Why You Say Yes When You Shouldn't — And How To Say No When It Matters Most | Dr. Sunita Sah

28:36And that is really powerful. That particular sentence that I have as part of a tool that I use has allowed me to step closer to doing the things that I once felt very uncomfortable to do, which is saying no, which is defying when I need to act in a way that would go against somebody else's expectations, but would align with the values that are important to me. Yes. So I can imagine a couple mechanisms by which clarifying your values would lower the release of cortisol in your brain. One would be not being a hypocrite probably feels pretty good that the delta between kind of vague sense of what a quote unquote moral person does and what you are actually doing probably creates a background static of cognitive dissonance or anxiety or sadness or stress that isn't helpful.

29:37Another mechanism would be what you just articulated, that if you're clear about who you are, what you stand for, then it makes it easier to do this otherwise very hard thing of saying, no, I'm not down for that. Yeah, I think both play into this because the thing that keeps us silent and compliant is that we often think about the costs of defiance. Oh, I don't want to lose my job or I don't want to lose this relationship or I just find it very difficult to say no or imply something negative to the person that's standing right in front of me and I forget about the bigger picture and everybody else that might be harmed.

30:17And I've identified some psychological processes for why that is, but what we do is we put so much weight on those costs of defying, which could be very real, but we don't think about the costs of compliance, like constantly bowing our head to other people and sacrificing what we think is important. And those costs can be very real. And indeed, stress is one of them. We build up resentment, we build up chronic stress, anxiety, inflammation, burnout, dissatisfaction. There's so many negative consequences for being compliant when you, and saying a yes, that's not really a yes. So we need to think about the cost of compliance, not just the cost of defiance.

31:06Coming up, Dr. Sunita Sa talks about some key concepts, including the defiance compass. We dig deeper on aspects of moral language to help you understand and clarify the decisions you make on a daily basis and much more.

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33:40Staying with this theme of values, you have a concept called the Defiance Compass. and values play a very important role in that. But I think there's more to the defiance compass. Can you describe what the defiance compass is? Sure. So the defiance compass is three questions that go around like really one leads to the other and the last question leads to the first question. So the three main questions, it starts with the very first one is who am I? And that is really your values. So identifying your values, what is important to you? and as I've said like a lot of those values that I see coming up time and time again in my students when I have them do this exercise tend to be very powerful and very sort of simple words that we want to enact on a day-to-day basis and we will say these things are important to us so integrity compassion fairness all of these things we'll say this is important this is how I want to live my life.

34:40So that's the very first question that can be done outside of any sort of defiance situation, like it's work that we can do at any time. The second question is looking outwards when you are in a situation to really assess what type of situation is this. So most people decide to either comply or defy by asking an additional two questions here, which is, is it safe and is it effective. But I should always add, is it safe enough? Will it be effective enough? Because yes, defiance is inherently risky. And we can always use the fact that it's never going to be safe to remain compliant. But as I've said, there's also costs of being compliant.

35:21And so we want to ask, is it safe enough? Will it be effective enough? So that's when we can decide whether we're going to defy in the moment or whether we're going to defer defiance to another the day, or whether in this situation, we're going to consciously comply, not just slide into it, but we are going to assess the situation. And I'll come to the definition of conscious compliance versus compliance and consent a little bit later on. So we have the two main questions so far is, who am I? What type of situation is this? And then the last question is, what does a person like me do in a situation like this?

35:57And this is where we're tapping into our aspirational selves. So we're reminding ourselves of our values. What does a person like me with these values of fairness, of compassion, of integrity, what does a person like me do in a situation like this? And here, we need to connect again with our responsibilities and our values. So we do that with that question. And then that leads to our action. We also need the skill set. We need the ability to defy. So we need to learn that. Otherwise, we won't be able to enact in alignment with our values. But here we're thinking, this is what I need to do. And once you act that way, it goes back to and it affects who you are.

36:39So however you act in that situation goes back to who am I and what are my values? Am I living my values on a day-to-day basis or not? Because if you're not, then who you are will change. So that's the Defiance Compassion. And it's a really useful tool that we can use in those situations to tap into our aspirational selves and perform the actions that we would wish that we could perform. So we actually become the person that we aspire to be. So many more questions to ask you. You mentioned that you would talk about conscious compliance. Yes. I'd be interested to pick up on that. Are you saying there are times where, you know, if we do the math on it, it might make sense to comply consciously even though we don't fully agree?

