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Sunita Sah is a trained physician and a tenured professor and organizational psychologist at Cornell University. She has done some of the most fascinating research on defiance, advice, and influence. And she’s distilled much of it into her new book, Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes. Not surprisingly, I find her work extremely compelling.
Today, we talk about how many of us have been conditioned to be good and quiet, and what the cost of being so compliant is. Sunita explains why she no longer sees compliance and defiance as binary. And why defiance is not a character trait, but a skill that any one of us can learn and choose to use or not. Compliance might be our default, Sunita says, but it’s not necessarily our destiny.
We also talk about why we sometimes go along with things that don’t sit well with us. And how we can use signals like nervous laughter or a crocodile smile to pause and change course. Sunita explains the phenomenon of insinuation anxiety, and false defiance. And shares a few very powerful stories of when people have used defiance in big and small ways, which can serve as a model for us all.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
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