We all have that loud voice inside our head screaming at us to avoid doing things that make us comfortable. While this voice is just trying to protect us, we must learn how to silence this voice and not let it stop us from going after our goals or making our voices heard.

Karen Worstell went from being a mom to toddlers who couldn’t afford to buy groceries to the Chief Information Security Officer for companies like AT&T Wireless and Microsoft. Now, Karen coaches women in tech and has a consulting business around tech and risk management.

In this raw and powerful episode, Karen shares why you must make peace with the skeptic voice inside your head and listen to the whisper of your heart, her advice for maintaining your resilience when things become difficult, her mission to help companies realize they should be encouraging their employees to be their truest selves instead of forcing them to fit into a set company culture, and so much more!

Take a listen to the episode below!

Mentioned in this episode:

• Karen Worstell’s Website
• Karen Worstell’s Blog
• Karen Worstell’s Resilience Course
• Shirzad Chamine’s Book: Positive Intelligence by Shirzad Chamine
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey
• Principle-Centered Leadership by Stephen R. Covey

 

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.

Today, I have with me Karen Worstell who went from being a mom of toddlers and a computer science graduate student all the way to Silicon Valley with all kinds of amazing experience to the point where she was even the chief information security officer for companies, like AT&T Wireless, Microsoft, and Russell Investments.  Now, she is doing her own consulting business around tech and Risk Management as well as coaching women in tech.

So Karen, I’m really, really excited to have you here on the podcast today.

Karen Worstell:  Oh thanks Andrea.  Thanks for having me.

Andrea:  Actually, I was introduced to Karen, I should say.  I think I might have gone up to you, Karen, to tell you that you did a good job.  But I actually heard you speak at a conference and I was so impressed with your story and your presence on stage because I looked at you and I thought “Oh my goodness, this is a classy lady.”  And you told your story then really wowed us with some of the things that you had to say.

So I wonder if you would be willing to tell us a little bit of what you share that day about that moment in time when things really changed for you, however long ago that was.

Karen Worstell:  Sure!  Well, yah, you know how we all have those events in our life that it’s usually some kind of a crisis that gives us crystal laser like focus.  Really, what I was talking about then, and I’ll just share again, when I was a mom of toddlers as you call it.  I had 2-year old and 4-year old at home and through a series of my own choices, I found myself in a situation where I was standing literally in the grocery store staring at the fruit section and it was like apples, “Where the heck are affordable apples.”

In those days, apples were $49 cents a pound.  That sounds like cheap apples because today, you can spend $3 a pound for apples.  But $49 cents a pound was the going rate at the time in the 80’s and I did not have money to buy apples and I had to go through the manager and asked him, did he have any apples that he had already pulled from the fruit stand that he could sell to me at a discount.

For me that was this moment that said, “You know what, something has got to change.  I can’t keep doing this.”  So about that time my amazing brother, Michael, who is thinker and one of my best friends.  He had a TRS-80 computer with a serial number of six.  He brought that over to my house and spread it out on the table.  It took up quite a bit of space with all of its various components at that time.  It had 64k of RAM, which I couldn’t even operate with my phone with that today.  But he put it on the table and he looked at me and he goes, “Sister, you have to learn to code.”

Now, I have never done anything with computers in my life, and I was pretty sure that if I put my fingers on the keyboard of that thing and did something wrong, it was going up in flames.  I was quite nervous about this piece of technology in my home.  He was very encouraging.  I mean, I literally put my fingers on the keyboard and typed in H-E-L-L-O, and nothing bad happened.

So with his help, I learned to this in programming and Visual Basic and I learned how to program in a language called Forth.  You don’t have much about it these days but I was really attracted to it because it was the way my brain works, which is something called Reverse Polish Notation.  It’s a technical term for the way information get pushed into the computer and then popped back out of the computer when you’re doing code writings.

