[Applause]
okay take a breath
just chill out
this is not the typical conference talk
as you can see one we get to sit down
and we get a fancy uh carpet
that's nice and
it's more
all of us talking we're just happening
to lead the scenario if you want to talk
due to the lights i can't actually see
you but raise your hands and somebody
will
bring you a mic
you relate any questions or comments you
have to them and they will relate them
to the mic for the people on the live
stream or the discords
um
she would take it away sure hit it so we
have a little agenda um
we're gonna tell you that we're not
actually experts and uh a bunch of stuff
what we're gonna do um
i can't even see that from here
neither so uh just jump into it
um
small disclaimer we are not really
mental health professionals uh we are
just professionals that have mental
health
issues
as a word
um
none of this talk should be taken as
medical advice none of it just yeah
we're not experts don't listen to us uh
if you're wanting advice we're experts
on us yeah you are not us what we do may
not work for you
but we're willing to
tips tricks and uh ways to train your
brains
um there is some uh trigger warnings um
so if you have any issues that might
come up uh just be warned that
we're gonna be talking about some and
feel free to bring up your issues
appropriately
um if you do need to get help for any
mental crisis that you might have
there's
plenty of options
up there uh this is our
personal monitor
um so a bit about me um i'm a kind of
i.t guy i've been
in the industry of i.t in general um
i've done like this admin work i've done
development work
most recently been doing security work
for the last
number of years
in my spare time i'd like just kind of
chilling out i do long walks on the
beach
[Music]
reading and yeah just
yeah just enjoying being me um
i also have anxiety and depression and
this is now my second talk of doing this
um my first talk was to a weird lecture
theatre style thing and this is much
nicer
this is a bit more chill um
i am what the hell am i i don't know
i've been variously in i.t since god
helped me 1979.
uh yes i am that old um
these days i am
well pardon me commercial i am paid to
be here by api metrics dot io if you
work with apis you definitely need what
we're doing uh hold on let me prove to
my boss that i talked to an audience
please wave to my boss
thank you
um hey pays for the plane ticket um
and other than that i've mostly found
myself in the last couple years being a
ceo trainer coach and mentor because
this may surprise some of you folks ceos
don't actually know what they're doing
they're winging it at all times and most
of them are desperately insecure about
it now you know
um next slide so what what is mental
health um so i guess one thing that you
yeah we've changed our slides in the
last hour and the first one i i had to
put up there is mental health as a
social construct because what is
mentally healthy for somebody who is in
the wacky high pressure area of opsec
and i.t in new zealand is different from
what's mentally healthy from a rice
farmer in thailand i have to move here
from thailand
um mental health
what it is is very much situational and
what's
you know there are some things that nah
if you're hearing voices and they're
telling you to
go out and arrange all the rocks in the
courtyard
that's probably
often most cultures but not all
so
we are dealing with the social construct
of mental health as it is perceived in
the west
and as it is
certainly affected by our industry
because
our industry
is unhealthy
no really
there are things that happen in our
industry
that just would not fly in a lot of
places
and we have grown to accept that and
we've grown to normalize it
and hopefully
we can start to
as the kids say that up by
being willing to be more present and
talking about
issues around stress and issues around
mental health especially as it applies
to our industries
and i think one thing to
mention is mental health is for each
individual person my mental health is my
mental health your mental health is your
mental health and all of yours if you've
had issues or mental health
problems they're yours but
we're free to talk about it amongst each
other and
it's talking about mental health is
almost as popular with management as
talking about your salaries in public
yeah
you should be talking about both by the
way
um because
you get to be the living example they
theoretically should not fire you for
talking about your mental health and
your mental well-being or your pay or
how much you're getting paid and it may
be informative to other people for you
to be that person and be public about it
um
so as we mentioned at the start this is
a interactive talk so if you guys want
to well guys and girls sorry um
well
that's probably not even the most pc
thing these days um sorry
if you want to get involved just raise
your hand someone will come ask
what your question is and repeat it and
yeah yeah for covered and if we shut you
down
don't be personally offended it's
because
we're helping to make sure that you're
staying on topic relevant to the talk
that we're trying to give
and
we're going to try to steer things so if
you're talking
a little bit too deeply
talk to us after we're not mental health
professionals but we're pretty nice
people and we're moderately willing to
listen
and i'm going to leave the video
immediately um
but yeah this is interactive so feel
free to throw your stuff in and what is
the next slide um i think also a bit of
background on
why
we're in this situation this is kind of
a
we meet up monthly ish and have coffees
and
we kind of chat about this sort of thing
yeah so fairly regularly and now we're
just inviting all of you to join our
conversation i guess yeah i
so being open about me hi
i'm a person with mental health issues
i've lost two jobs in the last 10 years
due to nervous breakdowns
that was not fun i have both chronic and
episodic anxiety
i take pills for the chronic anxiety
three times a day the episodic anxiety
such as
you know fear of getting on stage and
talking to 100 people
i took a pill just about 40 minutes ago
that's why i appear so chill i also take
pill before
salary negotiation
major client presentation
they're tools i have the type of anxiety
that will leave me a fairly gibbering
