Mindset Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Ranjay, welcome!

Ranjay Gulati
Thank you. A pleasure to be here with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about boldness and everyday courage and all the ways we can make that happen.

Ranjay Gulati
Yeah, I’m excited to talk to you today. And I think, you know, this has been a topic I’ve been studying for the last four years, so seeing it come to fruition is a relief and a delight both at the same time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, just before we pushed record, you started saying great stuff about why right now, right now is when it’s really important to tap into some extra courage and why. So why don’t we pick it up right there? Why now?

Ranjay Gulati
Well, the one thing I don’t need to tell you, you already know this, is that we are right now in what Harvard Business Review calls an uncertainty crisis. We have technological uncertainty, “Where is AI going and how is that going to affect my job?” We have regulatory uncertainty, “Where are tariffs going? How is that going to affect my job?” We have geopolitical uncertainty, “How is that going to affect me and my job?” We have political uncertainty. We have environmental uncertainty. We have health uncertainty. And now there’s uncertainty everywhere.

Now remember, uncertainty is not the same as risk. Uncertainty is where you don’t know the outcomes. Risk is where you, kind of, more or less can model the outcomes, you put some pros and cons, you put some probability on them. And the last piece of the puzzle to understand is when there’s uncertainty, uncertainty activates in the human brain. It really goes right to the primitive brain, the survivalistic kind of reptilian brain, and activates the primal human emotion of fear.

And fear hijacks the amygdala, so you can’t even think straight. And you go into what people usually call fight or flight, but rarely do we fight. It goes to flight or freeze mode. And so, it’s normal to recognize and acknowledge that it’s scary, “I’m scared, but what am I going to do about it?” And that’s where courage comes into the picture.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, certainly, an uncertainty crisis. That sounds like one of the most anxious crises you can have. It’s a crisis about uncertainty itself. And I like that distinction there in terms of risk, right? It’s like, “Huh, maybe I’ll try this thing, and it’s either going to work or it’s not. All right.” That’s risk. Whereas, uncertainty is like, “We have no idea what could unfold in terms of, like, what the options may well be.”

And, yeah, it’s sort of funny, in a way. It’s almost sort of like the air we breathe or the water we swim in. It’s, like, you say that, and it’s like, “Well, yeah.” But it’s like, “Oh, wait a second. It wasn’t always like this.” It wasn’t always like this, but, yes, now that is our everyday reality. We are besieged by uncertainty on numerous dimensions, almost always.

Ranjay Gulati
Yeah. And I think, honestly, I think the question is, “How do we then deal with uncertainty? And how do we deal with the fear?” And I want to go back, when you talk about courage, is to go back to the Wizard of Oz. And if you remember the character, the Lion in the Wizard of Oz, and what does the Lion want? He wants courage.

And, ultimately, when he reaches the Wizard after this tortuous journey, and he tells the Wizard, “I want courage,” and the Wizard says, “But you already have courage because you got here, you took actions in spite of your fear.” And so, I think it’s the first starting point to understand this journey that I’m talking about, is courage is taking action in the face of fear. It’s not the absence of fear.

Very few people in this world are fearless. Most of us experience fear when we encounter uncertainty. And the question is, “How do we build tolerance for that fear? How do we learn to outwit fear? How do we learn to tame fear? How do we learn to face fear? How do we learn to normalize fear instead of succumbing to fear?” That gets to the heart of the issue, is that, “What is my response to normal fear that I’m going to experience in these trying times?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Ranjay, that sounds nice, to have that set of skills, in terms of just our experience of living life and our emotional internal state of mind. I’d also love it if you could make the case for us. Perhaps you have a story of someone who mastered some of these skills and saw some cool results in their career. Or, what’s really at stake for us, whether we continue bumbling along as we are, versus really mastering some of, well, the nine Cs we’re going to get into of being courageous?

Ranjay Gulati
So, courage can manifest either in an instant. There’s a moment that comes up and suddenly you have to step up or not. Or, it can be very deliberate, well thought-out, and how you kind of operate and think through that. Let me give you examples of both. One is an instant one who is Brandon Tsay. So, Brandon Tsay is a young gentleman in his mid-20s, mild-mannered, slightly built, very pacifist gentleman.

In fact, he told me that he’d never really ever gotten to any fist fights or anything like that. He always ran away from a fight. And he’s a cashier at a dance hall in Southern California, a dance hall started by his grandmother. And he’s working behind the cubicle where there’s a cashier desk. And just a typical ordinary evening, the gentleman walks in with a gun.

And Brandon knows right away this is not good. Now the question is, “What is he going to do?” So, one side of him is saying, “Let me duck under the table. Maybe he won’t see me, and this, too, shall pass. I will be there to live fight another day.”

But something gets into him, and he comes out of the cashier’s area, through the door outside, into the lobby, and gets into a fight with this guy who starts punching him. In the process of punching Brandon, who’s taking the punches, he manages to pull the guy’s gun away and gets him out of there. He has no idea why he did it.

Now I had to really probe with him to understand why he did it, but it was in the moment. Now let me juxtapose this against another character whom I interviewed who was a former student of mine – Frances Haugen. Frances is Harvard MBA, you know, hard-charging, doing a great job, having a phenomenal tech career and is now at Facebook.

And she is very troubled by the content on Facebook and what it’s doing to people. And she doesn’t do much about it, she’s just thinking about it and is troubled by it. Then she sees one of her own close friends getting radicalized by Facebook content.

She also sees internal research showing that Facebook knows what their content is doing. So, she has to do, “What am I going to do?” She spends almost a year deliberating on what she’s going to do. Ultimately, she decides she’s going to be a whistleblower, even though it may end her career, which it did. But she felt she had to do something.

So, these are two very different characters, but if you try to understand, and none of them, neither one of them had really shown, they were not like these heroic people who were former Navy SEAL, you know, had been out there, they were always kind of on the front of things, but something activated in them, the capacity to take bold action in the face of uncertainty.

And that’s what I try to understand. How did they resource themselves? How did they find the self-courage to do something they, otherwise, would not have done in the face of uncertainty?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny you said Frances Haugen. I was like, “Wait, I know that name. That’s in the news. Oh, yeah, that Frances Haugen, the famous whistleblower.” So, she was a student of yours.

Ranjay Gulati
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, you knew her, pre-whistleblowing times.

Ranjay Gulati
A long time ago, yes. Not very well. She was one among many of my students. But I wouldn’t have flagged her.

Pete Mockaitis
But she wasn’t like a fiery. Yeah, nothing?

Ranjay Gulati
No, I would not have flagged her and said, “Oh, she’s, one day, going to go and whistle-blow.” You know, I think that was my learning. In many instances, these are ordinary people who somehow find in themselves the capacity to be courageous.

Mahatma Gandhi was an ordinary Indian gentleman who wanted to be an English lawyer. He wanted to live in England. Nelson Mandela was not about to be a leader.

So, you have all these people who somehow, and that was what my learning was, “How do they resource? What triggers them? And how do they resource themselves to become courageous?” Because I believe courage is a choice. It’s a choice we all can make and it can really unlock our human potential in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, yes, I’d love to dig into exactly this. When you say “What triggers them?” it’s interesting, you have an equation, which I find intriguing, that fear equals uncertainty, plus loss of control. And I was chewing on this for a while before we got on because, I suppose, if we have something real bad is going to happen to us, but we’re certain of it, the feeling isn’t so much fear.

Like, let’s say, “I’m going to get fired. I know it. Layoffs are happening. I am right in the crosshairs. I’ve got a meeting scheduled with HR, and they never schedule meetings with me. Many other people have been fired. So, it’s pretty much a certainty. I’m going to be fired.” Because there’s no more uncertainty, it doesn’t really feel like fear, so much as I guess dread, disappointment, sadness, resignation.

