Uncharted Minds: Exploring Neuroscience, Burnout, and Cognitive Strengths

All right. How's everybody doing today? Holy cow, that is louder than every other session. Give yourselves a round of applause. Applause. This is the crowd. This is the time. Welcome to B signs. Uh this is my second year. Uh show of hands. Is this your first year, folks? Yeah. I'm seeing some hands. If you all turn around and look at each other. Look at that. Wow. It's like we got some first- timers, and that's a good thing. My first time was last year. I'm so proud to be back here again. Dana Torerson, vice president of product marketing with Armor Code. Uh, but today I don't have to wear that title. I get to wear the title of MC for theater 13

here for Bsides with this great crowd. Um, the the topic today is uncharted minds exploring neuroscience burnout and cognitive strengths. I want you to give all your attention, your time to the team here for this panel, but also you can use your devices and go out and queue up some questions for this session and go out to bsidesf.org/qna. That's QN for Nancy, A for Apple, and that'll get you to the app. You can log in and then queue up some questions. The team will take the questions uh about near the end of the presentation. So if you think of something, just quick jot it down in Slido there. So, with that, I'd like to introduce you to Daydream Diamond, uh,

the founder and CEO of CyberSn. Uh, DRE, please take it away. This is awesome. Thank you, Dana. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, Besides SF. It's so wonderful to be with you. I love this community so much. I've been a part of Bides for at least 10 years now. So, it's wonderful to be with you. And more importantly, wonderful to be with you here, not more importantly, but just as importantly, with these two lovely humans. Um I am a workforce advocate and a workforce solutions provider and uh this topic of burnout and neuroscience uh is very important to me because I've been watching for way too many years uh workforce upset, workforce unhappiness and it is a it is our national security

issue. So I thank you all for coming. If you were in the keynote this morning, uh Clint, famous researcher, uh talked about emotional intelligence and this is a piece of what we're here tonight to do but or today. But really, um we're here to talk about our minds and your minds and to talk about what are we going to do about the big problems that we have. And so on that note, I want to let my other uh panelists introduce themselves. These are also two advocates of workforce um happiness and advocates of neuroscience and understanding the mind so that we can solve these very serious problems we have which we'll get into next. So um please Peter introduce

yourself and your fascination for the brain and then we'll go to Kayla. Thank you Dre. Hi everyone. Great to be here back in the states. Um I I've I was dwell I was thinking about this concept of uncharted territory the theme for this sort of event and it struck me when we were writing our pitch to to present here the parallels between this sort of ancient concept of navigating the oceans and there be dragons and all that stuff started to bring into my mind I how I regard the work that we're doing in cyber security for one thing because as we know It's relatively uncharted territory. We never know what dragon we're going to come across next. But

also for me, the neuroscience and the the brain is this rapidly rapidly growing area of scientific inquiry. You know, we hardly know anything about the brain even though we've been studying it for decades now, you know, seriously with with technology. And I think today is a really great opportunity where we can actually go into what we do know about the brain and how that is impacting on the well-being and the performance of the people that are working in cyber security including everyone in this room. So I just wanted to sort of see share with you that sort of parallel insight that I had and and I guess today our job is to help navigate through the part of the map that we do

know about and to share with that some insights that may be helpful for you. And with that I'm going to go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. I was just going to say and also you you're a cyber practitioner turned cyber minds founder to solve this problem with us all and you've been studying the mind since you were a kid. And I know we share that fascination when we first met. It's the mind is so interesting to me. For me, it was always about why are why do people do certain things? Why is some people perform a behavior that's not kind and others are kind? And so that's where it started for me. It's uh so I'm psyched to be working

with you on this project. And Kayla also practitioner become activist by being a practitioner, right? Yes. Hi everybody. I am Kayla Williams. I am the field CISO for Sierra, but very recently as in today it was announced. Um my my prior job was um CISO at DVO technology and before that I worked uh in VP of GRC so governance risk and compliance. So dealing a lot with angry customers, cut prospects, dealing with regulators, you know, having to pivot every time something changed globally would, you know, cause a lot of stress. Um before that I was doing work um at financial services and working as an auditor. So I actually have an a degree in accounting.

