Transcript

DEFY or Comply? The Hidden Cost of Always Saying Yes | Dr. Sunita Sah

From John R. Miles · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 52 min · 8,846 words · 80 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "DEFY or Comply? The Hidden Cost of Always Saying Yes | Dr. Sunita Sah", an episode of John R. Miles published October 21, 2025 (52 min, about 8,846 words). It mentions 4 people, works and ideas, including Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes, Darnella Frasier, London Business School, Axiom Business Award.

What this episode is about

Dr. Sunita Sah explores the paradox of societal rewards for compliance, highlighting that while conformity is often praised, it leads to significant individual costs such as regret, burnout, stress, and anxiety. She emphasizes the necessity of examining the hidden consequences of always saying yes, contrasting them with the perceived risks of defiance.

Key takeaways

  • Compliance is a social currency; it buys approval but may cost you your authenticity and well-being.
  • Being 'good' often means silencing inner dissent, leading to burnout and chronic stress rather than genuine fulfillment.
  • The ‘good girl’ narrative rewards obedience, but what if breaking the mold holds the key to true success?
  • We fear defiance’s costs, but the hidden toll of compliance—anxiety, regret—might be far steeper.
  • Education can be a masterclass in compliance; five degrees later, many still ask, 'But at what personal cost?'

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 10:00: Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes, London Business School, Axiom Business Award
  2. – 20:00: Darnella Frasier
  3. – 50:00: Darnella Frasier

Notable quotes from "DEFY or Comply? The Hidden Cost of Always Saying Yes | Dr. Sunita Sah"

  • After you got out of middle school and high school. You went to medical school, became a doctor, then you went back, if my research is correct, you went to the London Business…
    about London Business School · at
  • I want to talk about your book which came out earlier this year. It's titled Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes. Congratulations on it becoming a Next Big Idea Club must read.
    about Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes · at
  • It's George Floyd lying on the ground outside Cup Foods while a teenager named Darnella Frasier films what becomes one of the most consequential videos probably outside of 911 in history. And I want to talk about Darnella first.
    about Darnella Frasier · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Darnella Frasier — Person · Referenced exemplar (case study of defiance) · 4 mentions · first at
    Cited as an ordinary person whose decision to film George Floyd became consequential evidence and a symbol of values-driven defiance.

Books & papers

Companies & orgs

  • London Business School — Company · Business focus · 1 mention · first at
    Part of Dr. Sanita Saw's educational background mentioned during the podcast.

Places & events

  • Axiom Business Award — Event · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned as one of the awards received by Dr. Sanita Saw's book.
    You've won some book awards, including the Axiom Business Award, if I have it correct, and it also became a bestseller. So, congratulations on all of that.

Full transcript with timestamps

We are often rewarded so much for being compliant. Society doesn't just reward compliance, it teaches it in pretty much everything that we do. We're praised for going along, for keeping quiet, for not making trouble, for being a team player. All of these aspects, we get these rewards, but often they come with so many individual costs. That cost is real. We have regret, we have burnout, we have stress, we have anxiety, we have depression, we have chronic inflammation. We have so many costs that we don't think about. We spend so much time thinking about the costs of defiance. We need to spend some time thinking about the costs of compliance.

Welcome to Passion Struck. Hi, I'm your host John R. Miles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors CEOs creators innovators scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become passionruck.

I am so thrilled today to welcome Dr. Sanita Saw to Passion Struck. Welcome Senita. How are you today?

I'm doing well. Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm excited to be here. I am so excited about this conversation as well. I'd love to start these episodes out by giving the audience a chance to get to know you. I understand you grew up in England in Yorkshire. I actually grew up in York, Pennsylvania, the sister city, believe it or not.

And you've talk about that when you were growing up, you were referred to as the good girl.

Yes. Can you talk a little bit about that and that identity? Yes. When I was little, my father even told me when I asked him, "What does my name Senita mean?" He told me that Senita means good in Sanskrit. So, I mostly lived up to that. I did what I was told. What does good actually mean? How do we interpret it? It really means to obey, to do as you're told, to be polite, to be nice, to not question authority, to please other people. And so I did. I mostly lived up to that. Went to school on time, did all my homework as expected, even had my hair cut the way my parents wanted me to. I was really known as being the good girl, the teacher's pet, doing well. And that really became an important part of my socialization was to live up to this being good, being obedient at home, being agreeable at school. Yeah. And I heard you on another podcast tell this story that when you were at this age of

being the good girl, there was a teacher who you saw belittle another child. and it uh made you reinforce this identity arc of being the good girl even more. Can you share that story with us?

