Evgeniy: Me as an engineer can ask the client, “Mr. Customer, just to make sure we’re on the same page.

I want to make sure our team is ready. Are you guys going to deploy this in four, five weeks? When are you going to start the project?” It’s a completely naive question from a tech engineer, because I’m not the evil salesperson. I’m the techie one. “Oh yeah, Evgeniy, of course, we would like to start in January.”

Ding! Okay. Now we know if it’s a real project or not. 

[inro music]

Joel: My name is Joel and I’m a recovering nerd. I’ve spent the last 25 years bouncing between creative jobs and technical teams. I worked at places like Nickelodeon to NASA and a few other places that started with different letters.

I was one of the first couple hundred people podcasting back in the early aughts until I accidentally became an IT analyst. Thankfully, someone in the government said, “Hey, you’re a nerd that talks good.” And that spun me off into the world of startups, branding, and marketing, for the same sort of researchers and startup founders that I used to hang out with. 

Today, I help technical people learn how to get noticed, get remembered, and get results.

On Nerds That Talk Good, I want to help you do the same. I talk with some of the greatest technical communicators, facilitators, and thinkers that I know who are behind the big brands and the tech talk that just works. 

My guest nerd this week is if Evgeniy Kharam who is a consultant, podcaster, author. He’s just released a book called Architecting Success. The Art of Soft Skills in Technical Sales. 

 Evgeniy is a seasoned cybersecurity leader. He’s currently running his own cyber and media consulting service. He’s got a career that went from plugging in firewalls all the way up to VP of Architecture at Herjavec Group. He is a co founder on two cybersecurity podcasts. He advises the Canadian Cybersecurity Network. He has founded a Cybersecurity Ski and Snowboard Conference, which I definitely want to tuck into.

But what we’re going to be talking about a lot today is the book that he recently authored and released, which is great. There’s a lot of things in here that I wish I had been able to slip into my book. But I will be including it as a reference when I release, because I think it’s a great guide.

He also offers training, consulting mentorship, really blending the technical prowess with community and industry engagement. 

Evgeniy, thank you so much for joining me today.

Evgeniy: Thank you. I’m definitely very happy to be here today. And I think I like the name Geeks That Can Talk, because It’s not so straightforward and just take a book and in 24 hours learn something, 48 hours 72 hours or whatever it is it does require a lot of trial and error. It does require a lot of humiliation in some cases excuse me but yes because sometimes you messed up. Sometimes people laugh sometimes you like “WTF?

Why am I here? Why can’t I just be home and do something else?”

Yes, definitely, and happy to go deep or light as you want and as we can.

Joel: I’d love to start with just your background and journey getting here. You have I think a doubly unique challenge in that talking good technically not only obviously language barrier. I’d like you to share some of your journey. You told me earlier you’re a twice immigrant, so that’s environmental, language in addition to just technical subject matter, but just go ahead and give us a little bit of your background how you got from where you started to where you are now.

Evgeniy: Definitely. And you just mentioned something very interesting. Because when you talk to people, it’s ” Oh, we’re looking for very good consulting people. We’re looking for very good sales people, sales engineers, whatever it is, band testers. And we want them to be able to speak. We want them to be able to write.

We want to be able to want them to do blah, blah, blah.”

It’s guys, we need you. Choose two out of three. It doesn’t exist. Sorry, you cannot be very smart, intelligent, write amazingly, and speak amazingly. Maybe some few really can, but in majority of the cases, you will have to choose two out of three or figure out where people shine really well.

Honestly, I think I’m speaking right. I’m speaking well. I know what I’m talking about. I think I’m very intelligent. I’m a shitty writer. I never liked to write. I never know how to write it. I have issues with grammar in English, Russian, and Hebrew as well. It was a very big challenge to write the book. I had an amazing editor that helped to take words out of my head on writing.

I’m actually doing a relatively good job to take what I have in my head when I’m speaking. And this was one of the motivation to write the book, because many intelligent people have a hard time to outcome what is in their head to very simple language or business language. 

