Latest / Workplace Confessions: Behind Closed Doors / Meet Eric Reiners, Author of The Energy Edge

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Meet Eric Reiners, Author of The Energy Edge · Workplace Confessions: Behind Closed Doors

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Workplace Confessions Behind Closed Doors.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Elsa Barbie.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm Don Andrews.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: We have been friends since sixth grade.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Somewhere between a car wash job, a few questionable boy choices, and 40 years of friendship, we became the kind of people who always want to know what was really going on, including at work.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: Don spent 25 years as an employment lawyer digging into workplace drama from the inside out.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: I built a long career in the beauty industry as a brand educator with a few TV cameos sprinkled in for fun.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: We came up in very different industries, but we have the same passion, meeting new people and asking how they got their jobs, what they love, what they can't stand, and what happens behind closed doors.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: Every episode we talk to a new guest about their lived experience in the world of work.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: And because our guests stay anonymous, they can spill the truth without the fallout.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: We get into the choices they made, the tiny cruelties, the surprise kindnesses, and some of the moments that never make it into human resources reports.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: Equal Parts informative and titillating.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: This show stirs up all the tea while honoring the incredible, complicated, often messy work people are doing across the industries and across the map.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Workplace Confessions Behind Closed Doors.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: Let's get into it.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: He's held senior leadership roles including CTO, CIO, VP of product, and VP of Engineering at high growth technology companies, where he launched award-winning products and responded to high-profile cybersecurity attacks.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: The high stress environment of cybersecurity inspired him to create the Corporate Athlete Program, which helps corporate professionals train, perform, and recover like pro-athletes so they can feel great, stress less, and love their work.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Eric is here to share with us his new book, The Energy Edge.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: And without further ado, we'll jump right in with questions.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: So, Eric, what was your very first paying job?
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so in in high school, I grew up on a farm, so I got a lot of unpaid gigs where you're just expected to do all the chores before dinner.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: But so I think my first paid gig was AW Ripbeer.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_02: You ever been to an AW drive-thru?
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Love it.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: And so I was the fry cook and I worked with this guy, I think his name was Jim, and he had burns on his arms.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_02: He'd been there a while.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_02: So I was like, this is not the long-term goal for me.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_02: But I did a variety of, I ended up as a wheel cook at a restaurant called Perkins, and I worked at the 10 p.m.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_02: to 6 a.m.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: shift when I was in high school.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: So I would go home and sleep for an hour and then go to high school.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_02: That was my senior year.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_02: And I got to witness a lot during that, especially the 1:30 a.m.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_02: to 2 30 a.m.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: kind of shift area.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, so I did a bunch of stuff like that.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_02: But what I learned was I was well, I was into computers and writing code and cracking video games and stuff like that.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I was, I got my first paid consulting gig when I was 14 as a freshman in high school for a real estate agent.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I realized, oh my gosh, you can do money outside of retail as a teenager.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_02: And that actually led to a long-term relationship, which led to consulting gigs through college as well.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: So it helped me pay for college and I had this long-term relationship with this real estate agency.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: So that was cool.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: I realized, oh, you can make money writing code instead of slogging away at the fryer.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_02: So that was my, I don't know, before college, into college years.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: Excellent.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: Awesome.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: And tell us what you do now.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, today I'm a chief technical officer for a cybersecurity startup, and we protect high-profile individuals and their families from digital privacy and security risk.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_02: So think about if you have a business or businesses, maybe you have a brand, you have a reputation that you want to protect.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_02: We help you protect all that from a privacy perspective.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: We protect your home network and your family's devices.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_02: So we're basically applying what you'd have at your bank or your organization.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_02: We're applying that to the individual and the family.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_02: So it's kind of a new approach.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_02: The name of the company is called a prebay.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: And we're early stage startup.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: We're about two years in.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so we're having a lot of fun.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: So, Eric, we know what you do now, but we really want to know what how did you get to where you are now?
