1. The document describes the author's experience on September 11, 2001 and how it prompted her to resign from her marketing job and start a coaching firm called Tangible. 2. Over the past 6 years of running Tangible, the author has learned 6 important lessons from working with clients. The first lesson is about thinking bigger - setting ambitious goals that can have massive impact, even if they seem impossible. 3. Examples are provided of how the author helped widows of 9/11 through coaching, which illustrates the lesson of thinking bigger by achieving an "impossible" goal of working with those women.

1. You decide where you’re going.
We make sure you arrive.
At Tangible, we are proud of each of our client’s
accomplishments. We share their stories to
illustrate the importance of executive impact.
Impact that is reached because they discovered
their paths and moved their organizations forward.

2. TANGIBLE BEGINNINGS
On September 11, 2001, I was a Vice President of Marketing for a venture
capital firm, wrapping up a business conference that I had managed for my
company in the south of France. At roughly 3pm in France, 9am eastern
time, my cell phone rang. My professional life as I had defined it up to that
point was about to change. Someone had flown a plane, no wait, make
that two planes, into the World Trade Center. I had myself worked in and
around these towers at an earlier point in my career. Moving quickly, I
tracked down my daughter, back home in Massachusetts. She had just
entered her senior year in high school, and I pulled her out of science class.
In all my years of travel as a single working mom, we had never had a
situation where I simply could not get home. We needed a plan. My fiancé,
now husband, Joel Kurtzman, was harder to reach. I knew he should be in
his New York City office, safely mid town, but all phone lines were jammed.
It was seven hours before Joel finally got through to me on my mobile.
In order to hear him over the din of the restaurant where I had taken my
team for dinner and to figure out what to do next, I stepped out on to the
street. In spite of the lateness of the hour, tourists swarmed La Croisette
and crowded the shops and eateries along this boulevard by the sea as
if nothing much was going on. I sat down on the curb to talk. We spoke
briefly about the state of the world and the chaos that had us in its grip.
After assuring each other that we were safe and my daughter would be
cared for; that phone calls to relatives and friends would be placed to
check on their safety and confirm ours, we hung up.
I sat for a long while on that curb, staring at the lights of ships floating on
dark water some distance out at sea. I thought about what I had seen and
heard that day, about the people just like me who had routinely gone off to
work and who would not be coming home.
I had always meant to be of service to others in the world. I had taken my
first corporate job 27 years earlier in order to buy a new sofa. Nearly three
decades and several sofas later, I had begun to ask if I was doing enough
to give back. If the world was ending—and it felt like it just might be—this is
not where I wanted to be. This is not what I wanted to be doing.
By the end of the year, I had resigned my position as VP of Marketing and
enrolled in a year-long coach training certification program. The firm that
is now Tangible was launched.

3. SIX YEARS, SIX LESSONS
1
pg. 4-5
This year we celebrate the sixth
anniversary of the coaching and Think Big(ger).
consulting firm I started as a result of
the decision I made sitting on that curb
on a now infamous night in September,
watching the ships off the coast of
2
Cannes. pg. 6-7
Over the past six years, I’ve learned a lot Know what you know.
and met some great people. I remarried,
got certified as a coach, and put my
daughter through college. I moved
from the east coast to the west coast.
3
I worked as a consultant on not one, pg. 8-9
but two, Hollywood movies. In my first
year of business, I called my company Intention does not equal impact.
“Tangible.” Tangible remains the hallmark
of our work. It is at once a promise, a
commitment and an outcome.
4
There is nothing magical about the pg. 10-11
lessons included here but they do share
some key attributes: first, they are all Everything is personal.
lessons I could have gone either way
on until my clients, through their own
hard work and persistence, proved them
to me. Second, they all had to have a
5
pg. 12-13
tangible outcome.
Finally, each has a real client story that Put your trust in trust.
illustrates the lesson. We include it to
inspire and light the way. Each story
is authentic; however, to protect the
privacy of our clients, we have changed
6
names and some of the details. The pg. 14-15
outcomes, in all cases, are real.
Take care of you.
The “tangible outcomes” described here
are each the result of collaboration: at
a minimum, between me and my client;
but often in concert with one or more
coaches, working together to bring
about learning and results over time.