So I really liked that and I did pretty well with that.  I found out that I was really good at it.  And about that time, _____ University opened up a program in computer science.  They were advertising for students.  It was a graduate program and I did have my bachelor’s degree, so I went ahead and applied and to my surprise, I got in.

When you tell the story before this, there’s just all this opposition in my head that just really exploded because it’s like “OK, mother of toddlers.  I thought you want to be a good mother, right?  How can you go to a graduate school and be a good mother and clearly you have no money,” which is true, I had no money.  And truthfully, I just didn’t do very well with math.  Hello, the computer science department is part of the math department.

So I went ahead and applied anyway.  Kind of ignoring all the voices in my head and fear factor truly because I had no idea how this was going to all play out and work.  I got accepted, and two years later, I graduated with masters in science degree and computer science.  There were tons of people helped me along the way.  After I graduated, I had a number of positions and you mentioned this CISO in Microsoft.

Twelve years after I graduated with my computer science degree, I was the CEO of a Silicon Valley startup, and it focused on technology in cybersecurity.  So it sounds like a really incredible story.  And the reason I like to share it is because it really is everybody’s story because in my experience, really, what happened there was I took it one ordinary day at a time.  It was not a smooth path whatsoever.

There were a number of really huge crises along the way, but you show up every day, just show up every day.  Sometimes it’s enough to show up and say “Whatever today deals me, I’m going to deal with.”  I have no idea how it’s going to play out tomorrow and I did truthfully didn’t think in a million years that I would ever embark on a technology career like the one that I had.

My biggest goal frankly was to be able to get a job that paid me enough to have somebody come in the house…there were two goals.  Two big, hairy, audacious goals I had in my life.  To have somebody else come in the house and scrub the toilets, like that was a big deal because I only had two.  The other one was, it was so important to me to be able to pay my bills and to be able to pay all the bills that were due in one month in the same month and not have to make the choice about, you know, “What am I gonna pay this month and what am I not gonna pay?”

So my goals were not big.  I didn’t have like _____ goal that said someday I’m going to be the, you know, have this big role.  It was just showing up in dealing with each day at a time and that’s where we went.  The thing that I look back on is that it was this kind of a whisper that was in my heart that said “You should do this.  This is the path, you should take this path.”

And I had plenty of opposition also in my head saying, “Don’t pay attention to that.  We’ll try to do around that out if we can because this sounds risky to us,” and to go ahead and say “I’m gonna follow the whisper of my heart and I don’t understand how it’s all gonna work and I can’t give anybody a plan.”  But look where it went, you know.

I think it happens multiple times in our lives for paying attention that exact same scenario.  We hear that whisper that says “This is your path, walk in it.”  And then we hear the opposition that just really fires up, the skeptic in our head that says “What, are you crazy?  We’ll give you the list of all the reasons why this won’t work.”  And that can be so discouraging and there are times when we succumb to that.

I guess that’s the reason I share this story is to say, don’t succumb to that.  If that’s the whisper of your heart then follow it, because you won’t know the whole plan.  You can’t see the future.  All you can do is _____ that big desire to go in this direction and I’m going to do it, and yes, there will be obstacles.

In fact, some time during my first year of grad school, my 2-year old developed appendicitis which is extremely rare in a 2-year old.  He nearly died.  So I took everything I had, all my computer gear which was still that TRS-80 computer which takes up a lot a room.  I took that with my suitcase, with my clothes and a modem into children’s hospital with my son and all that computer gear in his room so that I could continue to write code.  It’s just that stuff happens.  Don’t let it take you off.  Don’t let your train off the rails.  It’s going to get you where you want to go if you stick with it.

Andrea:  You know, Karen, that image of being your son’s bedside in a hospital still trying to maintain your education, it reminds me of a lot of women and how it’s easy for us to struggle with guilt over that kind of scenario.  I’m assuming that you would have felt a little bit of some of that too, I don’t know, maybe you didn’t.  If not, then please tell us how.  But how did you handle that tension between being a mom and still pursuing your path that was whispered in into your heart?

