Insights: The Detractors

Hello Readers!

Welcome to the Insights series of the Hot Chocolates and Chit Chat section of my blog, I hope that by sharing my experiences and insight, it will help make your career journey a little easier.

Before I start, I want to be clear that this series is not about painting any individual, company in a bad light. This series is also not meant to scare you away from pursuing a career in Cyber. I want to pass on my experiences so that it can help support and guide you whenever you need it. My ask is for you to pass on your learning to others.

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I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass. — Maya Angelou

Best intentions may not always result in the best outcomes. I believe as humans, we have an innate desire to be helpful. However when this desire is misguided it can often have unintended consequences.

I want to take you through a few different stages of my life where each of these pieces of advice; offered with the best intentions could have had a potentially disastrous impact on me, my life and my career. I believe I am blessed to not have been limited by their lack of imagination.

At the age of 17, as a senior high school student, I busied myself with choosing a university degree. Being a first generation immigrant, my parents had expectations of me, culturally there were expectations of me. To help me decide, I sought the advise of my High School Career Advisor…

“Information Systems? That’s very ambitious of you. Have you considered something else?”

I still believe that the career advisor had my best interest at heart. It just wasn’t the right advice for me. Fortunately, growing up in Australia I grew a stubborn bone; where the more people attempted to dissuade me, the more I wanted to give something a try. So her discouragement decided for me that I would ultimately compromise with my parents to study IT at a university of their choosing.

Of course my parents were difficult to convince; between the two of them, I was constantly reminded that I would be wasting all those ENTER scores. Given the dot com boom had come to an end, mum became constantly worried about my job prospects upon graduation. It was a frustrating time, but I understood that my parents just wanted the best for me. They wanted me to be able to live a comfortable life without having to work 14 hours a day at a sweatshop or have fingers that have turned black from working with machine grease. They did what they thought was best for me.

In my final year, I became interested in Digital Forensics, so once again, I sought the advice of a university advisor. He kindly suggested that I reconsider as Digital Forensics was a very male dominated field and would be unsuitable for me. He also took a look at my transcript and advised that I was being ambitious with my career aspiration.

I can still vividly remember how much that conversation annoyed me. I thanked him for his time, left his office, marched down the stairs, out of the ICT building into the sun. My mind was made up. Hell or high water I was going to work in Digital Forensics with law enforcement.

I truly believe that the best way to deal with naysayers is to just ignore them. I turned discouragement into motivation for me to learn and improve my chances of reaching my goal.

Naysayers don’t go away regardless of how much experience you have or how much of an expert you are in your chosen area of expertise. Some naysayers genuinely want to help; however, they are often limited in their own ways. Some lack their own self drive and so feel better when dragging others down. Some are simply projecting their own fear of failure upon you.

It took me many years of practice to learn how to tell the difference between genuinely good advice and heart-felt advice that can diminish your potential. There is no rule or formula for me to share for you to be able to tell the difference. Hell, my parents were the first people to tell me to turn away from studying the in the area that has become the building block of my career! These days they will admit they “were rather silly back then” and now both promote technology as a must-consider career path to all their friends and their friends’ children.

My advice is:

1. Trust your gut and trust yourself. Thinking back, I always knew in my gut I was on the right path so no matter who the advice came from, it just seemed like noise.

2. Build a small network of peers and find yourselves a mentor (or a few); who you trust to get objective advice from.

3. Do the homework and research, make a plan and stay engaged. This is a fast moving industry with new areas of focus popping up. The only way to know about them is to be active. Just the other night I learnt there is a small group of people who specialise in automobile security.

In the next post of the Insights series, I will be talking about Self Doubt; the worst kind of super charged naysayer.

Until next time!

Disclaimer: All statements and comments are my own. They do not reflect the views of any past or present employers.

Perspective & Perception, all in the eye of the beholder

It is an honour to have a platform where I have the opportunities to share the values I believe in and support.

Recently, I was invited to give a online class to high students around online safety. One of the topics I chose to focus on was Cyber Bullying.

When making slide packs for presentation, I take a more graphical approach to slide pack creation.

Initially I landed on an image of a girl looking upset in front of her computer. In my mind this was a good visual representations of someone who is upset by what they just saw on their computer.

For years now, I have developed a habit to never send / release / publish any document without having a second or third pair of eyes over it. This time, I would be really inspired by the feedback (as evidenced by the writing of this post!).

I showed this to my boss, Chris, and he gave me an angle I hadn’t yet considered.

Why did I land on a girl being upset? I hadn’t thought about the underlying message this sent. Sure I was on the sadder end of Cyber Bullying many years ago. (Before the term was even coined!) It was likely my own bias that gravitated me towards the image.

Armed with this feedback, I re-created my slide with a new a series of images. I chose a mix of famous professionals, singers, an actor, a footballer, and overall, mixed between men and women. They all represented a group that is privileged by their position in the public limelight, but, all still afflicted by Cyber Bullying, nonetheless.

Similar theme, but very different underlying message…

The important take away for me in the change of this slide, is that we are all a product of our own experiences. How much of what we put out there is based on projection? When I created the first version of my slide, was I projecting? Was the young sad girl a version of my unresolved feelings from personal experiences? I am left to wonder how much of these unresolved feelings seep into our personal and professional lives unknowingly; subconsciously influencing how we behave, respond and act?

It’s OK to have biases, and its OK to stick to our guns and what we believe in. But I think it is also important to look at your messaging from different angles to appeal to the wider audience. One way to do this is to get someone else to review your material and apply their own perspective alongside your own.

The next time you need to release a report or give a presentation, get it reviewed by someone who can challenge your thinking and provide constructive feedback. You will be amazed at what you can learn about yourself.