37:29Sometimes. So, first of all, when I said at the beginning that we've misunderstood what it means to defy, and I gave you a new definition of that, there's so many ways that we've misunderstood defiance. And that's because we don't really understand what these terms compliance, consent, defiance, conscious compliance actually are. And I want to give people this moral language really to understand and clarify the decisions that we make on a daily basis. So if we start with what is compliance, compliance is basically sliding into something. It's imposed on us from something external. internal. So it could be an order, it could be a suggestion, it could be society's expectations.

38:14So yes, that's not quite a yes. It's coming from something outside of ourselves that's asking us to do something. Now, consent is often conflated with compliance, but it's actually fundamentally different. So my first career was as a physician, and I take informed consent in medicine, and I apply it to other decisions that we make in our lives. And I think this is a really useful framework to use. So to have informed consent, you need five elements. So the first one is capacity. You need the cognitive capacity, the mental capacity to be able to make a decision. So you're not under the influence of a drug or alcohol, you're not too sick.

38:56And physicians should always assess their patients to make sure that they have the capacity to make a decision on their medical care, but we can assess that for ourselves when we're making a decision. Then the next one is knowledge, that we need information about the decision we're about to make. But it's not enough just to have the information. The third element is a thorough understanding of that information. So, a grasp of all the facts, the risks, the benefits, and the alternatives. And then the fourth element, once you have the capacity, the knowledge, and the understanding, the fourth element is the freedom to say no.

39:33Because if you don't have the freedom to say no, then that's merely compliance. It's not consent. So if you have those four elements, then the fifth element is your authorization, your thoroughly considered authorization that is your active expression of your deeply held values. So that's your consent. It isn't compliance. it's very different. That's what I call consent or your true yes. Now defiance is actually your true no, and you need the same five elements to be able to defy. So I'm not talking about like a knee-jerk reaction or an emotional reaction. I'm talking again about a thoroughly considered authorization that's an active expression of your deeply held values.

40:17So consent and defiance are just two sides of the same coin. It just depends on what the expectation is, is whether you say yes or no. But you need all those factors there. And conscious compliance is not the kind of default compliance that we are kind of wired for in a way that we've been socialized to do. But it's when all those elements are present. So you have the capacity, knowledge, understanding, the freedom to say no. But in this particular situation, the costs are too great or the benefits are too meager that you don't think this is the right time and place to do it. That doesn't mean that you are always going to comply because the costs are only going to increase, but you are going to defer defiance to another day when it could be safer and more effective for you to do so.

41:09What about situations where you don't have the freedom to say no? I feel like many people listening may feel not only the costs are too high, or maybe the costs are so high that essentially I don't have the freedom to say. Yes, absolutely. There are situations like that. And I interviewed a lot of my students for this. And there's a defined hierarchy in that some people get to defy with less costs than others. And I write about a couple of situations where the black men in my class will spell out that if they are stopped by the police, perhaps a traffic stop or something like this, they want to get home.

41:47So they're going to comply so they can actually get home at the end of the day. So there's definitely situations where we want to consciously comply because it's too unsafe for us to think about anything else. And we need to be aware of those types of costs. I do say, though, it's important to add the word safe enough and effective enough because we don't want to use these things as a rationalization to never defy. And if you think about some of the famous no's in history, for example, Rosa Parks's defiance on the bus, and we often think about defiance in this way as being maybe loud, aggressive, violent, or we think about it as being superhuman and heroic.

42:28It's actually neither of those things. But Rosa Parks did say no on the bus. It was a really momentous occasion because it made a big social change. But if you think about it, there was a couple of things here. So one is that her famous no was preceded by hundreds of moments of likely compliance. So she didn't defy segregation laws every single day, every single moment. And so we need to remind ourselves that there are times that we need to consciously comply because it's too unsafe for us to defy. Was it safe for Rosa Parks in that particular moment? No, it wasn't safe for her. She received a lot of death threats after saying no, that she will not move for a white passenger on the bus.

43:11She was unemployed for 10 years. There were certainly a lot of costs for her. But when she was asked whether she would do it again, she said yes, without hesitation, because for her, living up to her values was more important than the costs at that particular moment. But it was also strategic in that she did have support and this was the right moment for her to do it. So she thought it would be effective. Now, some people will defy even if you can't predict it's going to be effective because they want to stand or sit down for what they believe in. So it is a deeply personal decision of whether we defy or not.