Karen Worstell:  Yeah.  That’s a great question.  I think for me, I distinguished between a couple of very important emotions.  One of them is guilt and the other one is shame.  I felt guilty about lots of things by being a mom of toddlers in grad school.  I felt shame about not being able to feed my children.  Which one was I’m going to pick?

I could say I’m doing something about this situation that I’ve gone myself in that I considered shameful.  But I had two small children who I couldn’t afford to raise and I could say “Yes, you know what, that path is gonna be difficult.”  But guilt is a lot of that is in our head, right?  The master skeptic is in my head.

Shirzad Chamine wrote a book about this.  The name of that skips me right now but I can send it to you so that you can share it with your listeners if you like.  He really talks about how all of us are completely equipped with the judge, jury, and all of the accusers in our head and they all take on very specialized roles and one of them is the master of guilt.  And that voice, it says “Boy no, other people wouldn’t be doing it this way.”  Or “You really should have handled this, don’t you think?”  I mean, “How how could you be in this situation and how could your son be so sick?”

I had taken a week off the school when my son got sick.  I took a week off and didn’t go to class and stayed home with him and he was still sick.  The doctors, the nurses, and everybody that we call over the phone and everyone we talked into in urgent care patted me on the head and said “Dear, your son has a flu,” and he sent us home.  So after seven days, my toddler was changing color.  He was so septic and I just said “That’s it, we have to take him to emergency room.”

While we drove in, we called the doctor, we said, we’re coming in.  So here’s a good guilt one for you.  I handed my limp toddler over to his pediatrician who looks at me and says “Why the hell didn’t you get in here before now?”  So yeah, a guilt.  I think, in some ways, I tend to be a little less willing to accept the guilt that other people lay on me and I’m not really sure why.  I’ll lay enough guilt on myself for a lifetime but when somebody else…I said “Excuse me, I called your office every day for a week and you told me it was the flu.”

So yeah, it’s a situation that we can sit down and say “Wow, you know, he’s right.  This is something I did totally wrong and I’m a bad mother.  I’m a bad person.”  What I can say in all honesty was “Could I have done things better, yes.”  “Does that make me a bad person?” “No.”  I’m always about learning how to do things better and I accept that.  People have always told me throughout my career, “If you did X,Y, Z you could have done that better.”  I’m like “Great, thank you.  I will do that better next time.”

I did not beat myself up over the fact that I did my best and I didn’t.  I might not have met somebody else’s standard of what was good.  I did my best and that’s all I can ask for.  That’s all anybody can ask for.

Andrea:  You know, I know that you talked about resilience and I’m wondering how resilience or how that being plays out in these kinds of scenarios with both your education and your career path and then also resilience as a mom and continuing on even when things get really hard.

What kind of advice you have for people along a similar journey who feel like they’re hearing this voice that you’re talking before but they seem to keep getting setback.  What makes somebody resilient or what kind of advice would you have for them?

Karen Worstell:  When it comes to that voice in your head the one that stops us then and attract sometimes, the best thing I can say and it’s echoed in Shirzad Chamine’s book, I think it’s positivity, intelligence or something like that is to recognize that, first of all, every single one of us has that voice in our head to some degree that is going to be the skeptic, right?

I learned to make peace with that skeptic.  The way that I describe that to people and teach that actually in one of my courses is to recognize that skeptic actually all it really wants is for you to be safe.  It wants for you in not be ever in harm’s way in any degree.  It doesn’t want you to fail.  It doesn’t want you to do anything wrong and the way for you to do nothing wrong is to do nothing, right?

So I try to just recognize that when that voice pops up in my head or that feeling in the pit of my stomach, I ask myself “Am I actually making a decision here that’s just a very dangerous decision?”  If the answer is no then I come back and say “Alright then, I will listen to this to the extent that says, what do I need to do to be smart, but I’m not gonna listen to it to extent that says stop.”

Andrea:  Hmmm great distinction.

