Pentesting the Self: Hacking Failure for Success

hi it is my pleasure to welcome erica norenberg erica is a security researcher specializing in digital forensics malware analysis and software development per talk pen testing the self hacking failure for success we'll discuss how we can pick ourselves back up from failure and learn from our mistakes all right thanks matt um i'm gonna hopefully present here and uh hope that everything works out so so i wanted to talk about my own failures and how i've overcome them over this last year it's definitely been quite an experience um i hope not to take the full uh amount of time because i don't think you guys want to hear me ramble on about failure for that long but uh for a full

hour or 45 minutes but i do want to share some of my experiences um how they kind of came about and how i kind of dug myself back up and pick myself back up out of the dirt basically and hopefully share with you um some things that i learned that maybe could help you guys also in the future because i know that all of us have been through this in some degree so i wasn't going to do one of these human eyes but i figured that a lot of you guys maybe don't know me um i'm very easy to find if you google my name eric norenberg i am literally the only erika norenberg in the united states so

uh you can find anything uh any of my talks or any of that um through even google but basically uh as matt said i'm a senior threat researcher most recently i worked at vmware carbon black tau which is our threat analysis unit i worked with uh one of the guys on my team was greg foss he's also presenting today i think at 10 30 or so or 11 30 and as well as terry riordan and adan who are speaking later today i've spent many years in the community in the security industry mostly doing malware analysis reverse engineering digital forensics some development ios development um basic tooling things like that my twitter is gutter charles and i

have to give the disclaimer that i am not a life coach by any means or any sort of motivational speaker i have gotten some inspiration from people like that over this past 10 months now but that's definitely not in my job description so one of the people that i got introduced to was actually through my sister who shared a podcast with me and it's one was from brene brown who's a vulnerability researcher i had no idea who she was and uh you guys may have seen the movie i think it's a netflix movie wine country she actually is featured in there uh during one of the scenes that was the first time i'd seen her but

i didn't even know who she was i thought it was just a made-up character but when i listened to the podcast and saw the movie again i was like oh yeah okay but um anyway she this podcast really inspired me because it was during the time when i had just been asked to do this talk and she started out with a quote that i think is really uh really rang true with me because it really represented something that i'd struggled with for a long time and really internalizing things and criticism from people and so it really spoke to me this quote is actually from theodore roosevelt but she quotes it in several of her books

and podcasts and different appearances so i want to read it i know it's long but um i will kind of give a summary but i really feel like it's important to kind of really listen to these words and it just it's a very meaningful quote to me that i've looked back on over the past year so the quote says it is not the critic who counts not the man who points out the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood who strives validly who airs who comes short

again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming but who does actually strive to do the deeds who knows great enthusiasms the great devotions he spends himself in a worthy cause who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat like i said this is a lot to process in one sentence basically but um you know it really is important an important message that you really need to um remind yourself that you're the one down in the arena fighting

some of us for um you know detections threat hunting anything like that um and you know when i first started all of this and my sister shared me this podcast i was like oh god another you know self-help tape or whatever i grew up with my mom and my parents having to listen to this stuff my mom had all the books that tony robbins and all these things and sitting on a 14-hour car ride to minnesota or to kansas having to listen to these motivational speakers and self-help people telling us how to live our lives and because i absolutely never thought that i would actually get into this but you know there are a lot of

people out there that have some really great information to share but that quote was a lot so um basically i just summarize it just don't listen to someone whose opinion isn't worth your consideration and you have to really think about the people in your life who whose opinions matter um some of those are the people that are down in the trenches you know your your co-workers the co-workers that you trust and love my team on tao and threat site they were fantastic fantastic resources people to lean on we were a very tight team these people their opinions matter my family those people the people that love you the people who know you the people who

know your work these are the people whose opinions matter and one of the things actually after the quote that bernie brown stated um she said she actually keeps an index card in her wallet to remind herself when some critic says something you know the the thing that we always tell ourselves in this community is you don't read the comments because there are so many people that are going to attack you for you know reasons having nothing to do with your work or anything like that um but those opinions don't matter you have to focus on the people whose opinions are worth your time and attention why are you gonna let somebody who doesn't know you at all who says you