And then loss of control, there’s uncertainty if we go to the casino, but we chose to be there. Hopefully, we set good limits, “I have $100 to lose at Blackjack,” or whatever. And so, it’s like, “Yeah, there’s uncertainty, but I’m not afraid. This is fun. This is exciting.”

So, anyway, I was just mulling over your equation, and that’s what I came to, but you’re the master. Tell us about this equation and how it impacts how we approach situations.

Ranjay Gulati
So, back to what I was saying, when the human brain, when normal people encounter uncertainty, it typically comes also with feeling of loss of control. And when you have both those things happening simultaneously, it activates in us the primal human emotion of fear. In fact, one of the books I read had a whole chapter on what they call the good coward. Because we use the word cowardice or coward as a very, very negative label. It’s one of the worst things you can call somebody.

But actually, I found cowardice is normal. That’s the default for most of us human beings. Courage is an exception. So, the default for most of us in our jobs, whenever we encounter any form of uncertainty, whether it is job uncertainty, or it could be a project uncertainty, it could be a proposal uncertainty, it could be whatever form of uncertainty, the natural, normal human response is one of fear. And we need to get okay with that and not be, first of all, ashamed.

I used to be ashamed of my fear. When I’d get scared, I’m like, “Oh, I’m not allowed to be ashamed, fearful. I mean, geez, look at James Bond and look at Clint Eastwood and look at Jason Bourne and look at all these people. How can I be scared?” Because in my mind, courage was fearless behavior.

But then once I understood that, once I understood that fear was a normal human response, and once I understood that I needed to find a way to tame my fear, I then tried to understand, “How do people, others, how do they resource themselves and what can I learn from that? Are there some systematic things?”

And I found, actually, a body of research that I tried to understand, it was fragmented, and understanding the research and my own research into this, I was able to triangulate and come up with what I thought was a set of practices that all of us can use to make courage accessible to us.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that sounds very appealing. So, here’s a great starting point, that cowardice is the default, fear is to be expected, no need to shame ourselves. Just understand, “Yep, that’s what’s going to happen here. That’s the natural response.” And, thusly, we can choose to go about doing some empowering. So, yeah, let’s do that.

I understand you’ve got, in your book, the nine Cs of courage: coping, confidence, commitment, connection, comprehension, calm, clan, charisma, and culture. Could you maybe give us the one-minute snapshot of what you mean by each of these things? And then we’ll just have some fun digging into the juiciest bits.

Ranjay Gulati
So just to, first, classify them, the first six Cs are at individual courage. The last three are about organizational courage, or team courage even. So let me start with the individual courage. The first one being coping. It’s important to understand that human behavior is not only rational, but it’s also interpretive. It’s how we look at situations. How do we draw meaning in storytelling? What is our story?

So, the first piece of coping is, “What’s your story?” If you have a story about, “I need to do something. I’m committed. It’s not “I’m interested.” It’s, “I’m committed,” that’s a different way of coping with the fear. The next one is comprehension, which is, “I’m looking at the gray, the foggy uncertainty out there. I’m not going to just leap into it. I’m going to do what a firefighter does. I’m going to tiptoe my way in and learn and take small steps into it.” So that’s comprehension.

Another one is connection, “I’m not going to go alone. Courage is not a solo sport. It takes a village. What kind of support do I have that boosts up my courage? I know there are people who give me emotional support, resource support, information support, and even feedback support. Do I feel boosted by the people who are backing me up?”

The next one is conviction, “Do I have conviction? Do I believe in it? Is there some kind of moral imperative underneath it? I need to do this because…” “How does it tie to my purpose?” The next one is confidence. Confidence is not just that I have the skills to do this job. Underneath it is this kind of can-do spirit, “I’ve got this.” How do you build up that kind of a Navy SEALS mindset? How do you build that up to be emboldened?

The next one is calm, “How do I keep calm in the face of the turmoil that fear can unleash? What are the rituals I might have? How do I focus attention on the task at hand and not get distracted? How do I reframe the situation? How do I maybe even use humor to lighten up the situation?” That’s individual courage.

You can then go to collective courage, which I’ll summarize by saying it’s shifting from me to we, “How do I get us all bought in to this idea that we’ve got to do something? How do I make it part of a culture? How do I make it part of our collective rhythm? It’s something we’re meant to do.” So that, in a summary, is the arc of the book, that courage is a choice. You can change and build courage muscles.

Because if you know how to resource yourself, you will find a way to be a lion king. A lion, I’m sorry, not Lion King, the Lion in “The Wizard of Oz.” Different musical.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, no, both are excellent and inspiring. Well, there’s so much good stuff to get in here. What I like a lot is comprehension makes a lot of good sense in terms of, “Well, yeah, if there’s a ton of uncertainty, we can get better comprehension and mitigate some of that by going step by step, taking a peek, doing a test, learning, having a conversation, okay, getting there. And action, absolutely. Hey, I’m about to do some stuff. That’s tricky, that’s demanding a lot of me. Let’s make sure I feel well, well-supported, connected with my people.” I like that a lot.

Tell us a little bit when it comes to coping and story. I think that could be a little bit tricky because sometimes I try to tell myself better stories to feel different things. And I know what I’m doing, it’s like, “Hey, Pete, I know you’re trying to trick me into seeing this differently and feeling differently about it, but I’m still scared. I’m still angry. I’m still annoyed. I still don’t feel like it,” like whatever. So, what are your pro tips in terms of coping and storytelling to yourself like a master?

Ranjay Gulati
So, the first thing I’ve realized is we are the biggest storytellers to ourselves. And these stories that we may or may not even be familiar with, it may be implicit, it may be buried deep in my psyche, have a powerful grip on us. They not only shape how we look at situations, but they also shape how we look at ourselves in those situations.

I’ll give you an example. In a recession, how do companies behave? Ninety-one percent of companies just go cost-cutting because the narrative they have is, “In times of uncertainty, survival is key. So cut costs, do whatever you need to do. This, too, shall pass. We’ll see it on the other side.”

Nine percent of companies, only 9% have a different narrative. They see adversity as opportunity, “This is a unique moment to leapfrog everybody else. Yes, it’ll be risky. Yes, there’s uncertainty here, but, you know, this is a unique opportunity. They don’t come very often. So how are we going to leapfrog everybody else in these down markets where everybody else has got their head in the sand?”

So, you start to see how these kinds of self-narratives, individually and collectively, become part of our way of facing uncertainty, because narrative, our own self-narrative, changes our sense of identity, how I see myself. It also changes the way we look at situations around us and the meaning we attribute to those situations.

So, I interviewed a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer, who is now a commando in Ukraine, behind enemy lines. He said, “Look, I just had to do this. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do anything.” So, what’s my story?

And a lot of people in work have an affirming story that, “I want to have an impact, I want to make a difference here. I want to get ahead. I want to be responsible. I want to be somebody someday.” Others have a rather negating story, “I don’t know if I can do it. I’m not sure. That’s too risky. What if it doesn’t work out?” So, “What’s your story?” is the starting point for this journey.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like that a lot. It sounds like there’s many flavors of story and they’ll take you down different paths, not just in the rough binary of, “Do this. Don’t do this,” but, “How are we going to approach it? And why is it worthwhile or not worthwhile to do so?” We can examine the story in terms of, “Okay, this is the story that is present.” Do you have any perspective on, once you’re aware of that, what’s the next best step?

