This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - How To Defy Expectations with Dr. Sunita Sah | 271

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

From our choices to our looks, biology to identity, marriage to motherhood, careers to caregiving—women are often handed two options: defy or conform. But what if defying expectations isn’t about rebellion for rebellion’s sake? What if it’s about trusting yourself enough to say no when the world demands yes? In this episode of This Is Woman’s Work, we’re talking about how to defy expectations with the brilliant Dr. Sunita Sah. Dr. Sah is an award-winning professor at Cornell University, an expert in organizational psychology, and a leading researcher on influence, authority, compliance, and defiance. Her new book, DEFY: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes, is a rallying cry for ending submissive behavior and living authentically. This conversation isn’t about being difficult—it’s about being true to yourself. Whether you’re standing up to societal pressures, breaking free of outdated norms, or simply giving yourself permission to live authentically, this episode will inspire you to rewrite the rules and embrace the power of no. As women, we’re often taught to conform, but Dr. Sah shows us why defying expectations isn’t just an act of resistance—it’s an act of self-preservation and growth. Connect with Dr. Sunita Sah: Website: https://sunitasah.com/  Book: https://www.amazon.com/Defy-Power-World-That-Demands/dp/0593793714  IG: https://www.instagram.com/drsunitasah/  X: https://x.com/ProfSunitaSah  Related Podcast Episodes: 159 / Unapologetically BOLD with Vaneese Johnson 201 / How To Find The Right Words When Creating Boundaries with Amy Green Smith Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

I am Nicole Kalil and you're listening to the This Is Woman's Work podcast, which tells me that you're at least a little bit curious about what it means, what it looks and feels like to be doing woman's work in the world today. Because let's face it, there are a lot of expectations and opinions, tons of commentary about what we should and shouldn't want or do or be, and lots of people sticking their nose in where it doesn't belong.

From our choices to our looks, our biology to our identity, if we marry and who we marry, how and when we decide or decide not to have kids, and then how we raise them. From careers to caregiving, boardrooms to bedtime routines, women often face what feels like two options, defy or conform. Let me give you a personal example. I wasn't ever sure I wanted to get married and when I did, one thing I was

absolutely sure of, there was no way I could say traditional vows at the altar. Let's be honest, if I promised to obey my husband, I'd be smote by God on the spot because she would absolutely know that I was lying. I don't think anyone really says that anymore, at least not at the weddings I've gone to, but it's not just the word obey for me, it's the spirit behind it. Submissive? Yeah, that's just not in my wheelhouse. Compromise, agree to disagree? Sure.

But submit and obey? Nope, that's not happening. I can tell you for sure that God or whatever it is that created me didn't mold me for that. And while some may think that's blasphemy, for me it's more about inner knowing, authenticity, and having firm trust in myself because my whole being knows that that's not who I am or who I'm meant to be. And to be clear, that doesn't mean that I expect others to submit in my relationships. I'm more of a mutual respect, equity,

and honoring each other type of person. And yet, there still seems to be some lingering expectation that women submit, mostly to the men in their lives. And listen, if doing that feels true and right and real for you, if it makes you feel the sun from the inside, then you do you. And I stand for your right to choose that for you. But for me, and I'm guessing for most of the women tuning in,

it's a resounding fuck that, like hard pass, right? So on this episode of This Is Woman's Work, we're gonna talk about how to defy expectations with the brilliant Sunita Sa. Sunita is a award-winning professor at Cornell University, an expert in organizational psychology, and a leading researcher on influence, authority, compliance, and defiance.

Her new book, Defy, The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes, is basically a rallying, cried, and submissive behavior. And I could not be more excited to dive into this conversation. So get ready to tap into your inner defiance. Sunita, thank you for being our guest for what feels like a very important and also potentially spicy topic. So I want to start by asking about how you define defiance. What are we talking about here?

Because I'm assuming it's not just defiance for the sake of defiance. Hi, Nicole, it's fantastic to be here. And thank you. So I have studied defiance for such a long time. I really had a masterclass in compliance growing up. As a child, I was known for being obedient, an obedient daughter and student.

I did exactly what I was told. I got up when I was told to, did my homework as expected. I even had my hair cut the way my parents wanted me to. And these were the messages that I received from teachers and parents and the community is to fit in, to be good, to comply, to obey. And I even remember asking my dad at one point when I was quite young, what does my name Sunita mean? And he said, in Sanskrit,ainita means good. So I actually lived up to that as much as I possibly could. And we often get these messages to be compliant as children, especially girls.

