.

Maybe not. Maybe none of that happens. But if somebody else was to do the same thing, maybe then he would think twice. So it can have a ripple effect that becomes greater than your own personal moment. Yeah. Because when we think about defiances, like we think about that you have to be larger than life, that you have to be a Rosa Parks or a Colin Copernic and that you have to do the, things with a loud personality, but in reality you don’t.

You can define in your own unique way, a way that causes you less angst, that’s more natural for you, and allows you to live your life in alignment with your values. Yeah, no, absolutely. And even just a small moment of resistance. And can I also just say, like, how incredibly validating it was to hear that?

You are a physician. And in that moment with a doctor went through this sort of crisis around, ah, what do I do? I’ve struggled with such the same thing. And in this dynamic, you have A hundred X more privilege and power by virtue of your profession than most people do. And so just to acknowledge how hard it is for people to have the strength to stand up in these moments and say, wait, just a second there.

But you’re talking about how important even if it. It doesn’t necessarily change something in that system right away, but even to put up a little bit of a struggle can start to make people think twice as opposed to everybody just passively going quietly, right? So Okay, so this is so interesting.

And I know I don’t have a ton more time with you, but I do want to make sure that we address something else that I think is really important. So what I’d love for you to talk about a little bit more if it’s okay. It was one of the things that I really appreciate about your research is that you have really tried to make it practical for people.

And in your book, Defy the Power of Saying No in a World that Demands Yes, is that you’re providing a blueprint of defiance for people who want to be more appropriately assertive in moments like this. And so you’re breaking defiance down into five different steps. And then you also include some recommendations.

to put this into practice. And now, of course, people need to get the book, which comes out in January to get all of the details. But is it possible just to give us a run through of some of these suggestions you have? Sure. So let me tell you a little bit about the five stages of defiance. Okay. The first stage that often so many of us feel is tension.

That’s the first like something is happening that I feel This is the right thing to do in this situation. I’m uncomfortable. Yeah, I’m uncomfortable. But what we often do is that we don’t acknowledge that. We might feel it, but we might feel some anxiety. We might feel insinuation anxiety. We might feel some doubt is this really what they’re saying?

Yeah. We might just think that it’s not worth our doubt to go on. They’re probably right. They probably know best. And what’s important is to feel the tension first of all, and then the second stage is to acknowledge it to ourselves explicitly.

I am uncomfortable in this situation to explore that tension. And when we realize that we have all the elements to either consent or dissent. And I take the definition from medicine of informed consent. What do we need? We need a capacity, so we’re not under the influence. We’re not sick.

We have the capacity to make the decision. We have the knowledge, the understanding, we’re free to say no, and then we can authorize no or yes, informed consent or informed refusal. So attention is first, acknowledging to ourselves. And if we have the knowledge and the understanding, then we can then explicitly articulate it to someone else.

And this is the third stage of defiance. And it’s a critical stage, because if you can just say to someone else, I’m not comfortable with this, that single statement is that you have acknowledged that there’s something that you don’t want to comply with. Research shows if you can get to that third stage, you’re more likely to get to the fifth and final stage, which is the act of defiance.

So if you can say, I’m not comfortable with this, then stage four is sticking to that, repeating it, and threatening to not comply. And so defiance doesn’t have to be loud or. angry, or it doesn’t even have to be like a heroic moment. It can be done in a way that is more natural for you.

And this is one of the ways to decrease the cost as well, is that you’re talking about yourself, I’m not comfortable with this. I don’t think I can go along with this. It’s not being self righteous and telling the other person that they’re wrong. It’s talking about, What you want to do and what you feel is the right thing to do And as I said if you get to that fifth stage That tension you had at stage one just tends to disappear and you feel a lot more content with your decision and there’s also many other Ways that we can practice defiance that I go into to make it so that When we’re in the moment, we can defy even when it’s critical because it is a practice that starts long before the moment of crisis.

We need to practice it and we need to understand how important it is to our lives. There’s a wonderful quote that I can leave you with that is often actually attributed to Bruce Lee, but it was a Greek poet that said this, under duress. We often don’t rise to our level of expectations, but we fall to the level of our training and that’s why it’s so important to train for defiance.

