Cyber909: Episode 20 with Shannon Rowbury

Transcript

Narator:

Welcome to Cyber 9 0 9, your source for wit and wisdom and cybersecurity and beyond. On this podcast, your host, veteran chief security officer and cyber aficionado, Den Jones taps his vast network to bring you guests, stories, opinions, predictions and analysis you won't get anywhere else. Join us for Cyber 909, episode 20 with Shannon Rowbury.

Den:

Well, howdy again, folks. We are back for another episode of Cyber 909, the cyber show that actually talks very little cyber, so I guess it's really a bait and switch. So every episode we have some fantastic guests and I am blessed today we have an Olympic medalist, someone who has spent a career being an athlete, disciplined, and then somehow, somehow, and we're going to hear this somehow, somehow managed to get over into the world of tech as a consultant with the West Strategy Group. So let me welcome Shannon Rowbury on the show. Shannon, thanks for joining.

Shannon:

Thanks, Den. It's great to be here with you.

Den:

So we met the end of last year, guess latter months of last year. You came to the executive event and you were showing off your magic as you were talking to us and bringing, I'd say, educating us on how you went from your Olympic career into tech. But before we get there, let's talk a little bit about this Olympian thing. So can you share with everybody a bit about your background and your Olympic journey first?

Shannon:

Yeah. I started out in track and field. Well, I really started out in Irish dancing. That was kind of my beginnings as an athlete back in my kindergarten years. But I started running in high school and I spent the first part of my professional career as a pro athlete in track and field. My main event was the 1500 and I competed in three Olympics, Beijing, London, and Rio. I have a medal from the London Olympics. I set American and world records throughout my career. And what I'm most proud of is I spent a decade ranked top 10 in the world. The reason that is what I'm most proud of is because I think it speaks to the ability to build a strong team, to be resilient, to kind of ride the highs and lows and create balance in my life. And those were lessons I had to learn along the way.

They weren't ones that were obvious at the outset. It was a team that helped me learn the lessons in a way that gave me sustainability. But yeah, it was a long career at a really high level, and it's been fun for me now to take those learnings that helped me be successful as an athlete and translate them into tools for others to use for business and life goals. Because ultimately at the end of the day, performance is performance. And I love exploring that intersection of things and really finding ways to create crossover and hopefully applicability for others.

Den:

And from the adversity perspective, you may notice people who know me will know I'm not a runner, I'm not a fan of the gym, but I do like trails and walking. I think there is brilliant, but I've never really been injured. I've never been injured to a point where my professions at risk. So as someone who relied on your body being tip top shape, and I think you talked to us about going through injury and I think of running as an individual sport unless you're doing really, but it's a team thing in the background, right? So can you share just the dynamic of what it's like to go through that injury or tough times, and then how did you get yourself through it? But how did the team help you get through it?

Shannon:

Yeah, I mean, we see most everybody. We often see the highlights in people's lives, but we don't that the kind of backstory and the in-between times aren't as readily posted on social media or covered on the TV broadcast. But the reality is that in my life, for certain and in my teammate's lives, there were these highs and lows. There were niggles, as the Brits would say, that would kind of pop up. And really for me, I had a massive injury that ended my collegiate career prematurely. So I had won NCAA indoors. I was a top recruit coming into my senior outdoor season ready to sign a big contract, and then I got a stress fracture in my left hip that basically made it impossible for me. I was on crutches. I couldn't even try to finish my senior season, and it was devastating. What I'm most proud of is that I use that setback as an opportunity for learning and ultimately an opportunity for development and growth in the running space and in the sporting space, we call that prehab.

My efforts were to really understand the root cause of the injury that I had, especially since my injury was a stress fracture, which is a chronic injury, meaning that something was off day after day, week after week, month after month, ultimately leading to a massive setback. And I think there's a lot of parallels in our personal lives in a business setting that the setbacks do happen sometimes from our own choices, sometimes for things that are out of our control. But ultimately, when that moment happens, how quickly can you bring it back to the things that are within your control? How much can you learn from that setback in hopes that it will be less likely to happen again? Because it's one thing for a thing to happen once, but if it's happening 2, 3, 4 times again and again, then we're not learning and we're letting the same mistakes get in our own way.