know oh you looked really fat on stage when you're giving that talk these people shouldn't make you feel inferior or you know you got this one detail wrong in this talk uh and obviously you don't know what you're talking about well you know you can't let these people's opinions uh take you down and i know that's better said than done or easier said than done but it's an important thing to keep in mind and to remind yourself so i'm going to talk about the f word okay so we're not going to start with failure i figure that's probably what you assumed but we'll get to that soon so the first f word that i want to talk

about is fear so this is fear is often a precursor to failure the fear of failure itself is often worse than failing at something that you try so if you try something and maybe it's a shot you know moonshot and you fail you know that's one thing but if you're so afraid of failing at that thing that you never do it you're either going to if it's something that's been assigned to you and um you have you're forced to do it you're going to either procrastinate or if you have this moonshot idea and you don't go after it because you're afraid of failing that's a loss of opportunity you know if you had succeeded maybe this

wonderful thing could have happened in your life for your career and the other way is um something i struggle with is perfectionism if you have such high standards that you get this assignment and maybe you're not quite qualified or you don't feel like you're completely qualified for this task you hold yourself to such high standards that you feel like you can never actually finish it and produce something that's up to your standards and so instead of producing something that's the best that you can do with what you have you don't produce anything at all and sometimes this is more detrimental than anything else because you have let somebody down now that leads into you know a shame spiral this can you

know snowball into an effect right so you can either lose opportunity lose um respect for yourself or um you know just make yourself feel inferior so there's one other f word that i want to talk about fine so this actually i took from um a motivational speech speaker life coach person named mel robbins um i happened to see a tedx talk of hers in san francisco that was called how to stop screwing yourself over uh it was it was really good but basically the point is that just fine is not okay um if you're fine if somebody asks you how are you doing i'm fine a lot of times this is indication that you're dissatisfied with something

something in your life it can also mean that um there are things going wrong but you don't want to show weakness or vulnerability you want to keep people at arm's length because that's safer you don't want to show and this again this comes back to the perfectionism as well i know a lot of us in this industry suffer from feeling like you have to be perfect all the time and in constant fear of publishing something with maybe some wrong details or maybe that um function that you reversed was you interpreted it wrong or maybe you got the wrong attribution or any number of things that can go wrong and these things for people you hold yourself to a higher

standard than most people who are looking at your work are holding you too so perfectionism to me may as well be an f word but uh that kind of gets off the subject but that was something that i wanted to to mention as well so last but not least failure so that's what we wanted to talk about um i'm going to share a very personal story of how i failed harder than i ever thought was possible and how i managed to pick myself back up and recover um but from the deepest depths of down in a hole i mean um over and it's been you know a year and a half basically um i'm hoping that

even though this is really hard to talk about publicly i'm hoping that doing this will help some of you come to grips with some of the things that you've been feeling and maybe feeling fail like a failure or being too hard on yourself and by sharing my experiences you can come away with some information that maybe would help in your own struggles or at least give you maybe the courage to reach out to somebody or make some new connections um learn to lean on some other people for help it's it's very hard to do that and about a week ago i did post a twitter thread which i'm sure you've seen if you've been following besides

boulder because i've retweeted it like six times um but i really really feel like it's important for us all to share our own experiences of failure and learn to be more vulnerable and talk about these things um like i said before the twitter community especially in infosec has had much more of an uh emphasis on people coming out and talking honestly about mental health issues their own struggles and i really want to keep that conversation going so i hope that this talk also um inspires some of you to share your own experiences and learn from those other people and maybe uh connect with some people that they post to the thread um you know maybe

there's somebody that really speaks to you and has common experiences that you want to connect with and and maybe become friends so let's talk about failure and what it actually means so if you're familiar with the show silicon valley you probably know this scene um basically gavin belson the guy pictured here is a ceo of a huge company in silicon valley and he has a product that he made a huge ambitious launch uh to basically broadcast using his technology to a uf a ufc fight to the entire world and had total trust in this technology what he didn't know was that his engineering team responsible for all the features that were going into this product