But back to your original question. I moved from Kyiv that used to be still USSR to Israel when I was 11. I spent 16 years in Israel, then moved to Canada. In Israel, I went to, I actually did nautical college for many years. I really like water and sea. Then from nautical college, I moved to the Navy and spent five years in the Navy.

Amazing school. I learned so much. I was a technician there. Think about a garage, for cars, but this was a garage for ships. When we will come and re outfit and basically change all the cables, change all the computers, we will do what we call the GPS for the Navy without going into too many details. But I learned a lot about Linux.

I learned a lot about cabling, Windows many different things. Really grateful for the school of adapting and understanding how to fix problems. You’re not jumping in the beginning to the end to the middle, you’re sequentially going and analyzing where is the problem. And it helped me later on and still helping me when I have a problem, how do I approach to a problem to find a solution.

It definitely helped me to become a very good firewall engineer later on in my life and later on to adopt many other things as well. After the Navy, something very important happened in the Navy. I went to learn MCC 2000, for the people that have been around for a long time. And I learned about Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, and I came back to the base.

And as stupid as I was trying to hack the admin password. I was trying to understand how it’s working.

Joel: You were learning, you were, you,

Evgeniy: yeah, I was learning.

Joel: That hands on learning.

Evgeniy: yeah, of course I got a call from the ATV partner. Like, “Dude, WTF, what the hell are you doing?” They’re like, ” ah ah. Okay, not a problem, we understand it wasn’t malicious, but it’s an army, you have to do something.

Next week you’re gonna do a presentation to the base, why it’s a bad idea to brute force the admin password.” 

Oh my god, Joel, this was like a horrifying experience, and I used to speak very fast, and still with my friends. I used to mumble quite a lot. I used to eat the end of the sentence. I went on the stage and I was all shaking.

I had, I was red. My hands were sweaty. I had no idea what I was talking about. But it was a friendly people that knew me. I finished the presentation and I’m like, “Dude, this is wrong. Whoa, no, this is not how it should be. There is something that can be done with your life.” And fast forward 25 years later, yes, I did quite a lot.

We can talk for hours about different trainings, ideas, and what I did to myself to be where I am today. Right now, at least.

I went to work for Checkpoint and the QA analyst was very interesting to go deep on firewalls. Very deep. And moved to Canada to work for a company called Herjavec Group as a Checkpoint Engineer.

I had this job. I’m a Senior Checkpoint Engineer because I’m the only one. But fast forward from 16 people, the company grew to 450. I graduated in 2002, two and a half years ago, amazing career there. Did a lot from managing people, did a lot of pre sales, did a lot of managed services pitches. They were like, “Hey, it’s Friday.

Can you come to Tuesday to Orlando and present?” “What?” “I don’t know. We’ll figure it out on the way. But they need to learn it they’re.” Like crazy stuff. And I had the opportunity to literally work with hundreds of vendors. It’s amazing. When a sales engineer or sales professional can work for two, three, four, five, six, I had this opportunity to work with hundreds, like literally.

I had the options to listen how they pitch, listen how they present, present with them to customers. And we’re talking about enterprise customers, talking about banks, insurance companies, financial, really big manufacturing. A lot of the knowledge came from there. And doing consulting as well by helping people to improve their cybersecurity posture, cybersecurity program, and tell them what needs to be done.

A lot of role playing between me and my teammates. A lot of understanding. And as a second time immigrant, guess what? I needed to dial in something that you potentially as a native don’t need to. I needed to dial in passion. Because my language isn’t perfect, because I potentially, sorry, I do have an accent, I have an accent, because I may not pronounce every word correctly, I needed people to understand it on a different level.

How it happened? I’m not really sure. I was actually passionate about the protection of the firewall, how’s clustering work? Let me explain what Active/Active SOCK and why you should do an Active VEC. I was actually passionate about that, but it’s translated, this passion translated to later on, and I saw almost a catching fire when I’m dialing the passion.

We all have, we have this expression about the professor in school, we’re like, “hi, hello, today we’ll talk about mathematics. Mathematics is very exciting and we’re going to spend three hours explaining…” It’s , we’re not going to do that. No, it’s not going to happen. So there’s many different parts.