Ranjay Gulati
You know, there’s an old saying, “Change your story and change your life,” right? And I think there’s some truth to it. This inner story is kind of like a central operating system that impacts everything we do. We’d like to believe that we have a rational calculative machine in our brain, cost benefit, does the math, looks at the expected value, pros and cons, SWOT analysis, scenario planning, we do that.

But there’s a parallel system that overrides all rational calculus, and that is this interpretive system. And you got to find a way to take and harness that. And a lot of courageous people harness that when they take bold action. Whether you look at Frances Haugen, it was her realization that, “I have to do something,” or, Brandon Tsay, in the moment, saying, “I have to do something.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. It’s interesting. As I think about being in Frances’s shoes, you can very easily tell a story, in terms of it’s like, “Well, you know, corporations, they’re going to maximize shareholder value. So, naturally, of course, Facebook is going to try to do whatever it can to maximize engagement on their platform, and that’s just sort of how business works. And I’m just one of tens of thousands of cogs in this machine. And if I’m not digging this job, I could just try something else.”

And so, like that is a story and that is reasonable in terms of, “Okay, yeah.” I guess, none of those things you would just say, “That is utterly false,” but, like, that is a reasonable story. But then she took another one, it’s like, “What I’m beholding is evil. And it’s quite likely, if I do nothing, nobody else will either. So, it is up to me to stop this evil.” And, likewise, those two, those points are also valid, reasonable, rational. And so, which story you’re operating in really would direct the subsequent steps and path.

Ranjay Gulati
Absolutely and very well said. But I think story is the first step in this courage journey. The reason I have all these other Cs is because then you resource yourself. So, take Frances, she didn’t do it alone. She forged connections to really help her find that courage. It took her almost a year to do this after she first thought about it.

She was talking to a reporter who was guiding her on what needed to be done. She was talking to a law firm that helps whistleblowers on what needed to be done over there. She had a friend of hers who was a priest giving her personal feedback on how she should do it. She was talking to her parents who were giving her the moral support, and saying, “Come on, you got to do something.”

So, connections played a key role over there. Another one is confidence, “How did she build up her can-do muscle?” “I got it. I can do it. And you know what? I’ll be okay on the other side of this.” So, there are several other resourcing tools I found. So, it wasn’t just an isolated thing.

Brandon Tsay had moral conviction, “This is my family thing and I’m the custodian here, and my mother who’s passed away is looking up from there and I’m going to hide under a table?” So, he had a moral conviction. So, conviction played a key role as well. Right? So, each of them has resourced themselves in different ways.

Back to Frances Haugen, she didn’t do it all at once. She kind of decided to methodically understand and do it step by step. So that’s why I had to build this model, if I may, of “What are the resources available to all of us to build up that courage muscle?”

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, that’s really powerful, “My mother’s looking down from heaven. And so, who am I going to be? Am I going to be hiding here?” And I think that’s really a beautiful illustration of the power of story there, because, in a way, like they’re just facts. Like, “My mother previously passed away.” Like, that is a fact, that is a reality that is present in his world. But then when we bring that into the picture, it is transformative.

Ranjay Gulati
And I think the part to understand for all of us is, if we look at the magnitude of what these people did, and we’re like, “I could never do that.” But I think it’s really important to understand how they resource themselves. It wasn’t just a James Bond, Jason Bourne move, where you’re jumping off of a cliff with or without a parachute, and somehow magically you survive.

These people are very thoughtful. And how do we do that? We don’t have to be a Navy SEAL or a Marine to do this stuff. And back to the workplace, I think my realization about the workplace is, it turns out, the two most common emotions people experience at work are fear and anger.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a bummer of a work day, “I was angry and then I was scared, and then I was angry again, then scared some more.”

Ranjay Gulati
Yeah, and I think, if there was more courage, more people would be able to live up to their full potential. I think that’s what happens when we live frustrated lives because we don’t. In fact, some research on regret shows that people have much more regret about inaction than about action. And I think we should all contemplate that, “How am I tackling the natural normal?” It’s okay to be scared, by the way, first of all, right? That’s normal. The question is, “What do I do with the fear response?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, you mentioned Navy Seal for the second time, and I did want to dig into the confidence point. My listeners are often saying, “I want more confidence.” Tell us, how does one facilitate, cultivate more of this can-do spirit, Navy Seal, getting after it, kind of confidence?

Ranjay Gulati
So, I was really struggling with this chapter because I thought, “Do people really want to know how to build more confidence? Come on.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes, they do. We do.

Ranjay Gulati
There’s actually some great research on the subject by a Stanford psychologist named Albert Bandura. He didn’t call it confidence. He called it self-efficacy. And there turned out to be two broad flavors of self-efficacy. One is very domain specific, “I’m the master of my craft. I’m a great marketeer. I’m a great salesman. I’m a great technologist. I’m a great HR professional. I’m a great whatever.” And you need that.

Domain mastery is critical to having confidence, but is not sufficient. There’s another meta skill that, loosely, we can call a kind of a can-do mindset, “I got it.” Where, you know, if you look at Captain Sullenberger, he had never landed a plane on a water body, right, but that’s what he had to do when he had to land the United Airlines plane, when the engine shut down after the flight taking off from LaGuardia. It’s this kind of, “I’ve got this” mindset.

In fact, when he was interviewed by Katie Couric afterwards, and Katie asked him, like, “What did you have to do to land the plane?” He said, “Oh, I knew what I had to do. I had to have the wings exactly level. I had to have the nose slightly up. I had to be flying above the minimum flying speed, but not below it and not too high above it either. And I had to do them all at once.”

And then she says, “But there was a big if.” And then he turns around, and says, “I knew I could do it.” How did he know he could do it? He never trained for it before, never simulated it before, but he said, “I knew I could do it.” That is confidence. And how do we cultivate that kind of inner spirit is one of the hardest challenges for all of us. But once we have it, we’re the Lion in The Wizard of Oz.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah. So, tell us, what do we know from the good doctor Bandura and other research about how one cultivates such a spirit?

Ranjay Gulati
So, he talks about a number of things. In fact, his original experiment was to train, I don’t know, 10, 12 Stanford students who were fearful of snakes. I think they’re called Ophidiophobes, and who say, “I’m scared of snakes” to come into a lab, and then he showed them a corn snake. Corn snakes are harmless, but they look vicious. They’re huge. They don’t bite. They don’t know anything else, but they’re huge.

And he was going to make them hold it. And they’re like, “I don’t want to be even in the room with it.” And so, he talks about first creating micro-wins, small steps. He talks about rehearsing failure modes, “What’s the worst thing that can happen? I want you to start thinking about what’s the worst thing that can happen.” And slowly start to build evidence and build self-belief that, “You got it. You can do it.”

Or, another example of this, a modern example, is what Navy SEALs do. They make the Navy SEALs in training go through all kinds of crazy scenarios. And once you’ve gone through boot camp and training, you’re like, “There’s nothing that’s going to surprise me.” So, how do you create this kind of inner muscle, that, “I can handle”? And that kind of can-do spirit, I think is key.

I think if you look at teaching, by the way, I teach at HBS, and we teach by the case method, which is a very Socratic method, where students can speak. My first time, I’m like, “God, people will ask crazy questions. They might make crazy comments. They might get into arguments with each other. What am I going to do?” So, you start to learn and you see different scenarios and you kind of build your domain-specific craft. But there’s a meta skill, you’re like, “You know, I’ll figure it out. We’ll figure it out.”

