SELF-CARE

Kip Boyle:

Hey, everybody. How you doing? This is Kip Boyle, and I’m here with Jason Dion. I think I’m even pointing at him through this virtual meeting space that we have. Anyway, welcome to Your Cyber Path. This is the podcast where we help you either start your cybersecurity career, or if you’re already working in cybersecurity, we want you to accelerate your career. We want to get you more responsibility. We want to get you promotions, and of course, with that will come greater compensation. And yeah, we can all think of good things we can do with more comp. We want that for you. So, we are here to share some more information that will help you, and Jason, before we start rolling this episode, it’s Halloween, right? Like, we’re on the brink of the spooky time of the year. Now, you’re-

Jason Dion:

Yeah, definitely.

Kip Boyle:

You’re in Orlando, so don’t all the theme parks have like Halloween-themed stuff to do?

Jason Dion:

Oh yeah. They love Halloween out here. If you go to Disney, they actually do their Halloween party in like July, and it’s the Mickey Not-So-Spooky Halloween, and then they leave up the decorations up until about Halloween, and then right after that, like overnight, they change the entire park, and it turns into Christmas.

Kip Boyle:

Ooh, wow.

Jason Dion:

And holiday season, so it’s a pretty big undertaking for them from a project management side, and it always amazes me how you can go in on like Friday, and then come back on Saturday, and it’s just like night and day, completely changed over.

Kip Boyle:

I didn’t know they did that, but now I’m thinking about that movie that Tim Burton did, A Nightmare Before Christmas.

Jason Dion:

Yep.

Kip Boyle:

Okay, maybe that’s the inspiration? I don’t know.

Jason Dion:

Yeah, and if you actually… If you’re A Nightmare Before Christmas fan, one of the things they do during this time of year is they actually add those decorations into the Haunted Mansion ride, so you’ll see Jack Skellington and stuff throughout the ride as you go, so it’s pretty cool. If you like more of the spooky side of Halloween, that’s where you go to Busch Gardens, which is out in Tampa, Sea World, which is here in Orlando, or Universal, and they do what’s called Halloween Horror Nights, and they basically have… They turn a lot of the rooms that the rides are in into basically haunted mansions that you walk through, and there’s like 10 different houses that they have, and they’re super, super scary, and every year, they put out a new house, and they change one of them out, and as you’re walking through the park, there’s people with like chainsaws chasing after you, and all sorts of weird stuff like that. So not for the faint of heart, not for the little kid.

Kip Boyle:

No, it’s not kitschy. Like, this is like really trying to scare you.

Jason Dion:

Oh, yeah, yeah. Halloween Horror Nights is all about, “We want to scare you as much as possible,” and so-

Kip Boyle:

Nice.

Jason Dion:

… if you go during the day, up until I think 4:00 or 5:00 in the park, it’s normal, and then after 4:00, they kick everybody out, they let everybody come back in who bought separate tickets for this Halloween Horror Nights event. I think it starts at 5:00 or 6:00, and it goes until like midnight, and you can go through these different haunted houses and experiences, all over, and it’s completely themed, and done at Universal level, so it’s-

Kip Boyle:

Wow.

Jason Dion:

It’s pretty awesome if you like scary things. I am not that big of a scary person, so I don’t really like going to Halloween Horror Nights, but I do have some friends this year that are in town, and they want me to go, so I think I’m going to take them. But yeah, if you like scary stuff, it’s a great way to spend a little bit of your time during September and October, as it leads up to the Halloween season.

Kip Boyle:

You know, the only scary stuff that I really enjoy on a long-term basis is the Alien movies, even though the last couple haven’t been all that awesome, but you know, go back to the originals, and it’s really just like haunted house in space or whatever, and there’s something about it being in like a science-fiction sort of motif that makes it really interesting, more than if it was like… Like I don’t watch Halloween, or Friday the 13th, or whatever, like those things. But for some reason, you put it in space, and all of a sudden, I’m interested, so…

Jason Dion:

Yeah, I’m not big into the whole jump scare thing, which is most of these movies are all about, “How can we do this, like, boom, and kind of hit them with [inaudible 00:03:57].”

Kip Boyle:

Right.

Jason Dion:

And I just don’t like that. I’m not one that likes to be scared, to be honest.

Kip Boyle:

Jason’s like, “Life is scary enough. We don’t need to add more.”

Jason Dion:

That’s kind of how I feel. I’m like, “Eh, you guys can have your fun. It’s not really my thing.” And you know, when I had… My kids are older now. They’re both over 18 at this point, and off in college, and all that kind of fun stuff, and when they were younger, we always hated when Halloween fell on like a Tuesday, like it does this year, because it just makes it so difficult to really enjoy it. And then it starts getting confusing, right? Because in your neighborhood, some kids will start knocking on your door Saturday and Sunday, which is like the 28th and 29th, because they can’t come out on Tuesday, because it’s a school night, right? Or they do like-

Kip Boyle:

Very confusing.

Jason Dion:

… the dress up for school thing, and then the teachers get all upset, because people are wearing costumes in school. And I don’t know, it’s always been weird to me when it falls on a weekday like this year, so it’s just not as much of a fun thing.

Kip Boyle:

So it should be more like Thanksgiving, which is always on a Thursday?

Jason Dion:

Yeah, I personally would like that better, if it was like, “Hey, it’s always going to be on a Friday night for Halloween,” or, “It’s always going to be on a Saturday night.” When it’s a Saturday, I find that to be the best, because you’ve got all day to prepare. You can really go all out if you want to decorate the house, and give the kids candy, and all that kind of stuff, and when it’s like a Tuesday, it’s just not as much fun for me, I think.

Kip Boyle:

Well, whatever your opinion is, those of you who are listening, we hope you have a good Halloween, however you like it. Maybe you like it with all the lights off, and the sign on the door says, “Go away kids, you’re [inaudible 00:05:16].” Who knows? Whatever you like, do it, but… And the reason why I’m saying that, in part, is because what we want to talk about today is the topic of self-care. If the best way for you to take care of yourself during Halloween is to hide under a rock, by all means do it, because we don’t want to deal with your cranky butt tomorrow.