So you’re saying to practice this as a muscle exercise, it may be even in small ways so that when the moment comes that you really need to defy in a more serious way, That skill, that muscle memory is there. Is that what you’re saying? Exactly. That we build up the ability to do that.

And when you look into some of these, Oh, I can’t be a Rosa Park. What she did was amazing, but what’s more amazing about her story is that it wasn’t a spontaneous. It wasn’t just something she did in that moment. She had been practicing that. For that day, for many years, and she knew that this was the time it was going to be effective.

She even talks about how she was asked to be secretary for an association and she was too timid to say no. I’m sure lots of us have been in that situation and we can relate to that. The importance of defiance being a practice and preparing for those moments that we know are going to happen.

Many of them are predictable and if we can practice for those days, what a difference it’s going to make to our lives. Absolutely. Okay. Fantastic advice. You’ve definitely inspired me to look for little opportunities when I could comply, just go along. But when I really, love that idea and just practice saying no to get more comfortable with it and trusting that when the moment comes where you really need to stand up for something big, it’ll be easier to do that.

So that’s good. Sending your food back. For some people it’s really easy, right? Sending the food back, saying no, I want my bangs a little different, whatever it is, like low stakes. Okay. So before I let you go and thank you for being so gracious with your time, but I just, I can’t let you go without asking you either.

The world in general people have very strong feelings particularly about politics and where the world is heading. And I think many people, probably on both sides of this are going to be in situations. where they are going to have passionately held values or feelings about things, but be in situations with other people around them where it feels like injustice is being done or there are things happening that feel out of alignment with their values.

And this is a big question. And if you were to say let me think about that. I’ll get back to you later. I would not blame you if you don’t want to comply with the question, but do you have any just general advice for the world right now around how to manage some of the conflicts that, that we’re probably going to see intensify?

Ah, so when we think about values, we often think about what we think is right or wrong. And often if we do focus on just that it can become what psychologists call a moral conviction that certain stances that we have, say homosexuality is right or it’s wrong, is subjective because people have different opinions on it and it become really decisive.

divisive. And that’s what we’re seeing right now in many parts of the country, that this is right, this is wrong, I’m right, you’re wrong. Whereas when I think about the most powerful way of thinking about values is to think about them in terms of How they inspire our day to day actions is integrity.

Important to us is equality. Important to us is fairness is benevolence. How do we want to see the world that we want to create? And the society that we want to live in and those values. They are not like right or wrong. They can’t be seen as facts as Which is what moral convictions are definitely so seen as facts and we people get very attached to them if we can think about our values and then approach That kind of conflict Perhaps at the dinner table that we see it with our own family Curiosity rather than with superiority, you know any kind of superior judgment on them, but with curiosity, asking questions.

Why? What do you mean by that? Like my mom did. Oh, what? Why do you have that perspective? Because I see it a different way. So open for dialogue rather than being divisive about what you think is right or wrong. And certainly with defiance, you’re living by your own values, but you can’t control what other people do.

And so being in conversation, especially if it’s someone close to you that you would like to be in conversation with can be done without approaching them in an aggressive or confrontational way, by just simply asking questions. Yeah. You can bring a little bit of that closeness together again. That’s fantastic advice. I love that. And to get clear around your own personal values and how you would like to see those expressed in your sphere of influence and also radical curiosity is I think my takeaway. Great advice. Dr. Sunita Saa, wonderful conversation where can people learn more about you and your work?

And of course, the book, Defy the Power of Saying No in a World that Demands Yes. Where would they go? Sure. You can go to my website, sunitasaa. com. So that’s S U N I T A s a h dot com and the book is there and from all out all places you can buy books so you can pre order it’s out on January the 14th 2025.

You can also sign up for my newsletter which is Defiant by Design which is on Substack so you can keep up to date with my latest research there and different Strategies and information for professional and personal growth. And if you go to my website again, you’ll see ways to connect with me on social media, on LinkedIn and Instagram.

Excellent. I will definitely personally be doing all of the above. And thank you so much just for spending this time with me today and sharing your wisdom and your knowledge with our community here at Love, Happiness and Success. I really appreciate it. Oh, this is wonderful. Thank you so much for inviting me.