Love Your Cyber Life: Wear Your BRA

good morning it's uh my pleasure to welcome karen worstel karen is a serial assisto for iconic companies across industry sectors and the silicon valley technology leader her keynote presentation is titled love your cyber life wear your bra and provides recommendations for a successful career in cyber security all yours karen great hey thank you so much for inviting me to speak to you this morning i have multiple cameras here so i'm going to take a minute to kind of get adjusted to uh where i'm looking because i want to be looking at you um i'm i'm very grateful to have the opportunity to be here today and i hope um you'll get a lot out of this and

as we come to the end of the presentation if you have any thoughts or questions i'd be happy to answer any questions that you have so many years ago i stood in the produce section at the local market looking for apples apples apples apples where were the affordable apples because you see i had a two-year-old and a five-year-old and i had 13 dollars in my pocket to last me for the next two weeks 49 cent per pound apples which seems like such a bargain today they were completely out of reach and in desperation i swallowed what was left of my pride and i went to the produce manager to ask him if he had any apples that he had pulled

from the shelf that he'd be willing to sell to me for a discount and it was so it's so vivid in my mind right now remembering that still small voice of inner wisdom that i could hear that said there has to be a better way than this and you can do this so about that same time my biggest ally my big geeky hacker brother michael he came over to my house and across my kitchen table he spread out a trs-80 model one computer with a serial number of six and said to me sister you need to learn to code well i'm a 98 percent left-brained creative i studied music performance and i did that until my early 20s i

thought when i was young i would grow up and design ball gowns for barbie dolls i designed and sewed all my own clothes all the way through college and i had managed to get undergraduate degrees in chemistry and biology through sheer will and hard work but still this whoring blinking machine intimidated me i was sure that if i did something wrong typed in something wrong it would go up in smoke so i finally sat at that keyboard and tentatively typed in the words h-e-l-l-o hit enter and nothing bad happened that blinking nine inch monitor with that amber cursor it just kept blinking at me and all the various ribbons and cables and components just sat there so

with michael's help i learned to program and go beyond playing games i started programming in visual basic and then i taught myself a programming language called fourth and i loved programming and i found out i was really good at it so when the local graduate school opened up a program in computer science for a master's degree that's when i heard that voice again and it said you can do this so have you ever had that experience when you had kind of that heartfelt inspiration about something that you knew could happen something that you knew you could do and then your head starts all kinds of noise some people call it imposter syndrome for me my head got super noisy and it sounded

like this i thought you wanted to be a good mother don't forget you have a two-year-old and a three-year-old by the way you have zero money and you suck at math which i kind of do so to make a long story shorter i applied i got in two years later i graduated from university with my master's degree in computer science my first job happened before i finished my thesis as a security analyst and 15 years later i left my job as the chief information security officer at microsoft to start my own cyber security consultancy and share my lessons learned and experiences toward a more inclusive work culture where everyone has voice and an impact so you may think this is an

extraordinary journey from a broke mom of toddlers to a chief information security officer with of multiple iconic brands like microsoft at t russell investments but what i know for sure is that just like all of you this journey happened one ordinary day at a time it took an unshakeable belief in that still small voice that carried me through it all and it took up showing up every day even when things got tough and as i look back on it it took a lot of allyship starting with my big brother michael people who believed in me and held me up people who made it possible for me to go even further to go to university as a broke

mom of toddlers and to help make sure my kids were cared for that path to the top of my profession in large part happened because of three things that i'm going to talk to you about today whenever it got tough these three things helped me they helped me by reminding me it can be better than this and you can do this so today i'm here to share with you those three things because tech can be far better than it is now and i believe with all my heart that it is within your power and mine to make it so you see tech suffers from a lack of diversity it's a la and a lack of inclusion and a lack of

equity 30 years ago when i got my master's degree women were 34 of the computing workforce today that number is far south of the 23 percent that it officially hit in 2016 when the aauw published its report on women in stem called why so few every area of stem over the last 30 years has shown growth in diversity and inclusion except computing and the huge question for me when i learned that fact was why part of my path to that understanding inc you know it includes what seems like a huge detour but in hindsight now it makes perfect sense because at the time that that report came out i was a chaplain i had just completed 2 000 hours of