But if we can always fail forward, the other an industry favorite, then at least you can come back stronger. And that injury I had at the start of my pro career, that was in 2007. I didn't have another major injury until 2019 postpartum, and that was due to having to come back from childbirth too quickly. So it was a completely different set of circumstances, but my original injury came from a leg length difference that's pretty significant and should have meant that my life as a pro athlete was not meant to be. My story is one that proves that even a anatomical anomaly that should be a game ender isn't necessarily. So

Den:

Yeah, I was just thinking as you were saying that the emotional strength to go through the devastation of what you think is a career ending injury. And so how did you cope with that emotionally or twist it another way? What advice would you have for someone that is struggling emotionally to go through something like that?

Shannon:

I cried a lot. I remember, I forget what movie was in the theaters, but I was injured. I couldn't train and I think it was a horse racing movie or something. And I just remember watching it crying, seeing an animal race and achieve great feats. And here I was sidelined and it was heartbreaking for me.

And so there is that emotional component for sure, and that it's important to recognize that feeling of disappointment and the fact that you are that disappointed I think is a reminder of how much you care. I think for me, there was this just conviction that I would be able to come through it. I was not ready to be done with my career. And step one for me at the time it happened, I was at Duke in college. I'm from San Francisco, so the opposite coast. And so for me, I had an incredible support team from a healthcare perspective in the San Francisco Bay area. So step one for me was get back home. When it came to getting back to the root cause, I also needed to get to the root of where I was from and really understand how I could rebuild the system around me to have it to both understand my injury.

So leg length difference, I identified it with a bone length scan. I got a massage therapist and chiropractor to kind of help keep my muscles and bones in alignment. I got orthotics to kind of lessen that leg length difference. I created a training plan in the gym and hip and core work so that I could make my muscles the first line of defense to minimize the chance that my body would get out of whack. A lot of it for me was first that conviction, but second then, okay, how do I take ownership of this process and put in the building blocks so that as I recovered from that injury, and it took me about three or four months till I ran on the ground again, but along the way, I was putting in those building blocks day after day so that when I did get cleared to run on the ground, I was able to go from zero miles to about 50 miles a week in the course of a month.

So that was around August. By December-ish or January, I had won my first indoor national championships and by June I made my first Olympic team. And so I think for me it was conviction that I was not ready to be done commitment to figuring out how I could unravel this injury and build a stronger system moving forward. And then most importantly, the willingness to show up day after day after day and do the work necessary. That's where a lot of people miss out either. I see the biggest mistakes. They don't take enough time at the outset. They try to rush back without ever fully understanding what set them back in the first place, or they have an idea of what they need to do, but they just aren't quite willing to put in that work, which includes the sacrifices of missing out on. For me, I missed out on weddings and birthdays and parties and social events. I had to be really conscious of how much sleep I got or the foods that I ate and all my whole entire lifestyle. But I was willing to make those commitments because, or that sacrifice to me, it wasn't even a sacrifice ultimately because it was really building me towards a much bigger and a really meaningful goal.

Den:

One thing when you went through the injury, people can take that one of two ways. They can go inward and just crumble and say, screw it, I'm not going to do this any longer or the other way, which is what you've done, which is I'm fighting for this, this is mine and I want it. Was there a mentor in your life at that point when the injury happened, you get the bad news? Was there a special someone in your life that said, Hey Shannon, you can fight this, you can do it, you can make it happen? Or was that meant or inside your head?

Shannon:

I think a combination of both. I think the people in my life, my coaches, my parents, my inner circle believed just as I did that I wasn't done yet, that there was another side of this that I would get over the hump and that I would find success. It wasn't guaranteed, but we all believed it was possible. I think when you're kind of that puddle of emotions and feeling like you're completely lost, you need that person to help get you up and take those first baby steps. For me, it was certainly my mom, she has always been someone that's a doer as well. So I think she helped me wrap my head around how we could start to unravel this injury and get to the bottom of it and to the point where she's, let's get you home. Let's see the people who you've, the massage therapist, the chiropractors you've worked with since you were a kid that you trust that really know their stuff. And let's use that as a starting point. And I even remember, of course, with an injury that severity, we did an MRI and the MRI showed a variety of things, but I had had the great advice from my chiropractor, which was, yes, there's a stress fracture in your hip or your femoral neck. Yes, you have a labral tear. There's some other things as well, but the biggest of all of those is the stress fracture in your femoral neck. Let's worry about that. And the other things, not that they don't matter, but let's not go