mess if i don't moderate it my brain
chemistry
is not the optimal brain chemistry for
the profession that i have picked or the
profession that has picked me so i have
to modify that brain chemistry with
tools
you know as you've seen the memes
somewhere and there may or may not be
memes coming up after the rainbows
um
if you don't make the right
neurochemicals that's okay store bought
is fine
now the reason for both those nervous
breakdowns was
irrational levels of stress
i've mostly been in the sales side in it
or the management side or the sales
management side things like that
speaker to money for engineers
and
the first one
um so the sales cycle in i.t
you don't go out and close a sale you
talk to people for three months six
months a year
there might be multiple proposal cycles
and eventually you develop a client and
you maintain a client relationship this
is very much relationship selling and
one afternoon i had my boss come in the
morning my boss came into me and said i
don't care what you do i need you to
close three hundred thousand dollars
today
that
is stressful
uh i'm pleased to say i did it
um
i'm not pleased to say how i did it i
went to
a client who'd been my client
he was at justice and then he was my
client at post and then he was my client
at other government agency that she'll
remain unnamed and i said hey dude um
do you have any of those shitty 25 000
jobs sitting on your desk that nobody
wants to do he said yeah i've got a
dozen of them it's like great i'll take
them all
now this particular employer is a large
company and i happen to know our
overhead on any project was 50k
so in taking
a dozen 25k project i was guaranteeing
loss on every single one but my boss did
not care about that he cared about the
clothes get him 300k so i got him 300k
and um
i was already an irregular employee then
i was grumpy i was
prone to inappropriate outbursts
i did not realize that what was
happening is i was having a nervous
breakdown i did not realize it when i
had been was getting fired
um
i didn't realize it until six months
later that not only had i had a nervous
breakdown but the guy that i replaced in
that role had a nervous breakdown too
and the only thing he and i had in
common was one boss
and one boss can really things up
if they don't know what they're doing
if you are in a management role here
feel free to ask management oriented
questions on how to
deal with things because that is a topic
that's not get addressed sufficiently
either
so that's a little bit about me and my
background and why i thought this talk
was important because also
i don't work at a big company anymore
and i don't give a when anybody
thinks
fair enough
um
yeah it's
good to kind of
think more about mental health and talk
about it and
there's a lot of kind of misinformation
out there because people seem to think
as from this slide uh
anybody here heard of miss or
disinformation before
nobody
um uh turns out daniel and i hear uh
sinners because we have mental
issues and yeah
there's an asterisk there
this is
we are not by our values sinners
by your values well
you're in the audience
fair enough
um
employee development we wanted to talk
about this this time around new new
content
yeah well happens um so there's this
thing that's not very common in new
zealand unfortunately called employee or
staff development
this is
helping you be better employees by
giving you new tools
at the very same company with the very
same manager
they did not have an employee
development program you remember this
and i went to
management i said you know
it's nice that you let people go to
conference because they they would pay
your way to a conference if you were
going to speak
which is really great when half your
staff is autistic and introverted
um
and i said you know we have things that
you know yes you've got four staff
members who are great at doing this but
we should probably have things for the
other people
have you considered sending them to you
know
a week of training every six months to
upskill and the manager said to me
approximately
well
if we send them the training what if
they take the money from the training
learn something good and go somewhere
else it's like
dude what if we don't train them and
they stay here forever
yeah
so
if you are a manager of skill your
people and talk to them about mental
health and
training doesn't just have to be
how to
cut code better how to do whatever the
narrow focus of their job is if you help
them develop into a more functional
human being they will still be a better
employee generally
yeah i mean i have a friend that
one of his previous companies
they gave him a training budget but they
didn't say it had to be related to his
job and he could just kind of
i don't know take a ski lesson
and call it a training because he got to
train himself profession well like
expand his brand in some regard and
learn new skills and picking up skills
in other areas can help improve your
skills in your work area and
also just bring you mental clarity and
happiness and happiness is good happy
employees are in fact more proficient uh
again we said this was interactive and i
see no hands as of yet so oh we got a
hand wait there is
i can't see
hold on
yeah
don't wait don't wait for a break just
raise your hand all right
what what should i do if i have to go to
sleep every night saying to myself what
management think of me is not who i am
rather than think about what has
happened during the day
does that make sense
i'm not getting it try again
what should i do if i have to go to
sleep every night saying to myself quote
what management think of me is not who i
am
rather than think about what has
happened during the day so
um
might have them clarify a little bit
um
obviously they're thinking about what
management is thinking of them rather
than just having enjoying their life
yeah yeah
but please uh
when the the thing is is that the
discord is a little might be just a
little behind our conversation
um but if it comes up again
um or if it gets clarified i'll clarify
it
yeah i guess with
kind of worrying about what people think
i think the best thing to do with that
is kind of talk to the person that
you're worried is thinking
maybe negative things maybe not negative
things and a lot of the time you'll find