clinically supervised training in pastoral care in addition to another master's degree and i was serving as the palliative care fellow at the va hospital in portland throughout my time as a chaplain one of the things that i noticed was that i had seen firsthand the similarities between the distress in people in the tech sector and distress of families and patients in crisis and there's a principle in chaplaincy called the principle of proximity and what that basically says is that the chaplain does not sit in her foxhole or her or i'm sorry the chaplain does not sit in her field tent waiting for the front line to come and make an appointment she goes and sits with the front line in

the foxhole and my foxhole is in tech my still small voice said to me again tech is your foxhole it can be better than this you can do this and so i left made the decision at that time when i learned this information about parity inequity and inclusion in tech and left the chaplaincy and came back to tech and i returned with a big hairy audacious goal to create a more inclusive work environment and to reverse the trend of women and under underrepresented groups leaving tech in my lifetime so these facts are current i'll give you a few facts and then we're going to dive into the three things six percent of partner level pay in big

tech goes to women this pattern carries across all of tech in a meal a meloo that author emily chain calls brotopia it's a symptom of a culture that doesn't value the voices of people who are different than the decision makers at the top life cycle processes in hr are designed unfortunately to reinforce the existing dominant culture and you if you have differences must fit in i do an exercise in all of my workshops that sounds like this it's it's kind of designed to make everyone feel equally uncomfortable right at the beginning and break the ice but i have everyone walk around the room three times the first time we walk around the room we walk around the room as ourselves the

second time people walk around the room i ask them to do so by embodying the energy that is the opposite of what they embodied when they walked around the room the first time and the third time we walk around the room we're not supposed to walk around the room as anything and be completely neutral and when we debrief when this is over the feedback that i always get with every single group is that walking around the room the first time as ourselves feels great the second time we walk around the room everyone spends about 30 to 50 percent of their energy trying to figure out who they're supposed to be and the third time they walk around the

room people use the language like all the energy went out of the room we looked like zombies time slowed down and my answer to that is welcome to corporate america because you see we don't create an environment where people can bring all of their variety and all of their rainbow and all of their diversity into the workplace and shine and create the kind of work environment where creativity and innovation really thrives what we do is we create a corporate blender where everyone comes in with all of their variety we put you all in because to fit you must blend to bland beige right so let's get to why we're going to talk about what we're going to talk about

today because here's the truth when we lift one up all rise so when we embrace the benefit of inclusion in the cyber business it's equivalent to promoting creativity innovation and diversity of thought that will help us in this asymmetric war that we're fighting right now and that's eating our lunch so this is our foxhole we're in it together it matters for all of us in cyber security because creating a workplace where everyone has a voice is the right thing to do and because we cannot begin to address the challenges that we face in cyber today with when our community is disengaged out of frustration for the next little bit i'm going to show these three pillars that you can do

right now every day and that will make a difference three things belief resilience and allyship and yes that spells bra in case you wondered where that came from the first pillar in the difference that you can make is belief when megan came to our two-day intensive that we do she was a senior software engineer and her experience led her to believe that it was best to fly under the radar she was frustrated that although she was considered a high potential employee she did not receive the visibility opportunities or compensation that her work deserved and after our two-day intensive this is what she wrote i have a renewed sense of self-awareness and confidence and i've learned that my professional

self-worth listen to this very important is in no way dependent on what i am able to accomplish how productive i am or how others perceive me i've also learned that the true value in making genuine connection is with is making genuine connection with the people that i work with and that i don't need to do it all on my own and get by on mere merit and solid work ethic i'm much more likely to ask questions contribute in meetings and admit that i don't understand something and talk to people about my work experience and how things are going with me i'm a lot more confident in my skill set and i'm better at reading my own emotional state and attempting to

