We’ve all had this happen. You have great plans. You have great intentions. And you have the commitment…
…but THE THING – whatever it is – somehow still just doesn’t get done.
So what do you do?
Do you obsess over it and beat yourself up for not getting it done?
Do you hold yourself up as a failure for not meeting your (most likely) impossible expectations of what you can accomplish?
Or do you do something completely different…something that is actually hard for dedicated and professional people to do:
Do you take a moment, assess the impact and give yourself a BREAK?
Most of us don’t.
Instead, we generally take this as a personal insult to our abilities, commitment, or whatever we failed to eat for breakfast that clearly caused this utmost catastrophe of the moment.
We internalize it, and in some cases, even let our mouths verbalize the same words our brain is using to beat us up:
Failure.
Stupid.
Slacker.
Over-achiever.
And then those words do funny things in our brains. They form a kind of feedback loop, so we start to become defined by the words that we use.
Our perceptions of what we can and can’t do are controlled by those voices in our own head, telling us stories and making sweeping generalizations based on THE ONE (or maybe more than one) time we failed…
…or we didn’t try hard enough
…or we didn’t try at all.
These stories are poison, and they get in the way of doing what we need to do. These stories and fears are what drive us as a security leader to not sleep, yell at our families when we shouldn’t, and even desperately want to murder the neighbor’s dog who won’t stop barking all night.
It’s happened to me, and, unless you aren’t human, I’ll bet it’s happened to you too.
The trick is knowing that the first thing you need to do when your brain screams SLACKER is to just breathe and give yourself some *slack*.
And tell your brain it doesn’t know what the hell it’s talking about. You’ll get them next time.
So, the moral of this story is there’s much more to being a successful security leader than “security” and technical skills. You have to be a successful human first.
And, BTW, those successful security programs aren’t created by machines either…or all the technical security controls you can buy.
They’re created by successful humans.
And if you want to short-circuit some of the ways your day-to-day life as a security leader gets in the way of being a successful human, let’s talk about what we might be able to do about it.
Just click the button on this link: https://archistry.com/go/SecurityLeader
ast
—
Andrew S. Townley
Archistry Chief Execuitve