4. mOdELING ThE wAY:
Achieving an “impossible” goal.
BACKGROUNd
To qualify for my coaching certification, I had to convince people to let me
practice my coaching on them. Since I had been a single mom, and was
at the time operating in the stunning wake of the events of 9/11, I wanted
to coach women who had become heads of households on that day.
ThE ISSUE
Two problems with this: 1) I did not personally know any moms who had
become widows on 9/11; and 2) I was hesitant to inflict my nonexistent
coaching skills on women who already had enough problems.
My program director stepped in, advising me to brainstorm a list of
possible ways I could resolve this. The list I came up with was predictable,
call the usual suspects and ask if they had any leads. Then one day, I
was checking out at the grocery store and the cover of People Magazine
caught my eye. It featured widows who had given birth in the months
following 9/11. I went through the mental gymnastics of talking myself
out of pursuing this as a lead, listing all the reasons that this would be a
waste of time. A search on the Internet for the editor’s contact information
yielded nothing. The email I sent to People generated an impersonal
auto-response. But within 2 days, I received a letter inviting me to submit
materials that they would forward on to the widows.
TANGIBLE OUTCOmES
Of the 53 letters People sent out from me, I was contacted by 10 women;
I was also invited to help start a nonprofit for people affected by the
events of that day. I coached 8 widows in single sessions, and 4 for the
better part of a year. Often we spoke in the quiet of the night, after the
children had gone to bed. We spoke about their finances, their children,
their pasts, and eventually, their futures. What if I had edited my goals
down to what was “probable?” I can’t imagine.
4

5. 1
ThE LESSON:
Think big(ger).
No matter who you are or how
successful you’ve been, there are
always bigger goals to pursue. We
are in the habit of setting small,
achievable goals. But it’s just as
easy to set “impossible” goals that
have massive impact. When you
set goals, take a creative leap.
Researchers who have conducted
longitudinal studies on creativity in
humans, observe that infants and
children are wildly more creative than
their adult counterparts. Evidently,
our creativity gets educated out of
us for our own protection as time
goes by. In coaching we talk a lot
about moving beyond our “comfort
zone.” One way to do this is to be
more intentional about thinking
big. What goals can you set now
that make a real difference to the
largest number of people? What
changes lives—yours and others’?
Consider a fantastic—as in the word
“fantasy”—outcome rather than one
that is “right-sized” and manageable.
What impossible goals can you move
toward? There are some big jobs that
need to get done on this planet, in
this millennium, right now. Pick one.
Ask yourself: what goal can I set
that will have massive impact?
Think of the biggest goal you can
and then double its size.
5

6. mOdELING ThE wAY:
Leveraging feedback.
BACKGROUNd
David was stalled in the ranks of senior middle management at a high
tech company. I was hired by his boss to help get him “to the next level.”
He was respected by his team but he was a notorious micro-manager.
An engineer by training, he was outspoken about his abilities and “high
standards.” He did not always make eye contact when we talked, not
because he was shy, but because he was text messaging on his PDA.
ThE ISSUE
Three years before, David had been verbally promoted to VP, pending
a meeting with the CEO, which he was told would be a “formality.”
However, following that meeting, all talk of a promotion ceased. At the
time, David was given a one-word explanation: “attitude.” Three years
later, he was still visibly distressed about it. With David’s permission, I
went back to his boss. “I underestimated the degree to which arrogance
would be a factor for the CEO,” the boss told me. “The truth is David is
one of the smartest guys I know. He’s loyal and his work has generated
incredible growth for this company. And if people can put up with his
style, they don’t just like him, they worship him. But David suffers no fools
in silence. The culture’s changing. They’re bringing in more MBAs at the
top. David has no time for MBAs.” David needed to know this. If he could
find the truth in it for himself, he could choose to adapt his style or march
to his own drummer. Either way, he could make peace with the past.
TANGIBLE OUTCOmES
David was coached to listen more and opine less. He turned his PDA off
during meetings. He found role models whose style he admired. He met
with the CEO quarterly and articulated his strategic vision for the area he
oversaw. By the time the year was over, the CEO put David’s name on the
list for promotion.
6

