All right. I think we're rolling. So, first of all, I just have to thank you so much for showing up to this. I feel so grateful and so privileged to get to talk to you.I'm gonna walk you through a career development journey through a metaphor in a cybersecurity one. I am the cybersecurity chief of staff at Citrix. But don't worry, you don't have to know a thing about security to follow along. I'm gonna start us off just by defining some terms.

And if at any point I lose you, I'm monitoring the chat and I'd love to take questions at the end. So it took me some time in my career to turn my belief from thinking, I'm a glitch to knowing I'm a zero day. What in the world does that mean? A glitch is a technical malfunction, an irregularity, something that isn't working, right? And in our life, that can be our fears and our doubts, our insecurities. I know there have been a lot of sessions today about imposter syndrome that can make you feel like a glitch. But a zero day exploit in cybersecurity takes advantage of a vulnerability that doesn't yet have a fix. It's a pretty risky kind of, of attack. There's a gap, there's no fix for it yet. And an adversary takes advantage of that for us. That can be our career growth opportunity. That can be a gap in our organization that we're the first one to fill like a zero day. So I hope that makes sense. Let me know, uh, if I lose you at any point again, I'm here for you. But it, everything in cyber has been sore resonated in some career development for me. And I hope that it's something that will relate to you. So really quickly, just some background on myself. I haven't always been a cyber person, but I have always been a security one. I started in the criminology side and really, I just, I love security in any way, shape or form. I just wanted to help people and make them feel safe.

And as I was starting my career, cyber was becoming more and more prevalent. And so I saw an opportunity and I jumped on it and through a role in incident response that became my zero day uh in all fairness. It isn't as simple as I just made it sound like join jump and grow. Um and has had its share of challenges through work and through life. Um It hasn't always been easy, but really, that's what's taught me how to be resilient. And I've applied that to my leadership and no matter what the challenge, I really have been able to, to lean on hope through those experiences. Um Ultimately, I'm an introvert. This petrified me so well, I'm the people person of security at work. I'm much more comfortable with dogs.

So I hope your pets are listening in. This is definitely a, a pet friendly event virtually. I know mine is tired of hearing me rehearse this. So let's get into it. There are three main things I want you to learn from this metaphor today in our career development. The first is to avoid glitch mentality. I'll tell you what I mean by that. Um Some of the traps of glitch mentality and what to look out for. I'll tell you about some of my glitches, how it's looked in my life and how to overcome it. Second is I want us to mind the gaps just like every zero day exploit. Our career development relies on identifying gaps and leveraging our unique abilities to enter into them. And third is to embrace your anomalies. An anomaly is another technical term, but just like it sounds, it's the abnormal, it strays from the norm. And these are the characteristics about you that make you different, that might position you particularly to fill that gap. And your anomalies are often what might make you feel like the glitch, but really it's the exact codes in you that make you the zero day. So keep going with me and let's start by avoiding glitch mentality. We really have to set ourselves up for success from the inside out glitch mentality is entirely internal. Again, a glitch is an unintentional error, a malfunction.

And sometimes it can feel like we're the glitch, at least I have in, in my experiences, you know, even still, I feel like a glitch when I question my place and when I fail to recognize how hard I've worked to earn my seat, I feel like a glitch when I self doubt or when feedback starts to ruminate and I'm over personalizing, I feel like a glitch when I think my past would discredit or disqualify my place here instead of knowing that it's the very thing that has got me here.

And I definitely felt like a glitch today as I was preparing to be on the main stage of this amazing conference. And I thought that that must be a glitch, right? But no, not at all. Glitch mentality is a trap because if you think about it, a glitch implies that something is broken, that something needs fixing. And for us, I'm here to tell you that there's nothing fundamentally broken about you. There's nothing that needs fixing. I think we all have to keep growing and learning and I sure hope that I do, but I have to realize that there's, there's no breakage here in why I got here. I will warn you that glitch mentality can sneak in at any place in our career, I think whether you're in an entry level role or you're in the C suite, if you're a student or you're just trying to figure out what to do next. Glitch mentality can sneak in there. So there are three things that I do when I start to fall into the grips of glitch mentality. The first is gratitude. Gratitude is the antidote to any glitch, not just at work, but in life and relationships and in hobbies, if you start to fall to a glitch, go to gratitude.

First and foremost, second is to give credit, give credit to yourself for how hard you've worked that you've kept going, that you showed up here to talk about career development, give credit to the people who have given you opportunities who have seen something in you that maybe before you did probably pretty smart people.

And third is to get busy. If at any point, my head is moving faster than my feet or in my job, my hands on my keyboard, I need to get productive. I need to get busy and get my head out of it. And something for me when I wanna get busy is I go gap hunting. So gap hunting a few years ago, I was in an inflection point in my career. I was definitely feeling glitchy and I was still trying to break into the cyberspace from the more physical side of security and figuring out what that was gonna look like for me. Um And I was sent through work to travel through England. It was my first time there. I was sent alone for a week to go to a few different uh sites throughout the country. And so I was traveling by tube, uh had a lot of time to think and as I was taking, taking the tube around England, I was hearing the operator say, mind the gap, mind the gap. I never heard that before. And um at at some point, you know, just through so much travel, it just kind of knocked me on my senses. And I thought, oh yeah, like that, that's what I have to do. Mind the gap.