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: Tell us your whole entire career journey.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like you're not done.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: So just you can stop what you do now.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's been all over the place.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: So I did a lot of horizontal moves across domains and industries and stuff.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_02: But I wasn't born a natural hacker.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: I like to take things apart and I was very curious about stuff.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_02: I'd always get in trouble.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_02: I took apart the vacuum cleaner when I was like 10 years old and I couldn't put it back together.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_02: So my mother was very upset with me.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_02: But growing up on farm, you're always fixing stuff.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so I had the attitude to get value out of old stuff and replace it.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_02: Not instead of buying new stuff, you just fix what you have.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_02: That led to me learning how to code at about 12 years old.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I wrote video games when I was young.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_02: I was trying to become a video game writer.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_02: That never panned out.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_02: That led to the consulting gig.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_02: But I was always curious about breaking into systems.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: So in high school, I got in trouble for breaking into a couple bulletin board systems pre-internet.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I was just fascinated by all that stuff.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_02: I was super curious about lockpicking and all this thing.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: So I didn't know you could actually get paid to do this stuff till much later in life.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I found my way into software.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_02: I first worked in retail.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: If you ever remember the company called Radio Shack, I was selling cell phones to a lot of farmers in a small town in Iowa, northern Iowa.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_02: And I was just graduated from college.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: I started doing it part-time in as a senior in college.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_02: And then I got my own store and I learned how to hire, how to do marketing, how to do sales, how to do inventory.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_02: All this stuff was like a great lesson in how to run a business.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: Didn't pay very well, but you could make more money if you sold more.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_02: So the profit, profit, you got paid but based on profit and sales.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: And so I really learned how to I had it was required to work 54 hours a week, six days a week.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: You got I took a Sunday off.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: That was the company requirements, by the way.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you can get away with that anymore.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_02: But as a store manager, you had to do that.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_02: So I did that for four and a half years, and I they gave me some stock.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_02: That stock vested and I quit the day that I vested and I bought a one-way ticket to Kathmandu.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_02: So I moved from this tiny town in Iowa all the way across the world to Nepal.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: And I did a bunch of trekking and mountaineering and started studying yoga there.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_02: That led to my Ashtonga yoga practice and things like that.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: So I took about a year off.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_02: I traveled around the world.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_02: I ran out of money.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_02: And then I made my way to San Francisco, where my sister and my brother lived.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_02: And it was in 1999 when all these dot coms were going, they were giving away BMWs as signing bonuses back in those days before everything crashed.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I luckily got there.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_02: I was working at Goodwill Staffing Services.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_02: I was down to, I don't know, about$500, I think.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_02: And I got my first paycheck at a company called Serena Software as a software developer.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I had$15 left in my paycheck, in my checking account.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_02: So I skimmed the deck and I spent a whole year traveling.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I met my future wife in New Zealand.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: We fell in love in New Zealand and Australia and we traveled together.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_02: But it was an amazing year.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_02: And I just took this year off to try to figure out what I was doing next.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_02: And that led to a career in cybersecurity and software.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: So can you you made quite the pivot from Radio Shack to Nepal and your interest in yoga?
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: Where did your interest in yoga stem from?
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_02: So I was always interested in let's call it altered states, like trying to figure out what's behind your consciousness and things like that.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: So I started doing meditation and practicing yoga, but I was self-taught.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't have a teacher in a small town in Iowa.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_02: So I went to the source of that, which is Indian Nepal and enrolled in a couple programs there and started learning ashtanga, which I had no clue what it was.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_02: And it's a very rigorous, Dawn knows that's a very rigorous approach to vinyasa and asana and pranayama.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_02: And so I got I went in the deep end on this stuff also.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: So it was really, it was a really good education.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I would, we would do eight hours a day of yoga in some of these programs, and we would meditate when the monsoon season came in April.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_02: I would be meditating on the fourth floor of this building, and the curtains would start to blow in on you, and the rain would start to pelt your back, and you'd be sitting there just idyllic.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: It was incredible.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_02: So that was kind of my introduction to yoga.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: Do you teach yoga as well?
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_02: Or are you just I did get a certification, but I don't teach anymore.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_02: I did for a little while I taught, but I do it for my own practice mostly.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: Cool.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: Very cool.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: The cybersecurity, when did that come into your life as far as being an entrepreneur about it?
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: Because you have your own company now.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_02: So I joined, I was kind of I worked for 10 years in Silicon Valley at a the company was profitable, did not go out of business in 2001, thankfully.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_02: And that was an awesome career.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_02: I went from the only company, the company's only junior software developer all the way up to a senior manager, I think, when I left.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I learned that transition between individual contributor to manager, and that was really hard.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_02: I was a really terrible manager for several years.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_02: And then I was kind of looking around a little bit and I saw this company called Rapid Seven, and I applied for the job.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_02: I applied for another job at the same time, and that was an individual contributor role.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_02: I kind of knew I could do that.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_02: But this company Rapid Seven was really exciting because it was a startup and they were doing really cool things.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_02: But I didn't, I didn't think they were going to be in business in a year.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_02: I felt like it was too high risk.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: But my wife, who is a big risk taker and a big thinker, I asked her, What should I do?
