4.6 • 12.2K Ratings
🗓️ 4 August 2025
⏱️ 75 minutes
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A conversation with a Cornell professor who is attempting to rebrand the concept of defiance.
Dr. Sunita Sah started her career as a physician but then switched over to organizational psychology. At Cornell, she conducts research on influence, authority, compliance, and defiance. She is the author of Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes.
In this episode we talk about:
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0:00.0 | This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. |
0:19.9 | Hello, party people. How we doing? Here's a question. How often do you say yes to things, only to regret it later? Why do we do that? Social pressure, power dynamics, eagerness to please, guilt, habit. |
0:34.8 | Today I'm talking to a Cornell professor who is attempting to rebrand the concept of defiance. |
0:42.0 | Many of us think of that term as negative, but my guest argues that the pressure to comply is a |
0:48.6 | pervasive, corrosive force in our culture and that we all need to do a better job of learning when and how to say no. |
0:57.6 | Dr. Sunita Saa started her career as a physician, but then she switched over to organizational |
1:03.6 | psychology, and at Cornell she conducts research on influence, authority, compliance, and defiance. |
1:12.9 | She's out with a book now called Defy, |
1:18.0 | the power of know in a world that demands yes. And in this conversation, we talk about how she defines defiance, the costs of compliance, the five stages of defiance, how to make |
1:23.4 | defiance a practice in your life, the upside of tension, even though many of us want to avoid it, the importance of knowing your values. |
1:30.1 | This is a theme that keeps coming up here on the show that I find very interesting. |
1:33.8 | She's going to talk about how to articulate your values and how this relates to your biology, |
1:38.7 | specifically your hormones. |
1:40.7 | And we talk about the gender components of defiance and much more. |
1:45.7 | Just to say, before we dive in here, it can be very tricky to figure out whether you should say yes or no in a given situation. |
1:53.0 | It often involves tuning into your body, which is an overused and cliched notion, but a powerful one nonetheless. |
2:00.1 | So if you want to get better at this skill, and it really is a skill, we've got a guided |
2:04.2 | meditation for you, which is specifically tailored to this episode. |
2:08.2 | And it comes from our teacher of the month, Kyra Jule Lingo, who will be crafting bespoke |
2:13.3 | meditations for all of our Monday, Wednesday episodes during the month of August. |
2:20.3 | We think of this as the kind of lecture lab model. |
2:25.2 | The pod is the lecture where you're learning interesting stuff, and the lab is where you practice applying it in your own mind. |
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