01:47 - Nyota’s Superpower: To hear and pull out people’s ideas to make them more clear, actionable, and profitable!

• Acknowledging The Unspoken


• Getting Checked

07:15 - Boundaries and Harmony

10:35 - News & Social Media

• Addiction


• Filtering


• Bias

18:54 - The Impact of AI

23:00 - Anyone Can Be A Freelance Journalist; How Change Happens

• Chelsea Cirruzzo’s Guide to Freelance Journalism


• Casey’s GGWash Article About Ranked Choice Voting


• First Follower: Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy | Derek Sivers

40:13 - The Intersection of Cybersecurity and Employee Wellness: Resiliency

• @selfcare_tech

Reflections:

Casey & John: “A big part of resilience is being able to take more breaths.” – Nyota

Damien: You can be the expert. You can be the journalist. You can be the first mover/leader. Applying that conscientiously.

Nyota: Leaving breadcrumbs.

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Transcript:

PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.

DAMIEN: Welcome to Episode 275 of Greater Than Code. I'm Damien Burke and I'm here with John Sawers.

JOHN: Thanks, Damien. And I'm here with Casey Watts.

CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey! And we're all here with our guest today, Nyota Gordon.

Nyota is a technologist in cybersecurity and Army retiree with over 22 years of Active Federal Leadership Service. She is the founder, developer, and all-around do-gooder at Transition365 a Cyber Resiliency Training Firm that thrives at the intersection of cybersecurity and employee wellness.

Welcome, Nyota! So glad to have you.

NYOTA: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate you.

CASEY: Yay! All right. Our first question—we warned you about this—what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

NYOTA: My superpower is to hear, pull out people's ideas, and make them more clear, more actionable, and more profitable.

DAMIEN: Ooh.

NYOTA: Yeah, that's one of my friends told me that.

And how did I get it? I'm a words person. So I listen to what people say, but I also listen to what they don't say.

CASEY: What they don't say.

NYOTA: Yeah.

CASEY: Can you think of an example?

NYOTA: Like that. Like when you did that quiet thing you just did, I saw that mind blown emoji because there's a lot in unspoken. There's a lot in body language. There's a lot in silence. When the silence happens, there's a lot when someone changes the topic, like that stuff is a lot. [chuckles] So I listen and I acknowledge all of that. Maybe we all hear it, or don't hear it depending on how you're processing what I'm saying, but we don't always acknowledge it and respect it in other people,

DAMIEN: You have to listen to the notes he’s not playing.

[laughter]

Do you ever have an experience where things that are not said do not want to be heard?

NYOTA: Absolutely. But that's part of acknowledging and so, you can tell when people are like, “I do not want to talk about that.” So then I would do a gentle topic change and not a hard left all the time, because you don't want to make it all the way weird, but it may be like, “Oh, okay so you were talking about your hair, like you were saying something about your hair there.” I try to be very mindful because I will get in your business. Like, I will ask you a million questions. I'm very inquisitive and maybe that's one of my superpowers too, but I'm also aware and I feel like I'm respectful of people's space most times.

CASEY: I really like that in people when people notice a lot about me and they can call it out. When I was a kid, my family would call me blunt, not necessarily in a bad way, but I would just say whatever I'm thinking and not everyone likes it right away. But I really appreciate that kind of transparency, honesty, especially if I trust the person. That helps a lot, too.

NYOTA: I was just saying that to my mom, actually, I was like, “You know, mom, I feel like I need a different quality of friend,” and what I mean by that is my friends just let me wild out. Like I ask them anything, I say anything, but they don't kind of check me. They're like, “Well, is that right, Nyota?” Like, Tell me, why are you saying it like that?” But they just let me be like ah and I'm like, “Mom, I need to be checked.” Like I need a hard check sometimes. So now you're just letting me run wild so now I'm just seeing how wild I can get. Sometime I just want maybe like a little check, a little body check every now and then, but I try to be mindful when it comes to other people, though. It's the check I want is not always the check that other people want.

CASEY: Right, right.

DAMIEN: What is it like when you're being checked? What happens?

NYOTA: It's hard to come by these days so I'm not really sure [chuckles] when I'm getting my own, but I'll ask a question. I'll just kind of ask a question like, “Well, is that true?” people are like, “This world is falling apart,” and you know how people are because we are in a shaky space right now and I'm like, “But is that absolutely true for your life?” How is everything really infecting, impacting what have you being exposed to in your own life?

So as we have the conversation about COVID. COVID was one of my best years as far as learning about myself, connecting with people better and more intimately than I ever really have before and we're talking virtually. So things are going on in the world, but is it going on personally, or are you just watching the news and repeating what other people are saying?

JOHN: That's such a fascinating thing to do to interrupt that cycle of someone who's just riding along with something they’ve heard, or they're just getting caught up in the of that everything's going to hell and the world is in a terrible place. Certainly, there are terrible things going on, but that's such a great question to ask because it's not saying there's nothing bad going on. You're not trying to be toxically positive, but you're saying, “Let's get a clear view of that and look at what's actually in your life right now.”

NYOTA: That part, that part because people are like, nobody's looking for crazy Pollyanna, but sometimes people do need to kind of get back to are we talking about you, or are we talking about someone else?

DAMIEN: That's such a great way of framing it: are we talking about you, or are we talking about someone else?

NYOTA: Yeah.

CASEY: It reminds me of boundaries. The boundary, literally the definition of who I am and who I care about. It might include my family, my partner, me. It’s may be a gradient even. [chuckles] We can draw the boundary somewhere on that.

NYOTA: Yeah, and I think we also get to speak even more than boundaries about is it in harmony? Because I feel like there are going to be some levels that are big, like my feelings are heard, or I'm feeling like I just need to be by myself. But then there are these little supporting roles of what that is. I think it's as you see, some parts are up and some parts are down because sometimes when it comes to boundaries, it's a little challenging because sometimes there has to be this give and take, and your boundaries get to be a little bit more fluid when they have to engage with other people. It's those darn other people. [chuckles]

DAMIEN: But being conscientious and aware of how you do that. It's a big planet with a lot of people on it and if you go looking for tragedy, we're very well connected, we can find it all and you can internalize as much of it as you can take and that's bad. That is an unpleasant experience.

NYOTA: Yeah.

DAMIEN: And that's not to say that it's not happening out there and that's not to say that it's not tragic, but you get to decide if it's happening to you, or not.

NYOTA: Right.

DAMIEN: And that’s separate from things that are directly in our physical space, our locus of control, or inside of the boundaries that we set with ourselves and loved ones, e