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: I've got two offers here, one for an individual and contributor and one for a director of engineering.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_02: She goes, Well, of course you got to take the high risk one.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: That's the uh and that company turned out to be a rocket ship.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_02: It took off, and we had a really amazing ride.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_02: Parts were flying off the rocket ship as we were accelerating.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: It was like 100% growth for a few years.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_02: Then it was like 87%.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_02: And six, it was in the above 40% for the entire time I was there.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: And we hired, we went from, I don't know, 50 employees to 3,000 within a few years.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_02: And I got to learn like all the stuff I had thought was good software practices, you have to move way faster in cybersecurity.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: And once I got into it, I was so excited by this field because new vulnerabilities come out every week, new exploits come out, attacker behavior is changing all the time.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so what I thought was software development, where you'd ship something once a quarter, now I have to think about okay, we need to ship things to our customers every day.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes every hour we have to ship new code.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_02: And so that was a whole different framing of like how to live in a dynamic world.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I was pretty rigid in my thought at the time.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_02: So I just had to completely disassemble myself and reassemble to survive this whole rocket ship.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_02: It was a fun ride.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_02: So I spent a lot of I had a lot of roles there.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_02: I started as director of engineering.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_02: I was part of the product team, I was product manager, VP of product, and then I did sales engineering for a while.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_02: I kind of jumped horizontally and learned a lot of different business functions.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_02: And then I was the CIO for the last four years, reporting to the CEO, and that was a lot of pressure and stress.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_02: And the company had grown to a point where it wasn't quite the same kind of culture.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_02: Things change as you get bigger, you get more policy and governance and things like that.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_02: We were a public company as well.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I felt just this intense pressure and stress.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_02: We had an incident that like just made me collapse from the incident response process.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I realized, oh, I can't sustain this.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_02: Like I can't do this and maintain my mental health and physical health.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so that made me think I gotta figure out how to balance work and life.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_02: And it wasn't the work ethic, that's that wasn't the problem.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_02: It was just like the intense stress and my response to it wasn't, I was no, I wasn't handling it well.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_02: And so that kind of led me down this journey of learning how what makes great teams great, what separates them from good teams.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I've been on small teams that can that have changed entire industries and done really amazing things.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_02: And then I've been on big teams or even mid-sized teams that just struggle to build that motivation and performance.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_02: And there, there's a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of stuff going on that slows slows you down, and it's not as fun.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_02: It's not nearly as fun.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_02: So I was like, what is the difference between these two?
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_02: And that kind of led this this journey of leadership development.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_02: And the book is kind of the culmination of that as well.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: So I quit again in 2022, and I had a very gracious leadership team that gave me a nice transition plan while we hired the next CIO.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I didn't know what to do, but I knew I wanted to do coaching.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_02: So I got a coaching certification and finished a master's degree and uh hung up a shingle and thought people would just show up and pay me to coach them.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_02: But that didn't work.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_02: So then I got out there and I started doing all this, I started doing free coaching sessions.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_02: And now I'm like, I've done about 750 of those now.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_02: And it's awesome.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_02: I'm meeting all these amazing founders.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: And so part of my part-time I do coaching, executive coaching for people in high stress, highly complex roles.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_02: And that's usually healthcare, cybersecurity, IT.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_02: That's kind of where I come from.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_02: But the people find me because they're, I call it successful and miserable, which is they're great on paper.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_02: They're they got a high-paying job, they've got the title, they're doing fine financially, but inside they're miserable, especially on Sunday night when they think about going back to work Monday morning.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_02: So that's the type of folks I work with.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_02: So I left to start that company that's called Be Wind.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: And then about a year later, uh my friend Gary called me and said, Hey, I've I'm starting another cybersecurity startup.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_02: Would you be interested in helping me with the technology?
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I I I went on part-time as the fractional CTO, and now that's almost full-time again, building the product, and we've got great customers and we're growing pretty significantly.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_02: So that's I'm almost back to full-time work again.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: Have you learned things along the way that'll help you prevent what happened to you in the high-stakes environment you were in before when you were ahead of the entire function for four years?
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think I actually drew quite a bit on yoga here.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_02: So I am much more aware of when I need to move my body, when I need to hydrate, when I need to basically shut down problem-solving mode and get into a divergent state and walk the dog.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_02: Walking the dog is my favorite activity for that.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm much better at kind of intervening before it gets too late and you get into chronic stress state.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_02: And that's one of the one of the tools I use.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_02: I'm also much better at saying no to stuff.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_02: Early in my career, I'd say yes to everything.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: And that led to all these amazing opportunities.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_02: And when you're younger, you can kind of do that.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_02: But now I'm very selective with who I work with and what I do.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_02: That's helped a lot too.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Excellent.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: How do you find clients for your new business?