43:50It comes down to our own personal assessment of this. What are the costs that we're willing to take? But I always say, again, think about the cost of compliance as well as the cost of defiance because it's not a neutral decision if you just say yes to somebody else. You said before that yes and no are two sides of the same coin. There's this concept of a full body yes. Are you familiar with that? I'm familiar with a hell yes, if that's the same kind of thing where it feels really good, right? Like true consent should feel really good. And it does go back to meditation and interception and the idea of being able to listen to your body's signal.

44:33Yes, you should listen for the tension and you should also listen for the positive resonance with, yeah, hell yes, I do want to do this. This is a great idea. Yes, and that is stage five, you know, which could be a yes, it could be a no. So as I said, when you do defy that tension that you have at the beginning, it melts away and you're left with those positive aspects that you're talking about. And so feeling that and remembering those feelings are also really important.

45:06Coming up, Dr. Sa talks about the steps that you can take to make defiance a practice in your life, the concept of psychological safety, and we get to my favorite topic, anxiety.

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46:55They are anticipate, visualize, practice, and repeat. repetition. Can you walk us through these, please? Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things I say about defiance is that we need to be prepared long before the moment of crisis, because if we have been wired to comply from a young age, we can't just do something that feels really unnatural to us. And even though I've redefined defiance, some people have such a strong negative association with it, they find it so difficult to be even saying any defiant words or acting in a defiant way. Because we also have this vision of defiance as being a particular personality trait, and it's not.

47:39It's a skill set. It's a practice, not a personality. And so one of the things that we want to start with is perhaps thinking about the situations that we complied and we regretted it that we wished we could have defied in that situation. And so we start anticipating because it's likely we're going to experience those situations again. So we can even, even if we think about workplaces, for example, we can start to think about, oh, I was in that meeting and somebody said something that was quite harmful to someone who wasn't there. And I just remained silent. I didn't say anything. And I know that person is going to say something inappropriate appropriate perhaps in the next meeting we have because they've done it so many times.

48:24So we can start anticipating the most common situations that we might face. It could be at work, it could be somewhere else. I was speaking to a rookie police officer who told me that when they joined the police academy and they went into their first role, that they knew that they would be asked to do something unethical or they would be asked to look the other way. They had anticipated that moment beforehand and they had thought about it, they'd visualized it. So let's think about the many situations that are often predictable to us. So we can anticipate, then we can visualize it. We start picturing it and we start practicing by scripting out what we would say.

49:09And saying those words out loud, it really gets our mouths used to saying those words, which could be just as simple as, I'm not comfortable with this. What do you mean by that? That's also a really powerful phrase. What do you mean by that? You're asking for clarification. Just practicing those scripts over and over again gets our mouths used to saying it, our ears used to hearing it. And that is what changes the neural pathways and makes it easier for us to say it in that moment of crisis. And there's a wonderful quote that's often attributed to Bruce Lee, which is apt because it is about practice.

49:44But it was actually a Greek poet that said, under duress, we don't rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training. And that's why it's so important to practice before we get into that situation. So I recommend it's not a personality, it's a practice. It's a skill set that we can choose to use. We can nurture it, we can create it, and we can choose when to use it. We can be compliant one day, we can be defiant the next day. But it really is a choice. And I don't want people to not defy just because they haven't learned how to defy. This really rhymes with the core contention of the latter half of my career.

50:25I used to be a journalist. Now I am whatever the fuck I am now, a happiness person or well-being person. But the animating insight of my work is that happiness, which I understand very broadly as all aspects of human flourishing or doing life better from sleep to exercise, to meditation, to therapy, to relationships, to beauty, to purpose. It's not a factory setting that's unalterable. It's a set of skills. And so that's what you're saying is true of defiance. And these four steps, you know, anticipate, visualize, practice the words, which I really resonate with that. And I've found that practicing for conversations, whether they're defiance conversations or not, can really help make them more successful.

51:08And then repeat ad nauseum ad infinitum, like that's how you do it. That really lands for me. Yeah, it's so powerful. It's so powerful. And it's also quite liberating to know that you don't have to have a self-concept or you don't have to think about yourselves as being brave or defiant or compliant as I'm not that type of person. Anyone can defy. It's actually, it's not just for the brave or the extraordinary. It is available and necessary for all of us. And so we can all defy in our own unique way with far less angst than we used to have. And it just starts with making defiance at practice. So we have that action plan that starts long before the moment of crisis.