that once you actually ask someone hey
what do you think of me
they'll probably give you a positive
response because
and you're there on the flip side of
this having been in the management role
they're not thinking of you when they're
in bed yeah that's true are you thinking
of them
um
it may be a compulsive thought process
and
you need
you know
overhead
cognitive overhead
you
too many of us engage with this work
every waking moment
and if you love the work that's fine but
don't think about the management every
waking moment or what they think of you
and
exterminating those thoughts can be
challenging especially if like me you're
neurotically insecure that's a thing
um
one of the things that we'll probably
get to later is talking about
perfectionism
perfectionism is the meanest of the
mental illnesses for me because
i've done something wrong i remember it
forever i do something right i move
right on
and if you suffer from that
it's good to learn techniques to manage
it what those techniques that may be are
different for each person
you might go for meditation you might
become a person who runs
jigsaw puzzles jigsaw puzzles are
profoundly good for some people my
partner is autistic and
put them into a jigsaw and it's like
gives you something to concentrate on
and take your mind off other things yeah
so if you're lying in bed thinking about
what does management think of me
well they're not thinking to you um
they're thinking of profitability i mean
unless unless you are in fact the
problem employee
um in which case you
it's hard to know if you are because if
you are a perfectionist you always
assume you're the problem employee you
did something wrong in february
um
so i hope we've answered that in some
way shape or form nice socks here
um
and yeah continue with questions as as
you have them are you all wearing black
yeah
security conference wait
i see some some whiter beige over there
i was in the green room before and
everyone was saying i was very colorful
and
i was the only one not in black yeah
well i've taken off the purple jacket
stage flights yeah
um i guess that kind of brings us into
our next kind of slide of work
boundaries um
because we're only
didn't work for a certain amount of time
per day and
it's your time like
if you choose to
think on work then that's kind of
not a great space it's not sustainable
really you need to kind of have that
divide of
work and yourself and hopefully sleep as
well because sleep is really important
and also
why do you want to give
your employer all that free time
all that free overhead they are you know
break out what you are making on an
hourly basis and cut it off at eight per
day 40 per week ideally 37.5 per week
ideally move to a four day week of 32
because the
studies show that productivity is the
same for 32 versus 40 but you get
happier employees yes you can look this
stuff up on the magic of the internet
um and happy employees are most
definitely more productive yeah
it's just a thing happy employees are
more productive how can you make your
employees happier how can you be happier
at work that is the secret to better
productivity it is not
i'm going to go home and hack on this
until i fall asleep
crack on other things hack on things
that you love that aren't related to
your employer but
don't don't give them free you you're
worth more than more than that
speaking of work boundaries
it's quite tough cool at the moment
yeah so if you haven't anybody here
heard of covet 19.
again no hands
um
if you're working from home
it's not really working home at the
moment it's attempting to work during a
pandemic you just happen to be at home
yeah though if if you're a manager and
you're expecting the same productivity
out of your team while they're working
from home
you
um
they're having you know
you've you know some of your people will
have three kids screaming around them at
all times demanding attention not
understanding why daddy's not paying or
mommy's not being or non-gendered parent
is not paying attention
and it's hard it is not
functional to actually work from home
everybody's doing their best and respect
doing their best but also
if you are the employee and not the
manager don't do too much
give yourself allowance to not be
working from home but being trying to
working from home and have the
boundaries so like
if you
like don't work for your bed and just
like eat sleep and
work in your bed have like a separate
space that's your workspace and then
another separate space that's
your play space and
kind of separate the work and
personal stuff
uh naturally i think we've got another
yeah yep
hopefully you can see me when i stand up
this is this is this is excellent i've
got one
i've got one meaning i've got a question
um
my experience of infosec sector
development tends to be either brief
highs of things working great followed
by long troughs or why can't you just
find that bug or get that shell
is this a widely held experience
and curious what the speaker's thoughts
on making it all a bit more sustainable
um i guess with the
long bouts of not finding stuff it's
quite a problem in infosec i've found
because i i used to be a developer and
as a developer you kind of make stuff
and you have a
achievable goal that you know whether
you've finished or not but in security
the the output's normally just a report
of hey i've got a report
and sometimes it feels not great when
the report's got nothing in it but in
reality that's actually good for the
client that you haven't found a lot of
issues and
yeah you kind of
have to realize that
even if you don't find a bunch of stuff
it's not a bad thing
and
stop beating up on yourself
yeah
trying
when your work is a negative output
because that's what this is you're
looking for you're looking for things
and not finding them uh try to regard it
more as playing golf where the lowest
score wins
um
it's it's it's more of a a meditative
pursuit
and again finding too much of your
self-worth
in your paying job
not the best way to go find self-worth
yes take pride in the work you do but
how can how can i be a better human when
i'm doing the work and when i'm not
doing the work
and work on your humaning skills in
addition i see a hand i think this is
related
so when i started out as a pen tester in
the street this is silly
i love it
