Kelly connects with Dr. Sunita Sah, an award-winning professor at Corenell University and an expert in organizational psychology. She is also a trained physician, who practiced medicine in the UK. She has a new book, it’s called “Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes.”  

This book really talks about the many ways we are taught to say yes, even when we should say no. 

“We often get these messages, especially girls, I think, and it’s also a dynamic that’s very familiar to many children of 1st generation immigrants, that we have this strict upbringing and these expectations for high achievements and certainly that level of compliance becomes ingrained. We become socialized, and so we become wired to comply. So, in that way, we are losing some aspect of our agency, and to reclaim it we need to understand that we have choices in our behavior. And being defiant doesn’t necessarily mean that we are being bad. In fact, it’s sometimes good to be bad, sometimes we sacrifice a lot by being so compliant.” 

You had the experience of this tension when you allowed a doctor to perform an x-ray you knew you didn’t need. 

“I definitely felt that tension. And sometimes we just go along with complying because we think that our doubts or our attention are just not worth the effort, and so we just try to ignore it. We push it down; we swallow our feelings; and even though we’re shaking our head, we’re going along with it. When in actual fact, we could use that tension. I talk about tension actually being the strength – as it could be a signal. It’s a signal that something’s wrong. Perhaps it’s now the time to defy. And that tension often comes from what I call resistance to resistance. You’re actually, we want to, as soon as we know that we want to defy it feels so uncomfortable because we’re so trained to comply with other people. And we feel this tension between doing what we think is right and acting in alignment with our values and feeling the pressure from someone else to just comply with them.” 

And there can be significant consequences to our compliance. 

“There was a survey that found that 9 out of 10 healthcare workers – most of them nurses – didn’t feel comfortable speaking up when they saw their colleagues making a mistake. And another survey found that in over 1,700 crew members in commercial airlines, they also didn’t feel comfortable when they saw their superiors making an error. So, these could be life and death consequences where we really need to look at why people find it so difficult to say no. So yes, there are consequences to saying no, but there’s also consequences to being compliant.”