We are told to not make a fuss, do what our teachers tell us, what our parents tell us, and simply to be good. So we end up being wired to comply. We equate being compliant with being good and defiant with being bad. And it could also be a dynamic that's familiar to many children of immigrants in that we have like a strict upbringing and high expectations to do well. In fact, even my first career, which was in medicine, and I ended up as a doctor was based on expectations. And so I became having this childhood of compliance, really fascinated by what this single powerful word, defy actually means for such a long time. And Nicole, let me ask you how many times have you wanted to object or disagree or

just opt out of something, but you end up just swallowing your words, so shaking your head and just going along with it? Yeah. I mean, I think about the default yes all the time. If I'm not paying attention or being purposeful or strategic, I'm going to say yes before I even think about it. It just flies out of my mouth. And Sunita, I have to share too, as a daughter, first born daughter of two immigrant parents, obedience, compliance, being good, living up to expectations. And what ultimately turned into perfectionism for me was the name of the game. That's how I thought I was supposed to function in the world.

So everything you're saying is on point. Yeah, because we get trained. We get trained to be compliant. We don't get trained to be defiant. And that's why it becomes so difficult and it can really cause serious problems. So when I delved into this further, I found that one survey, for example, it can really cause serious problems. So when I delved into this further,

I found that one survey, for example, found that nine out of 10 healthcare workers, most of them nurses, did not feel comfortable speaking up when they see their colleague making an error. It's nine out of 10. And it's similar findings in other industries too. So more than 1,700 crew members on commercial airlines, they only spoke up

half the time when they saw their superiors making a mistake. So these could be life or death situations and even when it's not, keeping silent when you know something is wrong or acting in a way just to comply with other people and disregarding your own values, it can be so destroying. And I started to wonder, is it sometimes bad to be good? What do we actually sacrifice by always trying to be so compliant? So I spent a long time looking at this, studying influence, advice, authority, running experiments studies. And what I've found that is crucial and really changed

how I think is that we misunderstood what it means to defy. And that's why I came to this revelation that we do need a new definition for defiance. So the old definition is that to defy is to challenge the power of another person, is to resist boldly or openly. Whereas my definition, my new definition,

is that to defy is simply to act in accordance with your true values when there is pressure to do otherwise. So we actually reframe defiance as a proactive, positive force. And in society too, because our individual acts of consent and dissent build up to the society that we live in. So it affects our lives, our communities, our workplaces. And that's why I'm so passionate about this.

Okay, so I love your new definition. It feels true and right and real for me because, as you mentioned before, being compliant or obedient can also be soul destroying if you're doing it to be people pleasing or for other sake and not being true to yourself. That's usually where if something felt true to me and it fell into the category of being compliant, great like who cares?

It didn't bother me in the least. It was when I was going against my own values, my own truth, what felt in my inner knowing the right course, it was when I went against that, that I did the most amount of internal damage and frankly didn't go all that far externally either. Right. So based on that, I would imagine values are very important when it comes to defiance. I would imagine step one is knowing what our values are. Right. But actually that's not enough.

And the reason I say that is that if I ask my students, my executive students, my MBA students, to articulate what their values are, a lot of them say integrity. So this value is really highly admired in our culture, right? It's desired. We want people to have integrity. It's really important to our characters, and everybody wants to have integrity. It's really prioritized as a value. So I then have my students do this other exercise. So they're all in one room and I ask them to please rate your honesty on a scale of 0 to 100 relative to other people in the room.

So, for example, if you think you are the least honest in the room, you would rate yourself as zero. If you think you are the most honest in the room, you rate yourself as 100. And if you think you're about average, then it would be 50. So I asked them to think of a number, write it down. And then I asked them, what was your number? And most of the people in the room, year after year after year, so many classes,

they will rate themselves at at least 80 or above. That's most of them. Hardly anyone rates themselves as average and practically no one goes below average, which we know is impossible because not everyone can be above average. So these are really, really high numbers. So we rate integrity, honesty, very, very high. But when it comes to our actual actions, we don't actually

display integrity. And what my research has shown again and again is what somebody believes their values to be is quite different from how they actually behave. And this starts at quite a young age. There was this survey of over 20,000 high school students and nearly two-thirds of students admitted cheating on a test. Nearly one-third admitted to stealing from a store in the past year. I found that quite shocking. And this was heartbreaking. More than 80% lied to a parent about something significant. So and that's heartbreaking because I have a son in high school. And these figures are likely to be even higher than reported because one in four confess that they lied on at least one question on the survey. So this is actually not unique to high school students. Our actions are