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: It sounds like a pretty select audience.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_02: We're doing word of mouth mostly, and but we're starting to do advertising now.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_02: So we're doing some advertising on LinkedIn, or we're trying to sell the to the enterprise as well.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_02: So we've found that we can sell to the consumer directly, and that's been working.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: What we want to do though is protect an entire executive team or a critical business unit that has a lot of sensitive data, legal, financial, customer data, things like that.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_02: Where when you're so your organization will protect you at the office and when you're using the corporate laptop, but as soon as you go home and you're using Gmail or whatever else, or you're on your home network, typically a chief security officer doesn't want to know anything about that.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: And so we're able to cover that gap and make them feel like there's some coverage there.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_02: Prior to becoming a customer, we had one customer who lost$900,000 in a land deal.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_02: Their attorney was compromised and sent them an email.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: The attacker sent an email from the attorney's account with the wrong bank account information.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_02: And once that money was sent, it was gone.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_02: There was no getting it back.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_02: That was one example.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_02: We also had a politician who had a key logger on their laptop that was logging every single key they had been typing for the last six months, and we had to clean that up immediately.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_02: But we didn't know what the damage is, so we had to change all the passwords and do some damage control there.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_02: Those are just two stories, but you can imagine the types of attacks these people are getting because they're very targeted now with AI.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_02: And it sounds like it's coming from your CFO or your CO wire this money to this account, but it's really just a void a fake AI that has been trained on the CEO's voice.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's the type of stuff we protect people from.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yikes.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: So what is one thing that you've learned along the way in your profession that let's just say you weren't prepared to deal with?
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_02: One one is there's no shortcuts.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_02: You have to do the work.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_02: That's an easy one.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_02: That wasn't a painful learning.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: That was just over time I learned get rich quick schemes don't work.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_02: I fell for a few of those when I was younger.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_02: I think the bigger one for me was that when you become a people manager, you're you don't do the work anymore.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: And that's like a big leap for it, it was for me at least.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_02: I kept writing code and I kept and I shipped a really terrible bug one time.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_02: It was like raining fire on us for a week.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: Customers were dead in the water, and it was because of one change I made.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I was the director of engineering, I shouldn't have been writing code.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_02: And I shipped it, and my team had to cover for me, support had to cover.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, I learned okay, you need to stop doing the work.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_02: It's about growing the team.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_02: And that was like the biggest leadership lesson for me.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: It just happened to come in a fiery moment.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_02: It happened to reside that woke me up to that.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_02: And so now I spend a lot of time coaching people on delegation and simplification and how to grow your team faster than the business.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_02: And what do you do to give opportunities to your high achievers such that they are really challenged and they're curious and they're motivated, they're applying their strengths, and you give them the autonomy and the empowerment to get big things done.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: So for somebody who way back in the day, you like to fix things and stay off the coding because you're in leadership now.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: Do you miss that part of your career now since you're only in leadership and coaching others?
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that leads to why I left the last org because I was I was spent a lot of time doing budget and politics and strategy.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I like strategy, but I was so far away from the customer and the team that I didn't feel as comfortable.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not as good in that area of leadership.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_02: And so that kind of led me, I just lost my curiosity and motivation for that type of work.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_02: So that's what led me to lead, to leave that organization.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_02: Great organization, but it just wasn't right for me at that point.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_02: So I decided to just do something brand new.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_02: I like to quit things.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_02: I'm a quitter, as I mentioned earlier, and start new things and then put my everything into that as long as I can until I lose that motivation.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: What is your favorite thing about the work you're doing today, whether it's on cybersecurity side or the coaching side?
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_02: The coaching is really incredible because I get to talk to all these amazing people.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_02: I have some clients that have been with me for a few years now, and I get to see these amazing transformations.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_02: There's so many people doing amazing things, like changing industries.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_02: And what I, if I learned anything in leadership, everybody has anxiety and everybody has fear.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_02: They're not immune.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_02: You're not immune because you have a title.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_02: And so I help people get comfortable with that fear and have and build courage to try things and to slowly do bigger and more audacious things.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I push them off the ledge a little bit to take higher risk.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_02: That's one of my favorite things to do with the coaching part.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_02: With the CTO work, I really love what's happening.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_02: We can talk stuff for that as a whole, that's a whole conversation.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_02: But what you can do to build a product nowadays is incredible.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_02: It's amazing what you can do with product now to do a prototype and show it to a customer.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_02: I love talking to customers and just to show people things.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_02: And then I spend a lot less time writing code now, and I spend a lot more time getting crisp on what is the problem we're gonna solve.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_02: Let's talk to customers about that.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: Is this the right problem?
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_02: Let's actually show them something working.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so I just absolutely love that.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_02: And then it's more product management work, management work, and less of the technical back end stuff.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_02: And so I just love that idea.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_02: And it's you can move so quickly, but now it's called I think it's like a you get distracted easily because you you can you you can be really audacious in your thinking, but then you spin up a bunch of agents to do a bunch of work and you're jumping between all these different things.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_02: And it's causing this mental health challenge with people.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you've experienced that, but that's what I'm observing with technical leaders these days.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I could see that.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: So I guess that would be a good segue.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: And what's the hardest part about your job?