Karen Worstell:  It’s there to keep us safe.  It’s just that we don’t exercise the part of our self.  So why is that a whisper in our heart and a skeptic screaming in our head, right?  Why is that?  It’s because the skeptic gets more exercise.  We need to learn to listen to the whispers so that the whispers speak with a loud voice.

Shirzad Chamine talks about it as if it’s stepping into your sage as opposed to stepping into your judge.  When the judge starts to get very active, they have to be very conscious and intentional about it and to say “I’m not going to give you all that exercise because my sage needs it more,” and to step into the part that says “What’s the wisdom in this.  How is this the right thing for me to do?”  Why does this make a difference to my life and why would this be so helpful?”  And to let the sage speak as opposed to the skeptic.

I think if we give that more exercise, and he has a ton of exercise about it in his book, but if we give that more exercise, we would definitely not wrestle so much with such a loud skeptical voice all the time.  Maybe we just give out way too much exercise.

Andrea:  That is a really, really great image.  I love that.  OK, so Karen, I know that eventually you stepped away from cybersecurity for a time.

Karen Worstell:  I did.

Andrea:  Can you tell us about that experience?  Why did you stepped away?  How did you end up as a chaplain of all things?

Karen Worstell:  Well, I have always, and throughout my career, I was very fortunate very early to listen to Stephen Covey in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and Principle Centered Leadership and all these other books of that organization put up.  One of the things he always talked about there was writing down your goals, what are your goals.

In 1997, and I still have the paper where I wrote this down and took that in my day timer.  I wrote a list of things that said, these are the things that I want to do in my life.  I want to write a book.  I want to lead an organization.  I want to be a chaplain.  It was on this list.  It had always been there and I think it was born out of my experience of being a caregiver of some capacity for elders when I was an adult.

This is a whole lot of the conversation that five times during my career; I either scaled back my career and I took a leave of absence so that I could care for somebody in my family with Alzheimer’s.  So I knew that that very difficult experience of doing that kind of care giving had to have a purpose and it seemed to me that at that point in time the chaplaincy was the way.

Well, fast forward to 2011 and my mother was dying from Alzheimer’s.  My sister had just been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer and I was working as the chief information security officer at Russell Investment at that the time.  So in a space of about a month, my sister gets very ill, I get laid off at Russell Investments and then the next day, my mom died.

So for me, I was like “OK, I get it.  I’ve been through this before.  This is it.  This is a setback.  This is how I’m gonna do it.”  And I always have like plan A, plan B, plan B1, plan B2, plan B3.  That’s how I work.  I would always shift into the new plan.  If the first plan didn’t work out, I have to shift into the second plan and I had that.  And I couldn’t make any of those plans work, for the first time in my life, I was unable to put one foot in front of the other.  I think my grief finally was so overwhelming that I feel myself really unable to make a decision.

I love cybersecurity.  I didn’t stop loving it.  I just was like “OK, I’m gonna get back into it.  Here’s how I’m gonna get back into it.  I’m gonna take this _____ course and I’m gonna study forensic and I’m gonna get back into the forensic thing.  I had always wished I was going to expand my capabilities and all I had some time off and none of it worked.  I couldn’t make myself even take a class on a subject I had always loved.  I was like “What is up with that?”

It was really like being stuck in a rip and being able to tread water and nothing else.  I couldn’t find a way out of the water, all I could do is tread water.  And I turned down all those dates with my friends who wanted to talk with me, who wanted to talk about projects.  I was like “I can’t.  I can’t and I don’t know why I can’t, but I can’t.”

I was very frustrated by all of that and then I finally just decided, “Hey, listen to this.  You are gonna have to settle it.”  It took about a year which was extraordinary amount of time but then when I ended up doing I was talking with a friend and I said “You know, I haven’t been able to go back in the cybersecurity.  I’m not really sure what that’s all about.  I love it.  I’ve always wanted to be a chaplain.  I don’t know what’s that about, but I’m not really sure what I’m gonna do next.”  And my friend basically says “Hey, I know this person, you need to call her.  She’s the head of chaplaincy.  You need to have a conversation.”