Do the hip surgery. Let's first try to recover this thing and be really diligent about the way that we treat it. And if it's still an issue, then we'll deal with that next. But sort of helping me to prioritize where to put my time and energy to. So that's where that team around you, even when it is an individual sport, that team around you really helps you see through all of the different variables coming at you and give you that support and guidance to focus on operation critical and drawing that path forward to really focus your energies on the most productive actions.

Den:

Yeah, I know a lot of athletes and sports people visualize and they visualize their future, they visualize their dream, they visualize holding the medal, they visualize being on the podium or were you coached ever to do any visualization as part of your journey?

Shannon:

Yeah, we did visualization. I was fortunate to work with a man named Greg Dale when I was in college and at Duke, and he was my first exposure to sports psychology. Now I think it's called sports performance, but I would say a lot of what we talked about was more process focused. And so most of my visualization has been around execution. I mean, I certainly would think about what I wanted to achieve, but that kind of outcome focus can sometimes be a slippery slope because then you're really fixated on a final product when there's so many steps along the way that you really need to steal yourself for. And so when I would do my race preparation and we would have visualizations for the race, a lot of time was spent around how do I want to show up in each moment of the race?

So getting to the starting line, how do I get in, take a deep breath and focus on what I can do, the reasons why I should feel confident at that starting line? What is the body of work that I've done that gives me every right to feel like I have a chance? And then in the race itself, breaking down my race, which is about three and three quarters laps. And I would be thinking about in lap one, I would have either a word or a physical cue to kind of help me remember how I wanted to execute in that moment. So for example, lap one would often be around positioning because the 1500 meters, we're all trying to share the same space on the track. We don't have our own lane. So it can't be so much about execution, it's more about intent or creating an idea of how you want to react. And so I spent a lot of time, yeah, it'd be I want to position in the first lap, I want to take a deep breath on the second lap to gather myself. Because for me, breath is a really visceral and valuable cue to kind of coming back into my body, things like that.

I encourage the people that I work with, I encourage everyone to sort of really be thinking about what are those words or cues like a deep breath. It can help you come back into the here and now because it is so easy to get into our heads and to think about all the things we need to do, but ultimately to make the best use of this moment we're in, we need to try to actually be in it.

Den:

And I think that's a really good point. A lot of people when they think of visualization, they visualize the end result, but they don't visualize the journey to get to the end result. And ultimately, I heard there was a audio book, Dr. Tara Swan, she talked about, I think it was the core, she talked about, don't call them visualization boards or vision boards, call them action boards, because the reality is it's not just about the thing you want in the future. What do you need to do to take steps to get there? So I thought that was a really great way to twist it. It also helps take it away from people talking about woo woo stuff and to actual goals, and I'm going to make the thing happen and I'm going to be part of the journey of making it happen. Yeah,

Den:

Yeah,

Den:

Absolutely. When you started, so then from the Olympic side, so how old were you when you ran your first Olympic race?

Shannon:

I think I was maybe 23 or so. And then my last, I think I was just before just 23, almost 24. And then was I guess 27 and then just over 30 when I was in my third Olympics. So my entire twenties into my early thirties was my prime career as a pro track athlete.

Den:

And what do you think? So at the end of it, I would never think of you hanging your runner shoes up. You're probably still running the side and round San Francisco. I did think earlier I was like, but maybe you had one leg longer because of the hills in San Francisco. You're just going to round them, and that's how your body over time stayed up straight.

Shannon:

I would've been better if it was my left, not my left leg, but my right, because you turn around the track. So it actually would've given me a little distance, but

Den:

Could yeah, sometimes just run the other way. Shannon just

Shannon:

Den

Den:

The same

Shannon:

Way. Yeah, they wouldn't let me do that in the race though. Darn it.

Den:

Yeah, I know, right? I'm like, come on, you got to do it both ways.

Shannon:

Yeah.

