Most people overestimate how readily they would speak up when it matters.

People comply with bad advice even when they know it is bad because saying no is hard.

Defiance is not a personality trait but a practice that anyone can build.

Most of us, in the abstract, believe we would push back when we see something is wrong. We picture ourselves as the one who would object, refuse, or stand up when others sat down. Decades of research suggest we are wrong. But the same research, paradoxically, contains good news.

When I was seven years old, walking home with my mother in West Yorkshire, England, a group of teenage boys blocked our path in a narrow alleyway. One of them yelled, "Go back home." My quiet, conflict-avoiding mother stopped, turned, and asked, calmly, "What do you mean?" When the boys didn't answer, she asked her question again.

I have spent most of my adult life trying to understand what she did. Not because the moment was loud or dramatic. It was not. She did something most of us, in most situations, never do. She closed a gap that most of us don't even realize we have.

It is the gap between what we believe we would do, and what we actually do, when something is wrong.

The Gap Is Bigger Than You Think

Ask people in the........

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