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_02: Cybersecurity comes with a bunch of risk.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_02: I had an outage actually right before this where our platform was down and it wasn't anything I did, but it's just like there's always alerts pinging you.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_02: There's always cybersecurity threats.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_02: There are customer escalations, things like that.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's the hardest, is like the number of stressors in cybersecurity is high.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's probably it's not like healthcare.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_02: My wife's a public high school teacher, she deals with all kinds of escalations and kids asking her questions all day.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_02: But it is like this it's this chronic stress that builds up.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's the hardest part to deal with is how do you handle that health in a healthy way.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: What about the coaching aspect of what you do?
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: What's the hardest part about that?
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_02: Oh sometimes people won't immediately tell you what's, or maybe they don't know what's actually happening that's blocking them, blocking their progress.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so you really have to pull.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_02: And coaching is a lot of questions, and you're asking questions to really get to the heart of what's behind not getting the strategic project done or not doing the big thing you want to do, or walking out on that bigger stage.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_02: And so that is maybe sometimes really hard.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_02: If someone's a little keeps their cards close to the chest, it's a little hard to pull that out.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_02: So you need some, I'm learning these skills to like how do you get behind what's the why behind that?
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_02: What's the why behind that one?
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_02: And then you go you could go pretty deep, and that's when real transformation can happen.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: So true.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: Let's take your cybersecurity hat.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: Leave it on this question.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about your industry, what would it be?
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: I think there's a perception that AI will do everything.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_02: And that's not just cybersecurity, but the there's a big misconception about what's possible with AI.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't think CEOs are well equipped to make I don't think they're well enabled and trained on what actually works and what doesn't work.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: It's not a panacea, it's not going to fix a bunch of problems.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's actually making the cybersecurity problem a lot worse because attackers can now spin up.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_02: They have no limitations.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas the defenders have all these limitations and governance around how to use security.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_02: And as an attacker, you only have to be right one time to get into a system, send you an email that somebody clicks on.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_02: As a defender, you have to be right 100%.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_02: So you have the surface area of risk that you have to manage.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I think there's a perception that AI can handle that.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's incorrect.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: Nice.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: What about on the coaching side?
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_02: I think people believe sometimes, and I do this sometimes, if I buy a product, I have a business coach, I have a performance coach, I have a I have I hire coaches for certain reasons.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_02: And once you buy it, you feel better already.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_02: So it's like, oh, I bought the book, so I've already solved the problem.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: But the real work starts with the first session and actually being honest and doing the homework and being vulnerable and transparent about what's actually going on.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_02: So I think that's maybe a misperception or a belief that could change that.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_02: You need to do it's that no shortcuts.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: You really need to do the work.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_02: The coach doesn't do the work.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: What's a myth about either of your two industries that drives you nuts?
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_02: That okay, here's one for cybersecurity.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_02: That the security team owns the risk in a business.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_02: And there's all kinds of ways to think about this.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_02: But the board is asking these questions.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_02: What is your cybersecurity risk?
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_02: What are you doing for cybersecurity?
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_02: And so if you're a business leader, I'm gonna pick a few, I'm gonna pick legal, finance, and marketing.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_02: And there's others as well.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_02: But oftentimes the IT team is responsible for all the corporate infrastructure and they've they've done their part to get governance and all that stuff in place.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: But then marketing buys this new tool off the shelf and it takes your marketing data and your customer data and it sucks it in and does all this stuff.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_02: If there's a breach on that, it's not necessarily the security team's job and responsibility.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_02: It was the marketing team's choice to do that.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_02: So I think the security team's job is really to educate people on use of data correctly and who should have access and what type of vendors and how do you put them through a good uh vetting process?
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_02: But at the end of the day, the risk owns with the business owner.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_02: But I think business owners sometimes think we have cybersecurity for that, and they're gonna own that risk.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_02: So I can do these kind of risky things.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_02: But you'd be surprised at the type of data that people are putting into AI systems and shoveling over to they're like, here's all our proprietary financial data and our profit loss statements, general ledger.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_02: Please analyze it for Q4 results.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_02: And that is there's a lot of spreadsheets on people's laptops.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of risk that's absorbed by these little micro decisions that add up to a significant amount of risk.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that is that's a cultural thing that needs to change a little bit.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: We each make decisions, we each have our own risk, and with the right enablement, we can make better decisions.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like it's best practices class that needs to happen before technology starts going off.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and it's going so fast right now, I don't think anybody can stay on top of it.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: Now the juicy part.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: What's the wildest, weirdest, or most unforgettable thing that you've ever witnessed at any of your jobs?
