you need to reach your vision

VANNESSA MCCAMLEY

REFLECT ON YOUR THINKING AND THE BEHAVIOURS YOU NEED TO REACH YOUR VISION

by Vannessa McCamley, Leadership and Performance Consultant, Coach, Facilitator, Author and Keynote Speaker

How often do you reflect on your thinking and behaviours to fulfil your purpose?

Often, we are so busy we do not devote time to reflecting on the thinking and behaviours required to achieve our WHY, our purpose. Over time some of the behaviours that have helped you be successful may no longer serve your purpose. Your purpose may have changed as you have grown and developed.

Regularly dedicating time to reflect is one of the most effective strategies for creating a compelling vision of the life you want, and realising that vision. The best way to look at the concept of a life vision is as a compass to help guide you to take the actions and make the decisions that will propel you toward your best career and life.

HINDSIGHT CAN BE A WONDERFUL GIFT

Reflection on key learnings is GOLD. Through reflection we can use the key learnings from past experiences to explore options in our current environment/situation and choose those most likely to help us achieve success. We often code memories as good and bad, wanting to move towards the good and away from the bad. A common example is a workplace brainstorming session where someone produces an idea and someone else says “I’ve tried that and it doesn’t work.” How often have you experienced this?

In this situation I often ask insightful questions like:

• Knowing what did not work, what would you do differently to set up for success? • What options could be explored to gain a different perspective and outcome?

To become clear on your vision / purpose, what you want to achieve and what this looks like, reflect on the learnings from these questions without bias.

WHY YOU NEED A VISION

One of my favourite quotes, adapted from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, is: “If you don’t know where you are going, how will you know when you get

there?” With a clear vision you are likely to achieve far more than you would without one. Think of crafting your life vision as mapping a path to your personal and professional dreams. Life satisfaction and personal happiness are within reach. If you do not develop your vision other people, the environment and circumstances will direct the course of your life.

Clients have asked for my help because they no longer want to go with the flow; they want to create the path that adds the most value to their lives. Here are the steps I recommend. The first step is the creation of a vision board.

WHAT IS A VISION BOARD?

Your vision board is a unique visualisation tool that creates a space in which to define your goals. Think of it as a map of your future that will inspire you and act as a guide to your day-to-day behaviour, steering you towards the future you desire. Use this to create your desired career, relationship, income level or anything important to you.

STEPS TO CREATE YOUR VISION BOARD

1. Define your purpose and goals along with your top three to five values. 2. Identify the actions you need to take to achieve your goals. Use photographs, images from the web, whatever inspires you. 3. Make a collage of all these images on a bulletin board, wall or piece of paper you can laminate or put into a binder. Feel free to get creative!

Consider including a picture of yourself in a happy state. What would this look like? What would it feel like? 4. Tip: to avoid attracting chaos into your life, be careful not to create a cluttered or chaotic board.

Simplicity is best. 5. Add motivational ‘affirmation words’ and inspiring quotes that represent how you want to

FEEL. Choose words like ‘courage,’ ‘brave,’ ‘free,’

‘creative freedom,’ ‘belonging,’ or ‘orchestrator.’

Take a few moments to review your vision board every day, especially when you wake up and before you go to bed. You can use it while doing yoga, meditating, making plans or relaxing.

Your GOAL

Plan/reflect When you do your best thinking

Mitigating Risks

Social Connection

Success Milestones in 30, 60, 90 days Positive Feedback Values

Vannessa’s Vision Board

My ‘WHY’ improves the lives, productivity and performance of individuals, teams and organisations while impacting their health and well-being positively. Passions

Aspirations

Self-care

Healthy Fuel Required

Mantra’s I am the conductor of my destiny

OUR BRAIN NATURALLY SEEKS CERTAINTY AND PREDICTABILITY

If you can prime your brain to overcome obstacles and create a vision based on these learnings you will save time and effort when making decisions about your career and life direction and looking after your health and well-being.