So I just kind of never chose the easy path to do anything. I think we can all can relate to that, right? I think it takes a special kind of person to want to be in security under the amount of stress that we face every single day in and out. um priorities change on the fly and that has a real impact on the way that we function as human beings and I'm kind of here representing that like the the practitioner side because I left my role as a CISO maybe to never return to it because of the stress and the burnout that I experienced and I got drawn to this cause because of that growing up as

a very anxious person not realizing that I had anxiety and now being medicated for the number of years that have been because of it has made me realize that I am responsible for my own mental health and physical health and and that's really you know why I'm here. I've learned so much from the two of you and I just want to thank you for letting me be a part of this panel to help educate all of you. Yeah, we learn through experiences and to be a practitioner and have experienced burnout and experienced getting out of burnout uh is really important for us and I think that's the first place that we should start and and

then we'll get into the neuroscience that this slide is heavy. It's super heavy. Like, take some deep breaths when you read this. And yet, we keep building technology to solve problems and not doing a whole heck of a lot to solve these problems up here that continue to get worse. And as somebody that was lucky enough to be hired out of college by two serial entrepreneurial men who I worked for for 21 years across three different companies, I see through a different lens because I was brought up through a different lens. We were told right when we were hired that we're here to build high performing teams and build really strong cultures and to care for

people and that your people are your strongest assets. And I'm now in my 50s and have been out in the workforce as a workaholic proudly in many ways. Uh and I have realized that um not many people have what uh I have. In fact, very very few. And so starting 11 years ago uh I decided this was something I wanted to tackle. And um again, it's getting worse. And so I don't I'm sure all of you when you read these stats and you look at these, you say to yourself, "Oh my gosh, like you know, who's talking about breaches being mistakes?" And who's we're not not talking about that for any other reason than it's not about pointing fingers.

And so, you know, who wants to talk about that because it then becomes pointing fingers, which we just have to say, no, we're not going to allow that to be the case. And we have to solve this. Like, our goal is that all of you leave here as activists. And if you're an employer or in the seat of a manager, you're leaving here with a greater sense of of accountability to how you show up in the workforce. And if you're uh not in a management seat, uh that you show up to recognize that you also can really impact how uh somebody feels at work. And um considering work is our livelihoods and it dictates where we

live and whether we're in safety or not in safety and whether we have health care or or the you know, clean water and all these things. I think we all should take it damn seriously. And so uh you know these stats are scary. Kayla, uh, why don't I'd love to hear from you what most has impacted you about these stats. The what's impacted me the most has been the way um it's made me feel as a leader. I've been a people manager for over a decade. Uh, and it helped me to realize that the my approach to my team was very different from apparently what every single person that's responded to these questionnaires or surveys has ever

had. I always wanted to lead from empathy first. I was raised by a single mom who had to work two jobs so I'd go spend the weekend at my grandmother's house and she wasn't there for things and that shaped me. It impacted me and made me not want to be that mother. I mean, nothing wrong with single moms. My mom kicked ass. So, I just want to put that out there. Um, I wanted to be present and I wanted to be the kind of leader that would allow people to take the time off that they need that could come to me and tell me that there was something wrong and would feel comfortable in that space.

And I never had that through my managers. My mother never had that. I mean, I remember saying to someone before like, I'm feeling really stressed out. I'm, you know, actually feeling physically ill about this that we have this thing that we have to do. And I was told to just suck it up, buttercup. Right. Like, you know, it's just one of those things. I didn't want to do that. Yeah, I put a poll on LinkedIn last week and I think I shut it down like 115 people is do you have a high EQ manager, a medium EQ, low or no EQ manager? And unfortunately, we have just under 50% that say low to no. And that's exactly

what you're talking about. You got a 50% chance that you're going to work for somebody that isn't there to care for you. And that's a problem. We have to stop allowing that to even exist. Uh and so yeah. Yeah, we can be what we don't want. Yes, it happens a lot in life. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Peter, how about you? These stats and Yeah. that struck me when I saw these was just how uniformly distributed this kind of sentiment is across the industry and wherever we go, we're sort of in several jurisdictions now, it's the same story. And that's telling me that that's not about the individuals. It's actually about what we are asking of them. the