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, okay.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_02: I like this one.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_02: I have some to choose from, I think.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_02: I think this might be wildest and weirdest.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_02: So I walk into my office.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: I used to work in this awesome building in downtown or in the Bay Area of El Segundo, and we had a 23rd floor penthouse view of the ocean and all this amazing place.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: So I walk into my office at 9 a.m.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_02: and I had to call at 9 a.m.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_02: I was running late.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I go, I open my door, and it's filled, the entire floor is filled with little glasses of water filled up on every square inch of my floor.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_02: And then I had to get to my I had to get to my office phone to do the meeting and the zoom call and stuff.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_02: So I had to go get a bucket and pour these little things and make a path to my top.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_02: And in those glasses were goldfish.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: There were goldfish at the glasses.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_02: And not all the goldfish survived.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_02: So that was the that's the sad part of the story.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_02: The fun part of the story is that I never found out who did this until it took me three years to find out who did it.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_02: And it was one of my best friends at the office, and he held it as a secret and got away with it.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_02: But there was a goldfish that survived, and we named him Lucky, and he lived to a long age.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_02: But I thought it was a fun shenanigan and prank.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_02: It was weird and unforgettable.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_02: So I would buy lunch.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes when we were on deadline, I'd buy lunch for the office.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_02: We so I bought lunch and everybody's lined up and getting one person, filled their plate, they came out and they dropped it on the floor.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_02: And what would you expect to happen there?
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_02: You would expect them to lean down and start cleaning it up.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_02: But they asked the office manager, please clean that up for me.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I just I flipped out.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, no, that's not right.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_02: And it was a man asking a woman, also, which is and so I get really upset.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_02: And that person didn't last very long.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_02: I wasn't that it was an indication of a cultural issue that it's like if someone, if you called a company and they said, That's not my department, you're gonna have to call this number to do that.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_02: It's like the worst thing you could possibly say as an employee of an organization.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_02: So I just got really upset about that and went off, lost my anger a little bit.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_02: And and it never happened again.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_02: But it was just a a small thing that I was very memorable to me in my career.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_02: Like, how do I stand up for this?
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_02: And it was, I don't know, minor thing, but you don't complain about free food and you also don't ask other people to clean up your messes.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for sure.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: I want to get back to any cybersecurity crazy story.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_02: I can tell a couple more stories there.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_02: So I took uh the our one of our best pen testers out to lunch one time when I was in Austin.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_02: And I was just like, hey, I was asking him, how often do you guys achieve your goal if you're trying to break into a bank or an organization?
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_02: So we get we got paid to go by the organization to test their defenses and actually crack into their systems.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_02: And he goes, and he laughed at me.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_02: He goes, What do you mean?
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_02: 100%.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_02: We went, we get our goal 100% of the time.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_02: So if, and that was like, oh my God, really 100%.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's not 80%.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, no, 100%.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_02: We get in, maybe 98%.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_02: We get in.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_02: And he told the story of when he got into a regional bank by going to the next building over at the same level as where the bank was, and was able to connect to their wife.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_02: Or what he did was set up a fake Wi-Fi access point that looked almost exactly the same.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_02: And people started connecting to his Wi-Fi access point.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_02: And then he started scarfing credentials, and then he was able to get domain admin, which is the keys to the kingdom, within 24 hours.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_02: And that those are the types of things.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_02: If you think about cybersecurity, those are like the fun hacky hacking stories.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_02: But almost every hacking story starts with someone going up to a desk, pretending to be someone they're not, and saying, I need access to your server room, or calling on a telephone and saying, Hey, I need access to your account to fix this issue because people trust people.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not common to do that exploit where you go up the elevator and you find the same level.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_02: And it's more common to actually hack a person than it is to hack a machine.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_02: And then once you have their credentials, you can do almost anything.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: On a more, let's just say, small world level, we've heard recently of some hackers in hotels and how easily people can just log into the system of like a Marriott or Hilton or whatever chain.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: Can you just quickly like a nice PSA would be great?
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what would be your common practices for anybody who's just traveling anywhere and they log on to other people's safe network?
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so I recommend not logging on to any coffee shop, hotel, or airplanes are a little bit better, but if you do need to use your laptop or phone on a Wi-Fi, then you can use something called a VPN, which is pretty common to use.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_02: There's NordVPN is a good example, Surfshark.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_02: And that way you encrypt your traffic because what happens is people will sit on those networks and they browse the traffic.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_02: They can sometimes find unencrypted traffic and they can see things that they shouldn't be able to see, but you also leave this digital trail that adds up to an attacker being able to profile you for an attack.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_02: And so I recommend using your phone if you have a phone that is connected to 5G, only tether to your phone for your laptop.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_02: Always put MFA on everything.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_02: So if you have your bank accounts and financial services, just make sure it has a two-factor authentication.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_02: Text you a number that you have to type in.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_02: Super annoying, but it's one of the most effective things you can do.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_02: And then on social media, make sure you lock down all your accounts so they're private.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_02: And so any photos you publish or any travel.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_02: If you go on vacation, make sure you post it after you come back, not while you're on vacation because burglars will attack your house while you're gone.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_02: These are some best practices.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, all those hotel networks have I'm not all, but many of them could have attackers there that are just lurking and looking for passwords and scooping up your data.
• 31:44
  unknown: Yeah.