51:58I would build on that to say that And it's not just the right thing to do. It's also the self-interested thing to do. You don't need to develop this muscle just because you want to be a good citizen, which is great. But it's also going to, as we said before, lower your stress levels. Make you happier, make your life more seamless. Yeah. And you know, you are more of yourself, but it does transform you to live in alignment with yourself. But it also has a ripple effect in that it changes the environment. So if you are in that meeting and you just say, what do you mean by that? Maybe the person that has said the offensive or harmful comment, maybe they change, maybe they don't, but that's not the point.

52:42The point is you've put it out there and that has changed the water in which everybody else is swimming. So now like that person might not say it again, the next time you are in that room in a meeting, maybe they do, but there's other people in the room as well that saw what you did, and maybe they will say something. So whatever happens, something has changed. And that aspect, what really made me think about defines being a skill set and a practice rather than personality was something that happened to me as a child. Because as I said, I grew up with a masterclass in compliance. And my mama as well, she got married very young to my dad.

53:23She's of Indian origin. She's four foot 10 at the most. She's petite. And I saw her as a very compliant person. She did all the cooking, the cleaning, the grocery shopping. She looked after everybody's needs. She was what I would call subservient and extremely compliant. So at that moment in time and for many years afterwards, I always thought about compliance and defiance as being binary. And I'd very neatly put her in the compliant box. And then when I was about seven or eight, something happened that really changed how I viewed her. We were walking back from the grocery store. She was pulling along a shopping cart that was filled with produce.

54:04It just looks like, you know, wheeled luggage, so two wheels. We were pulling it along. And it was quite a long walk back home. And we decided to go through what in the north of England, in West Yorkshire, we call a snicket, which is just a very narrow alleyway. And I was always told, don't go through the snicket on your own as a child when I would come back home from school. But we decided that two of us, you know, we would go together through this alleyway. And in that alleyway, we were stopped by a group of teenage boys. And they blocked our path and they started shouting out some racist comments and telling us to go back home.

54:41Now, my reaction to the boys was instant. I immediately grabbed my mom's arm and I looked down. I averted my gaze. I did not want to look at these boys at all. I just wanted to maneuver as fast as possible through them to get home. But my mom, which I thought she would just do that and be compliant, she did something different that day. Now, she was wearing, I just remember it so vividly as if it was yesterday, she was wearing her blue green sari. She had her hair in just one neat plait at the back. And as I said, she's quite small. She's petite. But she stopped and she looked at the boys directly in the eyes and she just asked them that phrase that I've already said, what do you mean by that?

55:22Now, at that point, my heart started racing quite fast and I grabbed her arm even tighter and I even whispered to her, you know, come on, Ma. And she said no to me and she put the shopping cart up vertical. She put one hand on her hip and she looked back at them again and she said, what do you mean? And they didn't say anything at all. They just started looking at each other. And then she continued to look at them. And when there was just silence, she said, oh yes, you think you're big, strong boys, big, clever boys. And she started telling them off in this broken English until one of the boys looked at the others and said, let's go.

55:57And they just dispersed. She grabbed the shopping cart and she started walking really fast through that snicket to get back home. And I was thinking, what just happened? So my mom, my compliant mom, suddenly showed me what it is like to be defiant. It's not a personality, it's a skill set and we can choose to use it. And she chose to use it that day, maybe because I was present. It became clear to me afterwards that she had experienced that situation before, like those boys or people like those boys. She would come home sort of muttering something. And I always thought she was annoyed with a shopping cart, but it must have been because of these boys.

56:37And what I realized is that compliance might be our default, but it's not our destiny. Anyone can be defined. It's not a character trait. And society is actually built on all of these smaller moments because what I hope to provide with the research that I've done and this book is that people get the tools and they start thinking about defiance and compliance in this way and they start teaching their children defiance skills as well as compliance. Because what I would really love is that we build a society where one of the teens would be what I call a moral maverick and speak up against the peers to tell them to stop.