I don’t want to talk forever, so

Joel: It seems like you had the advantage of coming from a technical background and having the technical experience being paired up with many sales engineers who are stuck in between the technical and the and the audience and, the customer, and then moving into consulting and being right in the den and the thick of it with the customers hearing their problems.

So you’ve had a very natural arc into that but the benefit of keeping the passion for the technology alive all the way through, I think is fascinating. 

I’m jumping through the book here, and I want to find the one that I tagged on asking the right questions.

 Here it is, chapter four, the power of questions. I’d love to hear about that. You start with, “what separates a mediocre sales team from a great sales team. It’s not always the pitch or the ironclad closing techniques.

Often it’s the ability to ask the right questions.”

Which seems to, from a technical standpoint, run counter because I’m the smart person. I need to share what I know to you, and then you will buy it. But, sales and persuasion seems to run counter to that. I’d love to know your philosophy on questions. And how do you know you’re asking too much, maybe?

Evgeniy: So a couple of things, couple of examples. One, we don’t, we need to remember that we have a very educated audience. And for the last two years, even more, because everyone can go to ChatGPT, BingAI, Gemini, put your company information and maybe your name as well. And in two seconds, understand, maybe with some hallucination, what’s the company does. So if you think you’re still in the educating state, probably not. Of course, if you just came out of stealth yesterday, And there’s two pages on your website, maybe people know what you do. But if you’re working for an established company, it’s very easy to understand. Now what I’m talking here is, you mentioned something before about me being a geek.

I am a geek. I like gadgets. And for me, security is still one big gadget. I think this is why policymaking and writing procedures is not something I like to do. Because I’m a geek. I like technology. And why I’m mentioning this here, because we have all this compliances check and I didn’t like those, because yes, there’s a value there, but “do you have DNS, do you do DNS security?

Do you have network? Do you have NAC? Do you know how to find vulnerabilities? Does everybody have MFA?” This is for me, yes and no question. It doesn’t help me. To talk to a customer. When we did workshops and I had the opportunity to do many workshops by myself and with the team, I want the stuff that you don’t tell anyone.

I want the stuff you’ll tell me over a beer or whiskey in the end of the day. So if I ask you, do you have firewalls? Yes. We will ask you, all of them are clusters. You say, yes. It’s still not enough information. I want to ask you. Joel, tell me about your firewall environment. What are the good stuff? What are the bad stuff?

Open up to me. If you simplify this and I like a lot to do metaphors, Joel, what’s your favorite color?

Joel: It is blue.

Evgeniy: Blue. Nice. How does it help me? What’s my next question? Why?

 We’ll talk about stories, but stories is me telling you something. What if we are having a dialogue? And you’re telling stories, I’m telling stories, and we’re having communication.

Joel, can you tell me about your favorite color and why?

Joel: I’m a big fan of actually the blue that you used on the front of your cover, this deep navy blue, because I don’t wear any black. The deepest I go is blue. It’s just something with my personality and my personal vibes. I am neither black nor white. I am ivory and blue.

Evgeniy: Is something happened about white and blue in your journey in life?

We’re not gonna go to psycho psychological session right now, but when we’re talking about open ended questions, and we’re trying to understand about your environment, we’re trying to understand what’s the motivation, we’re trying to get the information.

And we’re trying to open up and let you talk. One of the worst things we want to have on the call is the sales team just talking, and doesn’t let the customer talk and forget about active listening to shut up. And when the customers start talking, let them talk. Yes, if they start to mumble about why bad the weather or something about election or something else, brings them back.

But it’s your responsibility to do it. Now, it doesn’t mean that we don’t ask close ended questions. We are, but not in the discovery phase. The closed ended questions, actually, in my mind, are very important and they come with vulnerability. In my opinion, that came from a very mature salesperson as well, and the people I work in Herjavec Group, like Robert Herjavec, like George Frempong, and many others leaders in Herjavec Group, where I learned the sales part. One of the main qualifications of a salesperson is the ability to close business. If you cannot close business, why are you here? Because you’re so nice? Because you cannot take people for lunch and dinner? So you’re able to qualify if it’s real, that takes time, and you be vulnerable enough to ask, “Joel, we’ve been talking for the last three weeks.