Sure, absolutely. I was actually at middle school in England and I remember seeing there was a teacher that was quite aggressive with students and also physically aggressive and I noticed him disciplining a boy that was in our class and people were looking through the there was a window on the door so they were looking through the door to see what was happening and I came along and I joined them and I stood on my tiptoes so I could actually see through the window and I looked through and I saw the teacher slapping the boy quite often and there was a cup like a plastic cup on the table and it fell to the floor amongst all this violence that was going on and the boy was crying and he was then saying oh no the cup because it tore it broke and the teacher said never mind the cup and gave him another thump and I just couldn't bear what I was seeing so I had to look away and walk away And that teacher was always

really nice to me. And we were at the corner shop. I was there with my sister and we were just buying some sweets at the corner shop like you do. And I heard his voice, this teacher's voice behind me. And I almost jumped out of my skin and my heart started racing. But he was really warm to me. He did not know that I had seen this incident. And in my sort of child's mind, I really thought this was because I was good and the boy was bad. And I thought, I'm going to do everything I possibly can to not become the bad person here because I do not want to be physically assaulted the way that this boy was. And that became it stayed with me as some aspect of having to tow the line, be good, not fall out of line.

Growing up, I went to parochial school my entire childhood and we had nuns who loved to use rulers and the worst was the ones who had the wooden paddles who were smart enough to put holes in the wood wooden paddles so it would sting even more. So, you certainly learn to identify what was causing someone to get a shellacking versus who wasn't.

Yeah. Yeah. It certainly reinforces something, right? It reinforces what behavior you want to display and what behavior is going to get you into trouble.

I wanted to talk about your journey after you got out of middle school and high school. You went to medical school, became a doctor, then you went back, if my research is correct, you went to the London Business School and you got an MBA. Then you moved to the states and then went back and got a PhD and other degrees. Is that education arc pretty correct?

Yes, that's right. That's right. As I said, my upbringing was a masterclass in compliance and I was a very good student. So, I ended up with five degrees.

Wow. It's so interesting. I know you you did work at Duke. My first cousin Christopher went to Duke for his undergrad and then he went to Cambridge for his masters and then went to Stanford for his law degree. And when I ask him what the most difficult school he went to, he always tells me it it was Duke, which really shocks me. What did you find different between I guess you went to medical school in Scotland, MBA in England and then the United States for your other degrees. Did you find a difference in how hard each one was from area to area?

I've worked like now in two professions, academia and medicine and both are very hierarchical but someone climbing the career ladder. So in that sense there's similarity in that junior doctors are treated a certain way, junior professors are treated a certain way. So there's certainly that aspect about it between institutions. I think what differs really is your immediate environment and whether it's a workplace that allows someone to speak up allows someone to share concerns whether it's a workplace that val not just says in words that they value you but actually shows in actions that you know you that they value you and I think in your words as well whether you matter to them too and that definitely differs Well, well, I think a lot of people will find that differs by each place you go, by each boss you have, and it could differ within the same institution when the leaders change too. So, I've

certainly found differences in that aspect. I really enjoyed my time at Duke actually, and I was a posttock at the time. So I probably bypassed a lot of the political aspects of being a junior professor but I do write about certain aspects that I experienced there from a certain professor who expected me to behave in a certain way in the book. So there was that aspect present at Duke but that I think that was more an individual aspect rather than an institutional aspect.

Yeah. It's also interesting, if I have this correct, that you moved to to England when you were very young, and then you moved your own son to the United States when he was practically the same age.

Yes, you're right. I moved from India to the UK when I was one and also, yes, we took my son when he was one from England to the US. We stayed in touch with the UK much more and traveled back and forth, but that's right. And now there was an opportunity to move back to the UK several years ago, actually during the pandemic in 2020, but it was my son that said that he's American and he wants to stay here. We remained.

Yeah. What a story and what a coincidence that you were both one. I just found that interesting when I was doing the research.

Yes. Who knows? Like we follow patterns, right? I want to talk about your book which came out earlier this year. It's titled Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes. Congratulations on it becoming a Next Big Idea Club must read. You've won some book awards, including the Axiom Business Award, if I have it correct, and it also became a bestseller. So, congratulations on all of that.

Thank you so much. I've been really pleased with the reception of it. And this was really my life's work both professional and also bringing aspects of my own personal journey into it.

I know it's awesome. And I'm not sure how you felt, but my book Passion Struck was also a Next Big Idea Club must read. And to me, that was almost more validating than any best-seller list could have possibly been because I just hold them and the books they choose in such high regard. Yeah, absolutely. People that are interested in learning more about ourselves and behavioral science.