but had this exact same problem right so
speaking from experience
or maybe they'll find something and i
learned something from that and i feel
good about that as well
or um we both do frustrating
yeah so what tc's talking about is is
getting the external validation and
actually when you feel this way talking
to your team and getting them to come in
and look at what you're looking at and
seeing if it's not just you
um did you guys hear any of that yeah we
heard all of it
you can repeat it better than me i think
that's uh really good as well because um
i guess uh back when i was working as a
developer you you have more teamwork as
a developer and like
first security where a lot of the time
you're kind of working by yourself and
you're siloed off in your world and it's
kind of easy to kind of build this echo
chamber in a way that you're not finding
stuff and when you actually stop and ask
your colleagues hey can you have a quick
look at this and see if you can find
anything that i've missed that just
makes
a lot of stress come off you because now
you've got someone else to kind of
validate whether there is nothing or no
there is something there and it gives
you a learning opportunity and it
expands your skill set uh question over
there
one second
all right
if you don't have enough physical space
to be able to separate work and
everything else at home i totally get it
uh do you have any good ways of mentally
compartmentalizing these things uh go
for a walk in between
working and
doing something else
um just have a way to like physically
split your work day from your personal
day as if you were leaving the office
and going to home one thing
so i
commute by cycle and one thing during
the latest lockdown i was thinking it
was a bit weird but i jumped on my bike
and just biked around the block back to
home and that was my commute
and it felt weird to start with because
i was not really going anywhere but
my brain was telling me i've gone
somewhere i'm now at work and
it
made it slightly easier to concentrate
on work
and dress for work
get up
shower act like you're doing the thing
of going into the office
put on office appropriate t-shirt as
opposed to your regular home t-shirt
i have the advantage that
you know a lot of what i do is in the
horror of video conferencing so
yeah i put on a suit or a blazer and do
my hair
it's awesome
and uh
i i do the professional presents
uh for people who are coders i know some
friends who
keep a vid conference channel open
and
sit and code silently with people across
a vid channel
just the sound of more people banging on
keys is comforting
and
we were evolved to hunt in packs and do
things as teams
and isolation isn't good for us so
find a way to maintain engagement
uh beyond the whichever
comms channel you use for strictly text
text is good for most of us okay another
question from the floor here
in light of how vulnerability equals bad
in infosec can you discuss the topic of
emotional vulnerability and mental
health
do you want to go shall i oh you you go
that was deep no no i'm fine on that one
um
the thing is
infosec as we started out on this topic
is up
a thing to
come from the standpoint of first and
foremost is
you are valuable
there is no shortage of jobs out there
if your management doesn't like you
being the human being you are
fine you can go find other management
you probably get a pay raise in the
process
i looked at the numbers of sponsors of
this event it seems like there are a
fair number of employers willing to
throw money around to sponsor a small
event
the reason employers sponsor these
events is not just because they're cool
but because they want your body
hopefully your brain
um
so
practice being you appropriately there
are appropriate work boundaries but if
you're feeling stressed it's good to
talk about feeling stressed because you
know everybody else on the team is
probably feeling it too you're not that
unique
and there are healthy
and work appropriate ways to talk about
the you know
you're having a tough time with this
stuff
and open-ended questions are a great
thing just
ask other people that you are that are
on your team saying
man i'm i'm having
this type of pressure with this what's
your experience and what's your
experience not leaving them yes or no
are you having are you having attention
to yes
but what's your experience it's like
well
it it makes it wider
and
the
just if management discourages you
talking as human beings you want to find
other management and the management
should
they're human beings too and they have
stressors too and they should respect
and participate i'm not
talking you know
having encounter groups that work
necessarily
but the work and the stress and the
pressure are absolutely part of our
very messed up industry
so we should talk about that part of it
as well and normalize talking about the
stressors that go with the work that we
do
i mean personally i've found since i've
opened up more about my issues
i found that a lot of people just have
similar issues and i used to think i was
the only one but really it's actually
the majority of people i know kind of
have some issue of some kind we've got
another question down there yeah i've
got two things one was a comment about
the previous one about you know working
and living in a small space and trying
to separate the two and it was a
suggestion about changing the lighting
you know between you know being at work
and and you know just just having your
everyday everyday um
everyday life and have another one here
yeah awesome so as a people leader how
would you support your team going
through these mental health crisis
what's your recommendations what's some
of your ideas and plans for a people
leader
have regular catch-ups with them and
kind of treat them as human so you can
kind of
have catch-ups more on the personal side
and then catch ups more on the
professional outcome side and
kind of just bond with them as a human
instead of as a
manager and kind of
i don't know almost like flatten that
hierarchy out and let them know that
you're approachable to actually talk
about any issues that might be coming up
with them
and then
they will be more responsive and
probably let you know
stuff is happening when it's happening
before it becomes a professional problem
like further down the track