So, there’s a specific skill and then there’s a meta skill. And I think that is key. And I think, I had to do that myself, by the way. Also, I have a pilot’s license. The first time I flew, I was scared, terrified, even with the instructor in the plane. Then afterwards, after starting my flight school, I thought, “Okay, I’m okay as long as he’s in the plane with me because he’s a seasoned guy. He can land a plane without an engine. He’s done it all. He’s been around. He’s been flying for 25 years. I’m okay.”

But then I had to get on a plane by myself, and I’m like, “Oh, there are so many things that can go wrong. I haven’t trained for all of them. I need him on the radio. Hey, Jerry, are you going be on the radio? Because if I get, if there’s something crazy happen, I want to be able to call you, my lifeline.” But ultimately, I had to fly away from home base where I couldn’t radio him.

Now you’re on your own. You’re like, “Oh, Seattle SeaTac Airport is saying I’m flying too close to commercial lanes. What do I do? What do I do? Do I go higher or lower?” So, how do you build that kind of can-do muscle?

Pete Mockaitis
And so, it sounds like the two key principles there was, one, getting progressive exposure, like to the snakes, “A little bit, a little bit, a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more.” And then another is the meta skill of, “Oh, again and again and again, I have entered into situations that were murky and tricky and unclear, and I managed to figure it out. And this will be similar to my previous historical experience. Therefore, I could feel confident.”

Ranjay Gulati
Absolutely, the evidence builds self-belief. How do you let evidence build self-belief? A third version of that is how do you rehearse failure modes? You have to rehearse failure modes, “What can go wrong? Let’s go through everything that can go wrong.” And the rehearsing of failure modes also quietens us down because you’re like, “Okay, what can go wrong here?” And you start to rehearse the failure modes to see that there’s nothing outside the realm of your thinking.

And they use this, actually, a lot also in kind of flight anxiety schools, where people who are paranoid about flying would never get on an airplane. Well, airlines don’t like that, so they all have these flight anxiety management schools where you can go online or in-person and take a class, where they make you sit on a chair that feels like an airplane seat, and it vibrates when the plane is taking off.

You put on your seatbelt. They even have some turbulence, so you simulate the turbulence, you simulate the plane landing and taking off. So, the idea is to kind of immunotherapy, if you will, but a bit of kind of rehearsals, but, ultimately, you’re trying to let evidence build self-belief, that growing of self-belief.

And, you know, sometimes, I’ll tell you what confidence comes from, I’ve found. I’ve seen this in sports a lot, actually, by the way. Sometimes the biggest source of self-confidence is somebody else believing in you. That’s what coaches do so well. The great coaches, they believe in their players. And when they believe in their players, if you think about one of the classic plays was Duke-Kentucky game, National Championship.

I think it was a semi-final, maybe, I think, considered one of the best games ever. Coach K was the coach of Duke. And there was, I think, 2.5 seconds left, something like that. And Kentucky just scored a basket. And they were now, I think, one point ahead. And Duke had two and half seconds to get the ball across the court and hit a basket.

And when the players were asked, Grant Hill threw the pass, and I’m blanking on who threw the basket, but what is his name? Famous. He was an NBA player afterwards. They did it because they knew their coach believed they could do it. And if the coach believed they could do it, they could do it.

So, building self-belief is a huge part of the story as well. So, find yourself somebody who believes in you, and you’ll start to believe in yourself. That’s what moral-emotional support really is.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful and beautiful. And to the rehearsing failure modes, I mean, maybe you strap into a chair that’s vibrating, but I think sometimes that could just be a matter of really just thinking it through and visualizing the situation. I remember after I left Bain and started my own thing, it was spooky because I didn’t have revenue and my savings were depleting day after day, month after month. It’s like, “Oh, my gosh. It’s like the money is disappearing before my eyes. I’m not accustomed to this.”

And it’s funny, but before I examined that, I almost thought, “Well, what happens when a person’s money balance hits zero? What happens then?” Unexamined, it was like, “Well, I just assumed that I’m homeless and sleeping in an alley.” It’s like, “No, that’s not actually what happens.”

And so, to think about, “Okay, imagine a world in which I have $0. What happens? Oh, I go get a regular job. What are my other Bain people doing? They’re going doing strategy stuff for like Kraft Foods or something. Okay, so I would go be a cheese strategist. This is really the worst-case scenario. And I might even find it interesting, figuring out cheese pricing opportunities or whatever.”

So that’s, that’s much less terrifying than being homeless and sleeping in the alley, and much more realistic. But unexamined, that’s just sort of where the emotions can take us to. And that’s not very, very helpful for making wise, calm decisions.

Ranjay Gulati
That’s a great example. An illustration of what I was saying is that, ultimately, we are all engaged in a mental process to tame or even outwit our fear, right? And if we can tame or outwit our fear, we can take courageous steps in our lives. So, it’s acknowledging, so if we’re at work, it’s first is acknowledging that, “You know what? Fear is a normal human response to uncertainty.”

And guess what? It’s very common in the workplace. But most of us are immobilized by fear. But if I really want to have, I want to thrive and live up to my fullest potential, I got to do something about this fear business. And there are some methodical ways to think and act that allow people to behave courageously.

And that’s what I want to learn. And I hope that, you know, my hope, at least, is in this project is to help people find the resources they need to say, “Here’s a…” for lack of a better word, “…a toolkit that I can use to resource myself to act more boldly.”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, tell me, Ranjay, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Ranjay Gulati
No, I think, ultimately, I have just one line which is, the forward to the book is written by the Dalai Lama.

Pete Mockaitis
A good get.

Ranjay Gulati
Yeah. And he says, “Courage is an inner journey.” It’s really an inner journey. In my mind, courage is a choice. It’s really a choice. You have to make a choice. If you make a choice, “I want to be courageous,” you will find a way to be courageous. It is ultimately a choice. And I think, you know, I haven’t touched on even the second, last one third of the book, where courage is contagious.

You can build a courageous team. You can build a courageous organization. You can bake it into the DNA. You can be a courageous leader who fosters courage in other people. That’s the next piece of the journey. And I think every person, aspiring leader, needs to understand that. Are you leading a winning team or a not losing team? Are you playing to win or are you playing not to lose?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, this reminds me of the movie “Searching for Bobby Fisher,” where his coach, I don’t know why that still fires me up. He’s like, “Are you playing to win or are you playing to not lose? They’re not the same thing.” And so, you know, he gets the idea from his other coach. Anyway, a fun movie. But now, share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring.

Ranjay Gulati
You know, I already scooped myself when I said courage was an inner journey, but I will add a little bit more to it. What the Dalai Lama says in the forward is, “When we recognize our interdependence, our courage naturally expands beyond personal ambition toward the greater good.”

And I think we should contemplate that. That we have to have a more expansive view of ourselves. And when we do and we see the interdependence of ourselves with the world at large and other people around us, we act with more courage.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Ranjay Gulati
There’s a book by Jim Loehr, L-O-E-H-R, called The Power of Story. And the title says it all.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Ranjay Gulati
I have a diary in which I take notes, and then I have my little Post-it notes that help me deal with short-term issues. So, I have a diary that I write down my longer-term projects and my thought processes there, and then I use this to kind of keep track of myself. So, you know, living in the world of ideas, there’s always things coming your way.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Ranjay Gulati
Getting up early in the morning and, hopefully, trying to work out before the day gets ahead of you.

Pete Mockaitis
If folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Ranjay Gulati
Look, LinkedIn is a great place to find me. I have a newsletter there. I’m reasonably active on it. Otherwise, I have a website where I post a lot of the same similar videos and stuff like that, which is RanjayGulati.com

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Ranjay Gulati
I think we all need to ask ourselves, “Am I really living up to my fullest potential as a courageous human being? And how can I resource myself to be more courageous?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ranjay, thank you.