So this book as I was reading it, it's part memoir, part manifesto. When did you realize that you needed to write this book given that it's on your life's work? And why did you think right now was the right time to bring out a book about the power of no?

This was a book that I have wanted to write for quite a while actually. It's the book that I wanted and probably needed much earlier in my life and that's something I've heard from many readers now. Oh, I wish I'd read it much earlier in my life. And so it the time to write it came during the pandemic. That's when I started to write it. that really propelled me to sit down and start thinking about writing the book. It's actually the second book that I've written. The first one I ended up not selling because it was very academic and it was very much based on all of my research bringing it all together on why we take bad advice. Why so similar elements and someone said if you really want this to have more impact you've got to think bigger. And then I went back and I interviewed some of my students and I wanted to make this really accessible to a lot of people. So I put a lot more thought into it. It took me

three years then to write the books. I would have liked it to have come out a little bit sooner, but the I I wanted to really make sure that this was something that could speak to people on different levels. So the science is there but also as I mentioned my personal journey and stories of many different people some famous and some not famous at all and how they really manage to make decisions about when to speak up especially when it matters. And I think this is a really important skill for us to have because we often think that what I call defiance which is really speaking up or the power of no in a world that demands yes. Many people think of defiance as such a negative thing and they also think of it as a personality trait like that person's defiant and difficult they tend to say. So but if we have this negative connotation of defiance we don't realize the power of it and what it can mean and

how it can actually be really positive and lead to change not only to ourselves but to other people and in fact even pro-social for our communities. I want to open up with a personal story because I think this might give you a chance to to discuss this from your own experience. My wife is a primary care provider and anytime I need to take a test or she has to take tests, we always talk about the consequences, especially if it requires radiation or something like that. And in the book, you share that you yourself once underwent a CT scan and you you understood the potential risk because you were a doctor and you questioned it going into the procedure but you never said no if I understand it correctly and it really left you shaken afterwards.

Why did you choose to share that story and why do you think it relates so well to this concept of defiance and the power of no? So that story people find really fascinating because I had the knowledge and the understanding. So I actually knew whether I needed the CT scan or not because I knew my symptoms. I knew that if I said yes to ionizing radiation, it's about 70 times on average more than an X-ray. It's still small, but why take the risk, right? It can lead to problems later on in life. And I'm also a scholar of medical ethics. So I know about over diagnosis and over treatment and I believe that in the principle of do no harm and patient autonomy. This is an environment where it's informed consent and yet I found it difficult to say no and I think a lot of people find it difficult to say no in medical settings and mainly that might be because of the knowledge and understanding but even

when with that present it is really difficult to say no because we don't want to insinuate that somebody cannot be trusted that they're incompetent or they don't have your best interests at heart because I know if it's a for-profit environment they make money on every scan that they do and but to insinuate that you don't actually need it is very difficult to do because it implies that they are not doing what they should be doing which is to put the patient's interest first. So I found it very difficult to say no in that situation that I'd rather not have this.

I don't have the pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in my lung, which is what they were looking for. And I knew I didn't have the type of pain that would produce a blood like a blood clot would I didn't have the symptoms for that. So, I didn't completely understand why they wanted to do it. I knew it wasn't necessary. I should have said no, but I didn't want to make a fuss. I didn't want to make a scene. I didn't want to be seen as the difficult patient. So, I went along with it. And I so regretted it because why do we do that? Why do we go along with things that we would rather not go along with and we just swallow our words and shake our heads and then end up going along with it and then feel terrible afterwards. And it really did make me think, well, what could I have done? I could have said no.

There would have been no consequences. It would have been safe for me to do. It would have been effective for me to do. So why don't I have the skill set to do that? And how can I develop that? It's an interesting dilemma and we're going to talk about many other scenarios throughout today's discussion, but I want to bring this to myself for a second because as I was thinking about that, it made me think about my time in the military and before I deployed to Iraq, there were several times in my Navy career where we had to stand in line where they would give you shots in both arms as you're walking through this panel of anoxia of shots that you would get and you knew you were getting things like anthrax and other things that were really going to potentially have long-term consequences, but you have this huge dilemma that you can't really say no because if you do, you could get court marshaled, get kicked

out of the military, they're not going to let you deploy. And for me, the consequences have been long felt because like hundreds of thousands of other veterans, I have gotten different illnesses, aches and pains as a result of the Gulf War that they can't entirely identify where they came from. So, I don't know if it's the remnants of the oil fields, what we were expo exposed to from burn pits, whether it was the shots that we got, whatever it was, but there are so many situations in life where we're faced scenarios like that that if you did say no, it had huge consequences. If I would have said no when I was at the Naval Academy, they would have just said, "Great, then you're not going to graduate."