7. 2
ThE LESSON:
Know what you know.
There are two kinds of people in the
world: the kind who believe people
are fully baked by the time they reach
the workplace and could not change
if their very lives depended upon it;
and the kind who believe that change
is possible, though, let’s face it, not
really probable. Do people change?
Absolutely. Change can evolve
over time; it can happen in a split
second. For people to change, only
two ingredients are necessary: the
truth, and one’s ability to accept the
truth. Think about it: once you know
something is true, you can’t not
know it, no matter how inconvenient.
Though in my own corporate career
I always dreaded those “360-degree
evaluations,” in the end, I already
knew what they told me. I just didn’t
know I knew it. There is no substitute
for a good, objective assessment
by one’s bosses, peers and
subordinates (and let’s not forget:
spouses, children, friends) that raises
one’s level of self-awareness and
therefore one’s ability to change.
It’s one thing if one random person
thinks you need to work on yourself.
It’s another if everyone thinks it.
what are some ways you
can invite feedback? what
opportunities for it can you
create?
If you receive unwanted feedback,
consider it before you reject it. When
it’s your turn, look others in the eye
and deliver your feedback, kindly and
honestly. It is, as they say, a gift.
7

8. mOdELING ThE wAY:
Giving up the “busy” habit.
BACKGROUNd
Joan was a lawyer on the partner track at her firm and a working mom
with a very full plate. Her days began with dropping her daughters off at
school, returning phone calls during her hour-long commute, coordinating
her day with her assistant. Days ended with the girls’ homework, a few
hours more of email, phone calls to the other moms in her community,
and nodding off over whatever pre-reading was required for the next
day’s meetings.
ThE ISSUE
“Last week I turned in a report that my boss asked me to prepare 3
weeks ago. When I handed it to her, she laughed. ‘Now I know why this
took so long,’ she said. She was expecting a 3-page executive summary;
I gave her 50 pages of excruciating detail. I was so busy doing a quality
job that I didn’t even stop to ask whether it was what she wanted. I’m
busy, busy, busy, but am I accomplishing anything?” Joan had lost her
filter for what work would have impact and what work was just work.
She set three big goals for herself and broke them down into subtasks,
which she calendared. To give her the discipline to lift her head up
from whatever she was working on and ask herself whether she was
accomplishing something impactful or just intentional, she set an alarm to
sound randomly throughout the day.
TANGIBLE OUTCOmES
Within 3 weeks, her boss phoned me to ask what I had done to Joan.
“She’s so much more effective. It’s noticeable.” Within 2 months, Joan
had achieved one of her top three goals and was well on her way to
finishing out an impactful year.
8

9. 3
ThE LESSON:
Intention does not
equal impact.
It seems obvious to say that intention
and impact are not the same
thing. After all, the journey is not
the same as the destination. The
joke is not the same as the punch
line. Most people are clear on this
concept until it comes to their jobs.
That’s because if you are a salaried
employee, it’s likely you are rewarded
for your intention—for showing
up and moving the ball down the
field—rather than your impact. If
you don’t get the result, you still get
paid. If you do get the result, well,
you might get a bonus! And when
you’re flat-out busy, it becomes
easier to confuse intention—“I am
working a lot of hours and never
take a weekend off”—with impact.
“I finished the report, landed the
account, cut 20% out of my costs.”
There is virtue in intention but only
impact results in, well, results. As a
consultant, I am closer to the cause
and effect of intention and impact.
If I commit to deliver a result to my
client and in spite of my best effort
and hard work I don’t get the result, I
don’t get paid.
Interrupt yourself often to ask
whether this activity, right now
(this conversation, email, plane
ride, phone call) is heading
toward or away from a desired or
expected impact. If not, what can
you do to shift priorities?
Find a way to check yourself and
recalibrate if need be.
9