57:20So my immigrant mother wouldn't have to do that. And this is what I call the defiance domino effect. Like one thing, defiance transforms you, but also the people who observe it, it has this ripple effect. And it really affected me that day. And it stayed with me and probably led to the research that I'm doing now. Do you believe that people with, who through no innate merit of their own, people with unearned advantages, I don't want to name any names, but his initials are Dan Harris, people with unearned advantages in society have more obligation to defy than those who have unearned disadvantages, like who have disadvantages through no fault of their own?

58:11Yeah, I do talk about defiance hierarchy where some people can defy with far less consequences than other people. And some people are in positions of power where it should be up to them rather than people who are disadvantaged to always speak up. And so there's two things. For example, you mentioned women and girls at the beginning of this. Like, do they receive these messages to comply more often? Well, yes. And we see that there are more costs and backlash for being defiant for certain groups of people than other groups. And not only are there more costs, but some people are expected to be more compliant.

58:55So that means that they have to defy more often, but there's also more costs of being defiant. And so we really should be aware of that. And not expect the people at the bottom of the defiance hierarchy to be making all the change. And so it's up to the people that are expecting the compliance to really make the culture of it being psychologically safe to defy. And actually being defiant and modeling defiance for others. You used a term there that I had written down on my sheet of paper in front of me, my notes for this interview. as the next thing I wanted to talk to you about, psychological safety, which sounds like a kind of bland term, but it really is incredibly important just as a brief aside.

59:40And I'm not telling this to you, Sunita, I'm saying it to the audience because I suspect you already know what I'm about to say. There was this great article written by Charles Duhigg in New York Times Magazine many years ago about a research initiative at Google. I think it was Google. Anyway, some huge multinational corporation. They were trying to figure out what made for the most successful teams. And they couldn't figure it out. For some extended period of time, they couldn't figure out why some teams perform better than others. Finally, they arrived on this bland term of psychological safety, which means roughly the ability or the freedom or the safety, everybody on the team, no matter where they are in the hierarchy, feels to speak up.

1:00:24And so we've been talking a lot in this conversation, pretty much wholly in this conversation about individuals and when it's safe and wise to defy. But there's also this other side of the coin, which is those with power who are at the top of a hierarchy and can set the culture, the norms for a culture. So I'm thinking about me within my own company so that people feel safe to defy, which is a kind of enlightened self-interest because I want people to tell me when I'm being a schmuck so that I can stop being a schmuck, which is bad for business. So what can people like me who have institutional power or power within a family, power at all to do to create psychological safety?

1:01:13In other words, the conditions in which defiance becomes a safe thing to do. Yeah, and I think this is a great question is that, yes, there is some self-interest for leaders to do this, because if you do have an organization or a group or a team where it isn't psychologically safe, where people don't feel that they can speak up without being penalized, then you are going to stifle creativity, innovation. You're not going to get told if you're heading off a cliff with a certain service or a product. So you want people to be able to defy and create those types of cultures where you are not going to get the type of turnover.

1:01:52You're not going to have your workforce being fearful. And obviously, then all the costs that come with that sort of the high overturn, burnout, stress, all of those things. So in my research where I've looked at what I call the voice empathy gap, it's like a difference between how managers and leaders view their organizations versus the employees. So people at the top of the hierarchy will think that they have a more open culture and that it's safe to defy, but the people at the bottom of the hierarchy will not feel the same. There's this gap between what people actually perceive. And that's really important to actually diminish that gap, first of all, because when I have looked at why nurses don't speak up in organizations, they will say that there's two main reasons.

1:02:42One is that it's not safe. They're worried about their job or what people will think of them. So it's not psychologically safe. And some people will actually say, well, I'm not afraid to speak up. They're not talking about fear here, but I have spoken up many times before and nothing ever changes. So for a manager or a leader of that, not only do you have to show that it's safe for people to speak up, that they won't be penalized, that you will actually even honor that, you will reward that type of behavior, you will talk about it with your teams, that you want to hear those things, that you will actually act on that too when somebody does speak up.

1:03:20You won't just say, yes, that's great, and then not do anything about it. So those two things are really essentially important. And if you're a middle manager, then you also need to model defiance and show that you're speaking up to your superiors or other stakeholders too. So that modeling aspect is also really powerful for people to see. So make the environment safe by showing that people are not going to be penalized. Some latest research is looking into these types of meetings where people welcome mistakes that had been made. And if you look at the aspect of psychological safety, you will see that the really great teams actually report more errors and more mistakes, not because they're making more errors and mistakes, it's because it's safe for them to do so.