and also you know again you're a manager
you're a human being
employee also a human being talk to them
like human beings schedule time
you know even 10 minutes a week it's
like hey friday at 10 30 let's vid
conference have a cup of tea ready we're
not going to talk about this project
we're just going to
talk as human beings
the thing that many
more reports forget than managers do
hopefully
is that the purpose of management is to
help you
they are there to support you they are
there to be the tool set that interfaces
with higher management to get you the
things you need to perform better if
they are
focused on
flogging you to get more results they're
not a manager
they're a task master
you know you
uh a bit of a follow-up question like um
can you provide some clues as to what to
look out for when when you know they are
going people are going through mental
health issues
um if you don't quite have that
relationship with them yet
what are some things that you can say i
think daniel kind of alluded to it
before that if they start becoming not
themselves or like not as performant or
changes in behavior yeah more irritable
like
just turning up late or not at all or
skipping meetings like stuff like that
if they didn't normally used to do that
before maybe ask hey is something else
going on that is kind of
causing all this yeah short-temperedness
in somebody who's usually not
short-tempered patience and somebody who
usually is short-tempered
i'm not joking here they're you know
they're kind of just the extremes yeah
it's it's the changes yeah and
you want to if you detect
their if one if
you're not in touch enough with your
team
to be able to spot changes at all be
more in touch with your team because you
need to
especially in security
know that people are doing all right and
if they're not doing all right how you
can support them and getting all right
because stability is the core of any
security operation
yeah yeah so where are we on the slides
anyway we're doing another one uh
depreciation
man that's another culturally sensitive
one yeah depression is different for
everyone um
yeah i mean my operating threshold i
i am chronic nose
diagnosed chronic depressive and hey i'm
up here on stage and i seem pretty
engaged and i'm doing well and i am
doing kind of well this year you know um
isolation from other human beings is
really nice thank you i like
this it's been beautiful free nearly
freaked out at the airport today because
a lot of people were hanging their noses
over their masks and crowding me didn't
like that at all but what you know
depression
has the basic two styles as i mentioned
with anxiety which is chronic or
episodic
your nana dies you're going to be
depressed that is an episodic depressed
depression stimulant it's like i have
had an incident and i am going to have
some sad about that for a month six
months
five years whatever it takes everybody
deals with that sort of thing
differently chronic depression is you
just wake up and it's always gray
and
that is a matter of bad brain chemistry
and the insidious thing about it is you
don't know because
it reduces the function of the tool that
tells you that you're not doing well
so
at one point a very long time ago
i noticed it was july
which was odd because i thought it was
january and i had lost six
months
i wasn't working
i
don't know what i was doing
i apparently was managing enough to feed
myself clothe myself
somehow maintain an income
but i really was not aware of life or
time
and
that is a proper
serious depression and it took me
forever to notice that i was
i i wasn't even miserable i just wasn't
i wasn't feeling anything particularly
and there are all sorts of tools that i
used both standard tools like
psychiatry
drugs
therapy
and other tools that i learned such as
my favorite is the success journal
every day
i would set an alarm and at 5 pm i would
write down 5 things i succeeded at that
day
and sometimes that would look like
i fed myself breakfast i fed myself
lunch i fed myself dinner i successfully
watched tv for five hours
that sounds like survival but if that's
all you've got those are your successes
for the day and after three months when
you look back on
wait
it's september now what happened it's
like oh
wait
i've been surviving
it's uh it's getting close to end time
so i want to make sure if you do have
some questions how many more slides do
we have
fewer hit the button yeah hit the button
um just um what you just talked about a
little bit danielle was the the
self-identifying um do you have more uh
kind of clues i guess to self-identify
that you're actually going through some
stuff that you really need to talk to
someone about is that something did i
come close to that one
yeah it's
what were some clue what would have been
clues that you look back on and be like
oh you know
it made it a bit more obvious that if i
had listened to myself at that point in
time maybe i would have found this out a
year ago or something the problem is
your cognitive set is damaged
when you are depressed
you're you're not perceiving well
and it helps to have external people to
check in with
who look at you and say
that's not right and unfortunately our
modern society and lockdown encourages
and our industry for that matter
encourages a lot of lonerism
and we're just not built for it
having somebody to talk to
you know the great thing i i'm so
not pro church but the great
thing about having religious communities
is you're forced to check in every week
and people are watching you and people
can detect when you're going off the
rails
so having a gaming community is great
because your gaming community will say
oh you're not doing so well and check in
with you
um i'll kind of notice that you're
different i have the advantage of having
a spouse who said by the way
i'm going to divorce you if you don't
get out of this it's like oh i didn't
know i was in something i wish it'd take
less than six months
um
again
the problem with
noticing your own depression is noticing
that you're depressed
it it takes a sophisticated sensor to be
able to pick that up
because it's your sensorium that is not
working correctly i wish i could give a
better answer
sometimes sad is sad sometimes it's sad
which is seasonal affective disorder
especially further south you
go it gets dark