ABOUT VANNESSA MCCAMLEY

Vannessa McCamley is a leadership and performance expert specialising in neuroscience practices that help individuals and businesses grow in meaningful ways whilst delivering measurable results in healthy ways. She has a passion for helping people and businesses to overcome obstacles and enabling them to reach their strategic goals. She brings a strong background in IT security and more than 20 years of business experience to collaborating with individuals at all levels and from several industries. She is the author of Rewire for Success – an easy guide to using neuroscience to improve choices for work, life and wellbeing.

linksuccess.com.au/rewire-for-success

www.linkedin.com/in/vannessa-mccamley

linksuccess.com.au/contact-us

AS BURNOUT TAKES ITS TOLL, REMEMBER TO PUT THE U BACK INTO CYBERSECURITY

by David Braue

Cybersecurity overhauls will drive new technology investments in 2023 – but don’t forget your people.

After spending two years dealing with the implications of the dramatic shift to remote work, cybersecurity specialists have cast their nets much wider as they work to rebuild security infrastructure around new concepts such as zero trust, open security, and new approaches to managing security risk that are more actively aligned with companies’ operational needs.

“The whole system needs an innovation approach that is sustainable over time,” said Chris Hockings, chief technology officer with IBM, in spelling out those three priorities during the recent Gartner Security & Risk Management 2022 conference, “because we’re just not going to be able to do this thing the way that we did before.” Investments in these areas – which also include issues such as cloud security and API security, the major cause of the recent breach of Australia’s second-largest telecommunications carrier, Optus – will dominate security spending in 2023 as entities at every level overhaul their cybersecurity strategies.

This includes, among other things, a Budget commitment by the US Government to ramp up cybersecurity spending in line with a “bold new course to overhaul the Government’s approach to securing Federal IT” – and a $US10.9 billion cybersecurity budget will accelerate the CISA’s new 2023-2025 Strategic Plan and a transition to a multi-year zerotrust strategy by the end of fiscal 2024.

Other countries are following suit, with the global National Cyber Security Index (NCSI) highlighting the

ongoing deficiencies in many countries’ cybersecurity postures – whose transitions to zero-trust security, across enterprise systems, remote employees and cloud architectures, are set to underscore most cybersecurity investment during 2023.

Yet even as governments and businesses pour tens of billions into improving security technology, grandiose missives riffing about the importance of data protection say little about investing in strategies to support and nurture the people responsible for running those systems.

Although it rolls out well-worn tropes such as building a “diverse workforce, representative of the population they serve”, for example, the US Budget outline follows the very common script that sees people only as vessels into which cybersecurity skills must be poured: “a strong cadre of cybersecurity and IT professionals will allow the Government to run more efficiently and effectively,” the outline notes.

NOT WHAT IT CRACKED UP TO BE

Investments in developing skilled cybersecurity professionals is both necessary and important – but what happens when those cybersecurity and IT professionals, chastened by the realities of what can be an immensely stressful, difficult and ultimately overwhelming job, throw up their arms and walk away?

It happened recently to Lily Clark, a former client success representative who moved into a role with offensive security consultant with Pittsburghbased Echelon Risk + Cyber in September 2021 – and walked away from the small firm a year later after the pressures of the job compromised her wellbeing more than she could bear.

“Feeling like a failure that I couldn’t cut it,” she bravely tweeted, calling the decision to quit “a point of shame and a bit of sadness”.

Online colleagues were having none of her self-blame, with one fellow cybersecurity worker noting that “working in this field can be overwhelming while being underappreciated, and it never stops. Every time my phone vibrates I think ‘oh another [incident response] is coming’; it wears on you.”

“You didn’t fail just because one specific job at one specific employer was too much for you,” said another, “and in a way, your employer failed you.”

Such experiences are rife in cybersecurity, particularly as the stresses of COVID-era isolation were compounded by the increasing pressure to protect companies that were being attacked more than ever before – and the emotional alienation that festers within cybersecurity teams that are often comprised of isolated individuals spread out across large distances.