Den:

Now I love So you've done your Olympics. Congratulations on your medal. Thank you. I know for you that is the culmination of really that hard work is a recognition. I love that. I love the reward of the thing, but I think in any life journey, you said something earlier about fail fast and really what I take away from it was you learned a lot of lessons in the journey that helped you get to where you are now. So I twist it from being a failed fast to a, I learned a lot of lessons that enabled me to accomplish something and deliver ideally quicker. When you got to the end of your pro career, what did you look back at as the biggest lesson you learned?

Shannon:

A couple takeaways. So with my pro career itself, I guess as I look back on it, and I guess the two takeaways are sort of tied together. So my medal from London took 13 years to come through because I crossed the finish line in I believe sixth. But as it turns out, more than half the field was cheating. And so it took until this past September for yet another athlete to be disqualified, for me to get elevated into the bronze medal position. And so you're absolutely right that medal. In some ways it seems silly to think that that was a validation, but for so long I had been kind of told that success in the Olympics means coming first, it's making the Olympic team, you've done that, now you have to get a medal. Those are the two success metrics within the Olympics. And so what I really discovered though, because I got my medal all these years later, we had a celebration in the fall to just to celebrate the fact that this kind of thing we had suspected for so long had actually been proven true.

And it was really important for me to gather together the people who had been part of that team that had been part of getting me to the starting line in 2012, to bring them all together and to thank them, to celebrate with them and really recognize the fact that while I towed the starting line alone, it was them that had gotten me there. And I think the biggest takeaway I have from that pro athlete career was that investment in people and the investment in team. I certainly didn't have great experiences across the board. There were some really challenging moments both with coaches and with contracts and with a lot of different things. But what got me through it in one piece with consistent success was that team around me. And so I think that reinforcement of how vital it is to invest in people and invest in relationships, for me, it was really emotional 13 years later to see, with the exception of a couple people who had passed away, those same people still in my corner still able to have them all together in one room think that, yeah. And I think for every person at the end of the day, that's what matters. It's those, the metal, yes, it's cool, but I'm not going to wear it around every day. But those people in your life, they're the ones that make life worth living.

Den:

And you hit the nail on the head in a minute. We're going to translate this all over into business context and stuff, but I think of it like Shannon was the product, and in order for the product to be a successful product, then you need to live a good lifestyle, eat the right stuff, be super disciplined. You need to practice, practice, practice. And then there's the army of people around you and that also aids and supports you in the journey as well. But on top of it, then you've got all these other people that want a little piece of you from different contracts or business or sponsorship or all that shit that just goes along with it. So I always think of it in any time there's money involved, I guess

There's always a bunch of people that are there for the right reasons. And then there's what I would even say is the bigger tale of people, which is usually just trying to get a piece of the action. I know that through my journey of being a musician and working for record labels, and when I hung my boots up the equivalent of that as a musician who is working for labels, I remember a magazine article that said I was giving up or getting out of the biz, and they were friends of mine, so I worked with them on the article. But what was really interesting was back in those days, it was a little answer machine. I used to get about 20, 30 messages a day on that answer machine. And then after that article came out, I'd probably get about two. And I'm like, sweet. Now I know who my friends are, right?

Shannon:

Yes, yes. You see through the challenging moments, you really, it's brutally painful when the people you thought were in your corner turn out not to be. But that is an opportunity to really have clarity on who is on board and who you should invest in. If you are ever challenged, pay attention to the ones who show up and make sure that you invest in those ones moving forward, especially in the good times because it is so blatantly clear the people who really have your best interests at heart when something goes wrong.

Den:

Yeah, absolutely. And it's funny because one of the things that I recognized is even when I was in my role at Adobe or my role at Cisco, the number of people who are your friends or larger than when you go to this little rinky dinky startup and you don't have the same budget, so it's really interesting, they

Shannon:

Can get something from you.

Den:

And I heard this in another podcast actually, and oh God, it just hit me like a hammer in the head. And it was basically is you are not the one they want. They want the director of enterprise security, they want the ccio or they want the title, the person in the title at that company. You can have the same title at a shitty little startup with no budget. They don't have the same interests or love. And I can tell you there's a lot of CEOs in the valley that would reach out to me when I was running those big teams at Adobe and Cisco. And you can get on, you can't even get 'em to reply to a text message. Now, that was an eye open, not really an eye opener, but I guess it was a little bit, and now you bridged the gap. So let's talk about how did the opportunity come around for you to go from the ex Olympian into leadership technology space?