Ranjay Gulati
A pleasure. Thank you so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Sunita, welcome!

Sunita Sah
Thank you. It’s wonderful to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into some of the wisdom in your book, Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes. Could you kick us off with a particularly intriguing, fascinating discovery you’ve made about us humans and defying from your research?

Sunita Sah
Yes, absolutely. I mean, this book really came from decades of research and also my own personal experience growing up as a good girl, really. I remember asking my dad when I was quite young, “What does my name, Sunita, mean?” And he said, “In Sanskrit, Sunita actually means good.” And mostly I lived up to that.

So, I did what I was told, got up when I was told to, went to school on time, did all my homework as expected, because these are often messages that many of us received in childhood, not just from parents, but from teachers and the community, it’s to be good. And what does that really mean? We think it’s to fit in, to obey, to do as we’re told.

And that’s the dynamic that becomes very familiar to a lot of people, I’ve found, that we start equating compliance with being good, and defiance with being bad. And then when we grow up into adults, it becomes very difficult for a lot of people to defy because it has such a negative connotation. And it becomes so hard to defy an order, even an unspoken one, from an authority up here or even a stranger.

And so, when we actually need to resist something, to do what we think is the right thing to do, it becomes very difficult, indeed.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow! And so, when you say good and bad, we don’t just mean, you know, kind of desirable and pleasant, but rather morally, ethically, good, bad, like noble and/or evil.

Sunita Sah
Yes, absolutely. That’s what we think. We think the right thing to do is what we get told to do a lot of the time because we often think people in authority know best and we would often hope for that, but it’s not always true. So, what happens when we need to resist that? That becomes really important. And even if we think about, like, our workplaces, what do people mean by a good employee? It’s often someone who’s seen as going along with things, being agreeable, doing what their boss wants them to do.

And when we start equating our moral behavior in terms of how well we complete a task or how well we obey our boss, things become really constrained to just the cubicle that we sit in, and we forget about the larger picture, what’s going on, the larger impact to other people, to ourselves, to society in general. And that can really erode the soul at times. It can be soul-destroying, in a way, if you keep bowing your head to other people and disregarding your values.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Well, this is so big and there’s so many directions we can run with it, so let’s go with your book. So, what would you say is the big idea or core message there?

Sunita Sah
It’s really to reframe defiance, because I’ve been so fascinated by what that single powerful word, defy, means for such a long time. And if I ask people, you know, “How many times have you wanted to object to something or opt out of something, but you end up just going along with it, you end up swallowing your words?”

And we think that it’s so good to be compliant, but when I really delved into the research, and I conducted my own research, I really saw how compliant we are and it can end up causing serious problems. So, for example, one survey found that nine out of 10 healthcare workers, most of them nurses, felt too uncomfortable to speak up when they saw a colleague making an error.

And it’s also not just in medicine, across industries, another one found that in more than 1,700 crew members on commercial airlines, only half of them spoke up when they noticed an error. So, these are situations you want people to be speaking up, right? And so, you start to wonder, “Is it sometimes bad to be so good? And what do we actually sacrifice by being so compliant?”

And when I spent more time looking at this and finding this dynamic in so many areas, even when it’s not life and death, what I found that I think is crucial and really substantially changed how I think is that we’ve simply misunderstood what it means to defy.

So, I came to this revelation that we need a new definition for defiance because this old definition that often has negative connotations is that to defy is to challenge the power of another person, openly and boldly. Whereas, my definition of defiance is simply to defy is to act in accordance with your true values when there is pressure to do otherwise.

So, it becomes this positive force, a proactive, even pro-social force in society because, if we think about all our individual acts of compliance, of consent, of dissent, they really build the places that we live in, our workplaces, our homes, our communities.

And that’s why it’s really important to understand what we mean by compliance, by consent, by defiance, and how to live a life really aligned with your values.

Pete Mockaitis
This is very powerful stuff, and the word defy really has a lot of power to it. And thinking from an American context, in some ways, we celebrate it, like, “Yeah, to defy, we’re going to defy King George, and revolution. This country is born and we have freedom because we defied,” or, “We are going to defy the injustice of slavery,” or, Rosa Parks.

It’s, like, it sparks within us something beautiful and strong, and we dig it. And yet, when push comes to shove and we’re right there in the emotional moment, we don’t have good pleasant hero-vibes associated with defying someone who’s right in front of our face.

Sunita Sah
Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, there’s so much in what you said about what our image of defiance is and what defines actually can be. So, one aspect is, as you said, that in America, we’re sort of valued for being free-thinkers and we like our agency and independence. And yet in my research, I found that there’s such a high level of compliance.

Like, even a very simple one with no consequences for saying no, if you give people two options, option A and option B, just giving them the choice, pretty much everyone over 95% chooses option A because it’s just much better for you, right?

But if you have someone just telling them to choose option B with absolutely no consequence if they said no, it’s just a stranger, I find really high levels of compliance, going up to like 85%, which is ridiculous. And when they have an opportunity to change their mind in private, they will do so. So, it really shows the difference between what our public behavior and our private preferences.

And what I aim to do is really get that gap mitigated so people can act in alignment with what their preferences actually are. And responding to what you just said about our image of defiance, one of the myths about defiance is that it has to be loud and aggressive and maybe violent. It is about revolution, but it doesn’t have to be. It can be done in a very quiet way.

And really done in a way that’s more natural to us. We don’t have to change who we are. It’s just a skillset. It’s not a personality. And so, once we learn to defy, that is key to sort of making better decisions, in general.

Now, if we think about Rosa Parks, because she is famous for her no on the bus, but she actually complied many times before with segregation laws before she said her famous no. And so, we have to think about, like, we can be compliant one day and defiant the next. We have to choose the time where it’s going to be sort of both safe and effective.

Now you could argue that it wasn’t actually safe for Rosa Parks, it was never going to be safe for her, but she made that particular decision that day, even though it was preceded by probably hundreds of moments of compliance. And that gives us hope because it’s not about defiance just being an emotional response.

Yes, it can be based on some emotion, it can be based on her belief of really believing in equality here and wanting to stand up for something, or sit down for her principles. But it really is connecting with our values and learning how to defy, because that is the one thing that many of us have not been trained to do. We’ve been so trained in compliance, we don’t actually know once we decide to defy, we don’t actually know how to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I’d actually like to dig into some of the details there with that 90% of folks will pick A over B, unless someone tells them, “Hey, pick B.” Could you zoom us right into that social psychology experiments in terms of what is A and what is B? What are people being presented with?

Sunita Sah
Right. So, I conducted a series of experiments, mostly in the US, where I have people pick between two different lotteries. So, they’re different prizes in the lotteries, but lottery A is twice the expected value of lottery B. It’s just worth so much more. So, of course, most people are going to go with lottery A. It’s the superior lottery. And why would you not choose it?

But if I pair them with a stranger, and just call that stranger an advisor and the participant as the chooser, and the advisor then says, “You should go for option B,” because either they know or they don’t know that the advisor is actually going to be paid more if they get to choose this option B. So, they’re really giving them bad advice, poor quality advice.

What happens is, even when the choosers, the participants, have full information, they feel too uncomfortable to say no to this stranger. And so, they go with option A, and they say it’s because of this social pressure to go along with people around them. And what I’ve found in my research is one aspect of this social pressure I call insinuation anxiety.

And it’s a distinct type of anxiety that we have when we worry about our non-compliance with another person’s wishes, that it’s going to be interpreted as a signal of distress. It’s going to insinuate that the person is not who they appear to be or should be.