But let’s talk about self-care in the context of cybersecurity and your career. Now this is really important, because before we get to the tips, what I want to say very clearly is cybersecurity can be an exceptionally rewarding career. I mean, I’ve been doing it for a long, long time now, no plans to change, but it can also be wildly stressful at times, and you can be tempted to work too hard and burn out. Or, you could be at a job that you absolutely hate. Maybe it was great when you started it, but then you got a new boss or something like that, and now everything’s awful and you feel trapped, because hey, it turns out you’ve got a mortgage, you’ve got car payments, maybe tuition for somebody in your family, and now you feel like, “I’m stuck. I have to put up with this garbage, and I don’t see any way out of it,” right? And so that’s going to lead to chronic stress and awfulness, and we don’t want any of that for you.

So that’s kind of what’s prompting us to talk about this. Now, I’m going to come at it from private sector as I always do. Now Jason, would you say in your experience working in Department of Defense land, that the things I just said can also be true?

Jason Dion:

Oh, 100%. I was working with the Navy for 20 years, and sadly, one of the highest suicide rates for members of the military is those who work as what used to be called a CTN, or cryptographic technician network, which-

Kip Boyle:

Oh my.

Jason Dion:

… basically is government hackers and government defense folks, people working in the cybersecurity space, right?

Kip Boyle:

Mm-hmm.

Jason Dion:

And it always kind of made me scratch my head and go, “Why is that?” And a lot of it comes down to this idea of self-care, and the reason why it’s so important in what we do is you sometimes are going to see some stuff in your job that is just like the worst of humanity, right?

Kip Boyle:

That’s true.

Jason Dion:

When I was working at places like the NSA, and other places like that, we are seeing all sorts of stuff that you probably don’t want to see, right? If you’re dealing with terrorism and you’re trying to crack down terrorists, you’re looking through their emails, and their text messages, and that kind of stuff, right? If you’re looking at… If you’re on the internet service provider, you might be looking for things like child pornography, right? Because you’re trying to catch people who are doing that and put them away, and work with the FBI and law enforcement. And those things can really take a toll on you if you’re not doing proper self-care.

And that was one of the problems that we were seeing, and so the military and the DoD has done a lot to try to curb that, and they’ve done a lot of things to try to force self-care on people, and try to put in breaks and things like that, but this is one of the realities of depending on what you’re dealing with on a daily basis, you’re going to see some stuff that you may not want to be seeing.

Kip Boyle:

Yeah.

Jason Dion:

You look through those logs, you could see pictures, you could see emails, you could see texts, and a lot of that can take a toll on you.

Kip Boyle:

Right. No, that’s a great point, that I didn’t make, and that happens in the private sector as well, where you might be doing content filtering on your corporate network, and you’re getting all these alerts, and you’re having to forensically examine, what is this person doing? And you might see some stuff that you would never willingly choose to see on your own, and that can be absolutely traumatizing. So anyway, or I tell you one thing that I did one time, before we start getting to the tips, is I had a job where the CEO came to me and said, “Hey, I need you to investigate something,” and as he was… And he’s telling me like, “You’ve got to keep this confidential,” and as he was laying out the case that he wanted me to look in, it had to do with my boss.

Jason Dion:

Yeah.

Kip Boyle:

So I-

Jason Dion:

I’ve had those issues too, where I’m looking at my boss or my boss’s boss, right? Because when you run the network, you’re running it for everyone, from the [inaudible 00:09:13]-

Kip Boyle:

That’s right.

Jason Dion:

… all the way down to the janitor, and you don’t know who’s the bad guy in this scenario, right? It could be somebody doing some really awful stuff.

Kip Boyle:

It was really mentally and emotionally taxing, because here I am interacting with my boss. He has no idea I’m investigating him. I can’t tell him. It’s hella uncomfortable. Anyway, so there’s all kinds of situations.

Jason Dion:

He’s like, “Kip, what are you doing for three hours a day?” “I can’t tell you, boss. I’m working for your boss right now.”

Kip Boyle:

Yeah. It’s just awful. Just, I did not enjoy that in the least. Anyway, so whatever the situation is, you could find yourself in an unhealthy space, so we want to give you some tips to help you, first of all, maybe prevent yourself from being in these spaces, or if you find yourself in them anyway, what can you do? How can you cope in a healthy way, not in an unhealthy way? Because there’s all kinds of unhealthy ways to cope. We don’t want you to do that. So the-

Jason Dion:

Well, even before we get into that, one of the things I wanted to bring up is I listen to the Wall Street Journal podcast called The Journal, and they did an episode about two or three, maybe two or three months ago, and it was on ChatGPT and the workers behind it, right? So we talk a lot about data, and AI, and all these wonderful tools that are out there, right?

Kip Boyle:

Mm-hmm.

Jason Dion:

But we all know, to create a great AI or machine learning tool, you have to have a really big dataset, and you have to know what [inaudible 00:10:26]-

Kip Boyle:

Sure.

Jason Dion:

… and what is bad. And so the content filtering mechanisms inside ChatGPT, those weren’t built by a computer. Those were built by training it, based on real people looking at every prompt that people were putting in-

Kip Boyle:

Oh my.

Jason Dion:

… and every response the computer came back with, and then saying, “This is okay, this is not. This is dangerous, this is not,” and essentially, to do that at scale, they need to get a very low-cost provider to do it, and so they ended up outsourcing to a company in… I think it was Nigeria. It’s someplace in Africa. I think it was Nigeria, if I remember [inaudible 00:10:53].

Kip Boyle:

Okay.

Jason Dion:

And they had this huge data center just filled with people, and all they did for 12 hours a day was read, what did people post to ChatGPT, and what did ChatGPT say, and then be able to filter things out. So if you ever used ChatGPT when it first came out, in November of ’22, I think it was-

Kip Boyle:

Yep.