Just to make sure we’re on the same page, maybe even on the first one. Is there as a budget for this deal? Is this something you’re gonna do this quarter? This year?” I maybe slap on my hands and say, no, but it’s key. But you have to be vulnerable enough and this is where the not open ended, and the closed ended questions come in.

I want to know what you’re gonna do. And there is a play. If you got to the idea of a team part. And some people will disagree with me in the industry, but I use it so many times. So sorry, I don’t care. It worked for me. Me as an engineer can ask the client, “Mr. Customer, just to make sure we’re on the same page.

I want to make sure our team is ready. Are you guys going to deploy this in four, five weeks? When are you going to start the project?” It’s a completely naive question from a tech engineer, that I guarantee to you, everybody tell me, because I’m not the evil salesperson. I’m the techie one. “Oh yeah, Evgeniy, of course, we would like to start in January.”

Ding! Okay. Now we know if it’s a real project or not. And there’s gazillions of other ways where the tech and the sales can play with the questions to ask the questions that are going to help each other.

Joel: So that, that would lead me to think that It’s very important for the entire team to be on the same playbook, to have the back channel planning and the understanding of what each role would be. 

 What I do a lot with my clients is building that common messaging platform between product, marketing, sales, and leadership.

But I hadn’t yet, and you’re blowing my mind open cause I hadn’t yet thought about assigning almost responsibility to for certain parts of the message to certain messengers And playing that team out. That’s that is very interesting.

Evgeniy: And it doesn’t have to be 0 or 1. This can change all the time. But I like the analogy of the ball; who has the ball? We as a team need to know how to pass, and I just dropped the ball, how to pass the ball around. It’s mean that in some cases, the sales person will tell the engineer, “dude, stop, wait, don’t go there.”

Or the engineer will tell, “stop, don’t interrupt. I am leading. I’m going somewhere.” And I did it several times many times when I wanted to understand how real or what’s happening. And I told the sales, please don’t interrupt, bear with me. And my sales team knew that I know what I’m doing and left me alone without interrupting. In some cases, it’s mean, when I’m asking a question, I am probing the customer and the customer doesn’t want to answer or is being quiet. The nice sales engineer will jump in and say, yes, we can, ah no. Keep the silence. Keep the pause. Let them answer. I didn’t ask you to jump. That’s why the communication is very important.

How you do this? Keep the pause. If any of you went to the army, if any of you did some kind of exercise, you’ve practiced before. Okay, we’re going to use Slack, we’re going to use Teams, we’re going to have Google Doc running behind us. Whatever is the communication you decide to yourself. Me and my buddy Dimitri, we started a podcast together, used to have a WhatsApp running on the side. And we literally will just, because not in the camera, we just say, wait, like to each other or okay, I’m done. We move away from this. We now have a Google document running on the background because both of us use teleprompters.

I have a document on a teleprompter and we can just message there. Hey, I want to ask a question. Wait a second. Bear with me. But we found a way to communicate between ourselves that will work for both of us. Not everybody like multitasking. Not everybody wants to use WhatsApp. And some of my friends mentioned, you don’t want the Slack to jump in the middle of the presentation.

Joel: You’re sharing your entire desktop. Everybody saw that. Yeah. I’ve been on, I’ve been on those calls before. Gets me thinking about strategies and techniques for building that, that team. And the, the idea of the podcast here, Nerds That Talk Good, is for the technical practitioners.

How do you feel that a technical practitioner can ingratiate themselves into the sales and marketing group to be invited in to start building that trust? 

Sometimes we as nerds and geeks think more highly of ourselves, which sets up a barrier. So you talked about that humility and having that vulnerability, but what are some other techniques if you are a technical person and you want to be invited into the room, how do you build that rapport with somebody?

Evgeniy: So there’s a few things, and please correct me if I’m going to the right direction with this. I think as a sales engineer, if you’re talking about sales engineering, we need to have accountability on the customer. You’re not there just to show how the things are working. It’s you and the salesperson together working with the customer.

So you’re not just there to show the boxes, be the demo monkey. You’re there to work with your sales engineer and understand, “Oh, you know what? I’m going to work with this person. But actually, I think the guy that was on a call is very techie. How about you follow up with him as an engineer instead of me?”