• 31:45
  unknown: Wow.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: Do you want to paint a scary picture now and think of it more on a global level of what hacking can do?
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'm thinking war games, but go ahead.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you heard about this, but OpenAI had an incident where their AI was being tested for cybersecurity capabilities, and it was able to exploit its container and escape to the internet.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_02: And then it broke into three organizations over five days before it was discovered.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_02: So AA LLMs now, the Frontier Labs, have these capabilities in cybersecurity that are this is the war games type scenario.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_02: This is they are so capable at exploiting systems that they can find new flaws that nobody even knows about.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_02: Those are called zero days.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_02: And so they're exploiting those in the wild now.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_02: But this was just a test.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't even a test.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's imagine if you had, I don't know, you were going to take the SAT so you could go to college, but instead of prepping for it, you just stole the answers from Pearson Education or whoever does the SAT.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_02: It's the equivalent of that.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_02: So the the AI said, I'm not going to solve this hard problem.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_02: I'm just going to go break out and I'm going to go find the answer, the cheat sheet, and I'm going to then reply to the exam that way.
• 32:57
  unknown: Wow.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_02: It was achieving its goal.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_02: But it did it in a very malicious way that we would call malicious.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_02: But and then who goes to jail if the AI does that?
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_02: That's the question.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_02: There's a legal loophole here where no one knows who's responsible for that.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_02: But that's that like the that's the war gamesy picture where those AIs will be attacking each other and defending.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_02: And that could escalate into a pretty serious geopolitical situation.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_02: The the positive way to think about that is that the defenders also have these AI tools.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_02: So they can use the same capabilities.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_02: In this case, however, the defenders had to use a Chinese AI that was not limited in cybersecurity to defend against the attack.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: So it seems like you're very technical, but as far as in regards to the soft skills that you have, if somebody was thinking about entering into your field of cybersecurity, what are some of the soft skills that they need to have instead of just the tech the technical skills that you could acquire?
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_02: Cybersecurity people can be weird.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_02: There's a bunch of different subcultures within it.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_02: If you go to a cybersecurity conference, you'll see all the weirdness.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_02: There's the reverse engineers and malware people, and then there's the defenders and the offensive security people and the app sec people.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's a very diverse group of people.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_02: And they don't speak the same languages, even within cybersecurity.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_02: So I think where people excel in the soft skills are can they communicate complex technical things to a business audience?
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_02: So that's one of the first things.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_02: I encourage people that are curious about technology to go into cybersecurity because you learn so much and it's a very intellectually fascinating field.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_02: And then if you complement that with business skills and communication skills, you will go a long ways and be a leader in cybersecurity because it's a very small domain.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody knows each other, but that it's such impactful and meaningful work that I think you'll have a long career in that space.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_02: And it's getting even more interesting now.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's cool.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, tell us about the book.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, cool.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: So I wrote this book.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_02: So I what I found when I was working at in high stress, highly complex environments was I wasn't my body could not maintain the pace without without sacrificing mental or physical health.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_02: And what I observed was like you have this high stress, high anxiety approach.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_02: And nobody talks about anxiety at work, but I started talking about that more.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_02: And people are like, yeah, that's I did it on LinkedIn.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_02: I started writing posts about it and stuff.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_02: And people resonated with it.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_02: And so I said, maybe I can put this together into a book.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_02: And so I called it the energy edge because the first thing you got to get in place is your energy.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_02: How are you managing stress?
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_02: How are you managing cognitive load?
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's all based on neuroscience and sports science stuff.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_02: And we've built this modern work environment that is completely against our biology.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's nine to five, sometimes Saturday and Sunday as well.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_02: But your body works in rhythms during the day and the week and the month.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so the books about like how do you surf those rhythms instead of trying to power through with caffeine and coming down with alcohol and affecting your sleep and all these things.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_02: And then it gets into what should I focus on?
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_02: That's like one of my big strategic goals, what are my identities, and how do I head that direction?
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_02: Then we have then it ends with how to enjoy the ride.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_02: Because why are we doing all this unless it's fun and impactful and we're doing it with other people?
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's uh it's like a leadership guide.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_02: I wish I would have had when I was an early manager, because I didn't realize that I had to manage myself first before I could lead a team.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_02: So it's kind of that book for directors and above, maybe, and how to have fun, how to have an impact, but not destroy your mental and physical health along the way.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_00: Love it.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_02: And it launches on September 15th.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_02: Amazon, ebook, paperback, hardcover.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_02: The audible will come later.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_02: I have to record that.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I don't read, so I'm great.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_01: I can't wait to hear it.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so you'll get the audible then.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_00: She only does audible.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_00: I only do audible.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: Eric, I have so many clients.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: Most of the clients, coaching clients that suffer from this are women who cannot stop being the labor.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_00: They they see a little hole, maybe somebody's on maternity leave or they're out sick, or oh, I can do it faster than my team can.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: And they just step in and they do the work and they're missing this opportunity to conserve that energy to make greater strategic decisions or just to preserve their own well-being.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: What would you tell a client, or how do you help coach a client through that exact thing that you suffered from?
