Bounce Back From The Hack

Eventually your system will be compromised beyond your capacity to deal with it. What you do from a systems perspective is part of your growth curve. So is your emotional and behavioral path.

As a cybersecurity professional, you can feel over-invested in your defense processes and systems. A systems compromise can feel disorienting and hard to accept. Maybe you could have done something more; maybe they were better; maybe it was something so obvious!

We saw a recent piece in the New York Times (behind paywall) on how Olympic athletes deal with disappointment that seemed to capture this sort of scenario. It's abstracted here because the lessons Olympians learn are hard-won and eminently transferrable to other elite performers such as cyber-defenders.

1. Learn resilience. "Just as psychologists have athletes visualize their wins, they also ask them to imagine all the things that could go wrong, and how they’ll respond."

2. The power of purpose. "The best athletes set what are known as process-oriented goals, meaning those within their control, as opposed to just performance-oriented goals, which are based on results. If they lose a race, they can still say they achieved other goals, like improving their technique, pacing or fueling strategy."

3. Grit as a team effort. "He asks athletes to list the people or support systems they have in their lives, along with how often they’ve relied on them recently. This not only boosts their perception of the help they have available" -- not only as an athlete but as an individual -- "but illuminates where they could ask for more."

4. Acceptance is the goal. "Disappointment can activate the same parts of the brain that 'light up' during grief, Dr. Gervais said. And like grief, Dr. Loberg said, an Olympic disappointment can take years to process."

Elite athletes have to contend with failure as part of how they live. Your cybersecurity career may not seem as starlit, but your professional career has been built on success. Part of what makes you successful is your power of persistence in the face of setbacks. Persistence is learnable even if setbacks are unavoidable.

Take the time to invest in your personal professional skillset. You will learn from yourself how your new normal isn't a path to how things were in the past but instead a forward shift to making sense of things now.

Ask us how you can recover your bearings as a cybersecurity professional*.

(image attribution: public domain via JoePhin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

*NOTE: Pythia Cyber does not provide therapy or mental health counseling. We could recommend someone if you need assistance.