Jason Dion:

… there was things you could say like, “Hey, write me a program that does this bad thing,” or, “Tell me how to build a bomb,” or, “Tell me how to do this,” and they started learning over time, these are bad things, and they did that by these people literally reading and looking at all this bad content. Similarly, this has been an industry for the last 10 or 15 years, that we as first-world, developed nations don’t think about, but a lot of this work is being done in Africa and in Southeast Asia, and Google does the same thing for their content moderation, and Facebook does the same thing for their content moderation. So these are people, all day long they’re looking at the worst of the humanity on the internet [inaudible 00:11:42]-

Kip Boyle:

Yeah.

Jason Dion:

… say, “That’s bad. Take it off for the rest of us.” And so if you find yourself in one of these data analyst positions, in one of these countries, you can really have a really bad toll on yourself, and so that’s one of the things we wanted to bring this up, because we do have a worldwide audience. I have a lot of students who live in Africa, and they may take one of those jobs, and you need to be aware of what you’re getting into, because when they took these jobs, they didn’t realize what they were getting [inaudible 00:12:01].

Kip Boyle:

Wow.

Jason Dion:

And that being said, self-care doesn’t always have to be because of bad things like that, right? I am usually on the other side of self-care, where I don’t do it enough because I love what I do, and so I work myself to death, and I might work 80 hours a week, because I love doing what I’m doing, and try to put out new content for my students, and all that kind of stuff, and it’s important, even if you love your job, to take time off and have that self-care, and I think that’s what we’re really going to focus on here today, is what can you do to give yourself self-care? How can you make that work in your environment? How do you talk to your boss about it? And all those kind of things.

Kip Boyle:

Right.

Jason Dion:

[inaudible 00:12:32].

Kip Boyle:

And your spouse and kids if you’ve got them, or you know, just the people around you, right? Because they may not understand. Like if you’re going to do some self-care, they may think that like, “What? That’s weird.”

Jason Dion:

Yeah.

Kip Boyle:

But okay, so let’s start getting into the tips. The first thing that we want to talk about is time off. Your employer really wants you to take time off. They want that for you because they want you to be rested and recharged. They do not want you to be burnt out, so paid time off is a common benefit that almost every employer is going to offer you in some form or fashion, and… But what’s crazy is that I’ve seen some people so consumed with their work, Jason, that they don’t take vacations or holidays for years, and a lot of places have use-it-or-lose-it type of leave accumulation programs, and oh man, I never wanted to lose even a single hour of accumulated time off, so anyway. So that’s our first tip. Now, Jason, how have you done with this tip for yourself, or do you want to talk about what you’ve seen with other people?

Jason Dion:

Yeah, so you know, I’ll talk about myself over my 20-year career, because it’s different depending on where I was in my career, right?

Kip Boyle:

Mm-hmm.

Jason Dion:

When I first started out, I was in the military, when I was young. 20 years ago, I joined the military in 2002, and in the military, you get 30 days of vacation, which they call leave, every year. And you earn two-and-a-half days per month for every month you work, very similar to a lot of people that get PTO, and every month that you work, you get a day off or something like that, right? Or eight hours.

The difference is, in the military, is every day is considered a workday, so if I take off a weekend that is a four-day weekend, for instance Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. If you did that at a traditional bank, you would be charged for Friday and Monday, because Saturday and Sunday were days off anyway. And so you may only get two weeks a year while I got 30, but my days were counted for every day, so if I took off a four-day weekend, I lost four days, even though that was only two days of actual work that I [inaudible 00:14:40] right? And so it sounds like a lot with 30 days, but it actually wasn’t, and so there was a lot of times like that where I would kind of like, “Okay, I’m not going to take vacation this weekend. I’ll wait until next… I’ll take it Monday through Thursday, because if I’m going to get charged for four days, I might as well get four days off,” right?

And so I was really maximizing my amount of time, and then with the military, they allowed you to keep up to 60 days as what they called rollover. You’re talking about use or lose. Once you go over 60 days, which is after two years of not using your vacation, you start losing those days, and you can’t hold them anymore. So what most people in the military will do is they’ll earn enough leave to kind of get to 60, and then every year, they’ll burn their 30 days that they earned. As they’re earning 30 new days, they’ll use that up, and so they always have 60 days, and then whenever they retire or get out of the military, they basically can take their last two months off with pay as they’re looking for a new job.

Kip Boyle:

Got it.

Jason Dion:

And so I did a very similar thing to that. In my company, we actually have an unlimited paid time off policy, and I know we’re going to talk about this, because we did mention compensation, right? At the beginning of the show. And you know, a lot of people think like, “Hey, unlimited paid time off is an awesome benefit,” and I think it is. I implemented it in my own company. But I will also tell you the dirty dark side of that. Kip, do you know the dirty dark side of unlimited paid time off, and why companies really support doing it? [inaudible 00:15:51] you, the employee.

Kip Boyle:

Well, let’s see. I could guess a few things. I might guess that they don’t want accruals for unpaid time off in their accounting, in their statements. Is that-

Jason Dion:

100%. That is exactly the right answer. As a company, if I give you time off and you generate it based on eight hours per month, right? Of PTO. [inaudible 00:16:14]-

Kip Boyle:

Whatever the accumulation is.

Jason Dion:

.. for a year and you never took it, and I fire you or you quit, I have to pay you for that time, so now you’d have 12 days that I have to pay you for, and basically pay you an extra two weeks of pay when I fire you, or you quit, or you get let go, or whatever. And so a lot of companies moved to unlimited paid time off for that reason, because with unlimited paid time off, there is no benefit that they have to pay, because there is no accrual. Now, that’s not the reason why I use it at Dion Training. I use it because I really do want my people to take their time off, and we work as a very distributed global team. Most of us work from home. Very few of us work in the office. We don’t keep a standard 9:00 to 5:00, because we have people on all sorts of parts of the world. And so for us, being able to say, “Hey, you take your time when you need it. If you’re in the Philippines, take off for your Independence Day.” If Kip’s in America, he can take off for his Independence Day, and those are two totally different Independence Days, right?

Kip Boyle:

Right.

Jason Dion:

And so to be able to support a global, diverse workforce, it made sense for us to use unlimited PTO, and I want people to take time off. But I will tell you, when you’re negotiating an offer and a company says, “We have unlimited PTO,” that’s really good if you use it, but if you don’t use it, it’s actually screwing you, because they’re not paying you for the time you’re not using. But again, that goes against what we’re saying, which is take the time off. Enjoy the time off, right? You want vacation days.

