Good morning. Good afternoon. I'm so excited to be here and talk to you all. I am gonna be, talk to you talking to you today about channeling your passion and applying that in your day to day job. I am Lara Meadows, Vice President of Security Solution Architects.I've worked in cybersecurity for many, many years and I think it's so important to have passion in your day to day job. And there are so many different ways that we can pull in that passion to not only make our jobs more fun but to share ourselves and be our authentic selves at work. And there are a bunch of different ways that you can do that. So that's what we are going to talk about today. Ok. So let's talk about what are your passions? And there are a bunch of different passions that you can have. It could be people, it can be writing, it could be building things, right? There's all different types of passions that can apply to our job. But then there's other passions that we might not be thinking about that can also apply to our job like hobbies. Yeah. So there's different types of hobbies that we can see. Right. Um, maybe like, working out, maybe like gardening, maybe, like reading or baking or wine. Um, these are all different types of passions that I love as well. And there's ways that we can actually pull those into our day to day job. You wouldn't think so.

But there are ways that we can do that and again, it's bringing a part of yourself to work and bringing that passion to work and building that into your job. And so how do we do that? What do we do? OK. So before I jump into that, I just want to give you a little background about myself. I am a mom of three. As I mentioned, I've been working in cybersecurity for 20 plus years. I'm an army brat and I was an engineering major at Virginia Tech. Uh To me, one of the most interesting things about myself is where I came from. My parents. I have a mom who worked in headhunting. She majored in English and she was really a people person. And then I had a West Point dad who was in the military. He was very introverted, um focused on engineering. So I had this right brain, left brain upbringing, right? The best of both worlds. And I loved that I had the ability to take that and do something with it because again, I wanted to do something where I could leverage both brains and do that with passion. And so I, I'm just as happy whether I'm going out, hanging out with friends or if I'm at home wiring, you know, rewiring a lamp or fixing a toilet, something like that. So I love this ability to do this right brain, left brain.

And again, this is my passion that I love doing. Um my real passions, other than my family, of course, are people I like developing teams. I like allowing them to explore their passions and it's so much fun to build a team and to allow them and to enable them to do something where they are exploring their passions. I like solving problems. I like building solutions and leveraging both of those is what we'll talk about in a second. But my biggest passion is bringing women into cybersecurity technology roles. I I love the opportunity to bring young women, old women, all women um into cybersecurity. It's a field where we don't see a lot of women and especially on the technical side where I am. And so being able to do that, I did have a senior high school senior shadow me for the last two weeks as part of her senior experience as they call it. And with the senior experience she spent of course, over the course of two weeks getting to know our company, all the different roles that women can hold in that and just getting a general introduction to cybersecurity.

And it was such a rewarding and refreshing experience to see her, her eyes light up and for her to get exposure into the cybersecurity uh role and to be able to talk about it before she goes into major of it. A major in it. Excuse me. So what do I do? And what does my team do? We are, we're in this career that you probably never heard of. We're called solution architects. We're called sales engineers, solution engineers, presales. We go by many different names. And again, it's this right brain, left brain, we have this ability to, we are the technical arm of the sales team. We are the ones that are going in. We're understanding customers issues, we're building solutions for them, we're deploying them. So we are the technical arm of the sales team. We get to work on engineer, engineering. Uh We get to build, we get to deploy, we get to help customers stay secure. We also get to work with product management teams. So we get to help shape the product. We get to um influence. We get to be the voice between the customer and the product team so that we are helping to drive how the product grows. And then lastly, we're on the sales team. So we get this social aspect. We are people who are able to talk, we are people who are able to work and to uh excuse me, are are are able to be um influencers and helping customers be successful. I'm gonna jump over real quick. See if there are any questions? No. OK, good.

So let's talk about you. So how do we take these passions and turn them into projects? So I, I, what I like to do with my team is at the beginning of every year, I like to challenge them with a project and it's doing something that makes them happy, but it's also going to benefit the team. Um It's gonna benefit the company, but it's also leveraging something that they're passionate about and it could be a ton of different things. It could be building out content, it could be writing a paper, it could be recording a demo, a series of demos. Um And what I encourage you all to do is something very similar. So take your technology, take your company, take what you do and use it in a way, especially if you're in a company and use it in a way that's never been used. So if you want to write a paper, if you've got this awesome idea and you want to write a paper about it, um If you want to take your solution and use it in a new way, that's never been used before, do that. And it's all about taking this and turning it into um something that's yours and something that you can then proudly promote, share within the company. And there's a lot of benefit to doing that though. In doing something like this.

Um We talked about personal passions where there are things like the wine, like the um baking, like the reading and there are things that you can do with that passion where you can share that within your, your immediate team, share it within your broader team. And, and what I'd like to do with those is start a slack channel or, or maybe start a club or if you're a wine person, you want to meet once a month, you know, get people together in your office outside of the office and go drink wine or build a community and be a leader of that community for myself.

Like I said, women and technology is a passion of mine. And over the years, I have led women's groups within companies like Cisco, within companies like HP. Um My most current company, I work in a smaller company. I've set up a women's Slack channel where we share information we share and we communicate throughout the day. What's going on, what are we doing? How do you feel about this person that's speaking? And we have all sorts of um we started a book club so that, that kind of fizzled out. I'm not gonna lie. That did not work very well. But now we've moved on to podcasting. So now we're talking about different things. But again, it's a way for us to connect. We're spread all over the country. Um and all over the globe. And this is a way for us to be able to connect and make our company that much smaller. So again, I take, I encourage you, you know, share your passion that you have and be the leader to um share that passion within your company. And what is doing something like this, there's a lot of benefits to taking that pa passion and channeling that passion. Um not only are you building your brand and building yourself, but you're helping your team and your company inevitably, especially if you're building something that's gonna benefit them, whether it's that paper or whether it's that project, whether it's taking your company and doing something in a way that you never thought, you know, an idea that you want to propose.

Um It's also gonna help you with networking. You're gonna be talking to people outside of your team, outside of your company or excuse me, outside of your area. Um You're bringing people together and then the biggest thing too, I think it's so important is getting upward visibility.

Uh I mentioned that with my team, I'd like to give them the chance to have a passion project that they work on throughout the year. With that, I encourage them to go and uh I, I promote that and I take it to my leadership and I give them the visibility, give them the credit and give them that voice. And so again, it's a way that they've done something, they've championed it and then they have built it and again, it's theirs and it's theirs to the uh for them to take credit for and again, for them to get that visibility within my leadership team. Um And so I encourage all of you to channel that passion into networking, into visibility. Um and think really outside of the box of the different ways that you can take your passions that you have and share them with you in your organization and that's it. Do you all have any questions? I thank you all for your time and for joining this. 00, well, connect with me on linkedin if there's anything I can do and if any of you want to jump into cybersecurity, please do and take your passion to work. Bring your passion to work day. OK. Awesome. Thank you guys. Oh, for a client facing background. You know what I think that you have a lot of ability to jump into the tech space.

Um With the client, you're bringing perspective and you're bringing experience when you jump into the tech space. So with the client coming from a client, you actually um have immediate credibility and immediate clout when you're coming into the tech space because you've been on the back back end.

Um So, uh uh um I, I think that if you want to jump into tech space, do it. Absolutely do it because you're gonna have such a different perspective and such a broader background that you will bring a different perspective to your team and wherever you choose to go within the tech space and within the tech space, there are a lot of different options from technical to marketing, to engineering, to uh you name it.

There's a lot of different opportunities. I love cybersecurity. People go come join cybersecurity. It's such a cool unique field that we're in and its dynamic, constantly changing. OK. Thank you all so much. Have a great day and enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you.