My prom was booked at Windows on the World
I was a senior in high school. My prom was supposed to be at Windows on the World — the restaurant on the very top floors of the North Tower.
That’s what I say when people ask what it was like to be a native New Yorker on 9/11 and I don’t want to get into it. It usually says enough.
But this year, for the first time, I sat down and just started writing. Because I’ve always known that 9/11 is a big part of who I am and why BRAVE exists. Here’s what came out…
(A note before I start: I’m recalling this from memory, 25 years later, through the eyes of seventeen-year-old me. Some specifics may be slightly off. This isn’t a play-by-play — it’s one tiny perspective on a day that holds millions of them. What I remember better than any fact is the emotional intensity of being part of the city as it unfolded. That feeling is still in me today and informs everything I do.)
What Can I Do?
It was around 9:00am on a Tuesday, a few weeks into senior year. I walked into English class and something felt… different. Quieter.
I took my seat behind Justine — we sat in alphabetical order, her last name came right before mine. Her head was down on her crossed arms. Was she sick? I put my hand on her shoulder and asked if she was okay.
She lifted her face. She was crying.
“They’re… all… in… there. My mom and dad. My sister. My brother-in-law. My aunt. Two cousins.”
“Where? They’re all where?”
That’s when the teacher walked in and flipped on the TV. Definitely not how we usually started English class…
The news was replaying footage of a plane hitting the World Trade Center.
Huh? Is that real?
The silence that fell over that room of typically boisterous seventeen-year-old girls was heavier than anything I’d ever felt.
“The World Trade Center,” Justine said between sobs. “They all work in the World Trade Center.”
I held her hand while she cried. Her fear was palpable. I remember being so scared for her.
Conviction
The next thing I remember, I was asking to go to the bathroom.
I had no intention of actually going to the bathroom though. My feet were carrying me to the principal’s office. I remember wondering: what exactly do I think I’m going to do there?
No clue. It wasn’t a conscious choice. My body said move, so I moved.
My dad always told me: when you have a strong gut feeling, trust it — even when it doesn’t make sense. Apparently this was that.
I poked my head into Mrs. Clifford’s office and said, “What can I do?” She was as confused as I was. I told her what Justine had said and asked if we had records of where students’ parents worked. Could we figure out who had family in the towers?
Was my seventeen-year-old brain triaging? Trying to isolate who would need acute support? I don’t know. Maybe.
While we talked, a junior on the cheerleading team walked in — she was visibly shaking, starting to cry.
“My dad’s not answering his phone. How do I know if he’s okay?”
Her class had the news on too. The anchor had reported that FDNY’s Rescue 5 was first on the scene.
Her dad was on Rescue 5.
(For those who don’t know: a Rescue company isn’t just another engine or ladder. These are firefighters selected and trained for the worst, most technically difficult missions — building collapses, trapped firefighters, major disasters. Rescue 5 was, and still is, one of the most elite teams in the city.)
I couldn’t fathom her fear. All I could do was hug her.
I still remember feeling her quick, erratic breathing — and intentionally slowing mine way down. The way I did as a kid with my dad.
A Tangent About My Dad
When I was little, my dad had high blood pressure and multiple heart attacks. Maybe once a week, he’d feel “off.” My mom would grab the cuff, and sure enough — sky high.
They’d call me over. I’d crawl into his lap, back when I was still small enough to, and we’d just… talk. And his blood pressure would come down. Just because of our conversation.
It became a running joke that I was a unicorn with a magical ability. As a teenager, I learned it wasn’t magic — it was a skill. Because when I didn’t actively focus, it didn’t always work. Which was terrifying.
That discovery — that conversation can change our state — created a lifelong obsession:
What are conversations capable of?
How do speed and pressure change the way we interact?
What’s possible if we really focus on our conversations like I did with my dad?
That obsession became BRAVE.
Coregulation
I don’t know how long that hug in the principal’s office actually lasted. All I knew was that I would not be the first one to let go.
Looking back, that hug feels like the whole reason my feet took me there. People started running around somewhat frantically. Everyone there had a job to do. Except me. I was just there to hug her. It felt like I was called there just for her.
She never saw her dad again. He was only 44.
I didn’t have words for it then, but what I did for her was what I now teach leaders to do for their teams — leaders who I hope never have to face anything like that morning. It’s called co-regulation, lending my steadiness to her unsteady system.
(Also, some background on Rescue 5, because New York’s Bravest are close to my heart:
The call came in during shift change, as half the team was leaving and the next shift was arriving. So instead of six team members responding, all eleven went. Actually — twelve. A firefighter from another house was on his way home from an overnight shift. Instead of going home, he went to Rescue 5 and jumped aboard. He became known as the twelfth man. His niece was my teammate on the school’s varsity soccer team. She was our goalie and a dear friend.
This is what the bravest do. They jump onboard. They constantly ask “what can I do?” in the most unselfish of ways. I often wonder if my reverence for firemen, “NYC’s Bravest,” impacted the name of my life’s work… quite possibly.)
Conversation
Then the announcement. They were sending us all home. I remember fumbling at my locker for my phone — a bright blue Nokia brick (iykyk). I wanted to call my parents. My dad owned a restaurant and didn’t usually head into Brooklyn or the city until later — but I just wanted to check.
I dialed. Nothing. Just a weird buzzing. The girl next to me — same thing. So many people were calling their loved ones at once that cell service had essentially collapsed.
The system couldn’t hold that much fear.
Imagine the people in Manhattan who couldn’t call loved ones, who needed help, who had to walk home — I heard so many intimate stories of people taking hours to cross the bridges on foot that night.
I don’t remember any of that drive. All I remember is that I did it in complete silence.
