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a couple of months ago I got a call from my daughter school she's in the second
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grade it was about 3pm and she was crying uncontrollably at the end of the school day all of her friends had left
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for a birthday party that she knew nothing about now she was invited to the party it's just that it wasn't on my
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calendar it wasn't on my husband's calendar and so she didn't know about it
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and suffice it to say she was devastated Sam's story right well here's the thing
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this exact scenario had happened on more than one occasion and it gets worse I can anticipate that this exact scenario
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was going to happen there's something that I could do in order to prevent it
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from happening but on more than one occasion I haven't I have intentionally dropped the ball now before you start
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throwing tomatoes at me because I must be a very evil person or at least a very bad mom I would love to take you back in
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time to tell you how we got to this moment my name is Tiffany doufu my life's work is advancing women and girls
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that's pretty much why I'm on the planet so my life is very simple I know what's
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on my tombstone and I'm just kind of project managing my life backwards that
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is how I find meaning right that's the story that I choose to tell and for most
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of this journey I've been very focused on this one problem around women's
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advancement which has to do with women's leadership this is a study by McKinsey
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and Lehman basically you won't be surprised to know that even though women are half the population and half of
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entry-level employees by the time you get to the c-suite were at about nineteen percent and this is true for
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pretty much every sector of our society we're hovering about eighteen or nineteen percent these numbers haven't
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really changed for the past 20 years and I've been trying to figure out what are
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we going to do about this now for most of my career I've been focused on Kauai
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did solutions to the women's leadership problem things like equal pay for equal
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work affordable childcare right flexible workplace practices public policy corporate practices cultures where women
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can really bring their full selves to the table and the reason why i feel that women's leadership is really important
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is because Taniya doesn't matter so much what you care the most about it could be
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the environment it could be the health care it could be education at the end of the day there are people sitting around
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tables that look just like this and nice sometimes they're marable sometimes
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there would but they're usually in big plush leather chairs and these people at
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the highest levels of leadership or making decisions that impact every single one of us for most of our time in
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this country that we have a few notable exceptions that we love to celebrate this group of people sitting around
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these table are largely men they're largely white they're largely straight
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and able-bodied and wealthy and make no mistake I have a lot of friends who are white and male and able-bodied and
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straight and wealthy there's nothing wrong with that group of people it's
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just that we've got enough research now that shows that a diverse group of people coming together to solve a
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problem leads to a more innovative outcome so I figure that one of the things that we can do to solve some of
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our most complex problems is to bring a more diverse group of people around these tables I think that that would do
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the world a very a very very good thing the challenge is that although we don't
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have that many people of color women of different disabilities people from the LGBT community sitting around these
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tables I found that these collective solutions especially about four or five years ago started to in some ways be
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insufficient in order for us to solve this problem and it happened basically because I got very overwhelmed trying to
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manage the number of requests that i was getting four coffees and lunches and meetings and many of you might be at a
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place in your leadership where you're constantly getting pinged and constantly
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getting these kinds of requests and i decided that i would start saying yes to every single
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of them now I do not advise this it's just that my life's work is advancing
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women and girls and so I felt the need to sit down and have a conversation with every woman that reached out to me and
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one of the things that I observed in these conversations is that while I was very focused on helping women to aspire
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to more ambition to be a CEO to be a senator to be a business mobile most of the conversation was around very
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personal things very personal aspects of their lives and I found over and over again this very direct correlation
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between a woman's ambition her desire to be at the highest levels of leadership
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and the amount of work or responsibility she felt in her personal life usually on
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the home front and one of the questions that I often got in relationship to this
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was to me a very personal question it had nothing to do with all of the big public policies or corporate practices
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that I was preaching about which was Tiffany I just want to know how are you managing all of these things how are you
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managing being a wife and being a mother and running an organization and doing things like writing books and I began to
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tell my personal story and in doing so I had to share what I felt at that time was my dirty feminist secret which was