context in which we're asking them to operate you know and you know all the dimensions of uh you know the stressors but I could talk about a few and I probably will later on but really you know if you could name half a dozen it would be the relentlessness of the threat environment in which we're operating the fact that you can't see when you're succeeding when you're winning which is quite unique when you think about many of the jobs that are out there it's one of the few roles where a good day is that something negative didn't And yet when you're doing positive things, it's very hard to demonstrate that that plays into uh one dimension of

burnout that I will be talking about in a while around questioning your own value. And when that starts to happen, you're kind of heading for the door. And we're doing some research ongoing started in Australia that we're rolling out that is showing uh some concerning aspects of that particular dynamic. The other thing that struck me around the these stats is uh that um it is actually having an impact on how the prof profession is being perceived and I think that has real implications for attracting new talent into cyber security and to the point on empathy. We really need to be doing a lot better as managers, as leaders to kind of create the environments where not only can

people feel some professional growth, but also that they feel um cared for and nurtured and able to stay within these roles of which we are asking so much. So I think you know short point on all of that is this is a global phenomenon. Yeah, it is something that we see across all dimensions of cyber security and it's something that I think has got to the point now where it's just not something that we can talk about. We've actually got to go in there and make some positive change. Yeah, absolutely. In in all of us making change and I believe we need regulation, too. As anybody that's been following me or known me for a couple of years, I've

been uh advocating for compliance control. I thought, well, only compliance makes everybody's budget and makes everything happen. Let me go see what I can do there. Or uh regulation. I was actually at the White House last May talking about this at the cyber jobs summit. Uh and um you know, where we want to bring in 400,000 new cyber professionals. I'm like uh do you know what's happening to the cyber professionals we have? and they have no protections like pilots and emergency workers and healthc care uh folks have so many protections that our cyber folks don't and it freaks me out. It makes me feel insecure. And so uh that's why I'm out here being an activist. And so let's

look at this. Um, you know, I think we all hear the word burnout and I think we can easily just think it's time off or that it's the the attack surface is so great and we never win, which is where it started. That's certainly where it started. But it's all of these things. And I would venture to guess that at least 50 to 60% of our workforce cultures are dealing with 60 to 70% of what's on this screen. And that's why we're just continuing down the path of severe burnout where people of my age are getting sick. Um they are retiring because they don't want to have the stresses. I mean a chief information security officer basically is like the

scapegoat still today as we know and only getting worse. Y so um and you know the political climate call it economic climate call whatever you want it has disrupted our work uh place so significantly it's put this problem into you know steroid land as we call it right so I think it's really important before we get into the neuroscience to just take a few minutes and and and really look at what is burnout what can we control ourselves and be accountable for ourselves. Like I had to quit smoking two packs of cigarettes a day in my late 20s. I had to. My brain was like, "You're going to die. What are you doing?" And then my

other half of my brain was like, "You have all these people following you and you're teaching and it's super cool to smoke. Get, you know, and so I've had to do lots of things to stay in the game to stay in the game of health and happiness and corporate capitalism." and and yet there's some things that uh if I wasn't the founder or the CEO that I would have no control over that are up here, but managers do. And so we we got to we got to find the ones that we need to be accountable for. And then we've got to work with our employers or those of us that are employers to really change the

rest of this stuff because it's it's it's just compounding. I mean, I just made this uh list, I don't know, maybe six months ago, and I was like, "Oh, man. There's a couple more things I need to add now that AI has actually come into the workforce." Because, you know, you've got people being like, "How do you reduce more now now that AI is in doing blah blah blah?" You know, it's like every day people are like being told, "How do you do more with less now that you have AI?" Uh, and that's that's really only been the last six months when we were already dealing with doing more with less, right? cyber professionals could never really uh sell

the the the return on investment. Well, and that's caught up with us. And so, what do you want to say about this, Kayla? You know, I was just going to say before we we move forward, um if you're in a spot where you can influence, you know, the work that other people are doing, whether you're, you know, a line manager, a peer, a project manager, the one thing up there that has always stood out to me because I experienced it myself is like being an underutilized resource. I specifically recall numerous instances where I asked for more because I was bored and I was told no and at a role I had in a previous life um the

