Transcript
Narrator:
Welcome to 9 0 9 Exec, your source for wit and wisdom and cybersecurity and beyond. On this podcast, your host, veteran chief security officer at 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 9 0 9 exec, episode 40 with Dr. Sara Rabinovich.
Den:
Hey everybody, welcome to nine nine Exec, your podcast for your executive journey in tech. And every episode I find these fascinating people and today is like no other. We have got Dr. Sara in the house, and Sara, you're going to talk a little bit about your life as a, I'm going to say a cyber psychologist. I mean, that's kind of what you say on LinkedIn. So why don't you introduce yourself and tell us what it is you do for work.
Sara:
Yeah, thank you so much, Den. I'm so happy to be here and I love chatting with you. As usual. My name is Dr. Sara Rabinovich. I am a cyber psychologist and a professor at USC and I'm also a behavior scientist and stress researcher and found myself in this exceptionally rewarding role supporting cyber folks with burnout and stress relief and stress recovery that's really grounded in the science and what we know to be true about the body and what it takes to bring the body back down to equilibrium. And I love my work because it's not kind of sharing necessarily these sort of global theories. It's getting really minute and really precise in offering applied tools to help cyber pros and from the ground up, from the bottom up and the top down really genuinely in a research backed way, manage stress and manage burnout. So it is incredibly rewarding.
Den:
And then you're the founder of Pacific Mindful Wellbeing. Is that the day job or is it cyber cam because you have an app and then you also, so there's a bunch of things where you're currently, presently doing so how many different things are you juggling just now?
Sara:
That's a great question. So Pacific Mindful is the umbrella and we work with a number of high stress industries. I'm a former athlete and so we work with athletes and we work with nonprofits and engineers and cybersecurity and cyber is our main focus right now because burnout and stress are such a big problem. We develop an app like you said, and we'll talk about it in a bit. Tools for managing.
Den:
Yeah, that's brilliant. So let's roll back a few minutes to when you were a young kid and you're choosing your profession. So you're a female in what I'll think of as a male dominated industry, although the mindfulness and wellbeing, I wouldn't say as much, but in the cybers, definitely. So when you were young growing up and picking your career, how did you navigate yourself into this space?
Sara:
That's such a good question and I actually find that working in a male dominant field is a really good fit for me for a number of reasons. So as a kid, I always loved human interaction and being of service and supporting people and also had a really keen interest in psychology and understanding the mind and what leads people to do certain behaviors. And I mentioned I was an athlete, played college basketball and it's been a long time since then. So I think coming from an athletic background, there's a lot of mixing of genders. You have the men's basketball team are like your brothers, the wrestling teams like your brothers. So it's very easy to interface with men and to hold your own and athletics gives you a lot of confidence. I'm also like six feet tall, so tower over tower, tower and not, but truly I think that gives me some confidence too.
And I love working in cyber and I have found that it's a great dynamic because I think I bring warmth and a gentleness and a compassion in a field, and particularly with groups of men who were not socialized to be compassionate and I should say, who were not socialized to talk about their feelings under the fear that they would be seen as weak. And so it's actually a really good fit for me and I see a lot of value in empowering men and women and non-binary folks in cyber to bring their true selves and be their true selves and to be able to drop the veil sometimes to get the support they need.
Den:
And it is quite interesting, I mean growing up in the IT industry and security and stuff, for me, I remember being at a bank and it's almost like, hey, you got away a, and it's like, oh yeah, because the suit made me more intelligent. That's right. I think there's always these environments and cultures where there's very little wiggle room to be yourself. You're conforming to the company's identity or what they perceive and usually it's dependent on the organization and the leader. And as a leader, I look at it like, well, how can we build an organization that maybe still has the morals and values of the company I'm in but yet has our own unique brand and identity? And I did work with a coach years ago on brand and team brand and individual brand, and I think people go through their career, they just don't recognize that every day your brand is showing up, whether you're conscious of it or not,
When you think of leaders in stressful situations. Now cyber is brilliant because quite often we have either breaches to worry about or we are working with teams in high stress situations like they're always eyes on glass for a soc or they're always doing research in areas which are, I'm going to say morally saddening. So it could be child exploitation or other things of that nature. So how do you coach, let's jump into a typical coaching example from a cyber perspective of what you encounter when you engage with a client, how do you try and navigate and coach them and then what the end result looks like?