Kip Boyle:

Now, I’ve never worked in an organization that had unlimited PTO, but I’ve heard about it, and I’ve read a few articles, and I’ve talked to some people, and you want to talk about like a downside, right? One of the things that I’ve heard is that because there are no hard-and-fast rules, it can be difficult to know how much is too much.

Jason Dion:

Yeah.

Kip Boyle:

Because I mean, you can’t just say, “I’m gone for the next two months,” right?

Jason Dion:

Yeah.

Kip Boyle:

I mean, that just doesn’t work, even though theoretically, you should be able to do that under the policy, and so it gets really weird, because you’re like, “Well, how much is too much?” And then it’s very supervisor dependent, right? Because your supervisor’s really the one that’s making that judgment, so depending on who you work for you’re getting more or you’re getting less, and one of the things I read is because there’s so much ambiguity, is that people tend to not take even like a typical amount off. Like, they’re not even taking two or three weeks or whatever would traditionally be granted, and so please, if you’re in an unlimited PTO situation, don’t let that happen to you. Just talk to your supervisor, and just say, “Hey, this year I’m looking for three weeks, two weeks, four weeks,” whatever it is, and get it sorted out in advance, so that you don’t end up on the short end of the stick on that one, all right? So all right.

Jason Dion:

Yeah, and I’ll tell you, as somebody who runs unlimited PTO in my own company, we have people who have taken off a month at a time, and we’ve let them, and we don’t have a problem with that. But again, it depends on you, right? If I hired you, and next week you say, “I’m going away for four weeks,” we’re going to have a problem, right? [inaudible 00:18:57]-

Kip Boyle:

[inaudible 00:18:57] timing.

Jason Dion:

… for four weeks, like they had a very valid reason for taking four weeks. They were going to go fly over to Europe, and it’s expensive to fly to Europe, and they were like, “Look, if I’m going to fly eight hours over there, I want to be able to be there for two, three, four weeks, and really explore the area,” and we said, “You know what? We agree with you. That’s great. Go for it.” And you know, we basically came up with a plan. They told us like six months ahead of time. They said, “Hey, in September,” in fact last month, she’s… The person said, “I’m going to be gone for four weeks,” and we planned on that since March, and so leading up to it-

Kip Boyle:

Great.

Jason Dion:

… she worked a little extra. She got all her stuff done. We made sure we weren’t in the middle of a big project when she was leaving, and all her responsibilities were covered by other people on the team, because we all knew she was going to be gone, and we can then plan for it, because she gave us such a long period of time. We could say, if Kip said, “Well, I want to take off a week during that time,” be like, “Sorry, Kip. You’re on the same team, and this person’s already going, so you’re going to stay and cover for her. You could take your week in October if you want.” And that becomes one of the other friction points with PTO, is everybody tries taking it at the same time, for instance Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year.

Kip Boyle:

Yep.

Jason Dion:

A traditional time that everybody wants to go off. That can become a big problem for you. And so it does become a management thing, but good managers can work their way through this, and you as an employee can work your way through this too.

Kip Boyle:

Definitely.

Jason Dion:

My guidance to you, if you are somebody who is offered unlimited PTO, is the first year you’re there, I would treat it almost like regular PTO, right? And what I mean by that is most of us get two or three weeks a year of vacation time, and so you can take two or three weeks off, either as a chunk or as days throughout the year, but the longer you’re with the company and the more valuable you are, the more they’re going to let you take vacation, because they don’t want to lose you, right?

Kip Boyle:

Mm-hmm.

Jason Dion:

And so then the person I’m talking about, they’re a really good employee, and if they said, “Hey, if you don’t give me this four weeks, I’m going to leave,” I’d be like, “Yeah, take your four weeks,” right? And we just figured out a good time that works for her, and works for us, and makes it work for everybody. So keep that in mind when you’re dealing with like flexible or unlimited vacation time policy. I personally love to take time off, but I also work crazy hours, so there will be some weeks… Last week and this week, I’ve been working 80 hours a week.

Kip Boyle:

Yeah.

Jason Dion:

But this weekend, I’m actually going away for four days, and I am not even turning on my phone. I will just be disconnected completely, and that’s kind of my payback for those two weeks that I work crazy hours, and I take a couple of days off here and there every month. I take off a couple of weeks here and there every year, and I still go on vacations quite a bit. And my boss is okay with that, because I’m still getting my work done.

Kip Boyle:

Yep, yep. That’s great insight. Thank you. So for those of you who don’t have a lot of experience working in a corporate environment that is typical for cybersecurity people, this stuff might all be some kind of a mystery to you, right? You don’t really know what’s considered to be okay, so I hope this tip on making sure that you get your time off is going to be very helpful for you, to help you avoid burnout.

Now, let’s go onto the next tip. We’ve actually got three that we want to share with you today, so here’s the second one. This one’s a little different. This one’s money focused. What I coach all my folks to do is I want you to have an emergency fund. I want you to have a personal stash of money, and I want it to be, say, somewhere between like three months or six months, or maybe even a year of savings, in the amount of like how much you make, like what your take-home pay is, and I want you to have that in there, in cash, ready to go at a moment’s notice. Some people call this FU money, which means if-

Jason Dion:

“Forget you.”

Kip Boyle:

.. if I’m… Yeah, forget you, which means if this job is just going sideways, and I am hating it, and just like I cannot tolerate this position anymore, but I have that feeling of being trapped, right? I’ve got the mortgage, I’ve got the car payment, I’ve got the tuition payment, and student loans, and all that stuff, right? And you can’t get out of it, and maybe you’ve used all your time off. Well, now what do you do? Well, if you’ve got this FU money, guess what. You can just gracefully leave that situation, right? And remember, Jason and I have said this over and over and over and over again. Don’t burn your bridges. Leave with respect, leave with notice, all that. Do it all correctly, but if you’ve got this FU money, you’re out, so-

Jason Dion:

And the other thing with this is, I have a friend right now, and I go on travel quite a bit, and she’s like, “Hey, I’d love to go with you on this cruise you’re going on, or this vacation you’re going on,” and I’m like, “That’s awesome,” and she’s got money to do it, but she doesn’t have the PTO off at work, because she only has so many hours, and so now, because she has this sum of money, she’s able to say, “You know what? I really do want to go on that vacation for a week, and even if I don’t get paid, or I can miss the week of salary, as long as they’re letting me take that week off.” And so she’s been able to go to her boss and say, “Hey, I’m going to take an unpaid week off this week of November, or December, or whatever,” and if her boss is okay with that, she can do that, and afford to do that, because she has this backing of the money.