10. mOdELING ThE wAY:
Aligning values through action.
BACKGROUNd
Lucy is an executive in a $20 billion corporation, where she has worked
all of her adult life. I was hired by her company to provide one-on-one
coaching as part of a high-potential leadership development program.
On the day of our first meeting, she had turned 40. During the previous
year, she had lost her best friend in a car accident. I began our coaching
session as I usually do, by asking, “What’s the most important thing
we can talk about today?” She offered up a few tepid goals and began
to explain why she thought her company would want her to pursue
them. Among them: she felt she was ready to be a vice president and
the company did not seem to see her that way after nearly 20 years of
exemplary and certifiably selfless service. I asked: “Are you angry? Are
you accepting? I can’t tell.”
ThE ISSUE
Lucy dropped the party-line tone and said, “Look. What is it the company
wants from me? I have given them everything I have and it doesn’t seem
to be enough. I just buried my best friend. I am not getting any younger. I
love working, but I have no social life and I’m 40 years old. I want to get
married. I want to have a family. Does the company want to pay you to
talk to me about that?” Well, no, but — yes.
TANGIBLE OUTCOmES
We started where Lucy wanted to start. We worked together for
more than a year integrating her professional goals with her personal
commitments. She began dating a single dad she met on a business trip;
they have begun to discuss their future together. And last summer Lucy
was promoted by her company to Vice President.
10

11. 4
ThE LESSON:
Everything is personal.
People create businesses, work in
them, grow them and tank them. If
we really behaved as if this were true,
ensuring people’s happiness would
be all we ever did. And whenever
someone hit a rocky patch, we’d
help, not punish, the person involved.
We are more comfortable diagnosing
the “business” dimensions of a
problem—the organization, the
market, the economy—almost to the
exclusion of the personal dimensions.
People stuff tends to be messy.
Business parameters are more
definable. But people, good, bad,
and ugly, have exponential impact.
If you have ever quit a job because
you were unhappy, odds are you
quit a person, too. As a coach, my
clients will eventually ask if they can
talk about the personal side of their
lives. But in fact there is no personal
“side.” The personal you and the
professional you are one you. You
cannot separate them any more than
you can separate heads from tails on
a quarter.
what can you do to remind
yourself that inside every
professional you deal with lies a
consummate personal? what can
you do more of to integrate the
personal with the professional in
a business problem you’re facing
right now?
11

12. mOdELING ThE wAY:
dialing trust to achieve team impact.
BACKGROUNd
Drew was General Manager for a regional sales team that ranked dead
last in sales: 12th out of 12 regions. For a time after the rankings were in,
our coaching conversations centered on whether he should just quit and
get another job. Then one day he phoned and said, “I’m staying. I have
to see how this story ends.”
ThE ISSUE
With feedback, Drew assessed his mistakes and his managers’, had the
necessary frank conversations, and set out to hire his dream team. He
completely turned over his leadership team and we worked on putting
together a series of off sites and coaching conversations designed to
get his new leaders working together for the good of the team. They
set a goal of moving the region up 8 places, from 12th to 4th place in
the country by year end, truly an “impossible” goal. At Drew’s urging,
they focused their efforts on dialing in trust: understanding each others’
values, reigning in their own behavioral styles, and meeting each other’s
needs. When misfortune befell them, illness struck, customers cancelled,
they fought the temptation to throw their fellow team members under
the bus. Over the course of a year, they moved from an aggregate of 40
individual contributors to an interdependent team. What happened to
one, good or bad, happened to all.
TANGIBLE OUTCOmES
The team came in second in the US, first in their region, and beat their
plan by an average of 112%. Two of the team leaders were recognized
for their achievements at the company level, worldwide.
12

13. 5
ThE LESSON:
Put your trust in trust.
Bookshelves, my own included, are thick
with advice and counsel about how to
grow businesses bigger, better, and
faster. Six Sigma, TQM, tipping points,
blue ocean strategies all have their place.
But for sheer power and simplicity, I like
trust. Think of a team you’ve been part
of where the achievement was greater
than the sum of any given part. Odds are
you went through the stages of building
trust in order to reach your goal. When
trust among team members is high,
it’s like giving everyone a fast car and
an open road. When it’s low, when it’s
strategized, it’s like throwing sandbags
in the fast lane at random intervals.
No one is at their best. Proceed with
caution! You can intentionally raise your
levels of trust in others and theirs in
you. Trust responds when you make the
effort to understand the values of others,
calibrate your style to theirs, and meet
their needs.
what can you do to improve levels of
trust in a crucial relationship?
Think of values, style and needs as the
dials on the dashboard that is trust.
13