So you divide and conquer. You’re trying to understand. So you’re taking a shared responsibility versus I’m just here to do the demo and I’m done. Not anymore. No longer. There is many different things change. And because the technology becomes so complex, I think it’s almost impossible for the salesperson to understand all the nuances.

So in many cases, I see the sales engineer doing quite a lot of selling because the salesperson needs to make sure all the other things are done well. And right now this could be legal. This could be third party management, procurement, that you need to understand all the things. There is no more about, “Oh my God, you have such a great solution, we’ll buy it tomorrow.”

Six months after “let’s be sure our lawyers signed the documents and you guys didn’t upload all your SOC2 compliance reports.” There is many other things besides, “Oh my God, we love this.” So this is why the engineering, the technical people need to understand more of the business side. You need to understand what’s happening, but it’s actually a double edged sword because when I’m talking to sales or when I’m talking to engineers even more, they say, what did they call me on this call?

What are they going to qualify? Why is the salesperson always trying to push for a POC? Why? Like we’re not there. The customer didn’t told us they want the POC. You push the POC on them. We didn’t even indicate it and understood they’re going to have time and people working on this POC. So it’s, there is both sides need to understand each other.

Joel: So the engineer is listening for different things. When you connect the geeks on the lower end together, they’re able to speak in a language that’s oftentimes sales doesn’t pick up on and see,

” I don’t think what we’re proposing is right.

Let me try an end run. Let me try to, Lemme try to propose it this way. What we’re, what we’re suggesting isn’t their even their problem.” 

So sometimes the business use case is there, but the ability for the technology isn’t. And the salesperson will insist all day long that they’re ready to buy, they’re ready to have this.

And the engineers are like. ” I don’t think, I don’t think this will be successful.” And that might even be more important to avoid a failed implementation or a failed sale than one that wasn’t quite right or too early or the wrong shape to, to fit. 

Evgeniy: And think about that. All this applying, not just to sales, many other things can be applied inside the company. When you are proposing a new idea. When you’re proposing a new project, when you want to potentially have more money, have a better desk, more screens, we’re all selling in the end of the day in one way or another.

Joel: yeah and something that I talk a lot is you’re laser focused on the thing that you’re asking for, or the thing that you’re offering, and they’re being hit from multiple directions. Especially if you’re speaking at the executive level, they’re not just hearing from the security director.

They’re hearing from the Director of Finance or the Risk Officer. And so you need to understand all the different things that are bombarding your audience so that you understand where you fit and where you fit in the priority stack. 

Evgeniy: Yeah. No, we’ll get there. I know we didn’t get to the fear of fear chapter, but I want to talk about fear. I think it’s a very cool chapter, but

Joel: I definitely want to get in and get into the fear chapter and I was just flipping into that. But I want to talk just very briefly about tools and techniques. There’s a lot of. Tools that are available, I have my card deck and my messaging system is, it’s a framework.

It is a tool, but if a tool isn’t introduced correctly, if it isn’t implemented correctly, you just sit there on it and never use it. I’m curious about how you, what tools you think are essential and necessary, not from a security standpoint, but just from a from a communication standpoint.

Evgeniy: So let’s talk about not just tools, but about hardware. I think a good microphone is definitely something you want to have. If you can spend 50, 60, 100 bucks for shoes, please spend this time, this money on the microphone. I think a video camera in some cases is also a good idea. It’s almost like an evolution. Do you need to spend time on lights? Do you need to all depend where you sit and how it looks like? How’s your background? I just move. So I’m still struggling with the door because sometimes it’s crooked and it’s driving me nuts. I actually have a green screen that I used to do use before.

I may put it back. We’ll see. But if you’re using green screen, you definitely need to light it back. That you’re not going to look, because I really don’t like when people put virtual background 

And when they move their head, everything moves with them. It’s very disturbing in my mind. But this is hardware. I honestly love my teleprompter. I want to have a bigger screen because I have a direct eye content with you versus I’m still looking at you right now because my teleprompter is mirrored to my screen, but you see my side. And this is some of the hygiene that are fundamental to connect to people.