director of the sock was leaving and I was the director of GRC and I went to the CISO and I said hey I want to take over that role can we come up with something new for me to do and the folks on the sock team send emails being like we want her to be our leader because she's got GRC she can teach us so much about why it's important for us to be where we are. They like will teach her what she needs to know. We just really want to like work with her. And I was told no. I was told you're a mom. Really? You you can't do that. You're going to be so busy. No, no, no. So, I

had to interview all these people for the role. They hired someone and I left. I was like, see you later. Um, and I really feel like there'll be much more happiness in the workplace if people are able to get stretched. And if you have the opportunity to offer that to someone, if they come to you and you can, you know, influence that, please do give them stretch goals. Don't worry about them failing. I mean, of course, you're going to worry about people failing. You never want them to fail, but don't feel like you can't allow them to fail because even in failure, you learn. So, that's all I wanted to say. I always love that you bring, you know,

what it's like to be a woman to this conversation. I was just looking like, do I even have, you know, that even on this list? Meaning, as a woman, all of this is worse. Yeah. you know, I should put a little disclaimer across the bottom. I think I will from now on. And um and uh and for that exact reason, and you know, sometimes that can come from love that and it didn't for you, but for me and those two founders that I work for for 21 years, they literally I heard them pitching my job that I got at Rapid 7 and I was number 18 to to a male colleague of mine. And I said, "Why are

you doing that?" "Well, you just got married, DJ. You're probably going to I was like, "What?" Ah. You know, and as soon as they saw me react like that, they they felt bad. And of course I got the job. But um it's very rare that it comes from love like that. Uh and it is a problem for women and it and professional efficacy which is what I want you to talk about next is all over this thing is what you're talking about. Being underutilized impacts our professional efficacy as much as it does being overutilized. It's it's no different. It impacts the brain the same way. Right. Well actually interesting you should raise that. We have been doing um

in-house like analyses of companies and uh we came in with the assumption that everyone was going to be too stressed, overstressed, over stimulated and and hypervigilant and all the things that many of them are. But uh it surprised us there actually roles coming back to us saying we could do more and the fact that I'm not being stimulated enough is actually taking me off my game as well. And so I think the message we got and we gave a full report to the organization. One of the recommendations was make sure that you match the demands of the people with the skills that they bring so that you everyone's feeling like they're actually being productive in the

workplace and not just there staring at a blank screen all day long because something might happen. So I think there's a really interesting discussion around what does optimization look like in terms of you know the appropriate level of stimulation. We want to get into that the center of this what they call the Jüks Dodson bell curve too too much stimulation bad too little stimulation bad as well. We want to get back into that sweet spot right which is which is the responsibility of an employer and again having been in the workforce now for a little over 30 years we've gone backwards in terms of how much investment is given to people. I mean, it's it's the the lowest it's ever

been. Whereas, when I came into the workforce 30 years ago, it was pretty common that people were in training programs. I mean, I literally started in a program where it was mapped out from entry level to all the way to CEO. We knew how to build these companies, what we had to do, and how what to navigate. And all departments were like that. And so, you know, I liken it a little bit to the government or not a little bit, a lot to the government. We need more career mapping, more career support. We've gone the opposite way, training. We must advocate for this and we must I'll say this as the operator of the largest cyber talent firm in the United

States that you h if you have skills, you can vote with your feet. Uh if you don't have skills and you're coming new to cyber, it's going to be very difficult. But if you have skills, you can vote with your feet. And I encourage you all to do so. meaning we can't let ourselves be utilized in these environments if we're not going to be cared for. And and that's the one silver lining we have with this shortage. Um again, not doesn't apply to new to cyber. Whole another terrible problem we've got there. So, all right, Peter, we want to go deep into the neuroscience side of this. Meaning, okay, you got all those like if we went back, we got all

these things coming us at us. The typical, you know, alerts, emails, just the fast pace of the business, the lack of structure, lack of maturity, all these things, never mind low EQ man EQ managers and all this stuff coming at us and people are getting sick. So, what is happening? What happens to the brain? Well, let's look at what burnout is. I think first of all we talk about burnout a lot you like that we don't really understand that too much back no oh you're on that slide okay sorry I'm sorry go ahead so talking about this concept of you're fine uh it's not just feeling the overwhelm that many many people associate burnout with just too