Sara:
That's a great question and I think of it as a very bite-sized journey because execs are very busy, cyber pros are very busy and don't want to waste time on things that don't work. And so in behavior science, we call this functional analysis where we basically, I might begin talking with a CISO and say, so tell me a little bit about your stress. And I have this lens on that's a functional analytic lens where I'm thinking, okay, what are the main factors leading to this problem? What are the vulnerabilities that this person has? Are they going through a divorce right now? Did they just lose a crap load of funding? Are they under the gun with all sorts of pressure? What is this person's ecology that makes their stress make so much sense both as an individual and in the broader scheme of it? And then really focusing on, okay, how would you want things to be different as a behavior scientist and very behavioral?
Well, I want to actually be able to sleep at night instead of having to down three whiskeys. I want to be able to actually go to bed and wake up feeling rested and alright, well so what would that look like? And so we're really getting this picture in a conversational way about, okay, where are things now and how do you want things to look? And then what specific tools are going to get you there? And when I say tools, what I mean by that is we think about if kind of shutting off from work and lowering vigilance is one of the key factors leading to this CSO not being able to sleep at night and we're maybe beginning to work on some physiological stress management and soothing. If there's some life contextual factors maybe that he's ruminating about all sorts of scenarios, then we're going to use some rumination focused cognitive techniques to help him break free of some of the rumination and focus his attention somewhere else. And so we come out with a plan of two to three applied skills that a person can use. And then with the curiosity of like, all right, we'll collect some personal data here, what gets in the way of doing these things? What are the challenges? What's the outcome? Would you do it again now? I wouldn't, okay, well, all right, let's problem solve then. So it's a very iterative process and very person-centric individual process too.
Den:
Yeah, yeah. It's funny, as you were saying that I instantly realized I glossed over really fast the career path, so I want to come back to here. So before I do that, so when you're working with clients today, a lot of CISOs, a lot of executives and founders and CEOs, when they call you, what's their general aha moment? Because I can't imagine that this audience, your ICP would suddenly think to pick up the phone and call you guys, there must be some triggers, right?
Sara:
Totally. There are. And I think one of the biggest helps to this is that I am onsite on call at a lot of cybersecurity, like large and tech conferences with providing onsite support. And so even if some of these folks don't reach out to me via text, there's all sorts of indicators. This resource is here for you. But even if the CISO or the exec doesn't reach out to me, oftentimes I might, I go to all the events too. I might start interacting with them in any setting. Maybe it's at a party, maybe it's waiting in the coffee line. And it's really interesting how things evolve from there. And then we make an appointment and maybe it's a safe place to, it can be really threatening to say, Hey, I need help. There's a psychologist here specializing in cyber, I'm going to tell them I have a problem. It's much more subtle than that. It's usually a kind of smaller disclosure that leads to a bigger conversation and psychological safety built start moving into more
Den:
Work for me. It's fascinating because it is such a high stress or can be, but I think especially larger companies, a lot of the CISOs are under a lot of stress, a lot of personal liability quite often, and whether they're mindful of that or not, I don't know sometimes, but they certainly are. So let me just park that topic for a second. We're going to come back to this and I want to hear about the app and the kits and all this stuff that you've been pioneering, but let's go back to you're playing basketball,
You're going through your schooling when you were that young, so you kind of indicated that you were really interested in this field. So was this from a kid age, you're like, this is a thing for me. I feel the calling. I think I can jump in on this one. And then you went to university when you were going through university. I think now it's harder for kids in university to find work. So we will shamelessly plug our 9 0 9 IC platform where we're trying to connect cyber students with employers for part-time flexible work. And I think there's so many upsides to that. When you were at university, how was your view of the world about getting your first job and what was the very first job you got?