And that's what makes this so difficult. There's certain environments where it's impossible to say no. if you want to remain part of that environment. And many people say when I talk about this, oh, is this a book just for women? Because women are socialized to be compliant, women are socialized to be good, but boys can do what they want. They have more scope for different types of behaviors. And while that might be true that they might have more scope, plenty of men have written to me about environments in which they are expected to comply or even growing up in the type of environment where they were socialized very much to be compliant too. And that can make it really difficult because in these environments the military other sort of environments in the police right police officers how difficult it is for people to go against what everybody else is doing because either you're not going to stay part of

that environment the cost of saying something different is going to stick out. You have to have everybody's back otherwise they won't have your back. So there's so much going on in these situations where you can end up being complicit with something that's harming you or even harming other people or you're asked to look the other way. And so these environments exist for both men and women in in many different contexts.

Since you brought it up, let's go to the topic of police forces. So, in Defy, you open the book with one of the most memorable scenes that most of us have ever, especially in the United States, have ever witnessed. It's George Floyd lying on the ground outside Cup Foods while a teenager named Darnella Frasier films what becomes one of the most consequential videos probably outside of 911 in history. And I want to talk about Darnella first. Because in the book you write, she didn't set out to start a movement. She was just on a snack run with her cousin.

And yet, by refusing to put down her phone, she became part of one of the largest social justice uprisings in modern history. What does that tell you, Sanita? And what should it tell us, the audience, about ordinary people's capacity for defiance? I think when a lot of people think about defiance, we think about it as something bold aggressive superhuman out of reach. And what my definition of defiance is simply acting in accordance with your true values, especially when there's pressure to do otherwise. And so when we think about the filming of what happened to George Floyd, just taking out a camera phone and filming it, sometimes defiance can just be a shake of the head or a click of a camera. And that is what it takes, right? That we don't just become bystanders. We say something, we do something, we question, we ask, is this necessary? And we can all defy in ways that are more natural

to us with far less angst than we used to have. If we start thinking of ourselves as the compliant type, which is what I certainly did, we think defiance is for other people. And that's really excusing us from doing the work. When we see injustice, and all of us at some point in our lives will see injustice, whether it be at work or on the streets or our dinner table, we're going to see it. And the question becomes, how do we know when to defy? And how do we build the capacity to do it in those situations? Because there's many different types of defiance. And sometimes it is just asking a question.

Sometimes it is just taking out their phone and videoing even when somebody is telling you to stop, even when somebody is threatening to pepper spray. And that's what it takes. And that was the right time for Danella to take her phone out and video it. Like what? She knew that something was wrong and she knew that this would be important and it really did become one of the key pieces of evidence of what actually happened on that day.

Yeah. Well, being around a police force is something actually I know a little bit about because I was the assistant officer in charge of an auxiliary force when I was in station in Roa, Spain and had to get go through all the training of becoming an MP in the military and then led a group of people who were MPs. And I remember when I was going through that, one of the things that we were trained on is that when people are on drugs, and you never know if they are or not, they carry almost superhuman strength. So in this scenario that we're talking about here, that's probably going through the mind of the officers because I think some of them had runins with this individual before, had a history. So, you're prone to do more excessive force than less because of what you know about the person, the environment that you're in, and you're trying to protect yourself and others. But this has a lot

of different dilemmas around it because when you're new to the force, just like you're new to the military, and you're assigned a mentor, you expect that mentor to protect you. But in the same lens, you don't want to upset the apple card because that mentor of yours can determine the outcome of your life and what's going to happen over the next in so many years, whether you're going to pass through your probationary period, stuff like that. So in this scenario, you ask a haunting question. You have officer Lane and Officer Coung who had just joined the Minneapolis Police Department. both of them with really valuesbased reasons for wanting to be there. Yet neither one of them ended up intervening in the situation. And I think that to you was the more important question looking at this whole scenario.

What if those rookie officers had been trained to defy? How much different would the outcome have been? So can you just explore that a little bit for us?

Absolutely. So yes, that was the question. Well, the bigger question that came across my mind when people were saying, "How could they not say anything?" I was thinking back to that CT scan that I had where I couldn't say no to a nice woman wearing a white coat. So, how could I say no to a man with a gun? It's very difficult. And as you've explained already, you know, if somebody is your superior, your training officer, your mentor, it's very difficult to go against what they're saying. You put your trust in them that they know best.

