Dr. Sunita Sah
speaker
332 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 6 Feb
Dr. Sunita Sah’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It's amazing what we equate with being good, which is not being a bother to someone else at all.
And sometimes that's how we feel in organizations, right? When we work, managers love the yes man or the yes woman. Do as I say, don't question it. And we then just sort of narrow our vision to how well we are pleasing the boss rather than the wider. Like, what is it we're actually doing that has a value to the world?
One of the major things that was really crucial to sort of changing how I thought about defiance is getting rid of some of the myths that defiance has to be aggressive, loud. You have to have a larger than life personality. You got to be me. You got to be you, right?
Monica and I are never going to be here. Don't rule that out.
We can find our own way. We can be defiant in a way that's unique to us. So understanding that defiance isn't just for the brave or the extraordinary, right? It's available and it's necessary for all of us. I think that's one mindset shift that we can really all use and understand. And then the other is what I call the defiance compass, which I think is very useful because
which is when we're faced with a situation and we're trying to decide what to do. We have that tension, then we take the pause and we try to understand. These three questions came from James Marsh, who's a sociologist. But I've sort of adapted them to be not just three questions that we ask implicitly for every decision, but to put them in a circle because I think it is a circular thing.
So the first question is, who am I? And that's really connecting with your values. So if you aspire to be someone who's fair, compassionate, has integrity, that's what you really need to think about. That's who you are, because that's really important. If you've not found that out, spend some time doing that because people that clarify their values are more likely to act in alignment with them.
And also there's research showing that it reduces your stress and cortisol levels if you actually know what your values are.
So really know who am I? You can ask yourself that. And then the second question. So that's internal. Then you go external. What type of situation is this? Is it safe and effective for me to defy? And then the last question is with these particular values, fair, full of integrity, all those things. What does a person like me do in a situation like this?
If you believe you're one type of person, but you're never acting in that way, you want to sort of start thinking about whether that really is who you are or not. And I've found those three questions really powerful in terms of knowing this is what I would like to do. Really tapping into our aspirational selves.
I want to decrease that gap between the intention, what we think we'll do in a situation and how we actually act.
And that's fascinating.
But you wouldn't have felt good about it in the long run.
And in experiment after experiment, I've seen people say their one thing and then behave in a different way. So anything that helps us reduce that gap.
The people that could defy, they're really fascinating. So, I mean, I told you the sort of basic setup of the Milgram experiment, but when you look at all the different deviations that they had, that's where I find the work really fascinating and the people that defied, what was it about them that they defied? And many of them, it was because of responsibility.
So one was a professor of the Old Testament. So values were there and very high on that. So even though... He was stuttering and things when they said the experiment requires you to go on. He kind of asked, does it like maybe if we're in Russia, but not here.
So he was able to stand up to that because he'd done so much thinking about those types of values and humanity and not harming another person. And then the other person that really stands out for me is an engineer that had the knowledge of how powerful these shocks are. Interesting. And he lived through World War II. And so he was fascinated by this afterwards.
And he said he just felt really bad that he went as far as he did before he stopped. Because it's like if you throw the responsibility onto someone else and just say you were taking orders, that's really quite a cowardly thing to do. You're the one that's causing trouble. the shocks to someone else. And I know what kind of harm those shocks can do.
And there was another participant, a woman that said the same thing. I don't want to be responsible for causing harm to another person. So I do think that responsibility element is really powerful when we think about what does a person like me do in a situation.
Really? Yes. I'm just saying that because my son wants to be an engineer.
Showing 241–260 of 332 · page 13 of 17
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