Sara:
I haven't thought about this in a long time. Yeah, I went to NYU where I played basketball and was a psychology major and in psychology at NYU, but in general it's very research heavy. And so the job that I got right after was actually working for an asthma health education. It was part of NYU Medical center and it was doing research and being a research assistant. And so I was involved in research including suicide prevention research, which I think is super pertinent for cyber and tech for a number of years. And then eventually got my PhD at University of Oregon where I worked with athletes, supported the athletic department and the football team with life skills and applying for jobs. Just like you're talking about Dan, it's so hard nowadays that it's not, there's so many things you have to know around LinkedIn and the tech and how to present yourself and the correct format for a CV and confidence barriers and economic barriers. And so I too share a love for supporting young folks in early in their careers or seeking their first job. And I really align with what 9 0 9 does. I think it's phenomenal.
Den:
Yeah, hopefully. Yeah, it is funny. I always say to people, 99 cyber is the primary business, but the 99 IC is really the passion project because I think even at a young age, our company's not even 1-year-old yet. And I think of it, let's give back. Let's try and help the industry. And it's an easy, I'm not going to say it's a cheap way. We are building the platform so we have to pay and build it and stuff. And the pricing for employers to jump on is so cheap, but we want to make it that, so it's accessible. And I think of it, there's so many opportunities for companies and executives to get involved with our community that we should, I mean, even as this early age company, I am looking always to find ways to give back to the community. So that for me is an important ethos of our business. I mean,
Sara:
You do, I talked about how the culture of a company and the leadership really shapes the stress. And I think in interacting with both you and Aaron and being able to visit and chat, I think you exude a lot of accessibility and approachability and wisdom, but a genuine desire and passion to support causes mental health and cyber supporting youth to get jobs and talent matching that it's very much felt in interacting with you. And I can imagine that greatly shapes the culture of your company also.
Den:
And I think authenticity is huge. And when you think of the ethics of a business in general, and I was at Adobe for 20 years, and the culture generally within Adobe was just outstanding. I mean from the CEO on down. And for me, my life was, we were always on, everything was always like 24 7 IT operations, running the identity platforms and stuff. So you're always at risk of being called out at three in the morning. And for me, that happened a lot over the years of just all the services my team has ran. If folks just want to take a minute to say thanks for listening to the show, watching the show, however you engage with us. If you're liking the conversations, if you think we're adding some value, we'd love you to subscribe and share the show with your friends. If you know of anyone else that would benefit ideally for us, that will help us be able to grow the show, invest more in the quality, get some more exciting guests and keep bringing you some executive goodness. Thanks everybody. Take it easy and enjoy the rest of the discussion. I want to ask you a question. So when you think of, so the mindfulness kits that you guys created, so do you want to share a little bit about what was the idea behind that? Obviously you're in this industry, but the thought of let's create a kit,
Something must have triggered that. So what was the inspiration behind that? Where are you at on that journey and then how can other companies get involved?
Sara:
Thank you for asking. I love talking about this. So I developed a, it's called Cybercom app, and it's a behavior science based micro skills app has a hundred plus skills that are tailored for cyber folks for things like alert, fatigue, depression, social anxiety, imposter syndrome, all of these topics that are really front and center for a lot of cyber folks. But I thought to myself, so I'd go to these conferences and meet with 40, 50 people doing these kind of one v one mini stress management sessions, stress, it's all skills-based. And then I would direct them to the app and say, I think you're like, let's start a queue for you. I think this practice, this practice. But what I realized was a lot of the practices actually involve physical items. So when we talk about overstimulation, sensory overstimulation, which is super common, there's a lot of neurodivergent folks in cyber as you know, and overstimulation is often a big part of that.