much to do actually it's almost the opposite it's like there's nothing left the tank is empty the the work is still there but you're depleted And so we can talk about the three dimensions of burnout in a moment, but it is actually a neurological phenomenon. Ultimately, it's been recognized by the World Health Organization recently as a condition. So we have to talk about it more as something that is um firstly recognized, secondly understood, and thirdly then we have a pathway back to actually restoration. So how do we refill the tank is really a big part of that journey. Um, in terms of its impact, it really is impacting on your capacity to work effectively in the role. One of the

things that it does if you know if not not well managed is you start to feel less connected with the mission. You start to set back. It's actually a consequence of long-term unmanaged stress. So, it's what you could say comes after the stress. When the stress is chronic and is not there's no sort of no relief from it, you actually enter a deeper darker phase as it were we call burnout. That is where you're actually in that space of just depletion. We can talk more about that. I would liken that to depression. As someone who has been I mean I've been depressed my entire life and I've I have no qualms about talking about it. Um, I've been on medication

since I was about 13 to 14 years old. And the closest thing I can liken it to is being depressed where you just have no interest in anything anymore and you just you're kind of just there. Yeah, they're definitely parallel. So I wouldn't I mean we wouldn't equate the two because depression is a diagnosible condition. We actually do see that in cyber security as well. And I think you you know some of the research points to the fact that depression actually also can be a consequence of long-term unmanaged stress. Mhm. So, you know, there's many ways that we can come in at this, but let's keep working. The resignation and the skills loss is is a

long-term consequence of burnout if we're not managing it. Think about that. We're in an environment where worldwide we've got now about 4.8 million positions in cyber that are unfilled. I think the numbers around 350,000 in the US. Yeah. So, we already don't have enough people and yet people are leaving because we're not managing this issue. It just makes no sense at all. So I think that's really the call to action from today. Yeah. When we get to it is, you know, what's our duty as leaders within this area to create the environment where we we know what burnout is, we can talk about it openly with the team and also that we can um uh

come back and do some work on it. Yeah. I when I uh became a manager the first time in my career, I was super young and my mentor said to me, "Are you at the promotion dinner, are you ready to turn on and off the lights?" And I literally thought she was talking about the lights in the office because we had to be in at 700 a.m. and you know I was always last there. That was kind of how you did it. You worked the long hours. And I didn't find out till years later that she meant are you ready to have the power to turn people on or off? And is burnout is off.

That's what you just said, right? and on is excited, you know, a sense of joy, a sense of, you know, accomplishment, a sense of team. And that is the responsibility of a manager. I wish she would have told me. I mean, luckily, I naturally was that way. But once I realized I now use that in all my trainings to that's your job as a manager to turn you're either turning people on or you're turning them off. And unfortunately, we have a lot of off going on and a lot of people that become managers without management training because they're great individual contributors. And I don't necessarily blame them because there's more money in it. Typically, it also means a lot more

money. And again, in a in society, money keeps us out of harm way is out of harm's way. It keeps us with food on the table and and providing for our families. So, can we really blame people? Uh, you know, that's not what it's about. It's certainly about recognizing. And so, Peter, here's the brain. I love talk to us about what happens literally with the brain when we are in stress mode with all these things coming at us. We can't it it's overload. What happens? So, I said that burnout can be the consequence of long-term unmanaged stress. One of the main stressors we see is that we're not actually op the brain that we carry now

which is the product of 200 million years of evolution is not optimized for the kind of environment in which we're putting it. And to go back to ancient you know evolutionary biology that we do have a a defense uh or threat detection and response apparatus. It's called the lyic system and you've heard of the flight or fight response in the amydala. So now we are already hardwired to actually uh encounter stress and respond to it or or at least threat. The problem is that and what's driving a lot of this unmanaged stress and particularly when we get into anxiety and hypervigilance is that the part of the brain our danger center is activated but there's no cue

to turn it off because there is no physical threat actor that we can see has gone eventually you hope in a real life situation. And so as a result the psychological stressors keep the system locked on. We call that hypervigilance. And and in the longer term it starts to impact on the brain itself through neuroplasticity. Parts of the brain develop arguably unhealthy responses to unmanaged stress. Like you get the amydala actually will enlarge. And so even when there is no stress or present you are still remaining in that switched on state. Right? So if we can go to the next um you can't get out of it easily. No, you can't talk yourself out of it

