Defy: The Power of No in a World that Demands Yes by Sunita Sah (1/14/25)

**PREORDER TODAY - ON SALE - JANUARY 14, 2025**

This is the defiance handbook-a cleared-eyed dissection of the forces that silence us, featuring groundbreaking research, legendary cases of defiance alongside everyday examples, and strategies for speaking up when we know something's wrong.

Many of us make ourselves uncomfortable because we don't want to make others uncomfortable: we don't tell the server the soup was terrible, we don't speak up when we see a bully in action, we go along when a doctor rushes us into treatment we're not sure we need. We comply even when we don't consent. It turns out that legendary activists and whistleblowers also experience these moments of hesitation; Jeffrey Wigand, the tobacco industry insider who saved millions of lives, vacillated for two years before going on the record. Rachael Denhollander, whose testimony revealed sexual abuse in USA Gymnastics, took 10 years to tell her story publicly. In each case, they worked up to their moment of defiance-and had a huge impact. With practice, says award-winning psychologist Sunita Sah, we can too. In this book, Sah decodes the dynamics that keep so many of us quiet and offers clear, practical steps to live our values every day. She includes riveting, relatable examples of regular people in tough situations: nurses who witness doctors' mistakes; police officers pushed to carry out an unlawful search, a Marine ordered to violate military law. In each case, she illuminates why the individuals involved remained silent-until they didn't. Combining her own revelatory research with stories of defiance big and small, Defy offers life-changing tools so readers can practice in low stakes situations to be ready for high stakes ones. When we get comfortable defying, we stop being spectators in our own lives and we become agents of change.