And in so many cases, I am on a call with the founders and in their mind, they’re looking somewhere else. There’s like all over the place, they don’t maintain this human connection. So this is hardware. 

On a software side, it’s a good question. I was actually thinking about that, but the standard tools that the company gives you. There are CRM, there is I started to like more and more this audio AI helpers on calls when they tell you about filler words, how much you speak, how much you don’t speak.

Not every customer likes those, and I understand why, because it’s taking the conversation to a bit different level, but this is some of the important. I think for everyone, and it doesn’t have to be a tool, this could be just a recorder. on your phone to start to record themselves and analyze their voice.

You’ve been in podcasting very long time, but you may remember, did you like your voice in the beginning?

Joel: Not very much. I rambled. It was a rambling stream of consciousness. And the more I listened, the more and I have a theater background as well. But it even gets back to turning up the passion. I have to recognize when I turn up the passion, I speak more quickly and I get more excited.

And so just understanding that in myself and being tuned into it, I’m able to breathe. I’m able to slow down. I have had George Kamide on recently and he was saying you have to speak even slower than you’re comfortable when you’re, especially when you’re presenting. 

Evgeniy: This is interesting because it’s probably going to be depend on a person as everyone, everything else in cyber. I speak usually quickly, you speak quickly, George as well. So for us, we need to slow down. But there is people that I personally having sometimes very hard time to communicate that will talk very slow.

And you have a feeling like, dude, please just finish the sentence. So you’re going to understand how you communicate because you may want to communicate faster. You may want to communicate slower, depending on who you are. The best things to do is to analyze your voice and understand, or even better, have practitioner, a speech therapist, somebody to teach people how to think, play guitar, to work with you, to understand more about your voice.

I work with someone and I didn’t even realize I have. Look, I knew I have a very low voice, but I didn’t know how low it is. I had the pitch, I was missing the middle part completely. So he helped me to do that. He helped me to adapt and say, “dude, your accent is fine. People are going to remember your low voice and your accent, and they will immediately know it’s you.” And where I’m going with this, I think we need to understand who we are to later on, understand how to speak. I do very agree with George when we speak quickly and we under pressure we’re gonna put more filler words and we’re gonna sound worse. And if we do slow down and do more pauses and transfer the filler words to pauses, in majority of the cases we will be much more fluent and will not use filler words.

The fear factor, the calmness also goes there. Because I interview many people, and the people that really knew the subject had less filler words. People where you put them a bit out of the comfort zone will start mumble and have more filler words, something in their mind, instead of just pause and think about it.

I know for myself as well, I sometimes will be uncomfortable. And then I will go into the conversation. But for the technology people, let’s just do a very quick recommendation. If you are a technology person and not even, not, you know what is CPU. So think about it. You are giving 1% of your CPU to have a watchdog that watch how you speak.

If you speaking too fast or too slow, but the main part, every time you want to say um, you like, you just pause. For a second, and this is the only thing the watchdog is does is watching for you to say um, let me just pause. There is something psychological inside our head that basically telling us we need to consistently make sound because we probably sound better or somebody will interrupt.

No. If you just do that, and in some cases slow down, you will dramatically see how differently you sound. And how many less filler words you’re going to have, guaranteed. Try it.

Joel: I like the record yourself and be, critical and using some of these tools that can listen, mark, and check for those filler words. I’m doing it right now in my own head. I use Descript to edit this podcast and it has a function which will just remove the filler words. And I will now be paying attention to, as I improve and as I step through my episodes, how many filler words I have. Maybe I should start a chart.

Evgeniy: Let’s go a bit deeper here because I think it’s very fun. So think about that. As a human being, we can focus on several things at the same time. Not multitasking. Okay. Don’t go on me on this part. There’s no multitasking. Okay. I have twins. There’s multitasking. Trust me. When you have twins. 

We can drive a car. We can watch on the street. We can be on the phone. We can shift the gears if you need to shift and many other things in the same time. But there is four or five things that we can actually do in the same time. Again, focusing our attention on what we’re doing. So if you are so scared or so panicking.