And yet in the police academy, you are told that if you see something wrong, you should say something. And that's all very well and good to say that. But they don't get the behavioral training to do that. And just by having the intellectual idea, oh, if you see something wrong, you should say something, doesn't actually change our behavior very much. We need to practice that. So, we can actually do it when we're caught in the moment. And that training and practice becomes long becomes much before that moment of crisis. So, how can we do that? In the academy, there should be some roleplaying. If your senior officer says this, how can you question it in a way that isn't about showing disrespect, but questioning? And Thomas Lane did try to do that a couple of times. Should we turn him on a side? But at what point do you need to escalate and at what point can you have the other person listen?

So, this is very much about the environment for sure and some cultural change. But what was fascinating to me about that scene was how it's easy for us first of all when we sit back in our armchairs and watch this and say we would have done something different when in fact many of us forecast that we'll act a certain way but when we're in that situation we might we end up complying with whatever is going on. And second of all, I interviewed and I described this later on in the book other rookie police officers who were actually going through their training when this incident happened and it really did have an effect on them. So, one of the rookie police officers that I interviewed told me that he also entered the police force with similar good intentions as most rookie officers do, right, to serve the community. and they were very much informed as to the difficult situations now that they

might find themselves in and they wanted to do whatever they could so they wouldn't end up complicit in an unfolding murder. What can they do? And so the very fact that this had happened uh had people thinking about it and then thinking about what they would say in that situation. And I remember one of the police officers that I spoke to, he did say that I knew that I was going to face difficult situations. I knew I was going to see something unethical. And he had mentors before he moved into the academy that told him how to behave in these situations. So when he did enter a situation that he um was asked to search a garage illegally and he didn't want to do it because he imagined the worst case scenario. He imagined the homeowner coming down with a gun and all of this, setting off something really bad. And so he declined to go along with the senior police officers in that scene. And he

did suffer from it, right? But he was so glad that he did it. He said that his childhood stutter came back when he had to talk about why he made that decision. But it was the right thing for him because he knew he understood the law. He knew there was no standing to go and search this garage without any evidence that like some crime was taking place at that point. So he said that there was no standing for us to go and search. And seeing what happened to George Floyd really helped him think about the worst case scenario. And sometimes it's not about bravery that makes us defy. It's sometimes fear that can propel us to thinking about this is the worst case scenario. I do not think it's the right thing to do and I'm not going to do this.

I think we've now covered this from an individual standpoint. We've gotten into a good scenario. I think it's a good time to maybe take this back a step. So, you are kneede in the science around this every single day. And you write that we're neurologically, psychologically, and socially wired to comply. What's happening in our brain when we feel that pressure?

There's a lot of things happening when we feel that pressure. So, first of all, if we've been socialized to comply, we are wired to comply. We know how to do it. It almost becomes our default reaction. We either slide into automatic compliance or default silence that we're just not going to say anything or we're just going to say yes if we say anything at all. So in order to get out of that aspect, we need to then train how to say no. We need to practice those scripts. We need to ask, what do you mean? Can you clarify why this is the right thing to do? Can you tell me why this alternative isn't better? So we need to then train for defiance so that when we're in that moment, we don't slide back into what we're used to doing. And what we really want is for people to parent for defiance. We are so trained for compliance as a child. How do we now train our children for defiance when they need to? How can you encourage them

to take back their agency and say no when the time requires this? So we often rewarded so much for being compliant. Society doesn't just reward compliance, it teaches it in pretty much everything that we do. We're praised for going along, for keeping quiet, for not making trouble, for being a team player. You know, all of these aspects, we get these rewards, but often they come with so many individual costs. And that that cost is real. We have regret, we have burnout, we have stress, we have anxiety, we have depression, we have chronic inflammation. We have so many costs that we don't think about. We spend so much time thinking about the costs of defiance. We need to spend some time think about the costs of compliance

and I think that is an important thing to go a little bit deeper and that is you distinguish between compliance and consent. Why is that difference so critical to understand? Well, as I said, having this medical background, I was very familiar with informed consent, but even in medicine, I saw how deep compliance ran. And I watched patients comply with treatments and procedures that doctors told them to have, even though they didn't necessarily want them. Of course, I did it myself as a patient. And compliance, when we think about what exactly is compliance, so compliance is is really a yes that's not quite a yes. It's like sliding into something that's ex either expected, an order, a suggestion, and is coming from something external.