because it's actually a neurological phenomenon which comes back to what we were saying. So if we look at burnout subjectively, it may feel like these subjective things that we're talking about, but really when we go into what the three dimensions, the three red flags of burnout that you really want to be looking for, one of them is emotional depletion. What I said at the beginning that the tank is empty, you're feeling drained, there is nothing left to give. And that as a leader that's bad because it means you can't be empathetic and you don't have the emotional reserves left to even not only not to care for yourself but anyone else and that can even map into the home environment. Um

secondly this sense of disconnection with mission I talked about cynicism or depersonalization is the second thing. So it's feeling more detached from the work. I don't know why I'm here. You know nothing's ever going to change. Uh why are we doing any of this? And so you the quiet quitting kind of phenomenon that we observe. Now you may have one or more of these if you're in burnout. The third one is the one that concerns me most because it's the one that predicts resignation intent and that's come through in our research and that's this sense of I'm not really good at what I'm doing. Lack of professional efficacy imposttor syndrome. Well that comes with it. Absolutely. And again it goes back

to the invisibility. You can't actually show that you're succeeding. And so you start to question your own effectiveness. we can move on to the next one. And golden handcuffs supports that. I mean, we all have golden handcuffs. I mean, there is money when you have skills too. So, when we look at I'll just quickly go to this one and then I'll I'll step back from this and we can think about it a bit. But we went and measured those three dimensions of burnout in Australia in our in our groundbreaking research. And on that third dimension, the loss of prof professional efficacy, we're actually polling worse than frontline healthare workers. And this is after a pandemic.

This made national headlines in Australia. We were on TV and radio and in the press. No one no one knew. Yeah. No one knew that these cyber people were actually feeling what they're feeling. And and to to have us worse than that those frontline professionals in a pandemic, right? I mean, that's a huge wakeup call. And as I say, this is the one of the three dimensions of burnout that predicts resignation intent in a in a profession where we already don't have enough people. So that's really a a great concern for us. It like hurts my soul to to to be as close as I am to seeing the burnout in real action. to see people with such skill and such um

just social service demeanors to be so uh lacking in professional efficacy. And um it's like enough. Let's let's change this. Let's What can What are you thinking, Kayla? Well, I don't know if you guys are as chronically online as I am. I'm sure you have seen like the meme that's been going around for years. It's like how do I tell my body that an email should not trigger sweat and like stress and turn that fight or flight on? And if you're finding that just a simple email coming in or seeing a name like it, you know, pops up on your watch or your phone and you're all of a sudden you're like uh and you feel like oh my gosh, like your

heart starts to race like that's a problem and that's not you know indicative of anything that's like wrong with you. It's could be the environment that you're in that's causing these stressors to happen. And like just today actually, I turned off my Slack notifications on my watch and my email because I was like my my watch was going crazy and I was like I just can't even look at it anymore because it was stressing me out so much and I mean I'm in California so long. I know. I know it's true. Um but I you know my my prior role I was a CISO and it was I was constantly on I couldn't turn it off. I

would wake up in the middle of the night and grab my phone just to like what I miss what happened and that alone I wasn't sleeping. I wasn't eating right. I was miserable. I mean we've if you've ever seen us talk before any of us but particularly me when I've been speaking with you both um you know I I mentioned that in my my role I got to the point where I just went to my boss and I was like I need a week off. I was hating who I was. I was mean to my kids. I was fighting with my husband. And I was like, "Whoa, it's bleeding over now. I don't like who I am." And I just I just

took the time off and I shut everything off. I mean, I I did turn it back on, Peter. I'm sorry. But I did that for that week. I was just disconnected from everything. And I just sat outside. It was in July and I just read books and it was glorious. I'm like, "This is how I should be feeling." I mean, it was the week was definitely not long enough, but I felt better. the lack of uh not caring for our uh professionals starts with the chief information security officer. I mean, I spend almost six hours of of my day with chief information security officers every day in workforce risk management work. And if they're being

cared for, then they can care for their teams. if they're not being cared for and they're working for people who are low EQ and interact with them poorly, it is a disaster all the way down. And it just again breaks my heart. Uh because really it is the above the chief information security officer where the EQ challenges are happening like in in innately most chief information security officers actually do have high EQ and I think that is because of the social servant side of of this industry. Uh they are dealing with the CFOs and the CEOs and I I know I have that title but I can say it. uh and um legal and HR