Like if there's something missing or needs improving, maybe I'm standing on the platform with the gap and maybe I can bring the solution and that can apply to any career, right? You might be standing on the platform. I think for all of us, the gap is our passport. It can take you from A to B it's gonna travel you and zero day exploits take advantage of gaps that don't yet have a fix, right? So, so can you, so at this point, I want to ask you and I'd love to see it in the chat. Can you think of any gaps in your work or life where you might be able to mind the gap? Maybe it's something technical and I wanna see them start trickling in, but maybe you need more cloud engineering skills in your team or maybe it's something interpersonal like the team is having trouble building cross functional partnerships. What kind of gaps do you have in your workplace?

Can you think of any? For me? A few years ago, it was really no one was available or, or had the skill sets to, to track large initiatives, right? So I became a Scrum master. If you have any gaps that you can think of, I'd love for you to share them. And while you're doing that, it, I do have to acknowledge, you know, not every gap is gonna be for you, try not to take on everything but often when it is the right gap for you, it's gonna be your anomalies that put you on that platform. Our anomalies are often putting us in that intersection between believing or a glitch or becoming a zero day a trap. English mentalities, believing that our anomalies, right? The parts of us that make us different and unique are something to hide rather than something to embrace.

These are the thoughts that sound like, but I'm not like them. My background is different. I don't look like them or sound like them or think like them and oh my God. But that is exactly why you're needed there. So embracing our anomalies is what makes us uniquely qualified to mind. The gap in my experience. I think my anomalies are some of the obvious ones. I'm a young woman in a cybersecurity field. That's an anomaly still. I hope it doesn't stay an anomaly. But for now I'm an anomaly in that way. Um, I also have a non technical background that puts me in an anomaly in this technical field. I think another anomaly for me in a cyberspace is, uh um is my empathy that sometimes doesn't feel like it has a place and I bring a different perspective with all of these things combined and others, they uh these are all the things that I think for me can make me most insecure at times about my being here and, and my role in my company.

And when I, when I reality check that and I embraced my anomalies, I started to realize that that's actually my exact advantage. It's those qualities in me that filled the gap that we didn't have otherwise. And I think about it, of course, being involved in technology is like innovation depends on this. Like think about the, the technologies that we rely on every day. Like maybe it's attached to you. Those all started with a gap that someone knew well enough to embrace their anomalies to be so crazy enough to find a solution for. So you just thought of a gap a minute ago. I'd love to hear now about some of your anomalies. If you wanna add those, what are some of the things that set you apart in your workplace. Uh, maybe you're the only woman on the team or, and maybe, maybe you have, uh, you know, just a different work background, a cultural background. Maybe you come from, from somewhere different. Uh, what are some of your anomalies? Maybe they feel like glitches to you, but it's time to, to embrace those. I'd love to see you put them in here and as you think about those anomalies pair them with the gap that you just thought of too and together, you might just have your zero day. So to wrap us up and I know I sped through that.

So I hope there's some questions. I just want to remind you of our three things. It's to avoid glitch mentality, to mind the gap to embrace your anomalies because you're not a glitch. You are a zero day. So with that, I'd love to take questions. I'd love to stay connected if you wanna reach me on linkedin or Twitter and tell me about your glitch mentality, how you've gotten out of it. I wanna hear your zero day stories. Uh Anything that, that you may be able to relate to or need advice on um Please stay connected and I, again, I'm just in incredibly appreciative.

Alexa, thank you so much for being here. What a wonderful presentation. And I think you too, Alexa are a wonderful anomaly in all of the ways that you described. Super anomalous. Exactly. Um We do have some questions coming through. So let me ask you. Um oh my gosh, they're really coming fast here. OK. What's your favorite anomaly? And how has it helped you change your perspective about yourself

about myself? OK. You know, being in such a technical role or not role, but field, I'm a human role in a technical field as a chief of staff. And I think that that humanness about me has been the scariest anomaly and the most important for me because I'm able to kind of break some of these crazy scary side track things down into a very simple language that are helping people make sense of some of the risks and make sense of some of the things they can do to fix them.

And I think just having that anomalous empathy that I bring to my team is helping normalize cybersecurity and normalize doing our part uh in, in that space because we all have to do something if we want, if we want to prevent all these incidents that you're probably seeing on the news.

Yeah. And it's such a good message to, to normalize things I think even for ourselves, which is a good point that you made. And a lot of people kind of called out in the chat saying, yeah, sometimes I feel like I don't think like them, I don't look like them. And we have to just like, if we start to normalize everything around us, we will have less of that feeling coming through. Right.

Exactly. And I hope that there are more of them. Right. I hope I'm not like the, I don't look like them because I'm the only woman. I just want to

bring more women. And Yes. Exactly. Well, and being here today and sharing your story is such a great way to do that. So, thank you so much Alexa for being here. We're so happy to have had

you. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Thank you.