14. mOdELING ThE wAY:
Building resilience into the day to day.
BACKGROUNd
I met Sam at a 3-day off-site I was facilitating for a group of his peers.
He was a great participant who shared that he was the father of 6
adopted children. He never missed a soccer game or a school play,
but the demands of his job sometimes conflicted with the needs of his
family. He told us this in the cheerful, self-deprecating style of a stand-up
comedian, going for the laugh.
ThE ISSUE
On day 2, his manner turned serious. One-on-one, he confided in me that
he had not taken a vacation in 3 years and had not been to the doctor’s in
5 years. He said he kept starting and abandoning exercise programs, and
knew he needed to eat better. When I pressed for how he could make
these things priorities in his life, he said that he was on the road all week
long for his job and when he got home, he just wanted to relax with his
wife and children. Almost as an afterthought, he told me that his father
had died of a heart attack at an unexpectedly young age, the same age
that he was now. We set some goals around self-care and resilience and
Sam left to join the larger group activity. Two hours later, he was being
rushed to the hospital with chest pains. By the time his wife arrived at his
side, Sam was in a coma and the doctor’s prognosis was grim. Sam’s
wife papered his hospital room with artwork and photos of his children
and sat beside his bed telling him how much she and the children needed
him as he labored in a coma. After 5 days, he regained consciousness
and gradually understood the magnitude of what had happened.
TANGIBLE OUTCOmES
“I am living proof that you have to take care of yourself. In being there for
everyone else, I had risked being there for no one.” Sam took his health
seriously, lost 28 pounds, and incorporated self-care into his life style. He
now shares his story both in his community and at brown-bag seminars
at work.
14

15. 6
ThE LESSON:
Take care of you.
A few years back, I trained for and ran
a marathon. Believe me when I say that
if could do it, anyone can. The secret is
in the training. Our coaches taught us
to acclimate our bodies to the pounding
distance of the marathon (26.2 miles)
by walking for one minute for every 7
or so minutes that we ran. The theory
behind this method is that the one
minute we walk is like a mini-break for
our bodies between the minutes that
we spend running. One minute to give
your body a breather, let your muscles
recuperate, take a drink of water. We
were told if we did this during our long
distance training runs, and on the day
of the marathon itself, our bodies would
recover faster from the physical effort. It
sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? And yet it
worked. On the day after my marathon
run I was not even a little bit sore. I hear
myself drawing upon the analogy of the
one-minute break when clients tell me
they don’t have time to eat or exercise,
don’t have the staff to work less than
a 12-hour day, or just have to put their
heads down and plow through the
workload for the next several months.
The truth is, work sometimes requires
you to run a marathon. When it does,
give yourself the equivalent of the one-
minute break. what would that be for
you in your present circumstance?
Of course, the best break is to not run
the marathon in the first place. how
can you be sure your “marathons”
are necessary and not the result of
poor planning, inability to speak up,
or just plain habit? If you cannot find
the time to take care of yourself, you risk
not being able to take care of others.
15

16. TAKING ONE LAST LOOK
As a coach, I am often engaged in discussions of “return on investment”
around what I do. No good coach can take credit for the results of their
clients. Coaches are like prisms through which new perspectives may
pass. Those new perspectives can have the power to change an individual,
a team, or a planet.
As you think about your next 12 months, we hope you’ll be inspired to
notice how our six tangible lessons play out in your own lives. And when
you come upon your own lessons, we hope you’ll find a way to capture
what they mean, not only for yourself but for those around you. And to do
that, of course, tangibly.
Since 2002, we have been designing and delivering coaching and
consulting services to help Fortune 1000 companies and their executives
improve behavior, performance, and visibility at the place where business,
leadership and people intersect.
To learn more about Tangible, our faculty, and our products and
services, please contact me directly:
Karen warner
Tangible Coaching and Consulting
Office: 310-230-2226
Mobile: 310-926-9253
Email: karen.warner@tangiblegroup.com
www.tangiblegroup.com
© 2009 Tangible Group and Karen Warner & Associates. All rights reserved.
Design: Amy Detrick, amy.detrick@tangiblegroup.com