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that for most of my career even though publicly I was the staunch advocate for women and leadership that I felt an
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enormous amount of pressure at home this is a Time magazine report and you should
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go back and look at it because one of the things that blew me away was this idea that eighty percent of young women
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millennial women felt that it was important to be the perfect mom the perfect mom so not only did I have all
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these responsibilities at home I felt this pressure to execute them flawlessly and even though I was always talking
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about how women's roles in the public sphere needed to be disrupted I was essentially on Stepford wife auto pilot
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at home and I didn't want anyone to know this now this auto pilot was particular
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really driven by this phenomenon that I talk about in the book called HPD this is called home control disease it's
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basically when you feel that everything in your home should be done a particular
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way which is basically your way and I know no one in this room has ever had a case of hcd I had a very very very bad
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case and it manifested in all kinds of small little things that had amounted to something big so for example I loved
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fresh food I love to cook and I was almost every day so let's say on Monday I made meatloaf and on Tuesday I made
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fajitas and on Wednesday I made fried chicken on Thursday when my husband was at home by himself because I was off to
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some work meeting I would expect him to eat the meatloaf first because I had all
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of these running expiration dates in my head for all of the leftovers that were in the fridge and I would come home and
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he'd eat in the fried chicken I would open the fridge and I would be like why
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didn't you eat the fried chicken why didn't you eat the meatloaf and he would
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say well baby I really like your fried chicken and I was like so you don't like
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my meal oh and he would know not to say anything else now this seems very small and insignificant the difference between
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meatloaf and fried chicken but manifested in all these other kinds of ways for example I used to feel that it
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was important that all of the hangers in the closet face the same direction and I
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would go back through when I was fix them we have an amen here we're in church now this is great ok i also used
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to feel that it was very important to take all of the mail from the mailbox and deal with it on the same day to like
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get rid of all the junk mail and opened the envelopes because otherwise it was pilot but i would just mean more work
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for me i also felt that it was really important that all of the towels in the linen closet be folded a certain way and
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i would actually be really annoyed when people wouldn't fold them correctly and
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i would go back and fix it one of the things that was really important to me was that whenever someone sent you a
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birthday party invitation that you responded right away because if you didn't that person would think that you
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were very rude and you might even miss the party now I want to be clear that for all of my obsession in hindsight
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about what needed to happen at home I thought of myself as a very modern woman very
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ambitious woman my husband and I were in this very modern couplehood even though
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if you had done an analysis of our household division of labor in 1997 we've been married for 20 years it was
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the same as a couple in 1950 and we never really questioned this now I was able to maintain pretty much
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flawlessness at home and at work for many many years and thought I was so big and bad and in control until this one
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life changing event which was that we had a child and if there are any parents in the room you can already predict that
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basically my perfection at home and at work spiral downhill rather rapidly and so I had to figure out how I was going
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to drop some balls and I want to be really transparent with you I didn't intentionally decide to drop balls in
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the very beginning I basically just got so overwhelmed and stressed that i started dropping them and what I
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discovered was that the world didn't fall apart like no one came to read me my Miranda rights because I didn't pay
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the parking ticket and no one ever called me to say I'm going to be your friend anymore because you missed the
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birthday party there are three things very quickly that I want to share with you that I had to learn to drop in this
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journey the first ball that I had to learn the drop was unrealistic expectation about who I was supposed to
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be because what I realized is that I spent a lot of time trying to fulfill different roles my first role was
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daughter maybe yours was daughter or son I became a friend I was a sister I was a
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student a worker eventually I became a wife and a mother and by default I put like many women do and quite frankly
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many men do the word good in front of all of my role so it wasn't sufficient
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to be a daughter I have to be a good daughter wasn't sufficient to be a student I need to be a good student and
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a good worker and a good friend and a good wife and a good mother and it turns out that for all of those roles that we
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play there's actually a job description no one ever told us what the job description was but I promise you
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there's a job description for each one of those roles for example in order be a
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good sister and I'm the old 24 girl you have to respond to your sisters text messages within two minutes
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otherwise they'll think that you don't love them right in order to be a good
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mom you have to be there when your child takes their first step right in order for you to be a good husband you have to
