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1106 Design, LLC

Dear Author,

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How can we serve you today?

Sincerely,
Michele DeFilippo, owner

Service publisher Worldwide All categories

Chapter 1

I didn’t know, at twenty years old, holding my newborn daughter Taylor in my arms, that my entire life would become a study in listening — not just with my ears, but with my intuition, my spirit, and my whole body. I didn’t know that raising a deaf child would train me to hear the world differently. I didn’t know that my grandmother’s quiet wisdom, my winding path through motherhood, my yearning for a tech career, and my role as an 8-time TEDx curator would eventually converge into one unshakeable truth:

Women’s voices are data — and the world is starving for the intelligence we carry.

I grew up watching my grandmother move through life with a strength that felt both unspoken and undeniable. She was the first to teach me that independence wasn’t just admirable — it was necessary. “Never let anyone silence what you know to be true,” she’d tell me, sometimes with words, sometimes just with a look that carried generations of lived experience. She didn’t have corporate language for what she knew. She didn’t call it intuition or emotional intelligence or embodied data. She simply lived it. She noticed things before others did. She could sense danger, opportunity, deception, or potential long before anyone else caught on. She taught me, without ever naming it, that listening inward is a survival skill for women — and listening outward is a responsibility.

But the real lessons began with Taylor.

Hearing Without Sound

Taylor was born deaf, and later diagnosed with autism. Her world was quiet, but her communication was loud. She spoke in gestures, in rhythms, in the shifts of her eyes and her breath. She understood emotion like a second language. She noticed discomfort before a doctor could detect it. She sensed my stress before I could put words to it.

Raising her taught me to pay attention to information most people miss — the nonverbal cues, the emotional patterns, the subtle shifts that reveal more truth than language often does. Listening to Taylor meant slowing down, observing carefully, and trusting what I felt even when the world couldn’t validate it.

It taught me that listening has very little to do with sound. Listening is about presence. Listening is about honoring truth that might come from the margins.

This insight — nurtured at home — followed me everywhere.

Longing for More: A Stay-at-Home Mom with Big Dreams

By the time I had three academic degrees — one from Yale — I found myself living in a beach city outside Los Angeles as a stay-at-home mom with four children. I loved my family deeply. But I also longed for more.

I used to stay up late — exhausted from days of caregiving, therapies, and school meetings — reading tech blogs, analyzing industry trends, and imagining myself inside the rooms that were building the future.

I remember writing for Ebony/Jet, Today Show Parents, and Huff Post whenever the kids napped or the house finally fell quiet. I attended hackathons a decade ago, fascinated by what could be built in a weekend. And every time I published an article on tech or culture, I felt like I was inching closer to a world I desperately wanted to join but didn’t know how to access.

Despite my Yale degree, I found myself on the outside of tech looking in — watching my husband’s career grow while mine stayed pressed between diapers, IEP meetings, and the responsibilities no one applauds.

Platforms like POCIT (People of Color in Tech) kept me encouraged. Reading stories of other Black professionals breaking into tech helped me feel less alone. Their journeys became my motivation: if they could do it, maybe I could too.

Still, the gap between dreaming and doing felt enormous.

The Turning Point: 2020

The shift came in October 2020.

While more than a million women were leaving the workforce due to remote learning demands, I stepped back in — determined not to lose another decade to untapped potential.

My first job back was at a digital marketing company called Olly Olly. I worked from 5:00 am because I lived on the West Coast and the company was on the East. I hired a nanny to oversee remote learning for my girls while managing therapy appointments and my own nerves about being back in the workforce.

I was tired. But I was alive again.

Returning to work reminded me that my dreams still mattered.

But I quickly realized something else: if I wanted a real tech career — not just a job — I needed a technical skill.

Becoming a Student Again

So I paused my job and enrolled in a full-time UX Design course through Udacity’s Pledge to Equality Scholarship program. That decision changed everything.

I studied from before sunrise until after my kids fell asleep. I learned design systems, prototyping, user research — all while continuing to parent four daughters, care for Taylor’s needs, and rebuild a career from scratch.

I was selected as one of ten interns for Udacity that summer, and suddenly the doors to tech began to crack open. I interviewed with twenty companies before receiving my first offer — and when I finally started at Udacity as a Marketing + Communications Manager, it felt like I had stepped into the life I had dreamed of for years.

A six-figure salary.
A role that blended writing, design, and community.
A short contract at Meta.
My first season feeling fully aligned with my purpose.

But the truth is: none of that success came from the traditional definition of skill.

It came from listening — listening to intuition, to the needs of my children, to the desires I suppressed for years, to the inner voice my grandmother nurtured in me. And later, listening to the women whose stories mirrored my own.

Where the Data Revealed Itself: TEDx

In 2018, when I curated my first TEDx event, everything clicked into place.

I watched women step onto the red circle carrying truths forged in motherhood, migration, caregiving, special-needs advocacy, innovation, healing, and leadership. Their stories weren’t random. They were patterns. Their insights weren’t soft. They were strategy. Their intuition wasn’t mystical. It was predictive.

I realized that what I had been hearing from women in tech — the subtle warnings, the emotional intelligence, the unspoken signals — were the same patterns emerging on stage.

Women’s stories held the data companies spent millions trying to extract.
Women’s intuition predicted organizational behavior before the metrics did.
Women’s lived experience revealed the cultural truths leaders didn’t want to name.

It became clear: each woman was a dataset — shaped by resilience, sharpened by survival, strengthened by community.

And once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.

The Oldest, Most Ignored Intelligence System

Women — especially Black women, mothers, and caregivers — possess one of the most powerful intelligence systems in the world:

Embodied knowledge.
Emotional radar.
Intuitive decision-making.
Pattern recognition.
Situational awareness.
Communal memory.

But because their information doesn’t come in charts and spreadsheets, society calls it “soft.”

Yet this intelligence is older than any analytics tool. It is the reason families survive. The reason communities thrive. The reason cultural shifts happen. The reason teams succeed or fail quietly long before HR ever finds out.

Women know.
We’ve always known.
The world just hasn’t known how to listen.

Why This Book Exists

This chapter is an introduction to a truth I’ve lived:

• 
  Through my grandmother’s generational wisdom



• 
  Through raising Taylor in a world that wasn’t built for her



• 
  Through fighting my way into tech



• 
  Through curating over 100 women on TEDx stages



• 
  Through my own inner voice that refused to be silenced

Women’s voices are not opinions.
They are intelligence.
They are signals.
They are strategy.
They are data.

And when we finally recognize that — in our homes, workplaces, communities, and systems — we unlock the future.

This book is about teaching the world how to listen.

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