read others i'm much more comfortable with reaching out to people those are megan's words when we believe we can make a difference we do this was not something that we did to fix megan she already had all of the ability to make this happen it just took a little bit of a reset the mindset reset that happened with megan was almost instantaneous she influenced her she went on to influence her leadership she helped shift the culture got visibility got a promotion and a degree of assurance that was incredibly self-satisfying for her career the power of belief to make a difference is a hope that comes deep from your own inner wisdom just like the inner wisdom that spoke to me at

that very beginning of that journey unlocking that power of that belief comes from knowing how to listen to that inner voice and believing it so why don't we do this all the time because most of the time we as cyber people are all up in our heads we deal with systems and data and facts and metrics and when you're in your head it's very hard to pay attention to that still small voice believing in the difference you will make begins with knowing your inner self your in and knowing that your unique inner wisdom is powerful listen to it make room every day for what i call the download and setting aside the to-do list and the

head noise and just listen so what is your inner voice saying to you right now besides when is she going to finish her i invite you to take a moment and listen and record a voice note on your smartphone when this talk is over and capture that get accustomed to listening to your own smooth voice the voice of your heart and capture that each time without judgment and without all the noise from your head it is it telling it is telling you something important and at the end of the week with all of these notes you've captured review them do you see a pattern do use any particular message really stand out so that's all i have to say about belief

let's move on to the next topic in our three points the r in bra stands for resilience resilience is basically the ability to get up one more time than you've been knocked down in its simplest form it's easy to say and it takes being brave it takes courage it takes knowing yourself well enough that you don't believe the fake news that your own inner your own head tells you about what other people think of you this is the antidote to imposter syndrome by the way it means not succumbing to imposter syndrome it means that feeling it means overcoming that feeling that once people find out who you really are they won't support you anymore resilience takes knowing the warning

signs of burnout of knowing when you are just surviving and not thriving it takes courage to take time for self-care for fueling your brain and your body in the best possible way and resilience is the courage to say at the end of each day i will try again tomorrow in our five day online challenge called that we call flame proof which is another word for personal resilience i walk you through the five steps that could change your life and not only help you but help your team a rock star senior engineer recently did the program and wrote this to me just yesterday i was stuck in a vicious burnout funk and miss warstell's flame proof your

career reignited and energized my motivation to focus on priorities and goals in my professional and personal life considering the insightful lectures combined with exercises that elicit self-exploration i highly recommend the course the journey allowed me to develop the skills necessary to evaluate my needs and desires such that i could identify and realize career ambitions in a healthy fashion and while ensuring i took care of myself and my family i was thrilled to hear that so for anyone interested in more info on that um please dm me on linkedin and even if you're not interested in the course that's fine i will please dm me on linkedin following the presentation i would love to hear from you and connect

there let's talk just a little bit more about burnout for a minute do you know the number one no i always ask this of cyber people do you know the number one sign of burnout in an organization it's cynicism right cynical jokes in cyber security by the way are the best but cynicism is born from a wounded place cynicism comes from life experience that was traumatic or deeply disappointing and we all have that for many people cynicism is the protective mechanism that's not rational but it goes like this if i expect that people are self-serving self-interested and incompetent i won't ever be sucker-punched by trusting someone who will only let me down that's cynicism have you ever heard that in your

organization let me tell you this the big problem with cynicism is that it's contagious cynicism its impact on organization is like pouring gasoline on a campfire in a bone-dry grass line grassland during a chinook wind we are most often willing to believe the negative and not shift perspective to look for the positive i have an exercise i call turn it and turn it and the next time you see something that seems very much out of character ask yourself this question what's up with that don't get mad get curious take the decision and turn it around and examine every possible angle of it so that you can understand why the decision was made the way it was all right quickly let's

talk about allyship i know i'm running out of time here so i just took a look at the clock ally ship is the third component in bra allyship but and uh uh and at the rsa conference in 2018 we used b and ally as our hashtag it actually trended and and i thought this was really pretty incredible until somebody turned around and say you know you can read that multiple ways and i was like uh right so i don't know if you see it but we're talking about be an ally not the other ways that you can read that hashtag allyship is a new term and a lot of meaning is poured into it by