Kip Boyle:

That’s great.

Jason Dion:

And you know, when you talk about this, I hear a lot of people, if you look at financial experts, they always talk about a six-month emergency fund, or a three-month emergency fund, or a 12-month emergency fund, and I think that’s really what you’re talking about here.

Kip Boyle:

Yep.

Jason Dion:

And the one thing I wanted to talk about a little bit is you had mentioned salary, right? You said three months of salary, up to a year of salary. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s based on salary, though. And the reason is, everyone’s in a different financial position, based on where they are. For example, my wife and I, we worked really hard about 10 years ago to get ourselves out of debt, so we paid off the house, we paid off the cars. I was working crazy amounts of jobs. I paid everything off. And when I did that, my emergency fund requirement actually went way down.

Kip Boyle:

That’s a good point.

Jason Dion:

Because originally, I said, “You know what? For me to have six months of expenses, I need to pay for the house, the cars, the groceries, the utilities, all that stuff.” These days, I don’t have a car payment. I don’t have a house payment. I just have my utilities, and my groceries, and my fun stuff.

Kip Boyle:

Great.

Jason Dion:

And so like literally, I could live on 1,000 bucks a month, or 1,500 bucks a month, or 2,000 bucks a month, and be totally fine, because I don’t have all those other expenses. And so as you’re figuring out what is the emergency fund that you need in your life, think about that, and it’s what expenses do you have? What things are coming up? Because for instance, I drive a car that’s paid for, but I know that in three years, I’ll have to replace that car, so all the while, I’m saving up for that next car, and that’s going to be something I need to do.

Kip Boyle:

Or it might break.

Jason Dion:

[inaudible 00:24:46]. And then the other thing I would say is when you’re looking at your emergency fund, it’s not a replacement for what your lifestyle is today. It’s a replacement to keep you floating until the next job. There are some things that you could probably get rid of. For instance, if you have a $30-a-month Netflix subscription or a $200-a-month satellite bill, and you’re going to change that in for a $10 Hulu subscription, that saves you $190 per month, and you may not want to do that today, but if you were losing your job or you were going to quit your job, you may do that, because that extends your emergency fund even longer. I could talk all day on finances. Sorry, I’m a big finance nerd. But that [inaudible 00:25:18]. I see one of the common problems that people do is like, “Well, I’ll never save six months of my salary, because I’m making $60,000 a year, and I’m spending $50,000 a year right now to live on. It’ll take me six years to get that six months.” Well, you don’t really need six months of salary. You need three months of expenses-

Kip Boyle:

That’s a good point.

Jason Dion:

… or six months of expenses, and that may only be $10,000 for you, or $20,000 for you, depending on your situation.

Kip Boyle:

Yeah. Oh, that’s great insight. Thank you. And I think the other takeaway from what you said is that the lower you could get your run rate, right? The lower your monthly expense burden, then the less you have to save, which makes it even more achievable. But let’s talk about saving strategies. I’m just going to talk about one, maybe… There’s probably more, but the one that worked for me, that I really believe in, is just automatic withdrawal or automatic deposit into a savings account. What that means is that you can tell your employer, potentially, if they offer this, “Hey, I want 80% of my paycheck to go into the checking account, because I’m going to use it to pay bills and whatnot. I want 20% of my pay to go into this other savings account,” right? And then that way, you get used to living on that 80%, and you never even saw the other 20%. It just goes right into a savings account.

And for me, that strategy worked really well, and I actually kind of had a third auto-deposit which went into my retirement savings, right? So I have retirement savings. Then I had emergency funds, FU money, and then I had money left over to pay my expenses. And so how do you do that? Well, just figure out what your number is, right? Look at your expense run rate, and then whatever that number is, and then look at your situation. If you’re in a job you absolutely love, well maybe you can split the savings over a year, maybe even two years. I don’t know, right? Take a look at your situation. But if you’re in an awful situation and you’re like, “I need FU money immediately,” well, then you’re going to have to get aggressive, and maybe you’re talking about six months, or nine months, or some sort of a shorter period of time in order to get your FU money up to where you need it to be.

Anyway, that’s what worked for me. Jason, you kind of said what worked for you, but did you want to add anything?

Jason Dion:

Yeah. The other thing I was going to say is that you know, we have a mostly American audience, right? And so I would tell you, as Americans, the three things that we spend most of our money on are things that we, as Americans, have a bigger lifestyle on than anywhere else in the world, houses, cars, and debt, right? We are a consumer cult.

Kip Boyle:

Yeah.

Jason Dion:

And so if you’re looking at your situation, you’re like, “Look, I’ve been in this job for 10 years. I’m not going to get another big raise. I’m going to be stuck here for a while,” or, “I love this job. I don’t want to leave,” well, you may need to look at what other things could be cut in your life, right? The average car payment in America is like $500 per month right now. That’s $6,000 per year. I will tell you, I’ve driven a $1,000 car for two years, about 10 years ago when I was getting out of debt. I bought a car for 1,000 bucks, sold my car that had a payment, and I was able to save $500 a month, which was $6,000 a year, over that next 14 months, that helped pay off some of my debt, right? So that helped that. If you’re in a house, most of us are in really big houses that we don’t use all of. Now, if you’ve got seven people in your family and a five-bedroom house, you’re probably okay. But I know a lot of people, myself included-

Kip Boyle:

I resemble that.