Shannon:

Well, I think, I guess in a way it ties to what you just said. What you were saying reminded me of the fact that the shortsightedness investing of being interested in the title as opposed to the person. Because if you're in it for the long haul, if you are building a legacy, those small actions, you never know where they can lead. And the simple act of being genuine and authentic and building strong relationships, especially in cybersecurity, especially in the sporting space where everybody knows each other, that legacy carries with you and will create opportunities. And so I worked with Met Bob West, who's my business partner at West Strategy Group back in 2017. I was still racing at the time, and we just had a conversation, just a friendly conversation about nothing with nothing expected, but his mother's Mexican, my husband's Mexican, shared passion for track and field, genuinely wonderful person.

And he was working in cybersecurity. So I definitely had no business interest in 2017. It was not at all a space I was trying to get into, but that friendship turned first into a mentorship where he just was generous with his time, giving me advice as I transitioned to my next career after professional sports and helping me navigate some first that who am I if I'm not an athlete, really being able to define how my accomplishments on the track translated. Then navigating a startup space that wasn't the greatest working environment and having that reality check of corrected expectations of what was appropriate. And then ultimately it was that friendship and shared interest that when I had created Medalist Mindset, which is the foundation of the work that I do for leadership and performance coaching, I had just asked Bob as a friend if he would check it out, get his feedback on what he thought.

I created a medalist mindset with Lauren Gibbs, she's a fellow olympian bobsled silver medalist. And so I shared it with Bob for his advice, and he was working at Palo Alto Networks at the time, but was ready for his next step. Felt that medalist mindset would be a great tool that we could use as part of our consulting business to really support our clients to not only have go-to market support, but leadership and performance support for either the individual or their teams. And we decided to partner together. And so just going back to what you had said, the way that we treat people when we don't want anything from them leaves a mark. And it's really exciting to build relationships with others that you just have that mutual respect with. Bob is one den from our conversations, you as well, just someone of deep thought of integrity, of curiosity obviously works hard, but to me, I think if life has taught me anything, it's the investments and those kinds of people. You never know where they will go, they'll go somewhere interesting.

Den:

And I look at that because I think of it, there was something mentioned earlier as well about the team around you. I don't know a single leader who is successful without having a team, like a team around every team I've ever built I've, I've been individual contributor and I would like to think that I've made my previous managers look good. I think they've enabled me to grow in my career and enabled me to look good. And then with my peers and other people beyond the team in my personal life, my personal circle is small, intentionally small because I don't need a million friends. I just need quality and not quantity. And I think in business it's the same. I mean, I love the thought of, and I share this, the number of salespeople in my contact list, my phone is tiny. I've been doing this shit for over 30 years. You think more than 12 people who are salespeople who have sold to me,

Den:

And

Den:

They can call me up anytime and I'll pick up the phone because there's a relationship and trust, I think. And you mentioned that trust and integrity is huge. Now, the medalist mindset, you took us through this. When we'd done the executive session with you, I thought it was great good enough that I said, Hey, Sean, and I'm Ben. I would love to be your friend and have you on the show and all this stuff. So why don't you share with everybody some of the concepts or takeaways from that.

Shannon:

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, so medalist mindset, like I said, Lauren Gibbs and I created it, and it really was, it developed organically from the work that we were already doing with clients. She and I, individually and independently we're just working with business leaders, sharing our experiences as a professional athlete, sharing tools that we had used and the same kind of tools kept popping up. And as Lauren and I, we had worked together at a sports startup. We had both since left that startup, but we stayed in touch and kept having conversations about there really needs to be a better tool out there to take athlete sports performance tools, but speak about them and apply them to the business context, apply them to goals at large.