Consent, when we think about informed consent in medicine, it requires five elements. And we can take this framework because it's really useful and apply it to other important decisions in our lives. So the five elements are first of all capacity. So you need to have the competence to make a decision, right? So you're not under the influence of drugs or alcohol. You're not too sick. So first of all, you have the capacity to make the decision. Second, you have the knowledge. You've been given information. So you can make that informed choice. The third element is understanding. So it's not enough just to have the information if you don't understand it. So together the knowledge and understanding, you should have a thorough grasp of the risks, the benefits and the alternatives.

The fourth element is the freedom to say no. Because if you don't have the freedom to say no, then it's merely compliance. It's not consent. And as we've spoken about, there are many situations where we don't have the freedom to say no. So perhaps in the military, you know, that freedom to say no is certainly diminished. And then if those four elements are there, the capacity, the knowledge, the understanding, the freedom to say no, then the fifth element is your authorization, which is your thoroughly considered true yes, what I call consent or your true no, which is defiance. So consent and defiance are actually two sides of the same coin. It just depends on what people are expecting internally. But both consent and defiance are coming from within. It's depends on what your values are whereas compliance is very much external.

Yeah. So the way I understand this from the book and the way we've been talking is compliance is our default setting and it has evolutionary and social roots whereas consent really must be intentional, active and valuesdriven. Is that a good way to think about the difference?

Yeah, that's excellent. Yeah, that's an excellent way to think about it. So, I want to throw a real life scenario at you about this. When I was at the Naval Academy, I was elected or appointed, I should say, to be on the brigade honor staff. And normally, this is a cush job because they're not that many midshipmen who are purposely trying to create honor offenses because they know they'll get kicked out. And for the first half of my senior year, it was a breeze. But we come back from Christmas break and are confronted with the largest cheating scandal in the academyy's history greeting us back. And what I witnessed as I saw this unfold is you typically have anywhere between 900 to,00 midshipman who graduate given class. And what we found as we were researching this was there were probably at least half the class who had cheated on this exam. And the way that these things typically would unfold is you

would hear, and I'm sure this happens in other colleges, that there's gouge for this test. And when you would get the gouge, typically you might have answers from a test a couple years ago, there might be some similar questions, but it's not the exact thing. So these midshipman get access to this gouge. They take the test and then realize it's the exact same exam that the gouge is. And what ends up happening is out of this entire brigade, two midshipman come forward and both of them go to their physics and or their electrical engineering professor. And these two were both ranked in the top five of their entire class. So people who didn't really need the gouge. They are in quick order found guilty of cheating and kicked out of the academy. And to me it's an interesting thing because here are people who said I'm going to follow my values and I'm going to come forward.

And they paid the cost for it. But it caused the rest of the people to take a different action. And I just wanted to throw this at you as a scenario and get your thoughts on it.

Yeah. And just to make sure I completely understand, what was the different action that the rest of the academy was doing?

Oh, they hid that they got the gouge. They lied about it. They said that they weren't given it. They tried to cover things up. Yeah. It was completely the opposite.

Yeah. So, there's a lot to be drawn from that. First of all, if half the class are using this, there's some kind of norm that's developed, right? Where people then will start to rationalize, okay, I am going to use it because I want to even the playing field or that's the only fair thing to do. So, there's lots of rationalizations that we can use in this situation, but we can also use in many other situations. And that's one of the things that keeps us from doing the right thing. So if we take a step back and really think about what does it mean to be honest? What does integrity mean when we think about those values?

And one of the exercises that I do with my executive students every year is when I do think about your values, write down your values because it's really important to do this because if we clarify what our values are, the research shows that we're more likely to act in alignment with them. And also if we know what they are then we actually have a lower biological stress response. We have lower cortisol. So it's really good to clarify your values. And most people will say integrity is one of their values. It's like one of the most common ones that people will say. Nobody wants to be known as being dishonest.

And when I ask my students to rate themselves on a scale of zero to 100 as to how honest they are relative to other people in the room, where zero is that you are the least honest and 100 is that you are the most honest. You can guess probably what kind of scores that the students are telling me where they lie. So do you want to give it a guess, John?