often not aligned with our behavior. And I've learned for so many of us, the distance between who we think we are, like our values, and what we actually do is enormous. And there's numerous reasons for why that happens. There's enormous pressure to go along with other people. We don't actually understand specifically what compliance and defiance are. And then once we decide to defy, we don't know how to. So learning to defy and thinking about our values and how to behave in a situation is so important, given that much of our behavior is influenced by other people around us. We're with other people when we have to make a decision. So that is why values is so important to defiance. And to put our values into practice, we need to

learn how to defy. If we don't, then even at work, for example, we just become risk becoming what they call company, yes, men, or yes, women, where we determine how ethical we are, how much honesty and integrity we have, based on how much we do what our boss tells us to do, rather than what is the right thing to do. Okay, so this is incredibly fascinating, and it begs the question, how do we learn to defy? I would imagine as how we learn a lot of things, which is personal experience, observation, but how do we learn a lot of things, which is personal experience, observation.

But how do we learn to defy? Yeah, so learning to defy, there's various steps to do this. And I can only tell you a few, few today, but one thing is to have a mindset shift. So we often think about defiance as being really loud, bold, angry, aggressive. We have these negative connotations, or that you have to be heroic or superhuman,

and it's just out of reach. But what I want to tell people is that you don't have to be brave. You don't have to have a strong personality. You don't even have to be larger than life to incorporate defiance into your life. So it's not just for the brave, the extraordinary, it's available and it's necessary for all of us.

So you can do it in your own way with far less angst and stress. And the way that we can do that is making defiance a practice. We need an action plan that starts way before a moment of crisis, so we need to start thinking about it. So defiance is actually a practice, not a personality, and we can incorporate this. So we can start anticipating what situations might require defiance,

because they're actually quite predictable. So at work, we're probably going to hear some sexist remark at some point, right? So that is predictable. And in other situations, we might have encountered that situation and not spoken up and we've regretted it. So we can anticipate it and start visualizing what would we rather have done what would we rather have done in that situation? Or what would we like to do? And then we write that down, we script it out, and we start practicing it.

Because if you can do that and start practicing and role playing, it actually changes our defaults. It changes the neural pathways, so it becomes easier for us to do. And there's a really great quote that's often attributed to Bruce Lee, but it actually comes from a Greek poet, and that says, under duress, we don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to our level of training. So that's why making defiance a practice is really

important and starting there. We can start with a small acts of defiance and then build up. Okay, so I'm gonna recap a few things that you said because I think they're so important and speak to my experience as well. So first, it doesn't have to be loud and bold. I think a lot of us think it needs to be a mic drop moment.

And so unless we have the right best words, we don't do anything as opposed to, it doesn't have to be that way. And we probably do have plenty of opportunities to prepare for. We probably have an idea of what's coming. And so having some things, I call it like in our back pocket, that we're just ready to pull out certain circumstances so we have something to say that we feel good about,

that we've practiced and prepared and like, how do we get good at anything, right? Practice. Exactly. So all good advice. And in your book, you provide a lot of examples of defiance, some personal, like your own stories, some historical, some from recent history, all types of examples. Could you maybe share one that you think would be a great example for us to hear about practicing defiance? Absolutely. So many of the stories in the book, well all of

the stories in the book, have a different learning point. There's one that's really stayed with me. So I was quite young, about six or seven, and I was walking back home from the grocery store with my mom. And we had like a rickety shopping cart. So it's like a little, almost looks like a little bag of luggage on two wheels. And it was quite a long way back home. And we decided to go through what we call in West Yorkshire in England, a Snicket.

It's just a narrow alleyway. So we decided to go through that to cut down the time. And in that alleyway, there were about five or six teenage boys. And they blocked our path. And they started shouting out some racist comments and go back home. And my reaction was instantaneous to that, having grown up so compliant, like,

first of all, I grabbed my mom's arm, I averted the gaze, I didn't look at them, I looked down, and all I wanted to do was maneuver as fast as possible through the boys to get home. And my mom, who is quite small, she's petite, she's four foot 10 at most, She was wearing her blue sari. She had her hair in a single plait at the back. And I had very much, if you think about compliance and defiance as binary, which I've found that it's not,

I had neatly put her in the compliant box. So, in terms of marriage that you were talking about at the beginning, my mum did everything. She did the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry. I did see her as subservient and very, very compliant. But that day she did something different, which surprised me. So she stopped and she said a single sentence, which I think is a powerful sentence that we can all use. What do you mean? She looked at the boys directly and she said this, what do you mean? And I was had fear rising in me at that point so I grabbed my mom's arm even tighter and I whispered to her, come on, Ma. And she shook me off and she put the shopping cart upright vertical and she went

no. And then she looked back at the boys and she said, what do you mean? You think you're such strong, tough boys? Yeah, I've been really strong. And she just started telling them off and I couldn't believe what I was seeing. And the boys, they started looking at each other and then one of them said, let's go. And they dispersed. And my mum grabbed the shopping cart and she started walking really fast home through the Snicket. And I stood there frozen just looking at her like, what just happened? And then I ran to catch up with her. Why this story has stayed with me so much is that we often learn about compliance and defiance when we're growing up.