all the way down the line from the very first very lowest level of engineering they were weeks behind or months behind but each leader going up the chain was unwilling to pass that information on to the next person they basically passed the book they said we're weeks behind and they said you need to tell this person you're like we're not telling that person so on and on at the chain each of these features turns out to be months behind and the product is nowhere near ready and so when they launch the product and try to broadcast this ufc fight it fails horribly it's absolutely miserable and so gavin as the ceo has to go before the

board of directors and explain himself to avoid being deposed as the ceo so instead of explaining why the product failed and how they're going to overcome that or trying to make excuses he actually argued that failure is a necessary evil and a stepping stone and he cites the failures of eventual successful entrepreneurs such as mark zuckerberg and steve jobs and their initial failed attempts that now you know because of those they have iterated and become successful and he states that in tech failure is actually pre-greatness i'm not sure i really share his confidence in that um but i can share my own experiences and how it helped me to grow personally and realize my career

goals so here's where i start the more personal account of how this happened and hopefully can share some knowledge with you that that's helpful basically it started in 2019 i started getting into mac malware analysis which i'd had some experiences with off and on over the last 10 years but not a lot nothing in depth um i'm not a great researcher like patrick wardle or my former co-worker scott knight people like these but there was a gap there and somebody needed to do it um because it was clear that we had a gap in um analyzing these threats and and um visibility into these threats and somebody needed to take it on so i decided to take this on because uh it

actually started with um well let's get back so basically the idea is i submitted for several conferences in 2019 and and wasn't expecting to get accepted to them all but i ended up being accepted and i have a problem saying no so um i committed to way more travel and conferences than i was prepared for so some of these conferences back to back to back were also co-mingled with our work travel every quarter basically quarterly we met up in boston with our team to do quarterly planning and so during 2019 between the conference travel and the work travel i was barely home um there were house projects we have a house that um you know it's it's not exceptionally old

but there are a lot of things that need to be redone and we started a lot of house projects that that we could not finish um just because we were out of town all the time not only that but our farm as my husband tracy likes to call it we have two cats had four chickens at the time and a part-time dog um tracy's daughter's dog they lost some attention even though ashley takes great care of them she also works during the day so um the dog especially she's elderly and she likes people to be home during the day so but um in june basically was both the crowning moment and also the start of the acceleration of the

downfall

so i spoke at the second objective by the sea conference if you're not a fel um familiar with the objective by the sea conference it's um specifically mac security focused conference that was started by patrick wardle and he's a a very very skilled highly known highly renowned um mac os researcher and this all started like i said when um i first started getting into mac os research and malware analysis it actually started with a co-worker of mine jimmy he contacted me over slack one day it was in in the evening and he said he's a home brewer and he said uh hey i was looking at this recipe for a double block and the site redirected me to this thing

that wants me to install an adobe flash update and so this is pretty sketchy and so i visited the site ended up getting the redirect and was able to download the payload analyze it and i hadn't seen it before it turns out it was a very common adware called slayer but it really piqued my interest and so i did some analysis on it and ended up collaborating with my friend josh watson who's pictured there in our talk and we basically dissected i had dissected the malware he's a binary ninja expert so binary ninja is a reverse engineering platform if you're not familiar with it and our discussions actually led him to develop a plug-in for

binary ninja to uh analyze mac software which wasn't in there in the product so we had we ended up going to monaco to present this but uh my husband tracy came with me and we decided that you know if we're going all the way overseas we might as well kind of extend this into a sort of vacation so we decided to stop down in leon on our way to monaco for a few days and it was great we had it's always been on my bucket list to go to a michelin star restaurant so we had a fantastic meal at this three star two or three star michelin restaurant there and then we headed down to the

conference and the conference was just energizing this was i had been to the first one um i had the opportunity to speak the second one uh it's a very small knit small group so very closely knit and under 100 i think it was around 100 attendees so you really had time to get to know and actually have deep conversations with people and i'd actually picked up a friend of mine in baltimore is a a high level she works basically in in biotech and she had done this big she had been invited to do a huge conference in china and had given me this phone that somebody had chased her down in the airport to hand her this

