What Losing My Mother on September 11 Taught Me About Leadership

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Description

For 25 years, much of the conversation about my mother, Joan Donna Griffith, has focused on how she died. But the greatest leadership lessons I carry did not come from losing my mother on September 11, 2001. They came from how she lived, what she taught me, and how she prepared me for moments neither of us could have imagined.

In this episode of Branding Room Only, I’m sharing one of the most personal talks I have ever given, originally delivered as a PDC Talk at the Professional Development Consortium (PDC) Annual Summer Conference.

In this short talk, I reflect on what my mother taught me about preparing for disruption, making decisions grounded in your values, knowing your worth, and creating more leaders through mentorship, sponsorship, advocacy, and love.

Leadership begins long before a crisis arrives. It is revealed through how we prepare people, the choices we make when something is at stake, and how we advocate for others when they are not in the room.

Chapters

2:42 – The leadership philosophy Joan instilled in childhood

5:45 – The vital importance of preparing others for the unexpected

11:28 – Knowing your values and refusing to let fear make your decisions

15:15 – A lifelong reminder about exponential self-worth

18:12 – Love as the hidden meaning of leadership, and a question to ask yourself

Mentioned In What Losing My Mother on September 11 Taught Me About Leadership

Remembering Joan Donna Griffith 25 Years After September 11 with Peter L. Griffith

A Tribute to My Mother Joan Donna Griffith

Professional Development Consortium (PDC)

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Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by PGE Consulting Group LLC.

PGE Consulting Group LLC empowers individuals and organizations to lead with purpose, presence, and impact. Specializing in leadership development and personal branding, we offer keynotes, custom programming, consulting, and strategic advising—all designed to elevate influence and performance at every level.

Founded and led by Paula Edgar, our work centers on practical strategies that enhance professional development, strengthen workplace culture, and drive meaningful, measurable change.