I'm guessing it's pretty high like 65%. It's like higher like people will say 85 90 95 like it's really higher. This is something that is very precious to people like in terms of their character. They do not want to be seen as being dishonest. But of course if it's relative to everybody else in the class, half the class has to be above 50, half has to be below. But pretty much no one will say 50 and forget about going below 50. So everybody's bunched up here 85 or higher which is impossible. So that's one aspect that we perceive ourselves as being very honest and then we'll make rationalizations for when we're not. We'll come up with statements such as this is not me and when if you keep saying this is not you but you keep doing the same thing you might want to think about what is it that you actually are and then my work really comes to well how do we get people to act in alignment with the values when it

becomes difficult to do. So it could be in a situation such as the one that you've described, but many situations where we're called upon to be honest, we don't actually follow through. So how do we decrease that gap between who we think we are and how we actually behave? This is the key thing and this is what I'm trying to do with what I call the defines compass. It's a simple actionable guide that I have that really asks us who am I which is identifying our values and then what does a person like me do in a situation like this and that's really getting us to connect with our values and our responsibilities because we often forget about them in the moment and we think again we perceive that we wouldn't act in that way. we wouldn't forecast it, but then when we actually do, we have a bunch of excuses for why this is. And going back to your example, when people see the costs of acting in alignment with our

values, yes, sometimes they are. And this is what I mean about defiance. Defiance is simply acting in alignment with our values when there is pressure to do otherwise. And that doesn't mean that it doesn't come with a cost. Yes, there is a cost. Sometimes defiance is inherently risky but so is saying yes. So is saying yes. So we have to determine is it safe to defy? Is it will it be effective? And I think the question running through the people in the academy was this is not safe to do because these two officers were essentially fired and had to leave and I don't want that to happen. the cost was too great. This is what I call conscious compliance is in that all the elements for consent are there. You have the capacity, you have the knowledge, the understanding, the freedom to say yes or no, but you decide not to go along with your values in this situation because you think it's going to be too costly or

the benefits are not going to be sufficient. And in these situations, what I encourage people to think about is is it safe enough? Will it be effective enough? because we can always come up with excuses that it's never safe enough and it's never going to be effective enough. And this is a very personal decision because there are times when we want to defer defiance to another day because it's going to be way too costly. But we shouldn't continue to do that continuously because as we know that also has substantial costs to it.

So it is a very personal decision and if you think about some of the people that had defied for example Rosa Parks there were many costs for her defiance of saying no on that bus in Montgomery Alabama. She had death threats. She was unemployed for 10 years. She suffered a lot of stress and anxiety. But when asked whether she would do it again she said yes because her values for equality she very much connected with that and her responsibility and that was really important to her. So these decisions of when to defy, when to act in alignment with our values is first of all having the awareness, the conscious awareness of what you are choosing in that situation and thinking about is this worth compromising my integrity for? Is this worth compromising my values and at what point will I become whole with my values? Because how we act again and again becomes who we are. Well, part of the reason I brought it up, and

obviously it's not in your book, was I think although a very different scenario, it is really about following the crowd. And it reminded me of what happened at the capital on January 6, which is something that you do cover in the book, specifically through the lens of Clayton Ray Mullins. And people don't know the name. He was a 52-year-old salvage yard owner, part-time preacher from rural Kentucky, had no beefs with the election and went to save America because his wife and sister wanted to. But once he got there, these midshipman, they're handed the gouge. They decide to use it. He climbs up on ledge and has the American flag and he's helping people drag a police officer down the steps.

Blah blah blah blah blah. You're taking a person like I would think many of these midshipmen who have a value system that they're not supposed to cheat, lie, steal. It was in the honor code and part of the very ethos of being at the academy and it seemed like it was in the ethos of this gentleman too and his value system not to do the things he did. And in both cases, you have people who have a value system who then embody false defiance and go completely against those values, which is the bigger thing I was trying to explore. And then

yeah, in the case of those two midshipman, you have two people who stand up, which I thought the superintendent should have praised them for doing the right thing, held them up as the exact epitome of what we want people to do. And yet he sends the completely wrong signal by his decision to protect the academy by dismissing them, which shows everyone what's going to happen if they too come forward. So they then go completely against their value system and go the opposite direction. That's why I wanted to bring up the whole thing.

Yes. Leaders don't always get it right. We know that. And the scenario you describe like if they um had been praised for speaking up, if it had been safe for them to speak up and effective as in this is a problem that we're dealing with and if half the class had spoken up, right? Would that have made a difference? Would that have made a difference? And okay, this is a systemic problem that we need to deal with rather than an individual problem, right? Or two individuals that we need to deal with. This is not just a bad apple problem. This is something that's pervasive here because half half the people are doing it. So why has this almost norm come into our academy and how do we deal with that? That's very much a cultural problem and unfortunately yes, I don't think it was handled in the way that it should have been handled. But the two people that were dismissed, yes, they did certainly

stick to their values and it would be interesting to speak to them to see whether they regret what they did or not, right? Because they can say that they they did the right thing according to their values and hopefully that will stand the test of time.