iphone and so i was talking we were talking to her when we were in in baltimore for b-sides and i said you do not do not use that phone and she ended up giving it to me and i brought it with me to the conference and so a group of us were just tearing it apart and of course it was an android phone that was masked to be an iphone but um it was just really fun to collaborate with a bunch of people in person from all over the world and um to be able to share this knowledge and just have fun with it you know so the conference was awesome i always come off those with a high it's like you know

all this new information and and things that you want to explore so we leave the conference and decide to head to marseille we decided to go to marseille for a couple days head to burgundy and then finally back to paris to fly out so on our way to marseille we are we actually so from the conference it was almost tracy's birthday and so i decided that we we decided to take a helicopter ride you can actually take a helicopter from monaco directly to nice and it drops you off in the airport in the actual terminal so you don't even have to go through security or anything like that and it was fantastic neither of us had

been on a helicopter before we were sitting right in the cockpit right next to the pilot it was great so we decided we had taken a train we'd taken trains from there on but we found out that apparently you have to book trains ahead of time because they do actually sell out the train tickets but we had such a good time driving from liam to monaco that we decided to just drive to marseille and go along the coast absolutely beautiful um south of france along the coast but then we were on our way to marseille and we decided to just impulsively stop off at this kind of overlook tourist site and this happened so we were gone

from the car for exactly seven minutes i only knew this because i had taken pictures at the car before i walked out to the overlook and when i returned i took this picture and the time that it elapsed was seven minutes in that time the thieves had taken three bags um our two computer bags nearly ten thousand dollars in various equipment and dongles and computer everything including both of our passports and my wallet which i had left in the car because we were just walking out to take a couple pictures and coming back so not only was this extraordinarily inconvenient because we're in the middle of nowhere in france there's no police station nearby the closest station was

an hour away luckily we had there was a guy that came out into the parking lot who happened to speak english and was able to tell us there's no 9-1-1 and there is a number to call but we had no idea how to find that but luckily this guy um came out and he spoke english he told us what number to call of course the nearest police station nobody there speaks english so he actually communicated to them what had happened and they told us that we needed to come to this this police station for a jew which is a very small town so we head with uh there's glass all over the front seat um

completely i can't sit in the front seat my phone is dying so i'm in the back seat with no seatbelt tracy is driving an hour to this this place in frisjoo i'm leaning through the front seat luckily they hadn't taken my phone charger there was one that was plugged in that was the only saving grace there but um so we get to the the station for you and um of course nobody speaks english but we got enough information through that they actually sent a forensic analyst out which i i was shocked i mean this is the small town uh police station they sent a forensic analyst out who was dusting for fingerprints you know taking all this

information and so they took all this information but they said you know we can't really do anything with this um you're gonna have to go to like marseille and you know try to try to file a complaint with them but we'll send all this information over so we head to marseille where we were supposed to drop off this rental car as well and um obviously can't leave rental car alone and and of course we're very delayed at this point the time that i'm supposed to drop the rental car off was um six o'clock or something like that by this time it's it's after eight and so i call the rental car company and they said it's no

problem you know they're open until nine don't worry about it as long as you get there by like 8 45 you're fine well we got there at 8 35 and the death stare from the lady that we couldn't find anybody you know usually here you pull in there's a rental car there's a guy that comes and checks you in there was nobody so we parked into a space that was marked as the rental car company and i went into the office and the woman who was running the counter was absolutely great like she was she was completely irate and anyway we ended up finally i ended up getting a piece of paper from her to

report the incident but uh we had to just leave the car there with this window broken and she just didn't seem to care she said you know my intake guy is is gone i was like well the window's broken and she said well are the doors locked and i said yeah but the windows completely out not knowing i'm like is there some sort of translation issue here but no she she said uh are the doors locked i said yeah so anyway i i take pictures 360 pictures just in case because i'm like this is in a train station in marseille the car is going to get stolen or something is going to happen and i don't want to be responsible for

