Go To on Trusting Our Lived Experience

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Everybody, this short segment is called a go-to.

It refers back to this crazy thing we used to do

at the end of our sorority meetings in college.

If you can believe that, it was called for the good of the order,

and it was a way to share something

that had emerged over the course of the week,

which really was a bit of learning or thinking or feeling

that was to everyone's benefit to share.

And so that's all we'll do here.

Every Friday, we release a go-to,

and we encourage you to share it

with friends around the country.

We know that people use it as a way to stay in touch

with their best friends across the country,

and of course, far-flung family members,

wherever they might be.

And as for your local nearest and nearest,

consider it fodder for discussion over the course of the weekend.

This is Kelly Corrigan-Wonders

and our weekly segment called Go To.

So on Tuesday, we started a series

called Women of Consequence with an entrepreneur

named Laura Modi.

Laura Modi built in Bobby, which is an infant formula company

that uses much safer, better ingredients.

And there was this one moment in the conversation

that has really stuck with me.

Like, you know, the proverbial song

you can't get out of your head.

So I want to talk about it.

But I want to say that I don't think it has that much to do

with infant formula because it's actually about something

that every one of us is dealing with,

whether we know it or not.

Okay, so here's the setup.

Laura's in the middle of the 2022 formula shortage.

Do you remember that?

And parents are understandably totally freaking out.

And her company is suddenly the answer to everyone's prayers.

It is a subscription service for infant formula.

Her growth person comes in and says,

well, this is great that we can support people

in times of need.

We have one problem.

We cannot produce enough product,

continue to bring in new customers

and reliably be able to hold on to enough inventory

for those who are already subscribers.

And then she says, you've got 48 hours to make a decision.

And so this was this incredible chance

to sign up all these new customers.

But Laura went home and she couldn't sleep

and she told me she took off her CEO hat

and put on her mom hat.

And she thought about the women

who had already subscribed to Bobby

and whether she could satisfy them

and new customers at the same time,

which of course she could not.

And she decided, nope, we're not taking new customers.

We're not gonna risk failing the people

who already trust us.

The next morning they turned away

all inbound requests from new customers.

So what Laura actually did in this moment

that goes well beyond infant formula

was trust something she knew,

not because she modeled it

or threw it all into a spreadsheet,

not because somebody at McKinsey told her,

but because she had been that woman,

she had held a hungry baby.

She had felt the panic.

And that knowledge, the body level,

lived it in her bones knowledge,

told her what to do.

I have a feeling that most of us

are walking around with that same kind of knowing

and sometimes we ignore it.

We are exposed to a non-stop fire hose

of expert opinions and hot takes.

And we've become consequently sort of suspicious

of the one source of intelligence

that is actually ours.

I am 58 years old.

I have been through a few things.

Many of you have been through more.

And somewhere along the line,

I started treating things I learned

from all that living as anecdotal,

as if the plural of anecdote isn't data,

which by the way, it kind of is.

We do this, right?

Someone asks our opinion

and we start with a disclaimer.

Well, I'm no expert or this is just my experience,

or I don't have the research in front of me,

but well, a few raised kids through a financial crisis

or a global pandemic.

If you navigated your mother's dementia

or your father's cancer,

if you rebuilt your life after divorce,

if you managed a team of 25 people for a decade

and you know exactly what happens to morale

when leadership breaks a promise,

that is research.

You are the longitudinal study.

You've just been told it doesn't count

because it doesn't come with a control group.

I am a fan of research and control groups and data.

I just don't think it is the only thing

and I don't think the absence of it

should negate some kind of trust in what you know.

Laura calls this being the customer.

She said we are the customer

and that's what made her dangerous in the best possible way.

She wasn't guessing at what a new mom might feel.

She knew and she had the nerve to act on it.

So it's interesting to think about

like where are we the customer in our own lives?

We're the customer when we're in a doctor's appointment

with our parents or our children and we get talked over.

When we know something is off

because we are the one who has watched this person every day

and we can see the thing that the blood work is not showing.

We are the customer when we're sitting in a meeting

and someone is proposing a plan

that looks great on a slide deck,

but we've got this feeling

because we've seen this exact plan fail twice before

and we can't always articulate why it's gonna fail again,

but we know we are the customer.

When a friend calls, crying,

we don't necessarily need a degree in therapy

to understand what she needs

because we've been in that darkness

and we know what she needs right now is not a solution.

She needs someone to stay on the line.

That's instinct, but it's not just instinct.

It's the accumulated wisdom of a life fully lived.

It's pattern recognition

that took you 40 or 50 or 60 years to develop.

It is and I will die on this hill as valid

as anything anyone has ever published

in the Harvard Business Review.

And like I said, I love data,

but somewhere we got confused and started believing

that the only legitimate way to know something

is to have not experienced it yourself

as if distance equals objectivity,

as if detachment equals rigor.

As if the person who has never had a baby

is somehow more qualified to design the system

that supports new parents

than the person who couldn't stop crying

in a Walgreens parking lot at two in the morning

because every single brand of infant formula was sold out.

Laura said something about new motherhood

that I think applies well beyond new motherhood.

She talked about the gap between expectations and reality.

You're told it's gonna go one way.

Your body will do what it's supposed to do,

things will unfold naturally.

And then you're in it and you're thinking,

why did no one tell me this?

This isn't working.

Why isn't anyone talking about this?

I think women our age have a long and detailed relationship

with that gap between what we were told,

our marriages would look like

and what they actually look like

between what we were promised about our career

and what we actually got.

Between the way we thought our kids would turn out

and the way they're actually turning out,

which of course is still in progress

and I am not taking questions at this time.

That gap is where we live

and the thing is living in that gap is what makes us wise.

We've been knocked down.

We figured out where the ground is

and what it feels like and what it takes to get back up.

So what Laura did in that little decision window

she'd been given was refused to pretend

she didn't know what she knew.

She didn't defer to the growth model.

She didn't override her own experience

with someone else's framework.

She said, I know what this feels like

and this is the most important data in this room.

So maybe this week, notice any time you start a sentence

with I'm probably wrong but this is just my opinion

but I don't have the data to back this up but

and just consider the possibility

that you are not probably wrong

that this is not just your opinion

and just consider the possibility

that you do in fact have some data,

the data that is your life.

So what do you know that you've been pretending you don't

and what would happen if you just went with it?

That's what I'm wondering about this week.

Thanks for wondering with me.

We'll be back on Sunday with a special thanks for being here

and then again on Tuesday with our second episode

in the Women of Consequence series.

This episode was made possible by a grant

from IngaBorg Initiatives,

a social impact platform dedicated to improving

maternal health and making it easier to raise a family.

To learn more, please visit IngaBorg Initiatives.com.

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