I think that sports tends to be the testing ground for new concepts and new tools because is that half a percent or 1% of difference between a medal and no medal means that people are willing to try new things and the pressure of performance, you think of a product of me, the athlete as a product. I only had one day every four years where I could succeed as that product or not. The margins are so thin. And so Lauren and I, we spent time talking, really trying to distill down all of these tools into five keys. And what was fun for us is that our backgrounds into sport and into our Olympic medals were so different. Mine was more traditional in that I signed, I had a college scholarship at Duke. I signed with Nike right out of college. I had a pro career that lasted three Olympics.

Lauren had worked in corporate until the age of 30 and decided to on a whim, see if she could make an Olympic team, and then went on to get a silver medal. And so what we felt was fun was if we could with very different paths and with very different client sets, distill down these five keys and make them actionable as well, that we felt like there really there would be good applicability for others. And so the five keys that we have are mind, which is all about, or excuse me, goals. So how do you set a goal? Why do you set a goal? What is it that you're trying to achieve? We call that what is your Olympics? Because we think that every person has the ability to achieve at the highest level. It's just about really identifying what that goal is. And in order to identify that goal, you have to understand what motivates you and why you want that goal.

What will carry you through the highs and lows. Foundation is a second key, and that's about getting to the understanding yourself. Are there things that tend to pop up along the way? And can you address them at the outset so you minimize their chance of causing challenges or setbacks later? The third key is mind. How do you show up mentally controlling the controllables when you're in a challenge situation? Routine is the fourth key, and that's about how do you spend your day to day? Are you really conscious of how you spend the 24 hours that you have available to yourself? Can you set yourself up in a routine throughout the week throughout the year that is productive and also sustainable? And then the fifth key is team and the conversations we have with clients around that is both how do you communicate what your goal is to the team so they can understand and be on board? How do you also have, we had said earlier, these tough conversations with people that maybe were important in your life before but aren't really up to the challenges ahead or aren't really meant to be part of your team moving forward and thinking about all of these steps, goal setting through execution as a flywheel, where ultimately the team is that first line of defense when something goes wrong that helps you get back up and set that goal again and go through the whole process.

Den:

So we went through it and I thought as I was going through it, I was like, there's so much common sense, but there's so much common sense isn't very common. I think probably the end of it. But yeah, in the book there was so many nuggets and little gems and common sense and just if you're really going to sit back and think about how to do it right, then I'm like, this would be a good five step to follow exercise. And so you guys do this with a lot of executives. When you ask for feedback from your clients, what's the feedback and what do they see as the benefit or the result?

Shannon:

Similar to what you said, the kind of the simplicity, but the clarity of it I guess. So really, and that Lauren and I spent months trying to distill it down in a way that felt kind of straightforward and applicable and relatable, but set up in a way that was really thoughtful. So it builds you hopefully into a position where you feel like you're well on your way towards achieving the goal that you set. I think oftentimes between the goal setting and the achievement doesn't happen because the goal is set and then it feels really overwhelming to figure out how to get forward action. Part of the way that we created our workbook that supports the work we do with clients is it's an overview of the concept, a personal story to hopefully make it relatable and then a worksheet paired right next to it with the goal that people can immediately take action. I think a lot of the self-help or performance tools out there will talk about concepts, but don't necessarily provide actionable ways for that participant or that reader to start to unpack how they can apply that to their own lives. And we were very action oriented in the way that we created Medalist Mindset because we know that if you don't have those steps to get it going, that that behavior will never change and the action won't happen and it'll stay in there as a concept but not as actually a deliverable.

Den:

And I thought of it as a tool as well that could be used to bring focus. I think sometimes when we're doing, I'm building a business, you guys are running your business when you're doing these things, sometimes you just kind of forget to stay focused on the price. And if you have this thing, this, you call it a worksheet, I'll call it a cheat sheet, really, if you have it in front of you and you refer to it, not necessarily every day, but if you refer to it in a regular basis, it's going to remind you what's important. It's going to remind you how you built the foundation or how the foundation needs to remain in place

Den:

Because

Den:

Sometimes these things, they crumble away because you lose sight and you don't nurture them as well. I was thinking, I'm like, oh, I wonder when you're going to write the book. There's probably a book in the works. There should be a book in the works. Is it a book in the works?