Basically to make a long story short, I called them.  They were interviewing candidate for their incoming class.  I called her and I signed up.  They accepted me like that.  I was enrolled.  This is pretty much about three years of training and my interest was in palliative care.  I loved, loved, and loved the work with the whole different side of connecting with people.  I did about 2000 clinical hours of supervised training and class time.

I got another masters degree and started off on that and my last role was as a palliative care fellow at the VA hospital in Portland.  I truly loved the work I was doing there but more and more what I saw was the moral distress that I was witnessing not only with patients and their families but with medical staff, reminded me so much of what people in the cybersecurity industry were dealing with.

I wasn’t really sure how they characterize it or describe it but I made a decision to go back.  Because the truth is that someone gets about 15 to 30 minutes of their time when their in crisis in the hospital _____, but the bulk of the people who are really hurting who need that kind of support in order to continue their daily life are in the workplace.  And there’s this principal of proximity in chaplaincy that was in World War I where the chaplain didn’t wait in their field tent for the soldiers to come to them, they went to the _____.  That’s what I decided to do.

Out of that, our program on resilience, you know, we have a program Make Resilience Work.  We also call it MOJO Maker, but it is intended to bring the kind of resilience needed to thrive in an imperfect workplace and to be able to build your career, excel in the place where you plant it and to be able to navigate your career and your life through all the stressors that we have to deal with.  I’m mean; I’m not the only one who has kids who get sick.  But we all have to figure out how to navigate that and stay healthy and that’s what we decided to do.

Andrea:  That’s awesome!  Have you worked inside of a company around this particular, you know, bringing in your chaplaincy kind of background?  Have you found that to be a welcoming place or you mostly focusing in on the individual?

Karen Worstell:  We’re focusing on the individual right now and I just had a conversation with another missing individual who has a career in HR.  We’re looking to clear this to be able to bring a weekend intensive and to offer that to a corporate environment.  And then what we have on to back into that is a years’ worth of programming that people can access online to support them with all the things that they learned in the intensive.  We’re hoping to be able to take it there.  We haven’t done that.

I will say that one thing that I did in April, I was invited to run to a peer-to-peer sessions at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, which is a conference that attracts 40,000 cybersecurity professionals.  I’ll try to be very brief about this but what was very interesting about it was we ran a very quick exercise.  The title of the peer-to-peer session by the way was Why are Women Leaving Computing, which is a big issue for us because the number of women in Stanfield is making in progress everywhere accepting computing where its dropped off the cliff.  Nobody really knows why and I’ve been attracted to try to figure that out.

So I ran this session and I had everybody in the room, walked around the room.  I said “Walk around the room once for one minute.  We’re going to walk around the room and I want you to be yourself.”  And then I said “Walk around the room next and I want you to pick the energy that’s the opposite of yourself.  So whether you identify as a female, walk around the room as male, whatever that energy is for you that’s the opposite of what you are, I want you to walk as that.  And just take a look at the other people in the room and see how everybody was doing.”

And then the third time I had them walk around the room I said “I want you to be neutral.  Don’t be yourself but don’t be anything else either.”  What was mind boggling about that exercise; first of all, it was a great ice breaker because it made everybody uncomfortable.  So nobody had any fear speaking up after that.  The thing that was so impressive was that universally, everyone noted how much energy it took for them to try to walk around the room as something other than themselves that when they try to walk around the room as neutral, not only did it take energy, it sucked all the energy out of the room.

It basically made the room slowed down.  So people said, it made the room slowed down.  It looked like a room full of zombies.  And I said “OK, let’s think about what it’s like for people who come in to a work place with unique gifts and talents, unique life experiences.”  We hire for diversity and we have an organization full of color of every kind you can think of and we managed it all down to beige.  We tried to manage everybody the same.  That means that we have a culture where the people who are in the culture have to try to figure out what the culture is and used up a fair amount of their energy just trying to be what the culture expects.