Jason Dion:

Yeah, so right? The house I am sitting in right now as we’re filming this, we bought this house when we had two kids in the house. None of my kids live with me anymore, so I have a three-bedroom house and it’s me and my wife. So literally, we have a guest room, a master bedroom, and an office is what we’re using it for. I could lose one of those bedrooms and I’d be perfectly fine. It wouldn’t bother me at all. But again, we don’t have a house payment, so we just stay here and we don’t mind. But if you’re paying $3,000 for a house and you could be paying $2,000 for a house, that’s $1,000 a month you could have extra, to go to your savings or retirement funds, right?

Kip Boyle:

Yep.

Jason Dion:

And then the third thing is debt, right? If you have a lot of credit card debt, you are killing yourself, because credit card debt holds 20 to 30% interest, so if you have a $1,000 and you leave it in there for a year, that $1,000 is now $1,300 next year, and then next year, it’s $1,700. It just keeps snowballing on you. So the fastest way to get yourself out of debt is really focus on getting rid of your credit cards and don’t spend anymore, and then focus on the car, and then focus on the house, and work your way through.

If you need help with that, we’re not a financial talk show obviously, but two guys that I would highly recommend is Dave Ramsey, which is a really big cut to the bone, as hard as it can be to get you out of debt like that, like within two years, and the second person I’d recommend is Clark Howard. He’s a little bit slower. He’ll get you out over five years, but it’s definitely not as excessive as Dave Ramsey is. I personally used the Dave Ramsey plan. I had $60,000 in debt. It took me about 14 months to get out of that. I took second jobs. I sold a bunch of stuff. And this was back in 2010. And we got out of debt. We’ve been debt free ever since, and it’s really helped us grow wealth, because we’re no longer paying the banks, and the car company, and the credit card companies. We’re now putting it in our pocket.

Kip Boyle:

Right. I want to say a little word about debt, and then we’re going to go onto the next, the third and final tip, which is here’s something that really changed the way I thought about debt, which is somebody said to me one time, “You know, anytime you charge something on a credit card and you don’t pay it off, or you get an automobile loan, you’re renting somebody else’s money. That’s what the interest payment is, is a rent payment, so that you can borrow their money, rent their money, and do whatever it is you want.” And I thought, “Oh my god, I’m renting people’s money?” And then for whatever reason, that just gobsmacked me, and I’m like, “I’m not doing that.”

Jason Dion:

Yep. Yeah, I mean, I had one of those realizations, like I said about 10, 15 years ago, and ever since, it’s been able to allow me to flip to the other side, where now I don’t owe anybody money, and for me, my carry of what it costs for me to live my life is extremely low, because I don’t have any debt that I have to service. And on the other side, I’ve sold my house when I moved from Puerto Rico. That house, I actually, the person didn’t have enough money to buy it cash, and it’s harder to get a mortgage in Puerto Rico, so we just did a seller-financed mortgage, so they’re paying me every month for using my money, and I’m getting 5, 6, 7% interest, because that’s the going mortgage rates right now, because they’re super high, and I don’t even have to put my money at risk, because if the person doesn’t pay, I get the house back and I can resell it again anyway. So there’s a lot of benefits when you can get to the other side of this, and I know-

Kip Boyle:

Oh yeah.

Jason Dion:

… it seems like… When you’re in debt, it seems like you’re being buried, and it seems so far away, but Kip and I are on the other side. We’re telling you it’s good. Come on over here. It hurts for two or three years to get out, but once you’re out, you’ll never go back.

Kip Boyle:

You know, I haven’t said it yet, but I just want to say that I know exactly what Jason’s talking about, the struggle to get out of debt. I went through it for sure, and I had a very similar experience where I just… You know, “I’m renting somebody’s money? Oh, hell no.” And I just worked like a Hebrew slave to get out of that situation, and I’m like, I’m not going back there, man. No way.

Jason Dion:

And you know, the funny thing is, if I wasn’t trying to get out of debt, I probably wouldn’t be talking to you all today, because one of the jobs I got as a part-time job was as a college professor, teaching cybersecurity stuff, and that’s what started making me get used to teaching and loving it, and then I started my business from it, and it just kind of went from there. But like, I started that because I was looking to make extra money, and it was an easy way for me to pick up money by going and teaching community college or college classes, and they would pay me a couple thousand dollars per course that I taught, and it was a great way to take that, and I immediately just threw it on the debt, and that helped me get out quickly.

Kip Boyle:

Fantastic. Okay, well so that’s our little tip on money. Get an FU fund. All right, now the last tip that we want to talk about is… And this one’s maybe a little unusual for you to… But you know what, if you didn’t think the money part was unusual, you’re probably not going to think this is unusual. But we want to talk about the difference between self-compassion and self-judgment. Now listen, this is another one of those things where I’m like, “Yep, been there, done that, got the t-shirt, and I judge the t-shirt all day long.”

So look, what we mean by self-judgment is beating up on yourself. You make a mistake and you’re like, “You idiot, Kip. Why did you do that,” right? Now, I say it with a smile on my face. I’ve usually said it through gritted teeth, but you know, like, “Ah, you’re never going to figure out this cybersecurity stuff,” or, “Oh, why did you say that in the interview? You’re never going to get the job.” You know, whatever it is. Maybe it’s imposter syndrome, right? You get out of a meeting and you’re like, “Oh my god, if they ever knew how stupid I was, I’d get fired. I just can’t let anybody know.”

So you really need to, first of all, recognize if you’re doing that, and then the second thing is is realize that it’s not harmless. It’s actually very harmful, and we don’t want that for you. What we want you to do instead is have self-compassion. Okay, so I have described what self-judgment looks like. I don’t know, Jason, if you want to cop to any self-judgment habits that you’ve got, or if you just want to go straight into describing what self-compassion is, I leave that to you.

Jason Dion:

Yeah, so you know, when it comes to self-judgment, I think we’re all guilty of it, right? For me, I don’t tend to have self-judgment around what I know or what I do, but I have it more about my appearance, right? Like, “Oh, you’re a little soggy around the midsection, Jason. You’re a little out of shape. You need to go to the gym more. No one’s going to like you, because why would somebody want to listen to you when you’re not a skinny, athletic marathon runner or something?” I don’t know.