Well, I want to jump from what we've been discussing to this idea of becoming a moral maverick. And for this part, you use the story of Greta Thunberg. And I'm pretty sure everyone who's listening to this knows who Greta is. From what I gathered reading the book, Greta really represents the end point of the Defiance Compass. Someone who knows exactly who she is and acts in full alignment with her values. Can you talk about how what she is showing is that she's not merely brave in her convictions, she's also deeply self-aware, which even knowing that allows her to keep defying despite the backlash that she receives on a regular basis.

So, a moral maverick is someone who can speak up and act when necessary. And for many of us, it's a work in progress. That it's just as long as we're trying to get there, that is important. And one of the ways to get there that's essential is really knowing who you are and what you stand for. What are your values? And how can you act in alignment with your values on a day-to-day basis? Because, as I've said in my research, I've seen again and again how people what people say are their values and how they act. there's a huge gap between the two. So, how do we bring them together?

The first step is really to know who you are and then how do you act in that particular situation? How do you connect with your responsibility and develop the skill set to be able to defy when you need to and speak up when it matters the most? And most of us want to be moral mavericks. It's like a human thing that we want to speak up when it matters. We want to say no. We want to push back. We want to do the right thing. So what is it that's stopping us? Is it not knowing who we are? Is it not knowing our responsibilities? Or is it just not knowing the skill set? Like having that skill set practiced and the training having undergone the training so we can be defiant. We can stand up in that way and we can do it in our own way. That's natural to us. We don't need to to follow anybody else's representation of defiance. We can do what's most natural to us in certain circumstances.

Certainly, I did not view myself as a defiant person. I very much viewed myself as a compliant person and I knew that I struggled in many different types of situations and I had to learn the skill. But there were certain situations in which I found it easier to defy and those were for example when I had to question medical advice for my son rather than myself. it was much easier for me to do so because we can connect with our responsibility. We can connect with our values so much easier when it's about a loved one and we should give ourselves the gift of that for doing it for ourselves as well.

So throughout the arc of today's discussion we've talked about Darnella Frasier, you brought up Rosa Parks, I just brought up Kreta Thunberg. What do those three women have in common and how they prepared for their moment of defiance?

Each one did not think about maybe Rosa Parks was a little bit different, but most of the time we don't think about starting a movement in these situations. Greta Thunberg even said that she was just doing a school strike. She never thought it would be a movement. And I think her mother said, "As soon as one other person joins you, it becomes a movement." And Danella Frasier, she just saw something that she thought was wrong. She didn't think it would start a movement either. She was in the right time and the right place for her. But these things often start with this what I call defiance domino effect in that it's a single act that reverberates sometimes quietly, sometimes not so quietly to people that we may never expect. So when you just have a simple what do you mean in a situation when somebody says something that could be mean or racist and you just ask them what do you mean you might not think

it's something that big but because you have said it it has changed the water in which everybody else is swimming because people have heard it perhaps that person is less likely to say it again in the future when you're around or when the other people that were around again whatever It may give them pause to think, it may not. But the very fact that you've said it is that you're changing the environment. You're changing yourself. You're changing the people around you. And every single act of consent, of compliance, of dissent shapes the world that we live in. It affects our lives, our communities, our workplaces. And so that's why I'm so passionate that we know what it means to defy. We understand it. We don't misunderstand it. we understand what it means to defy and what it means to comply and that we have the skill set to enable us to act with defiance when we need it.

Senita, where is the best place for people to go to learn more about your research and you

So you can go to my website which is senasar.com. So that's su nits.com. Subscribe to my free newsletter on Substack. It's called Defiant by Design. You'll also find links on that website to my social media, Instagram and LinkedIn, so you can connect with me and of course you can also get my book there too.

It was so amazing to have you today and the book is really awesome and I highly encourage all the listeners who have tuned in today to buy it because touched just on the surface here and there's so much more to go through that I found valuable. We just didn't have enough time. Thank you so much again for being here. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed chatting with you.

Questions about this episode

What is "DEFY or Comply? The Hidden Cost of Always Saying Yes | Dr. Sunita Sah" about?

Dr. Sunita Sah explores the paradox of societal rewards for compliance, highlighting that while conformity is often praised, it leads to significant individual costs such as regret, burnout, stress, and anxiety. She emphasizes the necessity of examining the hidden consequences of always saying yes, contrasting them with the perceived risks of defiance.

What is mentioned in this John R. Miles episode?

4 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes, Darnella Frasier, London Business School, Axiom Business Award. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "DEFY or Comply? The Hidden Cost of Always Saying Yes | Dr. Sunita Sah"?

The episode runs 52 min; the transcript is about 8,846 words in 80 timestamped sections.

More from John R. Miles

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.