I came away from that thinking, “This isn’t a gender issue.  This is an equal issue.”  I’ve shared that with a number of people.  I’m going to be writing some stuff about that to post on to LinkedIn and onto the RSA blog, but this is where we’re at, right?  We have beige organizations.  We have organizations where all the colors have been sucked out.

What happens is people used up all their energy trying to fit the culture and they don’t have energy left over for creativity and innovation and all the other things that we need so desperately right now, especially in cybersecurity.  We were dealing with issues that only get worse and we have to come up with some really creative ways to try to really deal with that.

The creativity is born out of a person’s feeling safe enough to express their ideas as their ideas, you see.  And if they’re so busy trying to figure out how does their organization want them to be, they’re walking around the room as something other than themselves.

Andrea:  Definitely!  It kind of goes back to that imagery that you’re using before about the person’s screaming or the judge screaming, what was it called?

Karen Worstell:  The Sage and the Judge.

Andrea:  Yeah, the judge was screaming and so then your attention is drawn to that.  You have to spend all of your time worrying about that instead of being able to listen to that voice, that other voice inside of you that’s saying “This is you, just do it.  Just be it.”  Oh it’s so good.  I love that exercise.  What a neat way to help people visualize and experience the truth of what it means to be authentic, really.

Karen Worstell: Yeah.  It took three minutes.  And I have to credit Rachael Jane Groover.  She was the one who introduced that exercise in a workshop that I attended with her.  She had 300 women in the room who were walking around trying to be neutral.  I just remember looking, “We are a room full of zombies, like there’s no differentiation, no creativity, nothing here.”  That’s what inspired that exercise.  But yeah, in three minutes, it made the point.

Andrea:  And I think you could even make that point for whether be a culture at a work place or school or a family or wherever you are when there’s this heavy expectations that drain people and make them so that they feel like they have to be something else, or they can’t be who they are.  That’s really a neat description.

Karen Worstell:  So our Make Resilience Work, what we focus on is helping people find out who they are because a lot of us have been trained not to remember right?  It’s true, right?  We have a little bit of that trained out of us.  So learn to be comfortable in your skin, in your own space unapologetic for who you are.  Understand where your path is.  What is that whisper?  Where do you want to go?

And then the third strategy is all of the tools and techniques that we can all learn to help us navigate to that place that we want to be and _____.  Now does that mean that we completely don’t ever blend in with other people?  No, it means that we make a conscious choice to fit into those places that fit us where we can really fully bring all those gifts and talents and make that contribution that everybody craves.  Everybody craves to have their work be meaningful and to matter.

We’re pretty excited about it and this is going to be…we started off with some early steps in helping people get started and people can take a look…we have three sample courses that we really want people go out and test drive and give us feedback.  So I’ll share with you a link for that so that you can try it your listeners.

Andrea:  Oh yes, absolutely!  So we’ll definitely link to this in the show notes, but do you recall what those are right now at the top of your head?  Or we just go to karen…

Karen Worstell:  Yeah, sure.  You can go to karenworstell.com.  There is a menu item there called MOJO Maker.  If you go to MOJO Maker, you’ll have the link that will take you straight _____ the website for MOJO Maker.  You can sign up for free.  We’re not going to bug you to pay later.  Really what we want to do is get people’s feedback.  We put it out there so that people can try that.  It’s three of our most important modules that will eventually be part of about 22 different modules that people can take over the course of the year if they want to.

Andrea:  So that would be www.karenworstell.com correct?

Karen Worstell:  Yeah, karenworstell.com and it will take you to…there’s a link inside there under MOJO Maker.  It will take you to the class.

Andrea:  Well, thank you Karen for spending sometimes with us today, telling us about your story and sharing your abundant wisdom and your heart for people.  I really enjoy listening to you and having this conversation with you today.  It was really, really great.

Karen Worstell:  I enjoyed it too, Andrea!  Thank you so much for having me in your show and for the chance to talk with you.