And so I would bring little earplugs with me, a bag of them, and if that was something that someone was facing, I'd say, and here's earplugs, so let's kind of tune you into this practice and can teach you your signs of overstimulation and here's the earplugs. And then I thought, or ice packs, for example. Panic and anger are two big emotions that folks feel for many, I mean all humans feel. And the trick to managing it often involves directly intervening on your body. And so ice packs, instant ice packs that you place over your cheek, sensors have a very remediating effect because they activate what's called the mammalian dive reflex, which kind of lowers blood pressure, lowers heart rate, and brings that emotion down. So I thought, all right, I'm going to bring ice packs. So I'd bring ice packs, and then I was like, you know what?
I want to make this more accessible for folks who are too shy to come up to me. It's too shy to text because there's a lot of masking of burnout too. So I created these kids, I have one with me that this is the small version. It says cybercom toolkit, and it has a lot of items. They're QR linked. Actually, this is the nine, so thank you. Shout out 9 0 9 cyber, they're actually QR linked to a variety of practices in here. And so for grounding practices, for example, there's a little lavender that's cool. And so you go to the QR and it's like, what the heck do I do with this lavender? It guides you through it. In the bigger kits, there's an ice pack and it says, okay, what are your signs of being overloaded emotionally? Okay, here's how you can use the ice pack.
Here's why it works. It's super quick. There's earplugs, there's all sorts of things in here that really help folks manage stress on an applied practical level and are connected to science-based strategies. And so I was like, I don't know how this will go, but a number of companies were really generous, including you den and said, all right, well, we'll sponsor them. And so we ended up disseminating 900 kits at besides Black Hat and Defcon. And the crazier part to me, I was telling Aaron this was, they said, why don't get on the stage and talk about 'em and tell people they're here? And I did. And the second I did that, the 300 400 of them went, I had to go back to my room, get more bags, and I don't even know if it's about what's in the kit per se. I actually think it was someone saying, stress and burnout, you matter, and this is a problem and you're not alone. And let's get curious about it.
Den:
Even I can even imagine support groups for cyber stress. I mean, I could see ISSA and all those guys, they do their meetups in all these places. I could imagine you guys tacking on to kind of stuff like that of those regionalized events. So huge. Yeah, I mean, shit. It is funny though. I grew up not even thinking about it as a thing because so early in my career we were on call 24 7 building servers or identity platforms, and you just always felt like that's the gig, and if you can't handle it, then you're in the wrong industry really. But as you become a leader and you look at employee burnout, you look at a work-life balance, which we can adjust that term till the cows come home. I guess I just see it, it's the growing problem, but I also think that for that reason, there's a lot of, if you think of the tenure of a CISO being like a year and a half or two years at best, yeah, there's a big reason for that. If you're at a company and you've not been reached in a year and a half or two years, maybe that's the time to leave and join another one that preached. Right. And it's funny because I think of this as an industry of a lot of dudes who think, like you said earlier of not showing you emotions and stuff, but I also think it's a lot of people in an industry which is IQ heavy and EQ light.
Sara:
Very true. Beautiful.
Den:
That plays into this a lot. What's your experience from that perspective?
Sara:
I agree a hundred percent. And I think that when we think about IQ heavy and EQ light, in some ways it makes so much sense that you can't have best of both worlds. There's not that many people out there who naturally have exceptionally high IQs and also exceptionally high EQs. By the way, research does show that many leaders have those qualities, which is interesting. So I think probably a lot of CSOs do, whether or not it's being reinforced in the environment, but there's a lot of neurodivergent folks and folks who identify as being on the autism spectrum in cyber. And so a lot of the tools and some tools from the kit too are actually around super specific skills for networking when you're feeling flooded by imposter syndrome or you're between jobs and you don't even know the first thing to say. And so it's very specific ways of managing social anxiety and actual things you can say that are effective that open the conversation. There's also, yeah, and so I think it's really, really important and it's learned skills, eq, it's learned. People have higher, lower levels at baseline, but we can absolutely learn those skills and cyber folks do
Den:
Well. Yeah, because the one thing is there's a lot of leaders in the position because they were technically gifted. And so the best engineer then because of that, they get asked if they can lead the team. And sometimes you've got leaders that are technically gifted and human abilities totally suck. And I think while you can learn it, there's this whole, what's your natural instinct? You're either caring about people in your charge and their careers and their families or not. Now you can be taught to care more or you can realize, I mean, I would even say it's funny, I was hanging out with some of my old team from Adobe and we're like, man, then the leader 20 years ago was compared to now, I didn't practice leadership very well. What changed? Sorry?