different people and you may not agree with some of it here's how i use allyship very quickly when a very well-known first century jewish teacher walked the earth he was asked the question what is the most important law for us to keep i'll paraphrase it like this the most important law law is to love the creator with all you've got and the second most important law is just like it and that is to love your neighbor as yourself so the attributes are of the creator that we all could we all possess and can practice every day our mercy graciousness slow to anger kindness truthfulness being forgiving compassionate and just that my friends is allyship i want you to fill your cup with these

attributes that you possess so that you have the opportunity to share them with the people around you and on those days when it doesn't work ask yourself what's up with that you know there is there's so much more i could share with you i'd be happy to connect with you more on linkedin i want to just give a couple minutes here for any questions that you may have we are have just finished talking about belief allyship belief resilience and allyship ask yourself what it would be like to live in a world like that it's possible if we all we're our bra every day if you find yourself struggling remember there's a lot of resources to help you

with this wear your bra every day imagine it dream it do it you can do this thanks for your time

do we have any questions i'm not quite sure what we do next thanks karen um let's see i've been monitoring i didn't see any questions so far but uh if uh folks in general want to post questions for the ama please feel free to do so now and i can read them to karen uh so we have a question from aaron what should we be looking for in someone who isn't reaching out that needs help well what should you be looking for in someone who needs help and they're not reaching out and um i i would say um well you've already seen something because you believe they need help and they're not reaching out um and your

allyship in that situation is one i think of kindness right so when you can reach out to someone and say hey i just want to check in with you how it's how's it going this just happened to me a couple of days ago because i had a tip that someone really needed to hear a word of kindness and they were at a conference actually and i texted them and said how's it going and i didn't hear back so i picked up the phone and called them and just said hey i've been thinking about you and i really want to chat how's it going and so you can you know don't ever be afraid i think we all kind of have this

nervousness that we're poking our face into something where we don't belong um but you be brave you know the worst thing that can happen is they ask us to go away um at least you've done your kindness part to reach out i hope that helps be sure to damn me on linkedin too if you have any questions following up from this i'll be happy to answer anything that i get in the next week or so uh see we have another question from slammer uh do you have methods to rescue those that have burnt out and left the community wow um so in the five-day online course and i'm not here trying to push that but one of the

things that i emphasize in that is the one of the reasons we burn out and i've been there twice so i'm kind of a slow learner sometimes i guess but um that one of the things that's very helpful is to know what you want and to be willing to set the boundaries around that that will help you make sure that that happens and to show to know in a in a very clear way that you're working every single week on something that contributes to those goals of yours that are very important so as an example one of the goals that i set for myself and it was an important one for me to set and be very

explicit about because i was always so busy working which was i would i create um amazing experiences and memories with my family and my loved ones that means that every week i take time uh if not every day but it's usually not every day um to do something about that goal right even if it's making a great dinner or whatever it's something that i'm doing and i can tell myself at the end of every week that i am working on the things that are important to me there's a lot more about that um in the course but that's one of the ways to do it is to know what you want and make sure that you're setting

boundaries that make sure that you can do them thanks see we have another question from aaron um yes what can we do to create a more inclusive community for underrepresented individuals wow thank you for asking that question um we have so much work to do um tech is not tech is a place where we're moving at a very very fast rate and in order to move very quickly what we tend to do is self-select people who are like us who think like us who make decisions like us and we have to be willing to be patient for a process where communications of diverse ways of communicating whether a person is neurodiverse or ethnically diverse or

gender diverse how do we listen to them how do we seek to understand because it takes time to do that you will 100 percent always get better solutions and better decisions if you take that time but it's frustrating for us i think the number one thing we can all do is learn to slow down just a little bit i i always kind of use the phrase you know slow is smooth and smooth as fast take the time to be slow because you'll go much faster in the long run thank you i think we might have one more question uh oh we do uh how can a company be more inclusive to parents i love that question um so

not just parents but also people who are caring for elders right because i did that five times while i was in cyber security um and uh i'm about to go back into cyber security again for the first time without children or grown-ups to take care of um having on-site child care wow like if i had a way if if i had to go into the office how i could have um child care now in work from home we've really highlighted how hard it is for people who are caring for family members at home to be able to concentrate and focus and i think we just we fundamentally have to change the way we think about the workplace and

