My new TEDx talk just went live, and has been selected as a TEDx Editor’s Pick. It’s a personal story that begins in an alleyway in West Yorkshire when I was seven years old.
I open with a story about my mother. She was 4’10”, quiet and gentle. The kind of woman who apologized when someone stepped on her foot. For most of my childhood, she was the most compliant person I knew. I thought defiance was something for other people: it was loud, aggressive, bold. Certainly not her, and definitely not me.
Until one day, when I was seven, walking home from the grocery store, she did something that changed how I understood the word “defiance” for the rest of my life.
I won’t give away the rest of the story here. But the question it left me with, the question that shaped decades of my research, is this:
What if defiance isn’t a personality trait, but a practice?
For years, I’ve watched the same pattern emerge in my research. In private, when no one is watching, people choose what they actually want. In public, under pressure, they comply.
It's the junior doctor who doesn't question the order she knows is wrong. The teacher who stays silent through a curriculum decision he opposes. The engineer who signs off on the spec she doesn't believe.
The disconnect is striking. It’s not that they don’t know what they want. They just don’t know how to act on it.
We’ve been trained for compliance. We’ve been praised for going along, for keeping quiet, for not making trouble. We don’t get the same training in how to defy.
Defiance, properly understood, is not rebellion or aggression. It’s not about being loud or bold. My definition is simpler:
Defiance is acting in accordance with your values when there is pressure to do otherwise.
When you redefine it that way, it becomes positive, accessible, and meaningful. It becomes something you can build, not something you have to be born with.
Picture the meeting where someone says something that goes against everything you believe, and you feel that familiar lurch in your stomach. That’s the moment the Defiance Compass™ is for, a tool I introduce in the talk for finding your way through difficult moments. It’s built around three questions:
Who am I?
What type of situation is this?
What does a person like me do in a situation like this?
These questions sound simple. But making them explicit and asking them deliberately is what turns instinct into intention. It’s what allowed my mother, that day in the alley, to do something none of us expected. And it’s what allows any of us to defy, even on the days we’re not feeling brave or powerful or ready.
Most people will tell you defiance requires confidence, certainty, the right personality. That you have to feel ready before you can speak.
That’s the trap. If you wait to be ready, you’ll wait forever.
The defiant move is to stop treating defiance as a feeling and start treating it as a skill you can practice. To pause when something feels off, even for a breath. To ask the three Defiance Compass questions, deliberately, before the moment passes. To act from your values, not your nerves.
My petite mother was not loud. She was not aggressive. But she was unmistakably defiant. How? In that moment she knew who she was, knew what the situation was, and knew what someone like her would do.
That’s the practice. And it’s available to all of us.
TEDx videos draw most of their YouTube reach in the first 48 hours after publication. If this talk lands for you, watching it now, liking and commenting on it makes a huge difference.
Share it on LinkedIn or elsewhere, restack this post, send the link ( youtube.com/watch?v=JiqDTTikGNg ) to a friend or anyone who has been carrying the weight of what they didn’t say. I would love your help to spread the word and get this message to a larger audience.
With defiant determination,
Sunita
If you want to understand why we so readily default to compliance even when it costs us, and how to build the practice of pushing back, that's what DEFY is about.
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