Sara:
What changed?
Den:
I mean, there's been a couple of things. One is just maturity over the years. The other one is recognizing because when I was an individual contributor, and you go from that to become a leader, you struggle to delegate, you struggle to think that the people you delegate to could do it better than you, which isn't the point anyway. And you struggle to really enable and empower them because you're still struggling to let go. And for me, I also had the most aggressive timeline asks of anyone, and most of the time, our team hit the mark or got close to the mark. And my view is always, if you shoot for Mars, you might hit the moon. If you shoot for a Mercedes, you might get a BMW, but if you're realistic and you're shooting for a Ford because that's what you can afford, you might not quite even get the Ford. So I always had these lists, moonshot type ideas,
Sara:
Which you need to have. It's aspirational. Yeah.
Den:
Yeah. I think it has to be. I read a book on business about big, hairy audacious goals. I think it was coined out some professors in Stanford. And when you do a big hairy, audacious goal, for me it's like, will my company be X, Y, or Z in five years time? Well, that goal better be big and hairy, audacious, otherwise it's not really a goal.
Sara:
Yeah. What's the pointwise?
Den:
Yeah, doing 5% better this year than last year isn't audacious nor really a goal that is just organic growth.
Sara:
Totally. And I think your perfect example of a leader who has their mindset on big, heavy audacious goals and also demonstrates a lot of caring for your employees and a lot of caring for the cyber community,
Den:
You
Demonstrate both. I think you can do both. So from the kits perspective, there's a couple of thoughts I had. I was like, well, wait a minute. You could easily reach out to those earbuds are cool, but then you get these really cooler earbuds that actually have noise cancellation and stuff. And I was like, oh, you could reach out to them and see if they'll sponsor and give you the better rate, and you could reach out to all the suppliers of the stuff basically. That's really good idea. Try and get a better try and get some better deal because you're really pushing their products too. Right. And then I think from a cybersecurity vendor perspective, I mean this would be my call to action for all any of them listening is contact Dr. Sarah, reach out and try and figure out how you can help.
Sara:
Totally.
Den:
Because I think it benefits all of us because the negative effects of this are really that not only burnout, but it's employee retention performance. We start to lose performance, we start to lose skilled people. People become dejected with the industry and leave the industry that are great people and you don't want that. So I think there's a huge cost to the industry on this one. And that's why for me, it was like I thought, yeah, I thought this was brilliant work, wanted to be involved. So when you'd reached out, I'm like, oh, hell yeah, let's do it. And then being the baby company in the industry that's also Jones, I'm like, okay, this year we'll dip our toe in and then next year we will commit more. And I think for us, part of that commitment is also speaking to peer companies and be like, Hey, you could get involved.
Sara:
Totally. Especially for the seasoned leader who has seen the ins and outs of burnout and how it affects retention. Yeah.
Den:
Yeah. Maybe Adobe is shining your CSO. She might want to
Sara:
Involved. Yeah. I so appreciate your guys' help. I really do. I mean, you were our number one initial sponsor, and which shows, especially for a baby company, to use your words, a real investment in this issue.
Den:
Yeah, it is funny. I didn't know we were number one, but wow, I'm not trying to be number one in anything, to be honest. I used to say to my team, so I tell my team this in my leadership peer group. So as an example, when I reported to the CSO at Adobe, I ran enterprise security with engineering security and code signing and all sorts of stuff. So we had a big remit, but I always said when my boss is running his reports or being provided his reports, I don't want to be top or bottom in anything. I want to be top half of the pack, but I don't want to be the number one because then my peer group will look at me and be like, oh, he's an asshole, right? He is exceeding and doing more shit, but I'm happy to be two and three depending on the number of people that mainly, I usually always apply that to budget type things. I don't want to be the one with the highest budget or the lowest budget. I don't want to be the one on the scale that's been the highest overs spender or highest unders spender.