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Transcript

Paula Edgar: Welcome to Branding Room Only, the podcast where your personal brand gets a front row seat. I'm Paula Edgar and if you're here, it's because you know your brand isn't just about what you do. It's about how people experience you. In each episode, you'll hear stories, strategies and lessons from leaders and influencers who built their brands and made their mark. And I'll share the tools you need to do the same. Let's go. Hi, everybody and welcome back to Branding Room Only. As many of you know, 25 years ago, on September 11, 2001, I lost my mother, Joan Donna Griffith, in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Earlier this summer, I had the opportunity to take the stage at the Professional Development Consortium, or PDCs, annual summer conference for what they call a PDC talk, their version of a TED style talk. I chose to use those minutes to reflect on something deeply personal. What losing my mother on September 11 has taught me about leadership, resilience, relationships and how I choose to move through the world. So as we commemorate 25 years since September 11th, I wanted to share that talk with you here on Branding Room Only, because this is one of the most personal talks I've ever given. I hope that there is something in it that resonates with you. And here's my PDC talk. The last thing my mother told me was, you've got to break up with that man. She didn't know that was going to be the last thing she'd ever say to me. The next day was September 11, 2001. There was no warning. There was no circumstance. It was just my mother being my mother, telling me things that she knew I needed to hear. The thing about disruption is that it doesn't give us a warning, right? There is an imperative for us to tap into our leadership now. And I'm going to talk to you, but before that I want to show you a scarf that I made with pictures of me and my mom, so that she would be with me while I did this. But I'm not as ambitious, I don't have a lock, I don't do any of those other things, so I will be reading from this paper. Light me up, light me up. Okay, anyway. All right. Leadership begins long before the crisis. We have experienced this a lot. I want to tell you that for 25 years, the conversation has been about my mother dying. But I realized the conversation is really about how she lived. The greatest leadership lessons of my life did not come from September 11. They came from my mother. September 11 didn't teach me those lessons. They just revealed the lessons she had been teaching me my entire life. Growing up, my mother used to say to me, Paula, in life, you can choose to be the wind or you can choose to be the leaf. I was like, I'm a kid. What does this mean? And she explained that if you are the leaf, you're not directing anything. You're going wherever the wind blows you. You're flighty. You're not directed. But if you are the wind, you decide. I didn't realize it then, but she was giving me a leadership philosophy. I just accepted it as what you would say to a kid and then not really understood what she told me. And I thought to myself, I just want to go somewhere. I don't care about the wind or the leaf, but leadership is the wind. I think leadership is deciding who you're going to be before the circumstances arrive, before any disruption. And I think that's especially relevant for all of us today. At this conference we have heard AI, we did a drinking game for AI, anyway. But we've spent the last several years, constant disruption. Geopolitical and social disruption. This administration's shifting and inconsistent policies. Professional identity is shifting. AI, again, go ahead, is changing how we learn and how we interact with each other. Additionally, associates are asking different questions than they have been before. Some of you are navigating mergers. Some of you are just trying to hold the road while things keep shifting. If the one thing we've learned is that certainty is a luxury, right? So if we can't have any certainty, because we have no understanding of what's coming next, how do we build trust, if we also don't have control? I want to share with you leadership lessons that my mother taught me and I'm starting with this one. Leadership is preparation meeting disruption. On September 11th, I was living in California with the guy she told me to break up with. I did, don't worry. My family was in the New York City area. And when the towers were hit, I was there. So here I am across the country and not able to get to my family, because the airspace was closed. You couldn't fly for three weeks-ish. So while I was in California trying to figure out how to navigate this world, my aunts and uncles were in lower Manhattan every day searching hospitals, putting up flyers, my father wasn't OK. He had been having panic attacks, severe ones that the doctors thought were heart attacks. So it was a lot. My 16-year-old sister also wasn't OK. She was navigating something no 16-year-old should have to navigate. Three weeks later, I was allowed to come back home. I didn't tell my father… I was fine, because he was scared something would happen to me. When I got home, I didn't go straight home. I went to the hospital, because he had been admitted. I remember it literally like it was yesterday. I pulled back the curtain and he saw me, his face lit up and then he burst into tears. We hugged each other and then just as quick as we hugged, he said to me, why did you fly? He wasn't angry. He was scared, because he didn't want to lose me too. It was at that moment I realized that no one was coming to rescue us. We had to rescue each other. And so I decided that I was going to take, this is it. I'm going to do what needs to be done. I'm going to take control. So I'm going to contact the lawyers. I'm going to set up the meetings. I am going to navigate all the things that need to be navigated. There was a memorial to plan. Flowers had to be chosen. Calls had to be made. So here I was trying to be an anchor for my family, when I was drowning in grief. But that's what leadership does. That's what we have to do, in order to navigate this world. In the coming days, as I figured out I had to do all the things, my father started calling me his consigliere. And he's not wrong. The funny thing about that is I thought to myself, well, now I'm stepping into leadership. Like this is it. I'm stepping into a leader. But I realized I wasn't. I was just tapping into what my mother had already taught me and understanding it then. And here's something that still amazes me. In August of 2001, I had gone home to visit my family and they were getting prepared for a cruise, they were going to go on for their 20th anniversary, on September 5th. My mother did something that she had never done before. She sat me down on the couch and said, here's a paper. It had the attorney's information, it had the financial advisor's information and other contacts. Again, she had never done this before, but it seemed kind of routine. But as I reflect back and think about it now, it was extraordinary. She was preparing me for something, a disruption she couldn't have imagined. She just knew that someday I might need that information. She didn't know what was going to be two weeks later. When I think about my mother preparing me for a disruption she could never imagine. I remember that at that point, I thought differently about leadership. Like, how could she have known that I would need this information, that my father was going to have panic attacks and she wouldn't be able to get that to me and I could then take the lead? Leadership is preparing people for moments they cannot yet imagine. And isn't that what all of us do? We are preparing associates all the time. Like, hey, you need to know how to write and give feedback and relationship building, business building, all that good stuff. But really, underneath what we're all doing is we're preparing them for something they don't know is going to happen. We're helping them to develop judgment, resilience, confidence and leadership. We're