When you are stressed about what are you presenting, talking about, you actually focus points are going towards this part. And you’re less paying attention on the people you are talking to the slides, to the information, To the way you communicate, do you use filler words or don’t use filler words? 

By transforming, not removing, transforming the fear, the anxiety, to excitement, to something that’s part of it, because the difference between fear and exciting is; exciting, I know the outcome of the task, rollercoaster. The fear, I don’t know. There’s a big steep, I’m on the bike, I have no idea what’s going to happen.

I may jump and potentially hurt myself. So if you understand that every time we do something out of our comfort zone, we have this fear. “oh, it’s actually not fear, it’s excitement. It’s going to be something new, I’m doing this. Great, I know about this, let’s forget about that. And let’s focus right now on this.”

So you’re removing one unnecessary part. And now you’re focusing on the other things, paying attention to how you communicate, paying attention to how you use your voice, and many other different things.

Joel: I love that. I’ve been, again, I was a theater kid, I’ve been on stage, I’ve done podcasts and television, and I’m speaking at the Cybersecurity Marketing Convention that’s coming up. And,

Evgeniy: Wish I was there. 

Joel: Yeah, we will definitely miss you. And, I do, I have noticed that I have been able to turn my fear to excitement and Anticipation. And maybe that is a, that is something that’s come organically to me from being a stage person.

For someone who isn’t for someone, maybe it’s their first time getting up and presenting. Maybe they’ve been hauled in front of the ship by their superiors because they got caught hacking the mainframe, give me a couple tips. 

Practical, maybe we talk about some of those breathing techniques because it is almost about, like you said, hacking your brain. You’ve got your, I think in your book, you talk about the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system. In mine, I talk about the dorsal attention network and the ventral attention network.

But it basically comes to things you can control and things you can’t. And identifying those, how do you help them get into that control space?

Evgeniy: I think George mentioned this as well. When you’re presenting, the main part you need to remember, which is not about you. Excuse my French. You are here to deliver a service for the people that are there. So you are now customer success. And if you’re going to pay attention to yourself, you’re not able to pay attention to the people.

You’re doing a service for other people. This is one. 

Second, we’re not in Hollywood. So I had this opportunity to work with Robert Herjavec for many years. And Robert was one of my inspirations as well to see who is very good as a speaking person. And I had many conversations with Robert, like, “Robert, did you do that?

Did you do that?” I was like no. He was just native. So all the training and mind hacks I did to myself, he didn’t need to do. He was just like that. And if you watch Hollywood, we don’t really associate ourself with James Bond as an actor. Why? Because it’s a different level. Okay. So, you as a human being will make mistakes.

And guess what? People in a crowd will associate more with you that are human being and doing mistakes versus you being perfect because they’re never gonna be perfect. They’re never gonna be in Hollywood and probably don’t want to be in Hollywood. So you being human and owning your mistakes is much better than trying to perfect something. Because trying to perfect something mean you want to remember all the notes, all the slides. And if you make a mistake in a note, in a slide, you’ll just, “Oh, I’m so stupid. Oh, I did that.” No, you just made a mistake. Just move on. That’s it. It takes time to say, “Oh shit, I forgot a slide. Oh, I just, I think I was talking about something else.

I’m sorry about that.” And just move on. But, if your mindset from the beginning is going to be like that, there is an opportunity for you to do a mistake. There’s an opportunity for you to potentially mess up something. Nobody going to shoot you. Nobody said you, okay, you’re done.

You made a mistake in two slides. You’re no more presenting. Go away. Okay. We used the wrong grammar here. It’s okay. So this is like a mindset we set into ourself. Then, of course, you need to understand what you’re talking about. This means yes, practice, yes, understanding, but not to practice to the level that you remember every line.

You want to practice to understand what you’re talking about to make sure you can talk about it. Now, when you come to this part and you are panicking and you’re stressing, there are several things you can do. Box Breathing, as somebody mentioned to me a few weeks ago, it’s not from Navy Seals, it’s from India, but every breathing technique probably came from India in any case, in one way or another, so it is fine.