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aspire to be a breadwinner at all caught even the cost of spending time with your
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family even the cost of supporting the women in your lives and so what I had to do was move from being obsessed with
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performance of these roles to figuring out what really mattered most to me where did I find meaning and how was I
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going to use that to shape my story the second ball that I had to learn to drop was this ball about what I was supposed
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to do a few years ago I did a workshop with a group of women there were about 70 in the room and it was supposed to be
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this time management workshop and I asked all of them to write down everything you expected to complete in
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an ideal day and I mean every single little things start with you get up you go to the gym maybe you lie in bed for
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20 minutes thinking about how you're supposed to go to the gym right you get
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up you get dressed you have a commute you prepare for meetings every single little thing until you can't think of
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anything else and I asked them to write down next to every single one of those things how long you felt it would take
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to complete each and every one of those items and then I ask them some the total
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at the bottom well you won't be surprised to know that not one person in the room had a list that amounted to
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less than the 24 hours that any of us have in a day and only half the women in the room had put sleep on their list and
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I had in that moment what I call a Tiffany's epiphany basically I thought well it's no wonder that so many of us
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are walking around with such feelings of inadequacy when our expectation about what we're supposed to do even in one
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given day is woefully woefully unrealistic is actually humanly impossible to complete what most of us
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think we're supposed to be doing in an ideal day given the 24 hours that we all
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have and so I have to figure out what is my highest and best use instead of managing my life on default and just
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doing all of the things and creating a bunch of to-do list what is my highest and best views
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in achieving one of the things that matters most to me the third law that I had to drop was the most ironic ball for
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someone whose life's work is supporting and helping other people which is that I
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had to get over this fear of asking for help okay and it was really really bad for me folks I I would say that I was
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more afraid of asking for help than I was of actually dropping balls and one of the people that I learned in my drop
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the ball journey to engage and to get help from was my husband in fact one of the things that i delegated with joy to
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him was the management of our kids social calendar you know it's a role that often times in relationships
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defaults to the woman but it turns out that the person who is the social butterfly in the relationship is the
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person who has often best equipped to manage the children's social calendar so
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here's the thing though even though I've been through this drop the ball journey
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and its really really rewarding for me one of the things that I've learned is
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that the world haven't quite evolved for women who have dropped the ball or reeling families who have for example no
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one ever sends a child's birthday party invitation to their dad sometimes I commit this tiny act of defiance when I
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get it in my inbox and I send it back to the person and I say thank you so much for inviting a clue or Kofi to the party
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their father manages their social calendar can you please send him the end I give his email address but sometimes
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with the onslaught of everything that's coming at me my email box the meetings
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rushing from here to there I start relentlessly asking myself might drop the ball question is responding to this
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birthday party invitation my highest and best use in raising conscious global citizens and the answer is no and so I
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move on to the next thing and that's how we ended up with this situation in which
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my daughter the birthday party this is a kuwa she just turned eight on Saturday so she had
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her own birthday party on Saturday she loves doughnuts with pink frosting and sprinkles and a couple of months ago on
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the day that she missed someone else's birthday party even though I had no outs
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of guilt I soaked a lot of empathy for her because she was heartbroken on that day and so I brought her a doughnut and
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I read her her favorite story every time I share this I usually have people in the audience or that come up to me
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afterward and they say Tiffany I get it but I just couldn't do it I just couldn't do it especially when you
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showed that picture of a coup and she was really really cute and she had her doughnut and I want every single one of
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you in this room to know that I completely understand and I was there it's just that in the seven years since
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I've dropped the ball I've been able to run a national women's leadership
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organization I've raised millions of dollars for women's and girls causes
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I've even written a book called drop the ball that I hope will reach a lot of
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women and to help them with their journeys and if if anything that I've done in the past seven years helps to
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create a world in which my little akula can grow up to aspire to be anything that she wants to be I just feel like
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it's worth it I feel like it's worth it for her to miss one or two birthday
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parties and that's what I want to share with you today so thank you so much [Music]
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you