preparing them for leadership opportunities they haven't even imagined yet. For setbacks they haven't experienced yet. In other words, we're giving them an emergency contact list before they need it. But here's the thing, preparation alone doesn't do it. We have to think about the fact that no matter how prepared you are, there will come a moment when you're faced with a decision that tests not only your knowledge, but also your character. The second leadership lesson that I want to share with you is that leadership means knowing your values and refusing to let fear make your decisions. I was scared there. In the months and years after September 11th, my father and I went to meetings for victims' families. And one thing we realized pretty soon was that we were the only Black people in the room. I also realized as the narrative around September 11th continued to take shape, the stories of Black and brown families, who had lost loved ones, were not being told. And so I made a commitment that I was going to say my mother's name, that I was going to elevate her legacy and not let anybody forget to know that Joan Donna Griffith lived, loved, laughed and led and that she mattered. My values and the values that my mother set with me were tested a little bit later. Some of you might have remembered that there was a controversy around an Islamic community center and a mosque being built in lower Manhattan. There were some victims' families who tried to, the groups who tried to say basically that all victims' families were against this mosque. And I remember saying, absolutely not. We're not the same. Muslims didn't kill my mother. Terrorists did. And that's not the same. And so I would not have been living up to my mother's legacy and protecting it, if I allowed her name and our family to be associated with folks saying it was OK to hate. So it would have been easier to say nothing, trust me. It would have been easier to let it go, but I couldn't do that because the woman who raised me, she opened our doors to everyone. She fed everybody. She mentored all the people. And so in order to live up and align with her legacy, I had to say something. It would have been easier to allow grief to become fair. But leadership asks something different of us. Leadership asks us to think. Leadership asks us to have the courage to distinguish between what is easy and what is right. That experience taught me something I carry into every law firm, every client engagement and every leadership role that I have today. Values are easy when nothing is at stake. Leadership is choosing those values when they cost you something. And I know that's true for all of us. We make decisions every day that shape someone's career. Who gets sponsored? Who gets the stretch opportunity? Who gets to talk to the client? And who gets overlooked? And so, those aren't just management decisions, they're values decisions. And whether people tell you or not, they're paying attention. Which brings me to the third lesson from my mother I want to share with you all. Leadership means, oh sorry, is helping people know their value and creating more leaders. As many of you know, I'm from Brooklyn, New York. Everybody, okay? I went to school at Deerfield Academy, which is a boarding school. And when I was going there, I was nervous, because no one was going to look like me, or very few people were going to look like me. And I wasn't sure if I was going to be comfortable or fit in. And so my mother presented me with a pair of shoes, penny loafers. But she hadn't put pennies in them. She had put dimes in them. And she said to me, putting dimes in these shoes, because your value is exponential. And you cannot let anybody… allow anybody to shape your value for you, you have to value yourself. Okay, years later, after I was a lawyer and my mother was already gone, I was a lawyer, I got a job that I was really, really excited about. They had recruited me. They were like, we want your ideas, we want all of the things that you have, your network and your leadership. But when I started, it was pretty quick that we realized that what they hired me for was not what they wanted me to actually do. And here's what happened. They gave me a big office when I got there. And then they gave me a smaller office. And then they gave me a smaller office. And then they had me in an administrative closet, basically. And I was questioning myself. Should I be smaller? Should I be less ambitious? Should I change? And then I remembered the dimes. So how could I let somebody else's perceived value of me shape how I perceive myself? So, I left. Was that an easy decision? No, I'd like a 401k. But I had to do it, because in order for me to live up to what my mother had told me and what I already knew, I knew I would never let an institution… I walked out of that building like no. I'll never let an institution make me feel small again. My mother taught me that confidence isn't arrogance, it's clarity. It's having a clear understanding of who you are, how you add value and where you want to go. And that's why I'm so passionate about personal branding, because it's that. Your brand isn't what shapes your value. Your brand is what allows people to see the value you already have. And so if you leave your value up to somebody else to define, then we've already lost. So, I'm going to tell you one last story. In 2005, four years after the towers were hit, workers at Ground Zero found my mother's purse. And they brought the purse to us and I sat down with my father and started going through the purse. My mother was an incredibly organized person. She had her calendar in there. You remember, we used to carry the big calendars or the things like that. Her wallet was in there and it had a credit card that we had opened in August to get 10% off when we went shopping. But we weren't supposed to tell my father about it. So I laughed. I laughed a little bit while I was crying. And then deep in the purse was my father's high school ring. And so I said to my father, I was like, why was she carrying your high school ring around all the time? And he turned to me and he said, because she loved me. And that's when I realized that the true lesson of my mother's life and leadership is that leadership is love. Think about this. In the roles that you have, who are you carrying every day? Whose names are you lifting, supporting, making sure they're getting treated the way they need to be treated, when they're not in the room? It really sat with me that she was carrying his purse [00:19:56, she says his purse, she probably mbranding reans his ring]. Who are you loving and leading? We are in the business of professional development, but development cannot happen in a vacuum and it cannot happen without absolute ownership. My challenge to you today is to look at your colleagues, your associates, your partners and most importantly yourself, and ask, whose ring are you carrying? Who are you mentoring, sponsoring and protecting, when they're not in the room? Our workplaces are anxious. The future of our profession is not quite clear. So my question for you, my request for you, is do not let these volatile times make your programs, your value, or your people feel small. Be the preparation, be the courage, be the investment, be the leaders that we need you to be. Choose to be the wind. Thank you, Mommy and thank all of you for listening. Thank you so much for listening. 25 years later, I continue to learn from my mother, from her life, from her loss and from the ways that experience has shaped who I am as a person and as a leader. One of my mother's favorite sayings, which I use a lot and the one that has become very much a guiding principle in my own life was, you can be the wind or you can be the leaf. I choose to be the wind. And my hope is that something you heard today encouraged you to think about the experience that have shaped your leadership, the legacy you are building and how you want to show up for the people around you. Until next time, my friends, stand by your brand, and thank you for being here with me in the Branding Room. Bye.