that but anyway the short story we were supposed to go from marseilles spend a couple days there and then go to burgundy for a few days and then head back to paris to uh fly out but the problem was we had lost our passports so it's like well how are we going to get back out of the country we need new passports but the embassy in marseille was closed indefinitely for whatever reason and that weekend happened to be this is thursday and that weekend was the 75th anniversary of the normandy invasion so the embassy in paris which was our closest embassy was closed on monday and we were supposed to fly out first thing tuesday

morning so needless to say we cut our our trip short and headed straight to paris needless to say not much of a vacation although we did enjoy ourselves and um i have to say that um plus one for networking uh a french researcher that we met at objected by the sea completely saved us by um basically he said tell me the entire story because basically we had both seen there were four motor motorcyclists that were coordinating the robbery and we had full descriptions of all of them and so he told us you know write up everything that you can think of every description and he translated the whole thing into french for us if we had not had that um

the police in frasier and in marseille would not have given us a second thought they didn't even want to talk to us until i showed them that i had a document in french that they could read and without that because we had pictures of our passports uh on each of our phones we were able to um have the passport numbers and they were able to give us official documents to take to the embassy that sped the process so much so that's another just tip if you're ever going overseas or anywhere have a copy a picture of your passport number um if you're traveling with somebody else have it on each of your phones it really saved us

but anyway getting off the point after that conference coming back obviously stressed out trying to figure out what do we do now uh we have all these losses how do we handle that can we actually get reimbursed for any of this um and on top of that there are more conferences more travel coming up right away we had um i had the dfrws in portland uh which is a forensics conference we had a trip to florida which is also supposed to be a vacation but it was just kind of a weekend uh over my birthday and i ended up actually just we went on a fishing trip which was fantastic but i was sick the entire time on the boat

um spoke at jailbreak visited family after jailbreak we had besides nola uh ended up going to wife to meet um tracy's family this was the first time i'd been and it was just a whirlwind of meeting everybody which is fantastic but extremely draining and again the work travel this we had two two more um planning sessions to fly to boston so again so many more unfinished house projects like our deck pictured here which was falling apart um we didn't really realize how much until we started ripping it out which is often the case but there were rotted boards everything and and no it's still not finished we have about six boards put in and some

extra joists uh and then this is a year later basically and i had to get the obligatory cat picture in there that's hawkeye but um basically completely burned out stressed out the home projects are piling up the work projects are piling up because i'm going off and speaking and not doing research this time you know and so everything is just becoming more and more of a weight right and so they say that um when things start to get out of control we look to something that to change something that we can control and so one thing that i did was cut off 12 inches of my hair because that's that's how i dealt with it but um anyway so

winter came totally stressed out physical mental health uh really stress stressful um really suffering at this point but then came 2020. so we all know how 2020 has gone at the beginning obviously uh did not know what was to come i was asked to do this talk and i was like i have so much material already for this talk you know i was really excited about it um i had no idea that there was so much worse to come it started out by getting the flu or possibly it was actually covered recent research showed that we had infections much earlier than i thought than they originally thought and this was in february but you know overcame that

still just you know really not well but looking forward to a mini vacation in march we were going back to hawaii and um i was really looking forward to actually having like a vacation where things didn't completely go wrong or i wasn't just stressed out from giving a talk or working or networking and all those things so things were looking up right so i spoke at the third iteration of objective the sea which objected by the sea which was in maui so we had planned to stay with our friend sarah who's pictured there in the middle with me a lot of you probably know her sarah edwards big mac forensics um guru i'll call her

but we had a great time again you know this conference was just energizing meeting people and really getting time to to talk to people in person and so i ended up speaking at this conference as well um and tracy actually won an apple watch they had a couple giveaways at the end of the conference and neither of us are very lucky about that kind of thing so that was pretty exciting but our plans were to leave maui and actually sarah was going to come with us and stay with relatives of tracy's in you know on o'ahu and we're going to visit his ailing mother and other relatives again but at this point kovid was just