not this time of year
this time of year it's getting light and
that's lovely
but if you are a person who yeah when it
becomes autumn and the light
is less and you start becoming a dimmer
person
there are all sorts of things you can do
for that including the marvelous
technology of blue light there are blue
lights you can buy online that give you
the
extra bit of
synthetic sunlight that you need to help
moderate your seasonal affective
disorder
vitamin d also helps vitamin d vitamin a
uh
there are studies to support
vitamins these are known vitamins these
are not unknown rando supplements
always do your research but
always do your research
i was going to say something else about
sad but i can't remember what it is
yeah
um he or
evil's just
sad all the time and you know what and
the other animals love him yeah and
include him
and bringing him along
and yeah he's gonna be like that so
when your friends are being like that
include them sometimes nudge them
sometimes you have to drag eor along
with you
don't be
too invasive an but just
invasive enough
don't let your friends isolate because
they just say no i'm not feeling like it
great i'll come over i'll bring pizza
yeah
so what can you do when you
can't ask for help you feel like you're
kind of trapped in your own self and
there's no one you can kind of turn to
it can be quite daunting um
make you feel quite isolated and in this
day and age that there's quite a
it's a thing yeah it definitely is a
thing um
there are lots of places where i've been
where i just
could not ask for help
i didn't know i needed to ask for help i
mean self-perception
you know as a person
to learn
to be a successfully chronic depressed
person who still performs you have to
learn all sorts of special skills that
they don't teach you in school
and that is partially checking in with
yourself it's like you might even have a
checklist for yourself
am i feeling this am i feeling this if
i'm feeling this call this person am i
feeling this call doctor am i feeling
this call suicide hotline
they're there for a reason
um
gumboot friday we all know that it's
gumboot friday right i'm not wearing
gumboots but i'm slogging anyway um
if you can't ask for help sometimes
you're the first person that you need to
ask and one of the great things about it
and security people is we're good at
checklists
i mean one thing for me is i i keep a
journal every day and i kind of talk i
check in with myself like sometimes you
don't need someone else you can just
kind of self-check and then write down
in your journal hey this is what i did
today and then you as you're writing you
might think actually that wasn't a good
day because i did this and i didn't
actually do what i wanted to do or i
didn't have fun or i wasn't happy but
you might not know until you actually
kind of get it from your brain into
writing and actually write it down i'm
noticing
hugh's holding his hand like this like
he's writing with a
physical analog interface device
it's much different from just tapping on
your phone that that doesn't do the same
thing for a living
do your
journaling or your mental health
check-ins with a pen
not not not in a database not in a file
because
your brain goes on automatic it's it's
more intimate it's more physical it gets
you and yeah um
if you can't ask for help
and you think you need help and you just
can't ask
start with routines
alarm clock alarm clock is your friend
alarm clock goes off at x time or end
time depending on where you
live right turn off the alarm get up
make the bed right away get in the
shower right away
force yourself into routines to human
humaning is hard it requires effort
but human up
routines definitely help
feelings
are hard though
also being old is hard so that's marvin
the paranoid android uh from a
hitchhiker's guide series what 35 40
years ago a few years back yeah wow i
don't recall it sadly yeah well
i actually listened to the radio series
when it was new
um
yes so feelings are hard
feel them
and if they're miserable feelings try to
share them because
the weird thing there there is this
commutative property of feeling where if
you
share the negative feelings your
experiences is reduced and if you share
the positive feelings your experience of
them is increased
so sharing of the feelings is really
important regardless of what the
feelings are
and finding the people with whom you can
share those feelings
world of warcraft guilds are awesome for
this
um
your team might be awesome for this you
might do
you know
let's do the 10 30 check-in every day
how the hell are you feeling
and just everybody gets five seconds
timed to go through
you know
no matter how shitty it is there's no
judgment that's like
uh my kid is sick my father's dying it's
all being hard move on right expressing
them and expressing them to another
human being
it's what we pretty much have done for
tens of thousands of years
and it's important to know that
sometimes you might not actually know
what you're feeling but if you actually
stop and talk to someone and try and get
it out you might become aware of what it
is you're feeling but if you and if
you're too introverted to talk to a
person write it in your journal yep
the journal is the introvert's best
friend
i like this one
what does this be anxious about
everything really
yeah um
i was pretty anxious coming up here that
here i am i'm still probably not me
because i took my benzodiazepine the uh
also i
have gotten you know 20 years practice
sitting on well sitting standing on
stage sitting is just
luxury it's different i am loving this i
reckon the lights are different as well
because normally my head's up here but
yeah so they are a bit more in your eyes
right now yeah it's interesting because
i've done a bunch of technical talks but
recently i've started doing these like
soft talks and they're different like i
feel less confident about doing it but
well hard talks you know technical talks
we're talking about a defined subject
that's easy yeah you can study it and
there's going to be one person in the
room who
you're wrong on that yeah you're wrong
yeah but you're not on the stage
um
this is intimate and intimacy you know
part of i did not start doing these
talks until i
was
full-time
working for myself and did not have to
worry about employers and if my clients
