Go To on Trusting Our Lived Experience

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3:04For hers.com slash wonders. Weight loss by hers is not available everywhere. Prescription required. See website for full details, important safety information, and restrictions. . 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,

4:05wherever 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.

5:07It 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.

6:07So 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,

7:10as 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.

8:12She 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.

9:13That'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.

10:15She 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.

11:16She 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.

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