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think there's a time to pick up a shovel as a leader and to work alongside the team.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_02: And you don't want to lose your edge as well.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_02: That can be challenging if you don't know what the work is you don't know how to inspect the work properly.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_02: What I talk about is usually I might ask them what message do you send if you take that work over for them?
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_02: And let them kind of think about that.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what message is that?
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_02: Does it mean I can't do this without my boss?
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_02: Or the boss doesn't trust me to do this?
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_02: So I kind of get it, put it, put the shoe, sit in the shoes and the hat of the employee.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_02: And like when you give someone really challenging, if you expect really high expectations, there's this great quote my CEO taught me that was low expectations are condescending.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, oh wow.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_02: It took me a while to God, that's really good.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_02: I think I've been doing that.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_02: I've been doing that for a while.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_02: So when you set really high expectations and give people audacious goals and support them with coaching and training, they usually step up and do it.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_02: And they love it and they're growing faster than they so if you increase the capability of your team by 10% and you have a team of eight people, that's way more than you could do by working five extra hours a week.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: Did you uncover or discover anything that you didn't think about before while you were writing this book that maybe if I could have done this differently?
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_02: I got my first critical reviews back, and that was an eye-opener.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_02: And that was great.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_02: I mostly positive, but I got one which was I have two things for that question.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_02: One was, I discovered the power of praise.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_02: My friend Kevin introduced me to this, and I hadn't been doing it right.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_02: I used to say, good job on that project, or nice work.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_02: And that doesn't land at all.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_02: You need to say specifically what they did and how it made you feel and what the impact was.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_02: And that, once I learned that, I was like, that became a whole chapter in the book, like how to praise your team.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_02: And that was a really cool addition, I think.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_02: And you don't see that in a lot of leadership books because oftentimes you get the good job.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_02: But one time I got a text from my boss that said, Eric, I really like what you did at the staff meeting on Wednesday.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_02: I'm really happy to have you on the team.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_02: I feel super confident that you've got everything under control.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_02: Have a great weekend.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_02: And it was on a Friday afternoon.
• 39:30
  unknown: Wow.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_02: I had such a great weekend that weekend.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't think about work.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_02: I came in Monday.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_02: I belong to this organization.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_02: So just like a little thing like that can mean a big difference.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_02: And it's a very tactical thing you can do with your team.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_02: The other one was I completely underestimated how much work it is to write a book.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, and like I was trying to throw everything in there, and then I had I got an editor, and that was great.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_02: And she was like, You got to throw this out.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_02: This is terrible.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_02: You gotta rewrite this chapter.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_02: I think you should add some content here on this part.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_02: And I went from like 70,000 words down to 40,000 words, and it became a much better book and a lot simpler, practical approach to what we're trying to solve.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_02: And my message is like, honor your biology because biology always wins.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_00: So true.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, body keeps the score.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'm thinking of the 56 hours at Radio Shack.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_01: I need to ask you, how many hours a week are you working now?
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_02: About 35.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_01: There you go.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_02: And that's all right.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: When you said I'm gonna ask you about Radio Shack, I thought you were gonna ask him about the Commodore 64.
• 40:36
  unknown: Oh, yeah.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_02: That was my first computer.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_01: The Commodore 64.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_02: That's what started my entire career.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_02: When I actually, when I quit my job, walked away from it.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_02: First person I told was my mom.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_02: And she's like, How could you do that?
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_02: She was a nurse and she always worked two jobs.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_02: She always had a couple jobs.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_02: She's like, I don't know how you did that.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_02: How could you possibly do that?
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I told her is because of you.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I bought you bought me this computer when I was, I don't know, 13, I think.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_02: And that led to this amazing love of coding that led to this career.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_02: And now I'm able to do this.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_02: And she couldn't believe it.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_02: And she was so happy, but she's like, I can't believe it.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_02: I can't believe you quit your job.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: Great.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much, Eric, for being such a great guest and just teaching everybody about cybersecurity.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for sharing your story with us.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_01: You've officially joined the ranks of the brave and the bold.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_02: Awesome.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for having me.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_02: That was really fun.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's it for this week's confession.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_01: We've laughed, cringed, and maybe questioned our own career choices.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_01: Big thanks to our anonymous guests for keeping it real and reminding us that behind every job title is a story worth telling.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_01: If you've got a workplace confession of your own, we're all ears.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: Hit us up at our email address.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: And don't forget to subscribe, rate, and share.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: Your support helps us keep the secrets flowing.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, keep your badge clipped, your coffee strong, and your stories wild.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is Workplace Confessions Behind Closed Doors.