And what this really taught me is that anyone can be defiant. Even if you are compliant every day, that doesn't make, it's not a personality, it's a practice. It's a skill and we can all choose to use it. My mom had probably encountered those boys before and this time she did something different. Maybe because I was there. And so what I learned is that compliance might be our default, but it's not our destiny.

We can learn to be defiant. And because it's so important, society is built of all these smaller moments. So if we're building a society where we can raise people to be what I call moral mavericks. They can act up and speak when necessary. What I hope is that next time one of the teens would speak up and tell his friends to stop saying those remarks and to let us pass. So my immigrant mother wouldn't have to say anything. That's the type of society I hope for. And with those little acts, it changes us because we become more ourselves to become more authentic We live up to our values, but it also changes the people that observed it so it has this ripple effect affected me and

So it's so important because one person can create this reaction that makes a big difference It's so important and what a powerful story. I definitely embracing moral mavericks. I love that the feeling of the potential and the possibility of that popped into mind, I think because I had the story on the brain when I was prepping the US gymnastics, Simone Biles, opting out of the Olympics and that felt very much

like an example of defiance in the face of I'm sure a bazillion expectations including her own. And then everybody had commentary about it, right? Some people really admired it and some people thought she was weak, which is ridiculous, but whatever. week, which is ridiculous, whatever, where I'm going with this is how do we filter through everybody else's opinions or even some bad advice that we might get in order to choose for ourselves when to defy and when not? Yeah, that's great.

And it's a great example of Simone Biles, which, you know, as she, as you said, it was, it was unprecedented for someone of her rank and status to withdraw from the Olympics. And yet she knew her values. You know, she was compassionate towards what she needed in an environment that often exploits gymnasts to ignore their physical and mental pain and continue and continue and continue. And she did get a lot of commentary and negative evaluations for that, but she did what was right for her in that situation where there was so much pressure to do otherwise. So it's about connecting with your values and assessing the situation. Is it safe and effective for me to defy?

And then thinking about, who am I, right? What does a person like me do in a situation like that? I mean, these are really hard questions, but once we become connected with our values, it becomes easier to do and bring those things into consideration. So what's popping into my head is it is knowing our values, but also knowing how we interpret them and how they show up in our lives.

Because as you mentioned before, with integrity, you could take that value and have two people have completely different interpretation grounded in integrity of what you should do. So example, integrity would be speaking my truth, but somebody else could be like, no, integrity is supporting your boss, right? Or whatever it is. Right. So like it's knowing your values are, but to your point earlier, practicing them and

living them so you know in any given moment how you're interpreting them and how that value is going to show up for you in that situation. Yeah, that's a great point. We do have two selves, right? We have our independent self that wants to have agency and do exactly what we want to do. And so with that example, we want to follow our path of what we believe is the honest thing to do. But we also have an interdependent self in which we're connected with other people and we want harmonious relationships.

And these two ideals, they never, we never reach them because they're often in conflict with each other. Like, what do we want to do versus what do other people expect us to do? And in that type of situation, if integrity is really important to you, if your boss is asking you to do something that might be unethical or might be cutting the client short, you have to decide, you know, you have to make a decision as to whether you are going to go along with your values or not. And even if you do, it's difficult because one thing that I've discovered in my research is this psychological process I call insinuation anxiety, which is we don't want to insinuate that another person, we don't want to signal that another person is biased, corrupt, unethical, incompetent even. So say your boss is being incompetent, you don't want to signal that to another person and insinuate they are something that they should not, that they

are not, or should not be. And so this is a really powerful force. I've experienced it a lot many times, right? So it's just like, it could be small things from being in a taxi cab and you know the most direct route but they're taking a very long way and you don't want to tell them, you know, it takes some effort and energy, perhaps not for New Yorkers, but certainly for me, to tell them, why are you going this way? And

really insinuate that they're not competent at their job, or they're doing this because they want more money. It's like why you tell the hairdresser that you like the haircut, even though you absolutely hate it. And one of my friends told me a story about when he went to get a massage in New York City and he was hoping to have his lower back pain mitigated from having this massage and he went in and the room was just so lovely with candles and scented and he sank down on the massage table and then the massage therapist came in and the first thing they did was that they rammed his elbow into his back like with such force. And he that continued during the whole