Shannon:

Yeah, we're trying to collect more stories from different walks of life because the workbook itself has a lot of, our personal story is exclusively our personal stories from Lauren's and my journey through the Olympics and the learnings along the way. And the goal for the book is we don't have a contract signed. I do have a publisher I'm working with on a different book, so I we're putting it out there for feelers, but our goal is to provide more examples of how this crosses over. I think that there's a lot, that kind of idea of the parables, it's one thing to say a concept, but to really understand how others have experienced that in their own life is that spark. I find that kind of helps it feel relatable, helps them kind of understand how that makes sense in context of their own day to day and having more of those stories out there for people to hopefully help them in their own journey, whatever it is they're trying to achieve.

Den:

And I look at it, there's, well, first of all, from a time perspective, we could probably talk, I actually just have about 54 more questions now. I was sitting there thinking, wait a minute, wait a minute, I should have asked more about. And then I'm like, okay, time to move on. That's

Shannon:

Where you and I when we met the first time, it was a say where the conversation just kept going. But that's my favorite thing, finding those people. And it doesn't surprise me that you, with your background in music coming into cyber, I love people like you who have an intersection of things, two lived experiences that on the surface don't connect, but yet together they create an innovative perspective that is so valuable. And so I just want to say I so enjoy our conversations for many reasons, but I think that that is one of them

Den:

I know. And also I do recall we both wine as well. Oh,

Shannon:

Well

Den:

That's good. I think everybody needs a little wine in their life usually. And some good cheese. Actually, I'm a huge foodie as well. So for me it's like I love to scratch cook and actually I got into growing mushrooms. I know the health benefit of fruits and vegetables is not lost on me, but I love growing my own stuff. I got into the mushrooms and I'm a big fan of Lion's, Maine. So yeah, so for me it's like that stuff's great. I tried to make my own beer during Covid. That was an epic fail, ridiculous at it. I figured I should just go buy some shit. I literally spent I think $400 on a beer making kit. Now this goes back to when you're building a good team. I think I have great ideas, some visionary and some not so much, but I get bored pretty quick. So if a project takes too long or whatever, I want someone else to run with it. But my attention to detail is not the best unless I really want to or need to be. Then I'm not really detail orientated, but I surround myself with people who are,

And for me, the problem with the beer making is I needed someone who had an attention to detail beyond mine, my mushroom making stuff. Luckily enough, I went to this place North Spore, they're really good. I'll put links in the show notes. But yeah, it's pretty cool. Didn't

Shannon:

Expect to learn about mushrooms guys. Did

Den:

You? Well, what's funny, I used to have an architect to my team, and this guy was all about mushrooms. I mean, super smart guy knew his shit about mushrooms, and at that point in my life I wasn't really interested, but he could go foraging and find

Shannon:

Mushrooms. Oh wow. That's some confidence right there, because I would love that on the surface, but I'm terrified I'm going to pick the one one that will kill me,

Den:

That one or the one that'll put you on a really good trip and you'll never be able to find it again. Dunno that as well. I'd be disappointed. I'm like, where was that mushroom again? Yeah, but it is interesting for me as you go through your life journey, I can't imagine you being say 10 or 11 interested in going from dancing to running. And as you go through those years, you're a competitive dancer then a competitive runner. I can't imagine you just sat there and said, well, 30 years from now I'm going to be in tech.

Shannon:

Part of me, I've always loved, I grew up in San Francisco and I've seen the way that the innovation of tech. So for me, when I think of the intersection of things I said, I love that sports tech is an area that I thought I would end up in. So I thought it would be a natural evolution to take my experience as an athlete, leverage technology, and its incredible capabilities to work in the sports tech space. What I've been so pleasant, so charmed by I guess with cybersecurity are the people in it. So the drivers of the people in cybersecurity makes sense to me. Purpose-driven individuals, they have to be resilient, they have to perform under pressure. There's unexpected things that come at them and you have to just show up every day to give your best effort because that's what this space requires because there's a bigger threat out there and even the sense of community within cybersecurity that you might be competitors, but at the end of the day, there's this recognition that the greater good is more important. So I mean, I guess coming back to people again and coming back to really just finding those individuals who you can respect, who you can relate to, who you can communicate with on an authentic level. I still have so much to learn about the ins and outs of cybersecurity, but the people by and large that make it work, those I love spending time with.