who are um are not caring for them and not understanding. And I you know I I would advocate that we need to do what we're talking about for every employee. It just I happen to be focusing on cyber because that's where my where I can have the most leverage. Again, why would we want to treat anybody any differently? Uh but the as a chief information security officer where you're so responsible and you could go to jail, you know, uh all these bad things can happen to you. It's it's uh it blows my mind. So should we try and lift spirits here? Seems so depressing. I'm sorry. I think we should me be moving to what

can be done and let's talk about the hope that we could bring and what the positive change is that we want to see. Yeah. and also you know where where we want this to be you know one two years from now if it start today you talked about EQ let me just break this down from my perspective and then you know you guys are are the experts in terms of workforce management but I think from our perspective we think there are actually burnout is not the same as stress taking two weeks or a week off as you did was great for stress but it's not going to cure your burnout that's a much deeper thing and so you really need

to be looking at what are the interventions that you can bringing bringing in bring in peer-informed interventions that have been tested. There's one we use that we've that's been come through the military that we're bringing into cyber and we can actually show reversals in 10 stress metrics and burnout and sleep quality improves and so on. So I think you got to be looking at actual psychological tools that you can bring into the workforce as part of being an empathetic leader. And then of course the other part is what is an empathetic leader? And this is where you guys could could really add value. Yeah. And we'll just uh you know we're going to take questions in just a couple of minutes,

but these five things may seem weird like really that's what you have to say. Work a calendar. And I say yes because you know how much upset happens in the workforce because people not showing up to meetings, not being on time to meetings, not being prepared for meetings. I mean come on. the the the workforce needs teams to move forward with productivity. And when we aren't accountable to a calendar, we're not. And so it is it is a major thing that I've seen over my years in the workforce of who's successful is is is being on time and being ready and being prepared. It all falls under that. But of course, win-win communication. I mean, this is this is

the type of training that we all need to have. It used to be only provided for salespeople and only salespeople needed to learn this communication. Well, now it's everybody and and and that ability to have win-win communication conversations all day long is the skill that will save you a lot of stress. Uh and then of course we've got up here listening. I mean, I suggest you listen more than we speak uh and are super accountable to that. We've got consistent self-care. I mean, you got to get up and stand up every hour and half hour or so and you got to, you know, stand up sit down desks and you got to walk and you got to do exercise and you

got to drink water and you got to eat healthy food and like you got to do that and you got to figure out how to make that happen with all the other things going on. Um, and you've got to be able to handle change tolerance. So, let's let's um Anybody want to comment on that before we go into some questions? I would just say change tolerance is just resilience, being able to pivot. We I think we all know it. It happens every day. So I would just say go read um Who Moved My Cheese? The best book ever. And it is true. We must expect change on a regular basis. And so if we are not

prone to liking change, we need to reprogram our brain. And you can reprogram your brain that in terms of how you uh deal with emotions like what makes you sad, what makes you happy, what makes you mad. I wish I had learned this when I was younger. I'd be in the Supreme Court justice. I guarantee it. Uh but I didn't. and nobody told me uh and uh when I learned it in my 30s like oh I can reprogram you know how I feel when certain things happen and that really empowered me and I did tons of training of called transformational mind dynamics uh and uh it was all about change tolerance and um and other all

these other things you see here and much more but uh so let's who's got the iPad for questions it's you Peter you gonna you got that right there let's see what's here And certainly if anybody's in the audience. Well, that's not true. We're supposed to use this thing, right Dana? I'm gonna use this thing. Nothing. Oh, here we go. A lot of people on YouTube. If you had to pick one superpower related to neuroscience, in cyber security, what would it be? That's a good question. In cyber security, superpower, if you had to pick one, well, I mean, we see neurode divergence as a positive in cyber security. Yes. So that for one thing is something that um

uh should is often seen as a as an advantage. The one thing I could say about that is though that neurode divergent individuals arguably need some extra support in the workplace and so bring them in by all means but support them as well because there are going to be and and the research is showing that they are more prone to burnout. So so I think there's that sort of double-edged sort of aspect to it. Bring them in but support them. I think similarly with women as well, you know, all this thing we talk about cognitive diversity now is the thing that we're looking for. Yeah. Um they we need to give that support across the board. And I think that ties