want to fire me for this i don't want
them as clients anyway
um
i
feel that i have a lot to offer the
world by being one of the people who
will get up here and say yes i've had
two nervous breakdowns because of the
nzit industry and uh
that doesn't necessarily make employers
want to have you because they think
you're prone to it and it's nothing to
do with your employers it's like
nah nah the lawsuits in one case that
but it was definitely the employer and
employers don't like them you'll sue
either so
um
what is there to be anxious about i'm
anxious about carrington events yeah
yeah
carrington events are uh when you have a
really large coronal mass ejection and
the number of fast neutrons hitting the
planet increases so radically that it
damages
electrical infrastructure the one in
1859
caused actual telegraph offices to catch
on fire because of the amount of
fast neutrons hitting the copper wires
that were strung across the country and
uh we nearly had one plane crash in 2008
due to a bit flip incident uh from a
carrington event
uh so that's what i'm anxious about
today global warming minor
um
do i let my concern about carrying two
events affect me professionally
that would be crazier than i am right
now
and that would be the anxiety getting
completely out of control and i can't
tell if
it's just the drugs that are working
that i take three times a day for the
chronic anxiety or
there's just all nothing i can do
about carrington events except encourage
people to do
uh three-tiered processing and have two
processors agreeing at all times to
present prevent that flip yeah
all right i've got another another
question well
as
a lot of the crowd here are defenders
and
when the bad thing happens and the
management comes down and says why did
the bad thing happen
what are some of the tactics to deal
with that sort of negativity coming down
from from up top when you know what some
of those tactics that you guys employ
i guess
in general if like uh
people are approaching you in a negative
light you need to kind of step back and
think
what's the other person feeling like why
are they kind of approaching this from a
negative angle and they've probably got
things that they're worried about and if
you try and work out what they're
worried about and talk to that
rather than
be
defensive and try and protect yourself
sometimes you have to be a bit
vulnerable and express
acknowledgement that you understand what
the other person's feeling and then they
kind of in turn become a bit more open
and
less
attacky on you um in a way but yeah it's
it's a hard situation um especially when
like
negativity is getting directed at you
your default instinct is to become
defensive but
in some ways you have to be
almost the option become more vulnerable
and kind of accept it and just
understand what the other person is
going through yeah as as a former you
know owner of an i.t company that had a
bunch of employees
fuck-ups happen and
that's just the nature of things
as an employer i tried not to be
negative with my people what my main
concern is
what was the thing and how do we prevent
the thing in the future
in some cases that's firing a person
and
as a manager you can fire a person from
a standpoint of yes love what is good
for this person i had one person who i
fired who
the job was go every week and
power cycle a printer for a doctor
and he went because the doctor wants to
publish his report and doesn't know what
to do
and this
guy was brilliant and went in
and rewrote the printer drivers and took
about a day and a half on it
and that printer would never malfunction
again the doctor wanted to print his
report in half an hour like he always
did not wait another day and also we
lost the client because the doctor
wanted to report like he always did i
fired that person successfully and told
him to
go find a job where he's just not
customer facing because he's
really good
and you can hire him today because he's
one of the top robotics consultants in
san francisco and i've actually
performed his wedding for him
i think if you can fire somebody so
effectively that they ask you to perform
their wedding you're doing a good job
um
management should not it's not if
they're doing it right it's not about
blaming you for the thing that went
wrong they want to know the root cause
of what run wrong so we don't have the
wrong thing again because the wrong
thing upsets the client and the
reason the manager is upset is typically
because the client has just shut down
their throat and they do not like that
and you are getting some of the rub off
from that and if they're a proficient
manager
they center before they go talk to you
um
with the anxiety thing
one thing i
try and think of is when i'm anxious
about something i think
can i actually control the outcome of
the thing i'm worrying about and if the
answer is no i tend
to worry less because what's the point
of worrying on something that you can't
control and it kind of relates to
if a manager is coming down on you
they need to work out
what
can be controlled and in this case what
can be controlled is the future outcome
and there's no point dwelling on the
past but
we should jump on another step because
we're running a
bit short
um
parties are hard
parties are hard work is hard if you are
an introvert introvert
teams are hard and it's okay the teams
are hard and you want to
start by addressing your new team by
saying hi
this is awkward and it will always be
awkward for me
so
you know
own who you are
our industry is more often than not made
of introverts so owning your
introversion should not be embarrassing
and
finding the one person who you know if
there's a person on your team that you
can partner with
to ask you leading questions to do your
stand-ups or whatever
great
build your own coping mechanisms
we're all fairly above standard thinkers
and intellects in this room it's the
nature of our industry
it's just how it is
find your own rules that work within the
rules of what's appropriate for a
business setting
and there's a lot more flexibility if
you bring the flexibility yourself
because management wants you to succeed
their management wants it to make money
happy teams make more money
why don't you be happier daniel
be happy
you you don't worry
don't worry be happy yeah um
if only it was that simple way like