starting to become an issue this was mid-march it wasn't quite at the point where there were travel restrictions to the state but we decided to keep our plans because it was like well you know it wasn't really clear how serious it was at that point but just after the conference things started to turn so we knew it was serious we're in hawaii on maui we knew it was serious when there was a shortage of spam and rice there was run on spam in a race a day before these pictures were taken those shelves were fully stocked and we realized at that point that we needed to cancel our plans to visit the relatives of maui i'm oahu because um

the relatives were staying with were elderly and his mother and other family members were high-risk and we couldn't we couldn't risk exposing them so what was supposed to become a vacation for a week became a mad rush to try to buy new housing because we were stuck there we couldn't get immediate flights out and so tracy and sarah and i are trying to find new flights sarah had to give a talk or give a class for sans in san francisco so we're all we're trying to find new hotels and trying to get flights out it was crazy we tried to enjoy it but it it was mostly just trying to figure out how we were going to get out

and they'd even close the parks and beaches the day before we left and then they ended up closing the island the islands completely to tourists the day we flew out so nobody was allowed in um and actually the day we left there were protesters right outside the airport that were holding signs saying you know tourists go home you're not welcome here and demanding the borders be closed so needless to say that was not not the best vacation ever either so once we got home our town we live up in longmont it was near lockdown we hadn't stocked supplies because we'd been gone for two weeks and we really didn't know what was gonna happen we didn't think it

was that as serious as it was and we joked about running out of toilet paper but with three of the four of us tracy's daughters at high risk we decided it made more sense for them to come stay with us so we can minimize trips to the store because at that time they were limiting to once a week and share meals and i definitely sympathize with parents um i can't imagine having to work from home and homeschool or provide child care 24 7. it's bad enough as i can say four adults suddenly living together 24 7 um wasn't even easy year and certainly added to the stress so suddenly i'm making masks and you can

see that i had two very competent helpers in that and attempting sourdough which eventually did work out but uh obviously failed a few times um but my role at work had changed and i was taking on a lot more work than i could handle for even a normal climate not even with the stress of code so it's over committed stressed out literally physically and mentally suffering and i tried to push through but uh you know the next couple of months it just seemed like my efforts went nowhere so this leads to the final face down moment for me the terminology was another the face down moment was kind of another uh concept that i stole from brene brown

but um as you can see here this is another scene from from silicon valley where richard uh you know trying to do multiple a startup he'd failed and recovered several times but had reached the height of a failure that he just felt he couldn't return from and was literally just on the floor and for me this moment was like realization that the fact there was no way that i could recover from my current position in their eyes i had completely failed the tasks that i had been given despite my efforts and you know i to me i had been really working my butt off trying to get this stuff done but then shame completely overwhelmed me

because i had never had anything but positive um response to my work and praise and to be told that you failed and you're not good enough and that was just i was left completely powerless i didn't know what to do but then you know i realized i needed to pick myself back up somehow and dig myself out of this hole and step back and reevaluate and i got angry this turned into anger for my critics you know i thought again about roosevelt's quote and realized that i was putting way too much stock in the opinions of people who didn't know or understand my work and who didn't even know me or the hard work that i'd put into the

company over two and a half years some of these people hadn't even been there long that long so i took a step back to reevaluate and that is where we are now the reconciliation so i can't say that my failure was a case of pre-greatness obviously i'm not some sort of successful entrepreneur right now but i came away from this with a clear vision of what's important to me in my life both personally and in my career and realized that there are far too many times when i've said yes for the wrong reasons either to make somebody happy or to fill a gap that you know nobody else wanted to volunteer for and so i raised

my hand and that's gotten to me into trouble more times than i can say but again going back to this britta brown um in one of her books i thought this was really appropriate she said the opposite of failure is not necessarily success but reconciliation so aligning our past with an expanded vision that has just come into view so you can't um look at failure and say well i didn't i didn't really you know have some new product i didn't like succeed in in the way that a steve jobs had but you have to step back and say how is this a success for me and for me it was um taking a step back

and realizing that you know i had been doing a lot of things wrong for myself personally and for others in in doing things the wrong way for myself it was affecting my work my personal commitments and that's not just a dis justice uh injustice for me but it was also affecting others so you know i was stubborn i really didn't want to put bullet points slides in this deck i wrote it's hard but i did want to just kind of end with some key points i was too stubborn to admit that i needed help and realized that i needed help i was ashamed once i realized that i was too far down that i had fallen so far that i felt