massage. He never once said this is too much this. And he went home full of he had bruises for two weeks. And his wife asked him, This doesn't sound right. Why did you not say anything? And he said, Well, I didn't want to insinuate that he didn't know what they were doing, you know, and she said, so you would rather hurt yourself than hurt the feelings of someone else. And he was like, exactly. So we often do that. And it could be in these small things, but it's also could be the reason why the nurses didn't speak up when they see someone making an error or why the crew members and commercial airlines don't speak up, right? And so it becomes a

very powerful force. One way that we can deal with that is often just taking a pause, like a power of a pause. Sometimes you can't get away from the situation, but you can take, if you can take some physical distance, that's great. But psychological distance also helps. So this research done by Ethan Cross and others that show just closing your eyes for a few seconds and asking yourself, is this what you really want? Is this aligned with your values? Really helps you connect and speaking to yourself in the third person too helps, gets that psychological distance. So is this what you really want, Sunita? Is asking yourself that question,

is this what I really want? And then that gives you the connection with your values and enough energy to think about what's the next step. Now I need the ability to defy and figure out how I can defy without practice. So first, every one of your examples of insinuation anxiety, I have felt. Like every single one. So that is very real and alive, at least in me. And I love the idea of, you know,

the closing of the eyes and asking that question and the third person. It's something we can do anywhere, anytime. I often ask myself some version of what will you feel best about on the other side? Right? Or like, which would you regret more? Like when I'm in that, like, do I speak up or do I not? Okay.

On the other side of this, what will I feel best about? Will I feel best that I spoke up or will I feel best that I kept quiet? And that can, I don't always have the answer, but more often than not, I have an inkling of which version of myself I will like better on the other side. And I can use that a little bit more as a guide. I cannot let you go, Sunita, without asking this question, because it came up in, as I was preparing for this episode,

interpreting doubt as weakness versus a strength. Where does doubt play in to defiance? Because you kind of assume that it doesn't, right? Like if you're gonna defy, you should be, I think we think we should be certain. Right. Yeah, it's a great question. And one of the signals that you want to defy is tension. Right. So often when we have doubt about something, which is one example that can cause tension, we think we're not worth the doubt. We just like push it away by right? This situation might not seem right to me,

or I'm being pressured here. And we just push it under the rug, right? It's not worth making a fuss about, it's not worth making a scene. But we should listen to that because that tension is the first stage of defiance. And there's five stages of defiance before you get to the final act of defiance. And there's five stages of defiance before you get to the final act of

defiance. And that first stage, feeling tension is very important because that tension is a signal that you might want to defy. And it's an important, almost warning sign from your body, and it can manifest in different ways. So one of them is doubt, right? Oh, I'm not sure about this. I'm not sure what my boss has asked me to do. I'm not sure what this other person has asked me to do. But maybe because I've said it, it's okay.

Maybe I should just go along with it. Rather than saying that, listen to that. Listen to that. I mean, tension can also come up as anxiety, right? So I've described insinuation anxiety. And they're kind of both of them don't need to be there. So sometimes you can be sure that you need to defy and you don't have any doubt. Other times, you can feel a lot of anxiety or you don't

have any anxiety, but you have doubt, right? So the different manifestations of the same thing, which I call resistance to resistance. Because we're so wired to comply, we often feel resistance when we need to defy. And so listening to that tension, acknowledging it, the first stages of learning how to defy and not, not mitigating it, not saying it's not worth it. It's really listening to your body, to your mind.

Why am I feeling this tension? Should I be defying in this situation? Yeah. Okay, friend, I know you're wondering what are the other four stages of defiance, just like I am. And so you're gonna have to get the book. So let me remind you again, the book is called Defy,

the Power of No in a World that Demands Yes. You can grab it on Amazon, your local bookstore, wherever it is you buy books, but let's definitely get our hands on that. And you can also check out Sunita's website at sunitasad.com. We will put that and all other ways to find and follow Sunita in show notes.

Thank you for an incredible conversation. I'm like amped up and super excited to defy in the best way and can't wait to dive into the other four stages. So thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you, thank you. This was wonderful. My pleasure. Okay, as we wrap up this episode,

I wanna remind you that we're not talking about rebellion for rebellion's sake. My goal isn't just to be difficult or to walk around giving my finger to everyone and everything. This is about trusting yourself enough to say no when the world demands yes, when no is the best answer for you. It's about refusing to be who the world expects you to be when it's not who you are. So whether it's standing up to societal expectations, breaking free of outdated norms, or just giving yourself permission to live authentically, know that

defying doesn't make you difficult. It makes you true to your values and to the one person that you should always be true to, and that's yourself. Because that is woman's work.