into the, you know, leaders leadership at blind spots. You have to know your team. You have to be able to be a manager for everybody and you have to also manage pe your peers up and down, you know, whatever it might be. And I think that kind of ties into the neurode divergence. Like I had team members who were neurode divergent and I knew I could only speak to them a certain way and follow up with an email with things to do because they told me that's what they liked. That's how it worked for them. Very different from how I talked to somebody else. And you have to make space for those people and you have to

be accommodating and that's where the EQ comes in. So if you're a leader and you don't recognize your team's stressors and you don't recognize that someone on your team is struggling with burnout or they're close to burnout, you're not being a very good manager. Yeah. There's a question there on the is there a relationship between burnout and work for home versus working in the office? Good question too. Um again I could just quickly throw in our observation on that is that one of the big dynamics that we see in working from home is a sense of isolation comes through very strongly because you've got don't have the social connection that is supporting you as you

would in a physical workplace. Um the key there is to recognize that as a factor and manage it and so you've got to do interventions where you can actually overcome a sense of isolation and it can be more than just um you know happy hour on Friday so you know over zoom or something but I think it you really need to go a bit deeper there because isolation is playing on you it's playing on your emotions it's playing on your cognitive um reserves because you're you're now burning a lot of cycles just feeling terrible and trying to feel normal while feeling terrible. Um which is um interesting thing in itself. Um so I think yeah definitely

the pandemic did change a lot of the burnout statistics that we're seeing within cyber security and I think all the more reason why we want to be alive to that and then figure out strategies where we can go the extra mile and try and bring the balance back. I love that. I love the superpower build communities build be in the community all the time. Somebody over here has a question. Yes. Thank you for giving this talk. I actually gave a talk as last week on burnout. Yay. Seattle. And first of all, it's great to hear you making a lot of the same points I and my co-presenter did. So that's that's cool. Um I'm uh I'm also

neurodiverse. In fact, one of the things I asked the room at that time was how many people who are neurodeiverse? Half the hands went up. Yeah. freaking nuts. Yeah, it's true. Yeah. And so, one of the things I'd love to hear you talk more about is how to tune into preventing burnout for people with neurodiversity specifically. Um, like what techniques are you recommending people bring to bear even more? And um, one of the reasons why I gave the talk was I'm sick and tired of people saying, "Oh, you should take breaks to get rest." Yeah, that's not it. What I'm curious is, can you talk more about what do we need to be doing that we're not

Yeah, for sure. I'd say before the digital era, it was time off. Now we're all connected. It's not. So, what do you want to say, Peter, to to specifically neurode divergent folks? What's the difference? I I would just I mean we're looking at it through the lens of the the integrative restoration protocol that Richard Miller developed actually right here in California and it's actually interesting because it auto configures to the need of the individual. One of the things that we saw with the typical um mental health support programs in organizations which are known as EAPs I think you have heard of employee assistance programs tends to be very oneizefits- all not customizable down to the individual. So if you're

neurode divergent, you know, an EAP is probably not going to cut it unless you're lucky enough to find someone that understands, you know, neurode divergence and has the skills to actually assist you directly. So the other way to go is to use some technology or methodology like this protocol that I talk about that Richard Miller developed. It's it's a 10step sequence where you're going deep into your emotional state into deep relaxation, physiological rest. But the idea is that you are rebuilding resilience at a neurological level. So that even a person who's neurode divergent that might be actually finding it difficult to operate within a social environment or or even managing isolation if that's the case has skills

that they can apply that will actually speak directly to what it is that they are feeling rather than something that is very generic. And I think if there's one main point I would like to emphasize today, it is really start looking at these much more efficacious and targeted interventions that are available now. And I mean HR is a bit of a problem here because they will tend to say this is our silo and here's the EAP and as cyber people we need to say no, we need more than this. Yeah. So I think that's tempted and unfortunately we're being told we're out of time here. That's it. Holy moly, too fast. Thank you so much

everybody. Round of applause. Keep it going. For day three, we've got Peter, Kayla. Thank you very much, folks. This was very revealing. Uh, you probably saw me take a lot of screenshots.