715: How to Stand Up for Yourself, with Sunita Sah

Coaching for Leaders

Dave Stachowiak

Education, Business, Management, Self-improvement, Careers

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 13 January 2025

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sunita Sah: Defy
Sunita Sah is an award-winning professor at Cornell University and an expert in organizational psychology, leading groundbreaking research on influence, authority, compliance, and defiance. A trained physician, her research and analyses have been widely published in leading academic journals and media entities including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Harvard Business Review, and Scientific American. She is the author of Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes*.

We often think of defiance as a snap judgement. Yet, it’s so much more nuanced and purposeful than it often appears. In this conversation, Sunita and I explore the common patterns of defiance and how we can all do a better job of standing up for ourselves.
Key Points

We follow bad advice – even when we know it is obviously bad – to avoid appearing unhelpful.
Defiance means acting in accordance with your true values when there is pressure to do otherwise.
True defiance is not a snap judgement; it’s a process.
Acts of defiance are preceded by many moments of conscious compliance, when defiance is deferred.
Five stages of defiance often emerge: (1) Tension, (2) Acknowledgement (to ourselves), (3) Escalation (vocalize to others), (4) Threat of non-compliance, and (5) Act of defiance.
Vocalizing our concern to someone else is a key pivot point on the journey to ultimately saying no.
Respond explicitly to these questions: (1) Who am I? (2) What type of situation is this? and (3) What does a person like me do in a situation such as this?

Resources Mentioned

Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes* by Sunita Sah

Interview Notes
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Related Episodes

Find Courage to Speak When It Matters Most, with Allan McDonald (episode 229)
How to Build Psychological Safety, with Amy Edmondson (episode 404)
How to Speak Up, with Connson Locke (episode 546)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	We often think of defiance as a snap judgment, yet it's so much more nuanced and purposeful than it often appears.
0:08.1	In this episode, the common patterns of defiance and how we can all do a better job of standing up for ourselves.
0:16.4	This is Coaching for Leaders, Episode 715.
0:20.9	Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.
0:29.6	Greetings to you from Orange County, California.
0:32.6	This is Coaching for Leaders, and I'm your host, Dave Stahoviac.
0:37.0	Leaders aren't born, They're made. And this
0:39.9	weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. We have all been
0:46.2	in many situations where we comply with what's happening around us. And that is, in many ways,
0:53.4	the cornerstone of our organizations and our society for many around us. And that is, in many ways, the cornerstone of our organizations
0:55.2	and our society for many good reasons. And sometimes it's really not the right answer. Sometimes
1:01.1	avoiding compliance is the path forward, especially at the right time. Today, I'm so glad to
1:08.3	welcome a guest who has really dedicated her work to looking at how we think about compliance, defiance, and how we can make sure we're heading down the path we want to head down at the right time.
1:22.0	I'm so pleased to introduce Sanita Saa.
1:24.6	She is an award-winning professor at Cornell University and an expert in organizational
1:29.2	psychology, leading groundbreaking research on influence, authority, compliance, and defiance.
1:36.2	A trained physician, her research and analyses have been widely published in leading academic
1:40.7	journals and media entities, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times,
1:45.3	Harvard Business Review, and Scientific American. She is the author of Defy, the power of no in a world
1:53.5	that demands, yes. Sanita, what a pleasure to have you on. It's a pleasure to be here, Dave.
1:59.2	Thank you so much for that lovely introduction.
2:01.6	I loved this book, and I forgot that I was preparing for an interview with you while I was
	...

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