Kip Boyle:

Interesting.

Jason Dion:

I have more about that, around the way I look and the way I present myself, and I’m very, very conscious of that. [inaudible 00:34:28]-

Kip Boyle:

Well, you have the right haircut. You got to know that, okay?

Jason Dion:

I got the right haircut. I got the balding haircut. That makes me feel better about myself, not. You know, the reason why I’m bald is because I am losing my hair here, so I-

Kip Boyle:

Hey, dude.

Jason Dion:

… shave the rest of it, right?

Kip Boyle:

Yeah. [inaudible 00:34:39]-

Jason Dion:

This isn’t just… This isn’t just so I can hear things.

Kip Boyle:

Yeah.

Jason Dion:

But yeah, I mean things like that, and even before we got on this podcast recording, because for those who don’t know, we also put these clips on YouTube, and we have the full episode at Your Cyber Path on our YouTube channel, I’m always kind of wary about how I look on camera, and I actually switched from using the headset like Kip is to using a lavaliere mic, because you can actually see the green screen between my head and where his microphone’s headset is.

Kip Boyle:

Yeah, this little space right here.

Jason Dion:

And it drove me crazy. And I’m like, “Nope, can’t do that,” so I switched to a lavaliere mic and speaker, so that way, it looks better, and it looks like I’m actually in front of the bookshelf when I’m actually not. I’m in my bedroom in my house right now, and not at my studio. But again, it’s one of those things like I’m like, “Ah, people are going to judge me based on how I look,” and I’m a much harsher critic than anybody else is about myself. And so it is a struggle, I think, for everyone, no matter how successful or unsuccessful you are. I never really had the imposter syndrome thing, that I know a lot of people do, and I’ve met a lot of folks who are like, “I can’t speak up in that meeting. I just got here a week ago. They won’t know that I know what I’m talking about,” and I’m like, “Dude, just speak up. Do it,” right?

Kip Boyle:

Mm-hmm.

Jason Dion:

Make yourself heard, make yourself known, because you’ve got something valuable. The reason we hired you in the first place is because you’re valuable. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have wasted our time or money hiring you, and I think that’s important to keep in mind as well. So for me, I think when it comes to self-judgment, we are our hardest critics, and we have this internal monologue, and the horrible thing is you can’t turn it off. It’s not like a TV show where you can change the channel. In your head all day, it’s going, “You’re not pretty enough. You’re not smart enough. You’re not good enough. No one’s going to want you.” And this thing does get this negative cycle over time, so how do you overcome it? Well, I think as Kip said, self-compassion.

And you know, Kip was nice enough to prepare some show notes for us before we started talking, and one of the things he put in there was actually a quote from a career coach named Margie Warrell, and I think it’s really good. She recommends that you, “Treat yourself with patience, empathy, warmth, and understanding that you’d expect to have a friend give you, instead of being this harsh, ‘You idiot,’ self-judgment that we normally give ourselves.” So I think it’s important to keep that in mind, and we are our own worst critics, I think, and the research shows that as well. It’s not just us saying this. Research over time shows that people have this inner monologue, and they are the worst critic of themselves.

Kip Boyle:

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, and then research has also shown that when you treat yourself as your own best friend, right? If you make a mistake, you wouldn’t say to a friend, “Ah, you’re such an idiot,” or maybe you would in a joking way, but you wouldn’t really mean it. So if you can treat yourself the way you would treat a friend if you saw them stumble, right? You help them get up, ask them if they’re okay. Studies have found that this can actually improve your motivation. It can improve your learning, because it’s going to help you realize that you don’t have a fixed mindset. In other words, like you don’t have a fixed intelligence. You instead should have a growth mindset outlook on life, which means you can learn things that you don’t already know. And in this career field, that is hella important. You’ve got to be continuously learning. I think of myself as an infinite learner. There’s like no limit to what I can learn.

Well, if you can have more motivation and if you can have a growth mindset, then that’s going to strengthen your performance, and it’s going to give you resilience, so that when something truly awful happens, you’re going to be able to bounce back faster. So self-compassion isn’t a bunch of namby-pamby feelgood crap. I don’t know if any of you possibly could be thinking that right now, but it’s not. It’s just about treating yourself at least as good as you would treat a best friend, and we know science tells us that there are real tangible benefits to this. And so what’s that going to do? It’s going to help you avoid the burnout, right? Because if you’re already stressed, and then you start judging yourself harshly, that’s not going to get you out of a burnout situation. It’s going to make it worse. We don’t want that for you.

So okay, and the worst thing, of course, would be to just like run around under some crippling anxiety all day long, and then taking that home, not getting any sleep in the night. Ah, if I just described you, stop self-judging so much and try to turn a new leaf, and explore this self-compassion thing. Jason, you’re right. It’s not a switch. You can’t just flick it and just go from one to the other, so you’re going to have to explore some strategies and figure out what it’s going to take. This will be a new habit, probably take you 90 to 180 days, even if you… no matter how motivated you are to make this switch. But like Jason said with the money, come on over to our side. This is the way to live, okay? So those are our three tips. Jason, what else?

Jason Dion:

Yeah, and the last thing I was going to say on the self-judgment verse self-compassion, a lot of times, it is hard to break yourself out of it, because you’re the one judging yourself, right? So it’s hard to be like, “Hey, Kip, stop telling yourself you’re stupid.” Well, Kip’s the one telling himself he’s stupid, so he’s going to keep telling himself he’s stupid, right? So we want to make sure that doesn’t happen, and you know, for me, one of the things that helped me was you can go see a therapist, right? And therapy doesn’t have to be a way of life. It’s not something that you have to do for the next 20 years.

One of my degrees is actually in counseling, and one of the things we learned is a thing called CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, and it’s really focused on four to six sessions, to change a specific thing. So if you’re having these voice tracks in your head telling you, “You’re not good enough. You’re not smart enough. You’re an imposter. Blah blah blah,” go see a therapist for four to six sessions. It won’t cost a ton of money. It can help you put in new practices in place to help you overcome that and get you out of that negative spiral. And again, it’s not a super expensive thing. If you don’t have the money, there are free therapists available, and if you happen to be a member of a church, you can always go to your pastor, and they give free counseling as well. Usually [inaudible 00:40:16] CBT style, which is three to five sessions, and gets you going over the next… You know, once a week for the next five weeks, you’ll be a changed person. It will really help you.

