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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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I found some really shocking statistics. So one survey found that nine out of 10 healthcare workers, most of them nurses, don't feel comfortable speaking up when they see a colleague making an error or taking a shortcut. And crew members in commercial airlines, nearly 50% of them don't want to speak up when they see their superior making a mistake.
These can be life and death decisions and insinuation anxiety can account for some of the reasons why they don't feel comfortable speaking up.
So things were not great at all. He was in the middle of a war zone. His friends were getting blown up by various different explosive devices. In fact, his best friend was killed.
Yeah, so when this grenade went off, sort of too close for comfort, immediately they hear orders to dismount and to engage. So some of his squad, they run towards the mosque. Matthew, along with others, stay back to provide cover. And when his men came back, They had four young men as prisoners that were dusty, bloody, blindfolded and in handcuffs.
So Matthew was given one of the prisoners to basically look after. And his prisoner was yelling at the top of his voice in Arabic and he couldn't understand him and neither could his superior. So his superior tells him to shut him up. And Matthew asks, what do you mean? What do you want me to do? And his superior says, it's not complicated. Hit him in the mouth.
And so Matthew looks at the prisoner and he sees blood streaming from his nose into his beard. And he doesn't want to hit this man. He really doesn't. But it's a direct order. His best friend is dead. He doesn't want to be seen as a coward. So he raises his hand and he hits him in the mouth. And then his superior says, he's still talking. Hit him again. Hit him in the stomach.
And I remember Matthew looking at me while he's telling the story. And he said, so I raised my hand and that's what I did.
That's really fascinating to hear. And it aligns with some of my research as well. If you don't admit to yourself or to someone else that you feel something is wrong in this particular situation, if you don't say that you're uncomfortable with it, it's easy to convince yourself that you felt a different way at some point. I mean, cognitive dissonance is very strong, as we can see.
They felt tension, something that I call resistance against resistance, the resistance to resist, which is that they felt this tension between what they thought was the right thing to do and the tension to go along with what others expected of them.
Well, if we think about that tension, it can actually be a warning sign to us that something is wrong and that we should pay attention to that. It could be the first signal that you should defy before you even consciously know that you want to defy.
And I recognize that tension in them because that's the kind of tension I have felt when I want to defy but feel strong pressure to comply with what somebody else is telling me. And it can show up in different ways for different people, but we often experience that kind of tension when we want to go against something.
So instead of ignoring it or sweeping it away or thinking it's not worth our doubt, we should really think about what that tension means and whether this really means this is the time to act. This is the time to speak up.
Well, I felt immense pressure to just sign in front of him. But as soon as things started getting really awkward, my pager actually started beeping. So I had to tell him there's an emergency, a medical emergency, I have to go. And he was fine. He looked a bit deflated to begin with, but then he was, that's okay. I will send you everything and you can sign the paperwork later on.
And that allowed me to exit the situation, I now call the power of the pause because it allowed me to not have to send a signal of distress back to him. When I got the papers a week later and I didn't have to sign on the dotted line in front of them, I could much more easily assess my very low income. And so I threw the papers away.
Exactly. Ask for some time to think about it. Step away from the situation. Physically, if you can, would be great. Psychologically, if you can't.
That's right. Especially if something is seen as an emergency, it becomes very difficult to say no. A lot of times we can take more time to think about a decision. We don't need to make decisions in the heat of the moment. So we can step away. We can take the power of the pause.
And one thing that I've learned about defiance that is really helpful is that if you can take the power of the pause, it is great. But surprise often disables defiance. And anticipation enables defiance. So preparing for situations like that in advance is particularly helpful before the moment of crisis.
So if you can't get physical distance, which is ideally the best thing, one of the things I could have done in front of Dan was to get psychological distance. And researchers such as Ethan Cross examined what happens when we talked about ourselves in the third person. So you could close your eyes and you could say, Sunita, what is it you really want to do here?
And that gives us some distance to really think about what we want rather than what the other person wants for us.
That's right. So some of my research has examined What if the disclosure is not coming directly from the doctor, but it comes from a receptionist in a letter? I've even looked at giving out letters in advance, informing patients of conflicts of interest. In general, when people can deliberate on the conflict of interest disclosure and it's simple and it's timely and it's given time,
Showing 61–80 of 332 · page 4 of 17
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