sometimes people will just come up to
you and like you're not having a great
day and they're like oh have you tried
just
being
happier about life and it's just like
it's you can't do that when you're
having an anxiety attack you can't
meditate
they they self-cancel but what you can
do
is
basic meat infrastructure management
are you breathing
try to breathe
remember to breathe strangely
the part of your brain that's dealing
with anxiety seems like the part of your
brain that also deals with autonomic
systems like breathing
you have to stop and focus on the
breathing part you'll be much better
with air
bodies especially in this century it
seems
we're bad at hydrating
and you know v does count it's a it's a
myth that caffeine
you know yes it's a diuretic doesn't
matter you're still having fluid keep
having fluid make sure you're hydrated
hydrated bodies and brains work better
it's that that
it's just the thing so yeah while you
can't turn off an anxiety attack you can
breathe and you can have a glass of
water
it stops helping yeah and
focus on the breathing
and consciously drink the water just
don't plug
experience it
experience the sensation of the water in
your mouth yeah swallowing
it's a little step because
getting past the initial
punch of the anxiety attack once once
you're through five percent the other 95
is easier
this slide needs no explanation
sometimes it's just everything's
happening everything is on fire
and all you can do is try to stay calm
and get through it and that especially
applies when you're in a security
situation and everything feels like it's
on fire
and
really in the worst case scenario you
lose a client you lose a job you're
still you and you're fine
it's a weird picture this one
well fortunately i've got terrible
vision yeah
i can't even really see it
it's the same blur that they've all been
yeah um so you'll have to talk to this
slide yeah but basically
anxiety can make things
on the out would seem like it's all
normal like you might look like you're
doing absolutely fine but inside you
you're
not having a great time and
it's kind of hard to see that from
the external
and part of that is just working out
that hey that person's not
quite the same as normal and maybe ask
them how they are
checking in just understanding that
people might not be how they seem from
the outside
and sometimes there might be more one
issue
yeah we are complex systems all of us
and
yeah
nana died and you're feeling sad about
that but it also reminds you of your own
mortality and your own mortality reminds
you the kid in second grade who died and
we are complex systems and you can have
cascade failures if anybody remembers
cascade failures
it's seldom just one thing
we're all under time pressure we're all
under money pressure we all
either have landlords or mortgages one
of the two
and both of those are pressure points
we have complex systems oppressing us
and
we have to juggle to cue them
to deal with which one is causing the
most stress and trying to manage that
stress and it's just
modern life sorry don't know how to
solve all of it she'll be right
yeah so
turns out this is an australian thing
i've always thought it was new zealand i
guess it's just another thing they've
stolen she won't be right some things
don't fix themselves
sometimes you need to actually put an
effort and
sometimes you need to see a third
direction in your life sometimes you
need to find the way to talk to another
human being
sometimes complex problems are complex
and
you have the right tool set for
[Music]
solving an mx record failure but you may
not have the right toolset for solving
your
chronic insecurity about x y or is that
and seeing professionals is a good thing
to i have a greatest advantage coming
from california because we really regard
seeing a psychologist like seeing a
dentist my two-thirds i'm going
to see the dentist my brain's not
working right i'm going to go see a
therapist and there's nothing no value
judgment to it there's a lot of value
judgment to it here or so i have heard
yeah there's also a stigma quality
therapists here can be challenging
so if you do go see a therapist and
you're feeling like it's not good
fire the therapist
you know you you may have to go through
two or three therapists to find one that
works for you and if you
get to the third one and you're still
not finding it right the only thing that
three therapists have in common is you
yes um last question sorry we've
actually had this talk going for more
than 90 minutes which is absolutely
awesome we wanted to give this you know
so much time to talk about this but um
really 90 minutes we've got 60 60
minutes
we started at 4 20. wow
and nobody was smoking
so you've got to slide up here on where
to get help personally
but what about companies that want to
commit more to supporting their
employees with mental health um
a wellness budget is quite good i've
been at quite a few workplaces that do
that there's
employment assistance
eap
services employment assistant program
services yes that's the one um
[Music]
and
yeah there's also like um people that
you can get to come in to kind of assess
your workplace and do that i can't
remember
any names off the top of my head but
as a workplace you can hire specialists
to come in and create a more conducive
to success environment
you can have me come in and teach your
ceo how to be a better ceo because a ceo
who actually understands human factors
will do a better job
but yeah companies should be budgeting
for employee development budgeting for
ongoing employee training budgeting to
send you for conferences
you are you you all are the profit
center for the company
they should be investing in you
happy employees are productive employees
indeed
um
so if we have any more questions come
find us afterwards yeah we're happy to
talk we'll be here until they kick us
out
which feels very imminent i think it
does when's the ice cream social
um yeah so uh thanks for listening along
and thanks for
thanking the questions thanks for
being concerned about yourselves and
your co-workers and your situation and
your industry because
i t it doesn't have to suck and thanks
heaps for the organizers that gave us
these comfy chairs and yeah no fancy
carpet all right this is let's go on my
contract
henceforth
you