1:04:01So when you're choosing like which hospital to get your surgery done, it becomes very difficult because if you're just going by error rates, that might not be the best thing because we don't know the rate at what people are reporting those errors or not. So celebrate when people talk about their errors or mistakes, or they actually speak up and prevent those errors and mistakes, and then make it effective that you actually act on the information that's given to you, or at least you explain why you are not going to act on it. So there's some procedural justice that they're seeing. This has been, for me, like a really humbling process and ongoing.

1:04:43I haven't arrived at the end state here, but I've realized in doing coaching and just growing older that I grew up in a very hierarchical environment, not only in junior high and high school where there was a lot of bullying, but also in the news industry where there was also a lot of bullying. I think it's less true today, but certainly when I was growing up, you had these very famous news anchors, or I guess you would call them news presenters, household names back when television news had a much bigger place in the popular culture than it does now, household names and their executives who would, it was really not safe to say no.

1:05:21And you would just get told to do a thing. And if you didn't do it, you'd be ostracized. You had to do it, even if it was unsafe or uncomfortable or unhealthy or whatever. You just had to fucking do it. It was just that way. And I was carrying that management style into my life, even as a meditation evangelist. And to have it pointed out to me that I was doing that was really uncomfortable. So I've really tried. Again, if any of my employees is listening, I'm not saying I'm perfect at this. I'm sure I fuck this up all the time, but I really tried to call out in a very positive way when somebody has either publicly or behind the scenes called me on my bullshit to then go back to a group meeting and say, hey, person X did this thing was super brave.

1:06:12I really appreciate it. And I just want all of you to know that you will be rewarded for doing this. And I'm sure there's a lot of stuff I'm not catching, so I'm not trying to pat myself on the back, but this has been a really useful and painful learning for me. So I said a lot of words there, but I want to stop talking and see if you have anything to add. Yeah, I think that's wonderful because we learn from what we see and get trained in. And unfortunately, there are still organizations that have that type of culture. So I've worked in two very hierarchical professions in medicine and academia, both very hierarchical.

1:06:50And even though institutions differ, certainly that kind of compliance is also expected. and when I've also worked in as a management consultant for a while and even though the one organization I worked with had that very very strict culture that you're talking about like you can't question anything but another was completely different so knowing the type of institution that you're in really affects how you can enact defiance and having a leader that becomes aware of that and welcomes that type of change that their team speaking up can only have positive effects, I think, because really, creativity, you know, really comes from being defiant.

1:07:35And we need more innovation and creativity in all our organizations. And you don't want this type of ethical fading where the only person you're thinking about is the person that's right in front of you. because then this is what psychologists call ethical fading, is that if somebody in front of us asks us to do something and you don't think it's the right thing to do, but you start thinking about just pleasing them and that becomes the only thing that comes into your decision, like a yes man or a yes person, that pleasing your boss becomes the only thing that becomes important to you. You shrink everything down to that and you can end up doing things that you would say, this is not me, I wouldn't have done that.

1:08:17This comes back to I was just following orders where we know that if we get into that kind of aspect is where can it lead us? And history has shown us so many terrible consequences of unexamined compliance that, you know, one of the things that really got me into this work as well was when I was at medical school and I took a year to study psychology and I came across Stanley Milgram's obedience to authority experiments, where he had people come in, community members, and they were told they were part of a learning experiment, but they had to administer what they thought were harmful shocks to another person in another room.

1:08:59No actual shock was administered, but somebody was asking them to inflict harm on someone else. Then he found that two-thirds of people went all the way to the deadly 450 volts. But when you look at it, many of those people showed this sign of tension that we were speaking about, you know, nervous laughter, swearing, sweating. It's just that they wanted to defy, but they didn't know how to defy. and giving people the skill set to do that and understand what it like a culture that welcomes to fines can actually bring is the thing that's going to move us forward because we're at danger of our leaders just complying because they're thinking about the costs and we don't know where that's going to lead us two questions i usually ask in closing the first is is there something you were hoping to talk about that we didn't get to i would love to talk about one of the psychological processes that I've discovered that I call insinuation anxiety.