um having those conversations those are fairly brave conversations to have um i think people are going to be a little bit afraid that they'll be seen as asking for special accommodations or whatever but um you know start if it's not happening in your workplace already start the conversation and and and let's be really clear about how hard work from home has been for anyone who is it's been hard for everybody in different ways but for family members it's been particularly difficult and we lost we lost 10 percent of the women in the tech workforce due to work from home during the pandemic it set us back it set us back dramatically in terms of any kind of progress towards

equity in the workplace because so many people had to drop out it's i think the thing right now is just to make sure that the conversation doesn't doesn't go silent about how important it is for us to make sure that we value families um extended families and you know every variety of family while we're trying to all make a great tech workplace thank you for asking the question okay still i see a little bit more activity in the channel so i'll see if there's another question coming huh we do have another question uh so this is from punk coder uh how do we bring along management that are not fully on track with dei oh yeah

i i don't have a great answer for that um and if you just take a look at what's happening at uh some of the big tech firms right now well even this has been going on for for decades but the the um the culture does not favor diversity equity and inclusion just as i talked about and some companies are making a difference intel is a good one vmware is a good one right there's companies that are really working on it for those companies that are not there is cultural shift that needs to be happening and the only way that's going to really really change is when the message is coming down from the top it's very hard to do culture change from

the bottom or from anywhere in the middle so my suggestion is it's conversation it has to be really brave conversation if you've got individuals who they may have a blind spot let me give you some hope with that i had two managers one time this wasn't about diversity equity and inclusion but i had two managers both of them women directors in my organization who needed to me to hear something they had to say to me because i was interfering in their jobs in a way that was making it hard for them to lead their organization i was blind to this they sat down one day and they said we have to talk to you and they very bravely kind of laid it on

the line is like this is what you're really really good at we want you to do more of that we want you to stop doing this because it's making our jobs hard and i was blown away by their courage and um and we were able to work out that difference because they were truly speaking to my blind spot so you kind of have to gauge the person if this is something where they just it's a belief system and they bel they actually don't believe in dei then you're going to have a harder time because poking at somebody's belief systems is is a very difficult thing to do but if you have someone who just has a blind spot and you can

shed some light on that i think that's a very good thing to do i hope that helps it's hard when that that's the case and i guess i have a brief follow-up to that um do you think uh how do you think the approach for di like can that look different at different companies well yeah i think when you when you say dei it means different things to different people right and having an a at the end of the day here's what i found most helpful about dei at a high level when intel made the decision that they were their internal workforce was going to reflect their customer base and demographics they got very intentional about how they

were going to um rebalance their workforce and one of the things that they found as they were doing that and this is where our phrase about when we lift one all rise comes from is from the intel experience because when intel did that what one of the things that happened was you know they had 50 say they have 50 white men in the organization and what they found was for the first time in the organization their voice was being heard the big benefit of inclusion is not that we're hitting certain numbers the benefit of inclusion is that everybody's voice gets heard no matter who they are and there isn't a weight given to somebody because

of a particular class gender whatever that might be that they're and we don't really have meritocracy we haven't achieved that i think we even have a podcast out there called meritocracy is dead but but the truth of it is is that if you can uh this is the practice that has to start with each one of us and this is why on our podcast we talk about making the workplace making the tech workplace better from the inside out the inside is here we all can do a piece and the way we can do the piece is to make sure that we learn how to help other voices be heard and you know dei is driven by lots of different motives

and lots of different pieces of the organization it's going to be different things in different places but at the end of the day it is how do we show up in my book allyship dei shows up as how do we show up with kindness mercy graciousness being slow being patient right being just being compassionate how do we show up with that every day how do we fill our own cup so that we're able to fill other people's cup um every single day with the way we come to work i think that's how we're going to get there to be honest grassroots thank you so much that was that was yeah those were this is a great

discussion well thank you thank you so much for having me i'm really grateful to have the chance to be here and um please please please connect with me on linkedin i would love to hear from you thank you very much thanks