Kip Boyle:

And some private firms have an employee assistance program, an EAP, and that will give you free counseling as well, and then just your standard medical insurance probably has a counseling benefit in there. So there’s all kinds of different avenues that you can use to get these four to six sessions Jason’s talking about. Now Jason, as somebody who was trained to be a counselor, it’s pretty safe for you to say, “Hey, you should go try counseling,” right? But let me add to it, I have never been trained in counseling, but I’ve been to a lot of counseling, because I’ve been stuck in all these bad habits in the past, and I was just determined that I didn’t want to live that way, and so it was scary to go, and I wondered about like would people judge me as being weak, because I wanted to go see a counselor or a therapist, but I did it anyway, and I’m really glad I did. It has really, really improved my life. So I just want to go on record, it’s okay. It really is okay, and if you have to just not tell people because they are judgy, then don’t tell them. But go.

Jason Dion:

And the other thing I would say, as far as from the medical insurance side, check your medical policy, because a lot of them do have where you can go to counseling for a certain number of sessions at no cost, with no prior approval. For instance, when I was in the military and working with the government, we have TRICARE, and under TRICARE, you’re allowed to get eight free visits per year without any kind of consultation. And once you go, after that first consultation, if they feel you need more, they’ll just put it in with TRICARE and say, “Look, I’m the therapist. I say Kip needs another 10 sessions,” and they’ll approve it with no questions. It’s really not a… Cost should not be a big issue here, as long as you have a decent medical policy. But again, if cost is an issue, go check a local church. Even if you’re not religious, most churches will see you whether you’re a member of them or not, and they will do free what’s called pastoral counseling, and going through these type of things to help you with some of that, so-

Kip Boyle:

And they just care about you, so don’t worry that someone’s going to try to convert you or something like that.

Jason Dion:

And then the last thing I wanted to bring up, kind of going back, we talked really about the emergency fund, the FU fund as Kip called it. I like to call it the forget you fund.

Kip Boyle:

Yeah. FU money.

Jason Dion:

And again, this might be a difference between Kip’s world in the private sector versus my world in the DoD and contracting side is, contractors, if you’re a contractor, you never know when your contract is up, right? You may have a year contract, but they can also cancel it at any time. A lot of these, you can get fired at any time. Your contract, you may have been the best employee they had, but if you’re on a government contract and the government decided to go from Booz Allen Hamilton to General Dynamics, and you were working for Booz, you’re out of a job, right? And so having that FU money is super, super critically important if you’re working as a contractor. You should always have at least three months of expenses, because sometimes the transition from one job to another or one contract to another can be 30, 60, 90 days.

And as we’ve talked about before, the average time to get hired in the cybersecurity industry is about 35 days from first application to actually being told you’re hired, and then it’s probably another week or two until we actually onboard you. So you’ve got to be able to cover about 60 days when you’re trying to get a new job, and if you just got fired or you just quit because, “This job’s too much. I simply can’t take it,” you’ve got to have money to carry you onto the next job. Because otherwise, when you go in, and you’re going into an interview with Kip or I, we can smell the desperation on you, because-

Kip Boyle:

God, yes.

Jason Dion:

… we know you don’t have a job, and you’re just desperate to take anything, and that comes off as somebody we don’t want to hire, because we don’t think you’re passionate about us. We think you’re just passionate about eating, and not being on the street, right?

Kip Boyle:

And we’re not against that, but we don’t want that to be the reason you show up.

Jason Dion:

We want you to come to our company because you want to work for us. We want you to be excited about what we’re doing, not because you want a paycheck to eat. My wife is kind of a smart aleck, and we made her go through an interview to get hired at the company, just because we thought it would be funny, and when we asked her why she wanted the job, she said, “Because money can be exchanged for goods and services, and I like money,” and I was like, “Yeah, good answer, honey.” Don’t say that in a job interview, not the thing to get you hired, right? Please do not use that in your job interviews. It will not help.

Kip Boyle:

Yeah.

Jason Dion:

So yeah, I just wanted to point that out, is you know, think about those as you’re looking at… There’s lots of options for counseling. There’s lots of options to be able to get that excess money. And really, you can get a second job if you need to. I know a lot of cybersecurity folks who work two and three jobs, and they’re putting away crazy amounts of money. I will tell you, you don’t want to do that for 20 years, but if you need to do that for a year or two, because you have a highly valuable skillset, and you can make an extra 100 grand a year working another 40-hour-a-week job, you might do that for a year, to get yourself out of debt and pay off your house, right? And so I’ve known people who have done that, and it really comes down to how hard you want to work, but at the same time, taking care of yourself. And one of the best ways to take care of yourself is get yourself out of debt and stay out of debt, because it will just lighten the load off your back tremendously. I promise you here. Yeah, so that’s my thoughts. Any final words from you, Kip, before I close us out?

Kip Boyle:

No, sir. I have shared all that I came here to share. Thank you so much. Let’s go ahead and wrap it up.

Jason Dion:

Yeah, so with that said, I just want to thank everybody for listening to us for another episode of Your Cyber Path. If there’s any topics you’d love to hear us cover, please just shoot us an email at support@35.167.158.44, or go over to yourcyberpath.com/ask, and you can put in a question to Kip and I there. We read all of them, we respond to all of them, and we would love to hear from you. As always, you can go over to yourcyberpath.com to get the latest information on what we have, and the different episode guides that we have there for each episode. This one is episode 108, so if you just go to yourcyberpath.com/108, you’ll get all the notes from this episode, so if there’s anything we said, or for instance, we talked about Dave Ramsey, which is daveramsey.com. We talked about Clark Howard, which is clark.com. All those will be in our show notes at yourcyberpath.com/108. And other than that, we will see you on the next episode of Your Cyber Path, and look forward to seeing you then.

Kip Boyle:

See you later, everybody.