like i couldn't ask for help anymore or admit that i had over committed um or admit that i was uncomfortable with the work that i was given it was too late i didn't recognize when i needed help physically mentally professionally and i was afraid to ask for it for feel for fear of sounding inadequate or unqualified and you know again comes this perfectionism thing and you don't have to be a perfectionist to be uh have a fear of failure that's that's basically the same thing that tells you you're not good enough and this causes again a failure to produce for fear of judgment that it's not good enough from somebody else or just shame in

not feeling like you've produced something that's up to your standards and then again fear of failure can be worse than actually just trying something you know trying that moonshot and failing at it um but you have to know your critics if you do try for the moon and fail who are the people that are judging you on that are they worth your consideration and your inner critic is worse than any other we talk to ourselves more harshly than we would ever talk to a colleague or a friend you would never tell a friend or colleague who's struggling and coming to you for help the things that you would tell yourself when you're in a shame spiral and feeling like

you're not good enough and finally vulnerability is not weakness you have to be able to open yourself up to ask for help and know the people that you can trust to ask for that help and again you know i've taken the last month to try to step back relax reflect and look at where i've been and where i want to be is the first time since college that i've actually taken a break between jobs um and exploring different roles different companies trying to figure out what do i want to do where do i want to be who do i want to work with um and it's it's i'm still recovering from the physical effects of the stress

but um it's it's been a very helpful experience for me and you know don't get me wrong i still stress out about every interview suffer imposter syndrome like most of us or everyone i know um everyone i talk to i feel like is smarter or more experienced but now i know that like blanking on a question that i kick myself over after in an interview it's not the end of the world you know it's hard and it's never going to get me easier but i have to keep reminding myself that you have to take time and you know remind yourself to know your limits know when to ask for help and who to ask for help

find the help that you need and lean on your support system you can't bury yourself in your head because that inner critic is always going to take you down and you have to take time to disconnect you know i thought i was taking vacation but every almost every vacation i took that was of any length of time more than a day or so was really i was still connected to work i was still feeling guilty for not getting stuff done you have to take time and just back off don't listen to slack don't you turn off your notifications don't look at your email and network you know you making new friends like i said i'm really hoping that some of you

contribute to that thread or at least read it and maybe make new connections that have similar experiences to you and maybe you can make a new connection who will help you out and you maybe you can help them out and you know i know i'm still going to fail at all of these things again and again but the more you fail and the more you back out and recognize these recurring habits you can try to at least recognize the things when you need help and then when you build a good network friends family co-workers random people on twitter you may not have even met these people are all in your support system and you have to know when you can

lean on those people so that's my um the message that i want to leave with you is know yourself listen to yourself don't listen to those critics whose opinion is not worth your suffering so thank you and please feel free to reach out to me again i'm on twitter gutter troll if you google me you can find me everywhere um please feel free to to reach out any time

well thank you very good yeah that was a that was a great that was a great talk that's important to discuss um i think we might have there was one question that we could try to do really quick um we'll be switching over to the next session at 10 30. um the question was uh from aaron ott uh erica thank you so much for bringing up the word fear i do find myself procrastinating quite a bit for that very reason uh what have you found is a good way to get past that for me actually one of the best things was um the pomodoro method i don't know if some of you have heard of that but basically

um you i have a timer sorry i have a mac uh there's an app called be focused and literally you the theory is you work for x and amount of time you take a five minute break and then after you know four of these increments then you take a longer break like a 20-minute break and i found that it actually helped me focus on okay this is my task for right now and i'm just gonna hit it with everything i have for 20 minutes or 30 minutes however you have it set and i found that when i actually focus on that it's easier to block everything out and look forward to when i can take the

break and kind of um just dive into something without having to overthink it too much and kind of not focus on that fear of not being able to do it just here's a time slot and i'm just gonna hit it with whatever i have

well thank you all right well thank you again for that for the for the talk um yeah thanks a lot