I also don’t remember if seeing the second tower fall on TV in my parents’ bedroom was live or a replay. They replayed that moment so. many. times.
Newscasters were still debating whether it was an attack or an accident. My dad was certain it was no accident. Then he did something weird. He disappeared into his office for HOURS — and locked the door. He never locked the door. I didn’t know we could lock that door.
When he finally came out, I asked what he was doing in there. He dodged the question six or seven times. Before dinner, I cornered him.
“I was trying to get through to the White House.”
I’m sorry, What?!
That’s when he told me that when he was in the Army, he’d served in intelligence for a while. We’ve apparently been on a need to know basis for seventeen years in this house. My dad was always interesting to me, but this took it to a whole new level.
He never got through to anyone.
But I was so intrigued: “so, what exactly were you going to say to the president? If you had gotten through?”
“They’re not having the conversation,” he said
The rest of that night changed my life.
He walked me through the human dynamics he saw playing out — in the situation, in the interviews on TV. I asked a hundred questions. His read was unlike anything else I’d ever heard. Still.
He kept repeating two things:
“They’re not having the conversation.”
“They’ve gotta get together.”
He feared that unless our leaders found a way to facilitate a very hard, very specific kind of conversation — one that created understanding by deeply listening to the needs beneath the actions and words, one that prioritized curiosity instead of judgment — the situation would only get worse, and many more people would die.
In short: my dad wanted to help facilitate a brave conversation with the people who did this.
He genuinely believed that if no one could have that conversation, if no one stepped up, they were failing the American people, the victims, their families and our troops.
Whether he was right or wrong about the geopolitics, what struck me was the conviction of his belief: that conversation is the greatest force for change in the world.
I now share that belief.
His “they’ve gotta get together” became a core tenet of The BRAVE Framework — (the R). Are you putting someone on the “other team?” and creating opposing sides or can you find common ground? That one often unconscious signal is what can pull a conversation toward positive forward progress or stall it in its tracks.
Community
In the weeks that followed, I watched NYC come together in a way that struck me to the core. Community was the salve for the wound inflicted on our city.
(I believe Justine’s family made it out okay. Twenty-five years later, I honestly can’t remember for certain — memory holds the feeling of that morning far more tightly than it holds the facts.)
The scale of it was impossible to hold. The rink where I took ice skating lessons as a kid became a morgue. The places of our childhood were conscripted into grief overnight.
And yet — everywhere I looked, people were stepping up. My friends and I made thousands of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the first responders at Ground Zero.
Years later, after starting Caffé Unimatic, I had the honor of becoming close friends with Chef Don Pintabona. On 9/11, Don watched the towers from a rooftop in Brooklyn as paper from the World Trade Center drifted through the air. He has told the story of a page from a dictionary landing near him — the P page — and the words that caught his eye: persevere. perseverance. persistence.
The next day, he went to his restaurant, cooked everything he had, and brought it to the first responders staging at Stuyvesant High School. It was gone in hours. The streets were impassable — so when he spotted a barge on the Hudson, he had his answer: feed everybody by boat. That became Chefs with Spirit — chefs and volunteers running food down the river to the site, around the clock, for months. Over a million meals.
Don didn’t have a rescue skill. He had a kitchen. He asked the same question I asked Mrs. Clifford — what can I do? — and then he did it.
Everyone was banding together. Helping. Supporting. Stepping up. Every car had a flag on its antenna. Every fence was covered in yellow ribbons and American flags.
Culture
It was my first real experience of culture — or as Seth Godin puts it (words I still use to define culture today): people like us do things like this.
New York City was one huge community. People like us take care of each other. It was devastatingly beautiful.
Seventeen years later on 9/11/18 — convinced that the conversations we have over coffee can change the world — I hosted my very first BRAVE conversation, over coffee. It brought together 9/11 survivors, first responders, members of NYC’s Muslim community, and college students.
You’d think we would disagree about that day. That we were all naturally on separate teams. We didn’t. We weren’t.
What we learned: humans all have the same needs. Depending on our internal state and internal story, those needs lookdifferent on the outside. But they’re materially the same on the inside.
People like us do things like this.
Conviction. Coregulation. Conversation. Community. Culture.
What I Want You to Take From This
Candidly, I didn’t lose anyone in my immediate family that day. My story doesn’t compare to that of anyone who lost a loved one.
But I did experience something that has never left me: what it feels like to be well-resourced during a disaster — steady enough to offer yourself in service to people who need it.
In a phrase: “what can I do?”
I felt it again during Covid, when I ran hundreds of free BRAVE conversations online — for Seth Godin’s altMBA alumni, for women impacted by trauma, for young entrepreneurs, for leaders around the globe.
Because when the world shut down and people were super isolated, I asked myself “what can I do?” And then I asked Seth, and then I asked anyone who knew or followed me.
So that’s the message here, wherever you’re from, wherever you were 25 years ago today, take this with you:
If you are well-resourced in a moment that is hard for others, you can have the conversation that changes everything. You can be the steadiness for others who need it. You can help someone stand back up. You can serve.
A firefighter could rescue. A chef could cook. A seventeen-year-old could hug. My dad believed he could convene a conversation. Everyone brought the thing they had.
Service doesn’t require you to be the hero. It requires you to know what you can give.
You can ask “what can I do?” Because what we can do comes from what we’ve practiced before.
For us leaders, THAT’S the work.
When crisis, challenge, or the uncertainty of change rocks the boat, it’s our job as leaders to have already done the work to hold steady.
Not just for ourselves.
For anyone who needs help staying afloat.
As a tribute to anyone impacted by that day:
Do that work now.
Before you need it.
So that you can lead in the hardest moments and ask “what can I do?” without flinching.
Never forget.
— Elisabeth