So, for example, if your doctor tells you to do something, it’s quite difficult to say no because it insinuates that they can’t be trusted, they’re incompetent. And we don’t like to do that. We don’t like to do that with our friends, our peers, our trusted advisors, our colleagues.

And so, this aversive emotional state that we have keeps us quiet and compliant, and it’s actually quite powerful. It could range from, for example, something small, like you’re at the hairdressers and they’re saying, “Trust me with this new haircut,” and they’re cutting away and you just want to say, “Stop!” A lot of people, if you’re like me, find it very difficult to say so. We might just smile and say, “That’s great,” and even tip them at the end of the day.

Or it could be the life-and-death decisions that I’m talking about, the nurses unable to tell a physician that they’re making a mistake, or the co-pilot unable to tell the pilot that they think this is the wrong way to go. So, that force, that insinuation anxiety, this reluctance to signal distrust to someone else, because we don’t want to insinuate that they’re untrustworthy, is really quite powerful.

So, we have to understand that it comes up in these social interactions that we have, and figure out how we can decrease that social pressure so we can overcome insinuation anxiety and speak up for what we think is the right thing to do.

Pete Mockaitis
You know what this brings up for me is, just recently, I was trying to upgrade some internet speed, so I called up Comcast Xfinity, which is an infamously unpleasant experience for folks. And I was speaking with someone, and they said, “Oh, yeah, well, this plan will have 300 megabits per second upload speed as well.” I was like, “Oh, okay, well, that’s pretty good.”

But when I looked at the website, it says 41 is the upload speed. And it was interesting because, like, before my eyes, I’m looking at one thing, he is telling me another. And I said, “Well, could you help me understand why it is I’m looking at 41 and you’re saying 300?” He was like, “Oh, well, you know, recently they upgraded the speed.”

It’s like, “Okay, that’s cool. It’s plausible that upgrade hasn’t made it over to the webpage that I’m looking at yet. Could you send that to me so I could see what you’re looking at?” And for whatever reason, it wasn’t sending. And it was wild how, even though I’m looking at it with my own two eyes, I’m thinking, “Well, this guy works for Comcast Xfinity. He’s saying this with conviction, and that he has some sort of reference,” and I was just stuck.

We went through, we went in circles for more than an hour on this matter because I had to figure it out for myself, it’s like, “Well, I guess we’ll get it and I could see for myself, and if it’s no good, I’ll cancel it.” And so, that’s where we landed.

And even in, like, a social status-y position, I guess, like, I am the customer, this is a customer service person. I will never see this person again. But I could not bring myself to reject fully his assertion. It’s like, “No, you are wrong. I’m looking at it with my eyes. I reject what you say and we’re done with this conversation.” I could not bring myself to do it even in the rosiest of circumstances, and our compromise was, “Well, I guess I’ll see what happens.”

Sunita Sah
That’s how difficult it is because it seems so confrontational. It seems like you’re implying that this person is lying to you, lying straight out. And that’s so hard to do because, as a society, we value integrity so much. We do not want to be known as being an untrustworthy person.

And that’s why it becomes so difficult to tell someone else that, “I don’t think you’re telling me the truth here, right? This is my experience. I’m seeing something different and so you must be wrong.” It’s just so hard to say. And that is classic insinuation anxiety.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and if anyone was curious, sure enough, the speed was 41, as my eyes told me in defiance, or in contradiction, I should say, of what he had to say.

Sunita Sah
Did you cancel? I’m dying to know if you canceled.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I mean, once AT&T is hooked up, I’m canceling that one, so they’ve lost me. And sort of that’s how that unfolded. Okay, so it’s powerful. It’s in us. And so, we’ve got these emotional learned things all hooked up in our brains and emotions and nervous system that, “Oh, compliance is morally good and noble and wholesome, and defiance is bad or evil, objectionable and not something you want to do.”

So, then that is a bit of a pickle. So, can you share with us, before we get into the how, just kind of what sorts of goodness is on the other side if we manage to overcome this? Could we hear a tale of perhaps a professional who got really good at defiance and what kind of cool results that opens up for them?

Sunita Sah
I mean, for me, this was my journey from learning how to be bad at times, what people might say bad at times, because I went along to get along. I was good. I listened to what teachers told me. I just did what I was told. And then when I found that, like, teachers can be unfair and people can make errors, it just dawned on me that, if I really wanted to be living up to the values I thought was important, I had to learn how to defy.

And so, I found that these five stages of defiance, which is part of the skill of learning how to defy, and stage one is actually pretty important because this is one that people might be able to relate to, that you might be able to relate to in just what you were telling me about your experience with Comcast, is that the first stage is tension.

We have this tension between what is happening, the situation, what’s expected of us, and what we actually think is the right thing to do. And that tension can manifest in different ways, right? Some people just feel deeply uncomfortable. Some people feel a knot in their stomach. They feel some general unease, a tight throat. It manifests in us in different ways.

So, getting used to that sign is really important because that first stage of tension is really important to register and acknowledge to ourselves. And that’s like moving to the second stage, because what we often do is say it’s not worth our doubt, it’s not worth our anxiety, and so we sweep it away.

But after I learned how to defy, and what I’ve seen in many of the people I’ve interviewed, and in my research, is that if you can get to stage five, which is the final act of defiance, that tension that you had in the first stage, it just dissipates. So, if you just try to sweep it away at the beginning and say, “It’s not worth it. The other person knows better,” it comes back, it stays with us. We feel a lot of resentment.

And even though we often think that, “Oh, I’m going to upset someone,” “I’m going to lose a relationship,” “I’m going to lose my job even,” we don’t think so much about the costs of compliance, which can be significant. This tension, this anxiety, this stress, it can keep us up at night. It can lead to chronic inflammation, burnout, dissatisfaction, so many things.

Whereas, if we can live in alignment with our values, that tension dissipates, we feel more joy, we feel more authentic, and ultimately, it’s a more honest life. We feel like we’re making progress. We can be more of ourselves, which is something that, you know, we don’t want to give our soul away to be a good employee, right?

And so, that’s something that we really have to remember that, on the other side, that living a life aligned with what you think is the right thing to do is really reclaiming your agency. It’s very powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
It is powerful. That’s a good feeling. I want to zero in on the tension point. I think it’s also possible that you can defy and then have lingering worries of, “Oh, no, have I upset them? Is our relationship now in a bad place? Oh, are they going to come back at me in terms of retribution? Or are we no longer…?” whatever, dah, dah, dah. There’s any number of, like, little anxious worries and upset-ness that can linger with us post-defiance. What do you think about those?

Sunita Sah
Yeah, and these are the things that often keep us silent is because we have these worries before we defy. And, defiance in itself, and compliance actually, both are inherently risky, in a way, like, neither action is like risk-free because there could be great harm that comes from compliance. We’ve seen that in history, that unchecked compliance can lead to devastating consequences.

And so, this aspect of regret, a lot of people regret not speaking up when they could do. That’s a huge aspect of the cost of compliance. Do we regret defiance? Maybe sometimes we do if we haven’t thought about, “Is this the right place and time?” So, one of the aspects of considering, “Is this situation going against my values?” is one question that we can ask ourselves.

And then, “Is it safe? And will it be effective?” And that’s a very individual choice of learning how to defy and when to defy is figuring out. You know, Rosa Parks, as I said, it wasn’t safe for her. She received many death threats from her action, and yet it was effective. It was effective. And she made a strategic choice that day. And she had, like, a couple of really good examples.

When she was a child, she saw her own mother refuse to move on the bus for a white passenger. And that must have stayed with her. And I talk quite a bit about this sort of ripple effect of parents because I was brought up in a pretty compliant environment myself, and my mom especially, I thought was very compliant until one day I saw her defiance, and that stayed with me.