Sara:
That makes a lot of sense.
Den:
And then when it comes to individual costs, I don't want to be the one spending the most money on training, but I want to be number two or three.
Sara:
That makes a lot of sense. You're using the parameters to figure out based on your overall. Yeah.
Den:
Yeah. So I told my team that, and I think they got the madness in endeavors because when you're highest or lowest in something, you become a target for good, bad or whatever. And I was just like, I don't want to have the spotlight. So yeah, leadership tip right there. So when you're working with clients, so a couple of things. One is I think it's brilliant how you describe how you engage with clients when you're working with clients and they're going through a really, really stressful event, let's say, breach. So how do you try and help executives go through the stress of a breach?
Sara:
Yeah, it brings up so much, especially because a lot of execs who find themselves in cyber grew up in a way where they were often hyper responsible, whether that was taking care of a sibling or having a lot of pressure and very high expectations put upon them because they were very smart and practical and detail oriented and ambitious that, so there's already kind of this preloading of high sense of responsibility and moral responsibility. And so I think what can happen is then when a breach occurs, it's really devastating on an identity level. It can feel incredibly demoralizing. And what I see happen often is actually, so I used to work with veterans and active military for a long time who had PTSD. And what happens often is not much different from the PTSD reactions that active military duty individuals experience sometimes where there's a huge shift in your sense of safety in the world, who can be trusted, especially if it's an internal breach who can be trusted here. If this happened on my watch, then I can't trust myself at all. These sort of global negative beliefs that happen. And so paranoia beginning to withdraw from family feeling a sense of depletion, shame, disappointment. And so we use this framework that parallels a lot of the therapeutic work that happens with PTSD to help really capture the whole embodiment of it physically, what's happening for the person, what's happening in their belief system or mentally, and what emotions are here and how can we support the person holistically across the board.
Den:
And generally it's the executive plus their team, plus their peers, plus their peers team plus their boss's boss. Sometimes the board want to get involved. Sometimes the CEO wants to get involved. And I think there's a level of disarm and one of those words that level of you're losing the authority because sometimes the executive above you wants to step in. And because that quite often can be a loss of confidence and the fact that you've been breached and you're the CSO and that was your watch. Right, totally. Do you think the mental health side of life is a driving force and why executives or CSOs are leaving their roles early? I speak to a lot of CISOs and they don't feel they're getting the backend of their bosses. They're under this pressure emotionally and mentally it's taken a toll. Do you see that playing into the fact that a lot of them leave their jobs without any cause?
Sara:
Oh, absolutely. I really do. And I think we should take the pressure off the individual. I think oftentimes when a CISO leaves suddenly without any story, it's like, well, what was going on for them personally? But it's not an individual issue. It's much more societal and contextual than that. And so I think eventually someone's confidence and health and wellbeing and functioning erodes under the immense amount of stress and pressure that CISOs face.
Den:
And I've, for many reasons, done a bit of research on stress and the impact on the body from a health perspective. And I feel the correlation between stress and health is so huge that you've got your personal health, you've got your professional health in the sense of stress and life and all that stuff. And at some point I see it being where our health and our stress is almost like it might not be a big event. It can be just lots of daily small stressful things that over time in the background, your body just starts to fall apart.
Sara:
So
Den:
I mean, do you see something similar to that?
Sara:
Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's very interesting. We do a lot of research too with cyber stress, and there is what it shows. There's a measure of basically resilience to stress called heart rate variability that's actually super amenable, modifiable to really brief interventions like some humming polyvagal practices. And I think those are phenomenal ways of helping the body come back down to baseline. I think it's much less about how we manage stress reactivity and a lot more about how we help someone fully recover after moments of stress so that their body can come back to equilibrium. That chronic stress over time, like you're saying, that erodes our nervous system.