This is what the cybersecurity industry looks like on the other side of the fence – the consequences of increasingly urgent recruitment that is focused on the input side of the pipeline, but often leaves security workers feeling overused and unsupported.

Stress and burnout were by far the two most significant personal risks named by CISOs in the recent Heidrick & Struggles 2022 Global CISO Survey, in which 60% and 53% of North American CISOs, respectively, said that those issues were the biggest risks relating to their role.

Interestingly, CISOs in European (35%) and AsiaPacific (33%) companies were much less likely to report burnout than their North American peers – suggesting that companies in the latter market are either far busier than elsewhere, or proving to be particularly poor at managing the stress caused by fighting to keep up.

Other stressors named by respondents highlighted just how broad a range of stressful experiences cybersecurity is causing for the people who work in the industry: a third of Asia-Pacific CISOs, for example, said they feared losing their job after a breach and worried about being held personally financially liable for a breach – compared with just 16% and 11% of European respondents, respectively.

Throw in concerns about higher than usual turnover due to the “dynamic hiring market”, feeling underpaid, worrying that they can’t keep up with rapidly evolving threats, and concerns that their organisation doesn’t see the necessity of cybersecurity protocols – and it’s clear the realities of the CISO job continue to challenge even the most enthusiastic, well-trained candidates.

“The importance of the role of the CISO continues to grow as digital technologies become even more prevalent,” the report’s authors noted. “There is burnout and stress associated with this role, which should lead organisations to consider succession plans and/or retention strategies so that CISOs don’t make unnecessary exits.”

TECHNOLOGY FOR THE PEOPLE

Given the eye-watering salaries that many companies are paying employees with well-developed cybersecurity skills, executives may find it hard to believe that employee well-being is causing even well-paid CISOs to walk away from their jobs. But it’s happening – and when it does, it can bring even the most well-designed change program to its knees.

Indeed, fully 73% of respondents to Splunk’s recent State of Security 2022 report said they knew a colleague who had quit their security jobs due to burnout – with 78% saying that remote workers are harder to secure, and 65% had seen an uptick in attacks during the pandemic.

Even the best technology isn’t worth much without the people needed to use it and apply it to their business requirements. Given the technological change that is already ramping up and will dominate

the market during 2023, it is therefore crucial that executives focus not only on investing in security technologies, but on employee well-being initiatives to ensure that cybersecurity staff feel well-supported and capable of managing their workloads.

“When we talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion, it’s not just about finding the diversity and [hiring] people who don’t look like you,” said Elizabeth Wilson, director of talent and diversity & inclusion with global security peak body ISACA.

“It’s about bringing them into the fold, and helping them feel good about being in your place of business. And sometimes we do the great work of finding the people, but then we don’t know how to include them.”

This can be harder than it seems, particularly in security jobs that often see workers engaging with screens more than the people around them.

“We go back into our little holes and back into our working environments,” Wilson said, “and we don’t have that opportunity to engage with people – but it’s important to take the time to find what’s going on around the world in different communities, and supporting one another.”

Security automation technology – which evolved as a way of coping with the explosion of operational data caused by the adoption of tools such as SIEM (security information and event management) systems – has emerged this year as a key way of reducing the human toll of cybersecurity.

By streamlining the detection of security anomalies and using AI to whittle down floods of data into what is hoped to be a manageable stream, automation has become table stakes for a contemporary security architecture – and with so much funding going towards transitioning security architectures into the world of zero trust, it’s important that executives fund automation initiatives during 2023 with the same enthusiasm that they embrace other security technologies.

“We all know that cybersecurity continues to be one of the most demanding professions in the world,” Gartner senior director analyst Richard Addiscott noted at the firm’s recent Security & Risk Management Summit, where he exhorted attendees to build security strategies for 2023 that accommodate shifting societal and regulatory expectations.

“Focus on your people to foster more secure behaviour,” he said, “and adapt to increasingly distributed cybersecurity risk decision making. We need to pause – even if it’s only for a minute – and we need to look up, and look out, to reframe current thinking and simplify.”