And so many people have told me about the ripple effect of their parents. So, it’s a great role model for that. But she was very strategic in that she waited for that particular moment to say no. And she had the community behind her, and she could make a difference.

So, understanding what your own defiance calculus is and knowing that you’re acting in alignment with something that’s really important to you, really reduces that element of regret of, you know, this is something that you feel that you have to speak up when it matters most.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s great. Great thinking there in terms of it’s like our default mode is compliance and that is profoundly suboptimal because compliance may or may not be the right answer, all things considered.

And so, at the very least, if we can stop and say, “Hey, does this match my values? Is this safe? Is this effective?” It’s like, “No, I’m doing lottery A, of course. And then that’s that,” is super handy. And then occasionally, the decisions get rather tricky in terms of, “Is this the time and the place for my defiance?”

Sunita Sah
Yeah, absolutely. That’s a wonderful summary. And I think you’re right as well, it does get tricky for people, like, “How do you decide?” And I always say, ask yourself, “Is it safe enough? Will it be effective enough?” Because if we say, “Is it safe? Is it effective?” we could just use that as a rationalization to never act, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Sunita Sah
Because it’s never going to be 100% safe. It’s never going to be 100% safe.

Pete Mockaitis
“Because this person could flip out and assault me.” “How dare you pick lottery A? Are you saying I’m an idiot? Aargh!!”

Sunita Sah
Yes, even though the chances of that were pretty slim with everybody around you, and you know you’re taking part in this particular experiment. But it’s true that people will have a different calculus because it is a very individual choice. And many people defy even when they don’t know if it’s going to be effective because they so strongly believe in doing what they think is the right thing to do in that particular situation.

Pete Mockaitis
But just to really highlight, as you’re doing the calculus, you’re weighing it out, the resentment and regret on the side of compliance when that was not worthwhile, will often weigh much stronger psychically than the worry of, “Uh-oh, is something bad going to happen?”

And one more piece I think is undervalued in the weighing of compliance versus defiance is that, like a boss in particular, I love it when I get smart defiance in terms of, so I bought this business, Cashflow Podcasting, our CEO is fantastic, and so I am an owner. And so, she could just do the things I say, but some of the times, she really proves how exceptionally competent and capable she is, in my own estimation, is when she is telling me well why I’m wrong.

I was like, “Hey, what if we change the survey to have, like, 12 options here?” And she’s like, “Well, I mean, we could do that, but my concern is that they will simply not reply because it will be overwhelming with too many options.” I was like, “Okay, yeah, you’re right. It’s like you have told me why I’m wrong in an excellent way that supports what we’re trying to accomplish here. I value that.” As opposed to, if you have a total sycophant, who is like, “Okay, yeah, whatever you say, Pete. You’re the boss,” then we’re getting suboptimal outcomes for what we’re working on.

Sunita Sah
Yeah, absolutely. To be a good boss, to be a good leader, you don’t want just yes-people around you because you’re not going to have any creativity, you’re not going to have any innovation. It’s really the death of creativity in that aspect. If you want your business to succeed, if you don’t want a high turnover, you need to really reward defiance in your workplace and see it as this positive aspect.

And so, creating those environments where people feel that they can speak up, so it’s great that your assistant can speak up to you, right, the people that you work with can speak up and say, “Actually, this would be my concern if we went down that line.” And that it’s effective as well.

So, I found like the two main reasons that people don’t speak up in the workplace is that they don’t think it’s safe, they think there’s going to be repercussions for them speaking up, or that they don’t feel any fear. They think it’s safe enough but they’ve spoken up many times before nothing happens so it’s not effective anymore.

And so, if as a leader, we can like create workplaces where people will not be penalized for speaking up, and you take action and show that it’s effective when they do come up with a fantastic idea, or that they stop you doing something that would have thrown the business off a cliff, then that is wonderful that we can create those places that’s going to be far more successful and retain far more people for the long term.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, so can we zoom right into the heat of battle, there’s something coming our way, we think, “Hmm, it doesn’t seem quite right to me.” We’ve got our five stages. Can we hear, what are the stages? What does it feel like? And what’s our best practice to move on through and defy effectively?

Sunita Sah
Yeah, so these five stages are really helpful to think about, like, once we get really experienced with the defiance, we might not go through all of them. Some of us at the beginning might go back and forth, but they’re useful, it’s a useful framework. So, as I said, stage one is tension. It’s like that tension that you feel somewhere.

Sometimes we know that something is wrong before we’ve even consciously registered it. But I’m not talking about like a gut feel here. I’m not talking about an emotional reaction to something. I’m talking about that tension between what’s expected of us and what we think is the right thing to do.

So, here, we want to think, “Why am I having that tension?” and acknowledge it to ourselves. So, stage two is really acknowledging there’s something uncomfortable here and trying to understand why. And the reason I say that is not just a gut feeling, is that there’s different types of tension that we can experience from our gut, right?

One is expert intuition that we’ve done something so many times before, we know that this is the wrong thing to do in this situation, or, like, this is the way that we should go, and we know it instantly once we see a particular pattern.

So, the best way to describe this is like a chess grandmaster when they see a pattern on the board. They’ve experienced it many times before. So, you need a predictable environment, immediate feedback, hundreds of repetitions to get that expert intuition.

Gut feel is something different, and it could be expert intuition or it could just be our biases, and be able to distinguish between the two is really important. So, we have that tension, we acknowledge it, we figure out what it means, and that’s stage two, stage one and stage two.

Then stage three is one of the critical stages. And this is really just vocalizing your attention externally to someone else. So, it can be something as little as, “I’m not comfortable with that,” or, “What did you mean by that?” or, “Can you clarify that?” So, it’s asking questions and just stating that you’re uncomfortable.

And the reason this stage is so critical is due to a number of things. First of all, the research shows that if you can get to stage three, you’re much more likely to get to stage five. So, learning how to get to stage three, and those little questions or clarification things are really important because, once you ask for clarification, you raise volume on the situation, you change the environment somehow.

And you’ve put it out there that you’re not comfortable, which means you can’t go back in time and then say, oh, you were fine with it to begin with if you comply. That cognitive dissonance can’t kick in if you’ve already said that you’re not comfortable with it. So, that’s stage three is just, you can still be in a subservient position. You can just be asking your boss for clarification here.

Stage four is when you actually say you can’t comply, that you can’t go along with this. And you could have conditions, “Unless this happens, or that happens, or this happens,” or you can’t go along with it because of these concerns. And then stage five, as I said, is the final act of defiance, that you say no, you don’t go along with it, and that’s when you see that tension dissipate.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, what I like a lot in step three, escalation, is it sounds like you can vocalize anything any way professionally in terms of like and then it is very helpful for us, in terms of you say, “Oh, we could do that. Although, might that result in this?” And it’s just, like, super friendly, super professional but you have articulated something. And just doing that does a lot for us.

Sunita Sah
Exactly. This is where people can defy in their own unique way with far less angst than they used to have, because we need to get rid of the myth that defiance is a particular way or a particular personality. We can do it in a way that feels most natural for us and becomes comfortable. So, we can practice that even if it’s just a little script.

I love this, “What do you mean by that?” When we hear something in a meeting and we don’t think it’s quite right, it’s like, “What do you mean by that?” then the other person has to repeat it and explain it. And if there’s like some logic that doesn’t make sense, then everybody else gets to hear it too. And what you’ve done is you’ve put it out there, you’ve changed the water in which everybody is swimming.