Den:

Yeah, yeah, I mean it's funny because I've been in it forever, IT and security, if you ever say that some parts of it is security then over 32 years in this stuff. Oh wow. Yeah. 1992 or something, I dunno. I was a kid. But it is cool because I love the diversity. I think there needs to be more diversity, gender diversity and everything else. But I think of it as diversity of people and personality and the more we get some really weird, awfully brilliant, weird people in our industry. And I love when I go to Defcon just seeing all the different types of people, like their clothing, their hairstyles, their tattoos, the music. There's a whole music scene as part of Defcon that I love. So for me it is fun. And the conversations, I think there's the guy who does the mushrooms or there's just so many different people with different personality types, which I just love it. It's brilliant. That's cool. And then I meet people like you as well, right? It's like, holy shit, there we go, an Olympian. So who'd have known, right?

Den:

Yeah.

Den:

But I think it's great, and I think it takes all these disparate diverse backgrounds and thought leadership to come into the industry to help bring freshness and vitality to it. We focus, and it's funny because when I first started doing podcasting, I was at Banyan Security, we'd done about 34 something episodes and I kept thinking it's like, oh yeah, let's cool. We'll dissect that breach and we'll talk about this breach.

Narator:

And

Den:

A lot of the times my leadership wanted us to talk about breaches, especially the ones that our technology would solve or prevent. And that was cool because I had a lot of faith in that technology. They built a great product.

Den:

But

Den:

I love the fact that I can do this now because one of the things that I'm trying to really raise is more about how we thrive, how different people can bring different things to the industry, more about our brand, more about emotional health and wellbeing. Over the weekend, we just launched a podcast about wellness with a wellness coach talking about yoga and meditation. And like Mel Ray, he's an executive coach, he's a veteran, CIO and cso, and we talk about vision boards and manifestation and shit.

Den:

The

Den:

Reality is I think there's huge amount of room in our industry to raise the conversation of the emotional side of it. So the not techy side, but all the other stuff. You don't become a leader. You don't become a leader just because a good coder or you had a good

Shannon:

Research, you can't last. And I remember when I came out, I had that injury in oh seven, made my first Olympic team in oh eight was just heads down forward full speed, go, go, go. But by year two, I started to notice the cracks, the inability to sustain that intensity. And by year three, I felt like I was losing the ability to control When I would need a break, my body just would start to decide for me. But because I knew I wanted to build a legacy because I knew I wanted a long career, for me that was a trigger to start investing in a bit more of that assessment in what you had talked about, the wellness, the balance, spending time, really understanding my year as a whole and where could I kind of plug in some time for recovery. I think even in the business space as well, there's a seasonality to every year.

And yes, there's things that come out unexpectedly, but if you've been in a position for six, definitely 12 months, you should be able to start to understand the ebbs and flows of that year. And you need to make a point of carving out some time for recovery in it because it's impossible for you to go hard when you really need to go hard if you're always going hard. And if you haven't created time and space for recovery, I think of it as like a pendulum. And if you want the pendulum to swing high one direction, you have to allow it to swing high. The other,

Den:

There

Shannon:

Has to be that balance in it. And so I think to your point, creating this wellness oriented podcast, it is often treated as a nice to have that thought around general health and balance and wellbeing. But the reality is that it is as essential as the other aspects of the business because without it, the other aspects will start to have cracks and start to crumble because the people will not be able to sustain.

Den:

Yeah, I mean, it's a tough industry to survive in with the amount of pressure and stress people are under if you don't take some time for your emotional wellbeing. And I love that side of it. So I do know that we are about 50 odd minutes into here. So Shannon, I appreciate your time. Thank you very much. I'd love to have you on the show again. I think there's a lot more to cover, especially as you get some book getting published. We should have you on and talk about the next book

Den:

And

Den:

The adventure and where this is all going. So hopefully we'll see each other in person again soon. Thank you for your time. It's been great having you on the show, everybody. Shannon Rowbury from the West Strategy Group. We will put all the links in the show notes so you can check out the business side of Shannon as well as all the Olympic business. So thank you very much.

Shannon:

Thanks Jen.

Narator:

Thanks for listening to Cyber 909. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and don't miss an episode of your source for wit and wisdom in cybersecurity.

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