Her husband was at the Pentagon when she got the call.
“He says, ‘There’s an inbound to D.C.,’” says Dianna Flett, recalling the conversation they had on Sept. 11, 2001.
Flett did what she was trained to do. After learning the aircraft was about two minutes away, she called her supervisor.
“He said, ‘What’s your source?’” says Flett, who was the acting office chief of the Regional Assessments Asia-Pacific Office—which oversaw Afghanistan—and pregnant with her fourth son. “I said, ‘My husband at the Pentagon,’ not knowing that that was the target.”
Flett had joined the military decades prior for financial stability, having grown up in a lower-income home in New Jersey. She was the first in her family to go to college, attending Rutgers on an ROTC scholarship.
Her husband was left uninjured in the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, but Flett decided that two active-duty parents was one too many. She retired from the military, after 21 years of service in operations including Desert Storm, and focused on parenting.
About five years down the road, Flett found a new way to channel her leadership experience: strengthening the confidence of young girls. In 2009, her son Sammy had come home from school in Stafford with a message.
“He said, ‘The girls in middle school, their confidence is just crashing. They’re making all these bad choices,’” Flett recalls.
Flett had just learned about first lady Michelle Obama’s new mentoring program for teens and considered launching her own program designed for girls before they reached middle school. “And then I got into my research, and I found out that a girl’s self-esteem actually peaks when she’s 9 years old,” Flett says.
In 2009, she got Girl Smarts off the ground, working in tandem with the host school’s counselor. They generated workshop ideas that were relevant to their audience, such as When Beauty Becomes the Beast and Words Count And Sometimes They Hurt.
“It’s not a sit-around-and-talk-about-your-feelings sort of thing. I teach them how to do power posing. I teach them what to say when a bully’s coming at them.” Flett says.
With Girl Smarts in its ninth year, Flett now pulls in former participants and local female leaders to serve as speakers. Flett is grateful for the support she has found in participating schools—a total of 20 in four counties. Last year, the White House named Flett a Nominated Change Maker and invited her to attend the United State of Women Summit.
Flett sees a direct link between her status as a role model and her military career, which she says helped make her a confident and effective public speaker. She targets these skills in her Girl Smarts Guide to Leadership workshop.
“I kind of didn’t like the idea of waiting until they’re 21 or 22 to lean in, you know? Let’s teach them how to lean in when they’re in fourth and fifth grade,” Flett says.