And even that person that’s saying that thing might think, “Oh, okay, maybe it isn’t such a good idea.” Maybe they will, maybe they won’t, but people have heard it, you’ve heard it, and that makes a big difference. So, it’s just a small thing that you put out there in the environment that can make a massive difference.

Pete Mockaitis
“Sunita, what I mean is we should break the law in order to get more money.”

Sunita Sah
“Can you just clarify that? Can you clarify?”

Pete Mockaitis
“Like, that’s kind of what I was worried about.”

Sunita Sah
Right. Interesting. You see, now it’s out there and everybody’s heard it.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. All right. Well, so then, when you say scripts, I love scripts. Can you give us some other favorite turns-of-a-phrase that work wonders?

Sunita Sah
Yeah, so I have to stress “What do you mean by that?” It’s such a great one that I use over and over again. It’s so simple. Just, “I’m not comfortable with that.” Like, for example, when you were talking to them about your internet speed, and you know the fact that it’s different to what you’re saying, “I’m not comfortable with that.”

It’s a great opening into, “Yeah, I’m not sure that’s quite right for me, you know. I’m not feeling comfortable here. What can you say to make me feel more comfortable?” And then they will be acting with conviction, it’s like, “I’m still not comfortable with this,” right? It’s sticking to it at that point. So, they’re two great ones, “What do you mean by that?” “I’m not comfortable with this.”

“Can you clarify? Can you clarify?” again is another one. Just use those three. And then the other thing that you can do is think about many of the situations that need our defiance are ones that we’ve experienced again and again. As I said, Rosa Parks had been on that bus many times before. She’d experienced it, many other situations before.

So, think about the situations that we’re in that we comply that doesn’t sit right with us, and then think, “What is it that I wish I would have said or how I could have said it?” Because sometimes we can follow up, like, if email is easier for you, you can maybe compose like a very polite email. And I did this quite recently, “Oh, could you help me understand why this decision was made? Any clarification that you can give would be greatly helpful.” And, actually, the decision got reversed, which I was amazed about.

So, just asking those questions, you’re still in a subservient position, but you’re defying, you’re on the stage to the final act of defiance. And even those questions can jump you straight up to stage five.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m thinking about any general pointers or principles to bear in mind. If we’re worried that if we defy too often, does it seem like, “Oh, you know, Sunita is not a team player. She’s difficult to work with. She’s selfish”? Any thoughts on how we can defend against negative reputational impacts?

Sunita Sah
Yeah. So, a few things there is, first of all, I’m not talking about cooperation. We can all be cooperative, we can all be team players, but often the best thing as a team player is to point out if you’re going down the wrong track. So, the people that you work with that tell you their concerns, do you see them as being difficult or do you see them as being really helpful?

So, a lot of this is to do with how it’s communicated and whether you’re offering great ideas or avoiding huge errors. And again, it depends on the workplace. So, if you’re in a workplace that really can see sort of the benefits of people not being 100% compliant, right? There are some workplaces where you might not be able to do that at all.

But, hopefully, in most of the healthy workplaces that we’re in, when you are defiant, it’s going to be something positive, not just for you in terms of, like, your selfish needs, but for the organization as a whole. And when I look at, like, I’ve interviewed whistleblowers and things, what I’ve found is that these whistleblowers are not doing this for selfish reasons.

If they were, they would not say anything at all because some of the costs of whistleblowing are huge. They are really huge. They take a big toll on people. And I’m not saying that we should be whistleblowers, but actually these people are the ones that really believe in the mission of the organization, and they want to bring the organization up to align with the values that they say that it has. That’s what concerns them.

And so, the people that are defying are actually defying from a great place. It’s the people that are just complying, even when they know that something is wrong, that leads to the negative outcomes most of the time. But I would also add to that that we choose when it’s the right time and the right place for that defiance to be effective, and to be seen as a team player.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, any final thoughts, top dos and don’ts to make sure to mention?

Sunita Sah
Absolutely. So, one of the key things that, you know, once you’ve learned the difference between compliance and defiance and consent, because there’s differences in those aspects, the five stages of defiance, and really got rid of the myth of defiance as being something negative, the key thing that I want from people is that those people that say they want to defy but they don’t know how is to know that it’s not a personality, it’s a practice, and it’s a skillset that we can all learn.

And it’s not just for the brave, for the extraordinary. It’s available and it’s necessary for all of us, and it’s to start building up that skillset. So, I have a defiance compass that asks three questions, “Who am I?” So, it’s really understanding your values and what you stand for. “What type of situation is this?” This is the safety and effectiveness that we were talking about. And then that last question is, “What does a person like me do in a situation like this?”

And this is tapping into your aspirational self to really understand, “If I am a person who values integrity or justice or equality…” whatever you value, “…what would I do in a situation like this?” And that really gets us in alignment with who we aspire to be, who we want to be, rather than regretting by not failing to put our values into action.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Sunita Sah
“Under duress, we don’t rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Sunita Sah
Yes. So, I actually really like the Milgram studies, the Obedience to Authority studies. To some people it’s controversial, but what I find really fascinating about these studies, and there’s been a series of them, is that people really often focus on that stark delineation between those that comply and those that defy.

But if you delve into the actual participants, and we’re talking about the study where subjects came in and they were told that they were taking part in a learning experiment. And what actually happened was the experimenter asked them to give harmful electric shocks to another person. And what Milgram found was that two thirds of people would go ahead and give electric shocks up to a very fatal dose of 450 volts just because somebody else told them to.

But when you look at those participants that did comply, they’re not just happily giving the shocks. They’re actually showing signs of nervous behavior. You know, they’re stuttering, they’re sweating, they don’t want to do it, they just don’t know how to say no.

And that gives us a lot of hope in that if we can learn how to defy, then we don’t have to be those people that are pushing the lever for 450 volts when we don’t want to.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Sunita Sah
Animal Farm by George Orwell.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Sunita Sah
Oh, a daily walk every single day. If I can do it first thing in the morning, it just sets me up for the day.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share with folks that really seems to connect and resonate with them, they quote back to you often?

Sunita Sah
I would say the definition of defiance is one that they come back with, like just learning sort of what defiance actually is. And then also learning the difference between compliance and consent. If you have a minute, I can really quickly take you through the difference between that.

So, compliance is what we have been talking about, something that we were socialized to do, that we slide into it. It’s usually some external force that causes us to do so. But when I think about consent, I take informed consent in medicine and I apply it to other decisions that we make. And for that, we need five elements.

We need capacity, so not being under the influence of drugs or alcohol or being too sick. We need the brain capacity. We need the knowledge, but it’s not just the information. We need the true understanding, which is the third element, like a real grasp of the risks and the benefits and the alternatives.

Then the fourth element is this freedom to say no, because if we don’t have the freedom to say no, it’s merely compliance. It’s not consent. And if those four elements are there – the capacity knowledge, understanding, the freedom to say no – then the fifth element is your authorization, your true yes and your true no.

It’s very different to compliance. Your true yes, consent, is radically different to compliance even though people conflate the two.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Sunita Sah
You can go to my website, which is SunitaSah.com, S-U-N-I-T-A S-A-H dot com. I have a newsletter on Substack which is free to subscribe. It’s called Defiant by Design, and you will get more things, more knowledge about defiance, compliance, and other research on personal and professional growth. And also, you can connect with me on LinkedIn and Instagram. That’s all there on my website.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Sunita Sah
Have a mindset shift as to what do you think about defiance being a particular way. And then just ask yourself, when you’re in a situation, “Does this situation go against my values? And what would a person like me, with these values, do in a situation like this?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Sunita, thank you.

Sunita Sah
Thank you very much.