1:10:01Because I think it's a distinct type of anxiety that arises when we start worrying that our non-compliance with another person's wishes is going to be interpreted as a signal of distress. It's the fear of implying something negative about someone, especially when they're standing right in front of you. And this can happen in sort of small-stake situations. For example, when you find it difficult to speak up to the massage therapist if they're using too much force. You don't want to insinuate that they don't know what they're doing, or you're in the hairdresser's chair and they're like, just you with this new haircut, or let me try some purple streaks or something, and you find it very difficult to say no to them and maybe almost thank them and give them a tip on the way out to more serious situations.

1:10:49So insinuation anxiety could explain why nurses don't speak up when they see a colleague or a physician making an error. It could be why co-pilots remain silent and don't say anything to their superiors when they see a mistake. So we really need to understand that aversive emotional state that we become so concerned with offending someone right in front of us that we forget about everything else. You know, there was one situation that I read about in Michelle Lamont's book called how professors behave, that she got out for me to have a look when I told her about insinuation anxiety. And it was about a woman that had gone into this committee.

1:11:30She was asked to be part of a committee with four senior men, and they were assessing grants. And when they were evaluating the grants, there's certain criteria, credentials that need to be sort of met for them to allocate a grant. And this woman said when a particular application came up of a black man, she said the conversation changed and it seemed steer towards more negative gossip than about the criteria or the credentials. And she, as a Black woman, really wanted to speak up and say something, but she didn't. And afterwards, she said the one thing she wanted to do was the thing she couldn't do.

1:12:07And that was question their integrity. That is classic insinuation anxiety. We don't want to imply that someone can't be trusted, is biased, are incompetent. But at the same time, we then dilute our own integrity to go along with it, even though that's the thing that we say that we value. So it really is a powerful force and it keeps us compliant and silent in many situations of small stakes and high stakes. But understanding it, naming it, getting some physical or psychological distance helps us manage it. So that we can practice anticipating, visualizing, practicing, and repeating. Absolutely.

1:12:49Absolutely. If this particular force can be present even when all the five elements of consent are present and it still trips us up, what we need to do is be aware of it. This is about the signal that I sent to someone else. And in those situations, if to break that signal is to get some distance from that person. So that's what I also call the power of the pause. It's just taking time out if you can. Right. So there are one way to defy actually might be just to not say anything or to do your best to avoid the problematic person in question. Well, that is one way to defy, but it's more of a question of if you can get some distance or if you have an opportunity to change your mind is not saying yes straight away.

1:13:37So you might have to give a decision at some point, but it's much easier to do it when you've taken some time and you can connect with your values and you can understand that you want to say no. So the pressure is greatest when you're there in the moment. And if you can learn some scripts just to get some distance. So if you can get some physical distance, you know, let me get back to you that. That sounds interesting. Let me think about it. That's the best thing. If you can't get physical distance, you can get some psychological distance by speaking to yourself in the third person. So maybe you could close your eyes for a few seconds and just speak to yourself in the third person.

1:14:13That gets psychological distance. Sunita, is this what you really want to do? Or go back to that final question on the defiance compass. What does a person like me do in a situation like this. So getting that distance, either physical or psychological, is the thing that can help you connect with your values and help you decide whether you want to comply or defy. Final question for me. Can you just remind everybody of the name of your book and also if you have a website or social media handle or anything else you're making that we should know about? So the book is called Defy, The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes.

1:14:50it's available at most places that sell books but you can also go to my website which is sunitasar.com that's s-u-n like the sun in the sky s-u-n-i-t-a s-a-h.com and on that website there's also a quiz that you can take that will help you find your defiance style and you'll also find links to my free newsletter called Defiant by Design, which is on Substack and ways to connect with me on social media, LinkedIn and Instagram. Excellent. Dr. Sa, thank you very much. Thank you very much.

1:15:33Thanks again to Dr. Sunita Sa. Check out her book. Also, don't forget to check out danharris.com. We've got a guided meditation that is specifically tailored to this episode, all about helping you tune into your body so you can figure out, do I want to say yes to this or no? We're now doing guided meditations that come with all of our Monday, Wednesday episodes, only available to paying subscribers over on danharris.com. Our teacher of the month is Kyra Juolingo. She's amazing. Also, if you become a paid subscriber, you can get our live video conversations where I guided meditation and then take your questions.

1:16:10In fact, I've got one coming up tomorrow, August 5th, 2025. at 3.30 Eastern over on Substack or danharris.com. Synonymous, really. I'll see you there. Before I let you go, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

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