Den:
So years ago, one of my coaches, she said to me, I should take up yoga and meditation, which I didn't do until more recently. And when I did, I thought, oh, wow, I should have done this 10 years ago. So I see a lot of successful executives that leverage both yoga and meditation as part of their daily practice. Where do you guys place that in the guidance that you give to your clients?
Sara:
Yeah, I've been a mindfulness teacher, a mindfulness based stress reduction teacher for 16 years, which incorporates yoga, yoga and mindfulness. Oh, it's fundamental. It's everything. And I think having been a mindfulness based dress reduction teacher, which those are, you go on nine day silent retreats and all this stuff, and it's intense for the training and for folks, but it's intimidating. Like you're saying your coach, you wish you had done this years ago. The app and the kits practices really breaks down mindfulness and gentle movement. So two minute practices, we just want to get someone to dip, get their foot in the door, not feel overwhelmed, not feel like, oh my gosh, I have to sit for 45 minutes or else F it, do anything. And it's the backbone of it, and I love that. That's something that you've incorporated too.
Den:
Yeah. Yeah. It's funny because meditation, for somebody whose brain is crazy as mine, it is really hard. I find it really hard to shut down. I find it really hard to sit in silence. I'm such a storyteller that for me it's just like holy shit to meditate is I block time. I want to try and make sure, but I think there's a discipline in life that if you're not disciplined, then all of these things, you start them. If you don't feel it's working and you don't give it long enough, then it just fizzles out.
Sara:
And we expect that and accept it and say, the practice and mindfulness practice and the app is very compassionate. It's like, screw it. Maybe you did, maybe you fell off the horse and didn't meditate or do yoga for a frigging year. That's okay. The practice welcomes you back. There was some reason and there's some reason you're back at it. And how do we really reinforce you being back at it instead of punishing the lack of discipline, which is often the case.
Den:
Yep. Yep, yep, yep. Well, it's funny, my friend goes to chiropractor and the chiropractor's like, you should come three times a week for maintenance. And it's like, for me, I hear this Sara, and I'm like, this is such a scam and I believe in chiropractors, but the minute this guy starts saying, oh, and then he gives her shit because she didn't turn up, I'm like, that is not good business. That's not a client
Sara:
Experience. The goal of all these micro interventions really should be, and the goal of when I do in my therapy practice with clients is to get them flying. You want the most effectiveness in the least amount of time. That's the least costly for someone. And to set them up with the most sustainable set of skills you can with the door open and say, Hey, if you need maintenance, I trust your wisdom about you enough to know when you might need to come back in. And then we go for it. But I think it's creating dependent relationships is just not helpful for anyone.
Den:
Yeah. Yep, yep, yep. No, I love that. So I know we're up on time and a little over, but I love this conversation. We could probably chat for hours on this stuff. I know, and to be honest, I did have my little list of prepared questions and I think I covered one of them, so we'll have to have you back on at some point. I think as we maybe start next year early, we can maybe get in and have you come in and give people mindful thoughts for the year
Narrator:
On
Den:
How they should approach 26 in a new way. So Dr. Sarah Rabinovich, so I don't try and screw it up. Thank you very much. I'm going to leave you to close the show with one parting word of wisdom for our audience.
Sara:
Okay. One word or one phrase.
Den:
One phrase, one bit of advice, one phrase, one jam.
Sara:
Asking yourself the question, what do I need right now in this moment? And when you're feeling stressed, asking yourself that question and tuning into your body and your mind and your emotions and allowing the answer to come up because you know what you need to manage your stress, but giving yourself permission to listen and put it into play. Beautiful. And being kind to yourself.
Den:
Beautiful. Thank you very much and thanks for coming on the show. This was wonderful. We'll do it again sometime soon. So I appreciate you, Sara, and all the great work you guys are doing. We are big supporters and big fans.
Sara:
Thank you, Den. Likewise. Thank you.
Den:
It easy everybody.
Narrator:
Thanks for listening to 9 0 9 exec. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and don't miss an episode of your source for wit and Wisdom in cybersecurity and beyond.
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