The idea is that Box Breathing exists and it helps you to normalize your body and your state of mind. By definition, majority of us have about 12 to 20 breaths per minute. And guess what? Our breathing also relying to our heart rate and our heart rate also, they connected to each other. If you watch freediving, you will see a lot of many interesting things, how they calm themselves and trying to lower the heart rate. By lowering the heart rate, they use less oxygen and stuff like that. So with box breathing is we inhale for a number of seconds, let’s say five. We hold for five, exhale for five. Hold for five. What just happened? Our cycle is 20 seconds. It’s mean we just move from 12, 15 breaths per minute to three breaths per minute. Guess what happens with your heart rate?. Your heart rate will slow down. During a panic attack, when you like stress, your heart rate majority of the time goes up.

So you’re basically hacking yourself, if you can say this, but automagically, by doing box breathing, you will lower your heart rate, you will have a clear idea, you will be more calm. Maybe we’re going to go and help you to go with the flow. Flow is a different conversation. Something else. I literally used to sit in the washroom for five minutes before I present and just do box breathe.

So this is one. Two, again, there are many others like one to two, you inhale for four, exhale for eight. So basically giving the same similarity. There’s physical exercise you can do. I’m not telling you to do push ups before you’re going to present, but I’ll see if I can do this. But if you stand. And you rotate around yourself, that some people do that natively, you normalizing your body.

So if you just literally rotate around yourself for five minutes, it’s going to be boring as hell, but it helps you to calm down and actually there is a proven record how it normalizes your left and right brain and helps you to relax as well and your body. And there’s many other small examples that working the same, helping to balance yourself and helping to get you to the zone. If you listen to many speakers on a national level, they have a routine. They listen to a song, they hum something, but they’re getting themselves ready to speak and communicate.

Joel: And I think that keys into the practice and having the playbook and establishing the conditions in the environment. You’re signifying to yourself, like you said, lots of speakers. We saw this, see this in the Olympics. Michael Phelps always listens to the same track as he does the same movements.

And you’re signifying to your brain that, it’s go time. This is the thing we’ve prepared for. It’s very much like being in the Army or the Navy SEALs, right? That’s, like you say, they practice and practice. 

You mentioned in the book you have a head nod towards the Wim Hof cold exposure.

I do the breathing every morning. I’m trying to get myself back into the cold showers. But I have noticed that calming the nervous system and just having a methodology to do that is extremely powerful. And when I don’t do it I’m not always aware until anxiety comes up or I start to get, nervous and speak too fast.

I want to pivot towards the end here to how do you personally keep the passion up? What are the things outside of work, outside of technology what are the things that, that you Keep that inner fire that you keep yourself centered. You said you’ve got twins running around.

I can only imagine that is a a sense of stress. So what does, what do you do to unplug? Because we can’t go all the time.

Evgeniy: You mean beside having drugs or what? No, just kidding. 

I actually Love outdoor. Outdoor is my way to recharge, to connect. And honestly enough, by being a consultant, I had this rare opportunity to go on a camping site, have my kids swimming in a lake, or doing some kind of program, and I had Starlink up, and I will do a Zoom call with the customer.

I literally did it several times during the summer. 

I like whitewater. We’re doing a lot of canoeing. I like mountain biking. I like snowboarding. Every chance I have, I will be able to and be happy to go outdoor and be in the forest and be connected with the nature. I definitely like water as well. That’s why whitewater is probably one of my favorite sports.

Very challenging very scary in some cases. There is something I like to use that in whitewater, there is no way you can decide that you want to do that, like nature doesn’t care. You have to understand the water and adapt to the water to make sure you can do it. Because if you want to cross a river here.

No, the stream is just too hard. The rapids are too big. 

Joel: The river says, “no.” 

Evgeniy: Yeah, you need to go with the flow and not try to fight the flow in this case. So definitely being outdoor helps me. And I got this unique opportunity with a couple of buddies to start Ski and Snowboard and Cybersecurity Conference to connect my outdoor passion to my cyber passion as well.

And by the way, Ski and Snowboard. Was test foror the book. I’ll explain how. I did a snowboard instructor training. And I really like how we connect and how I talking to everyone. And because our hills are so small, my partner for the ski and snowboard, Tony, at this job that it’s a perfect elevator pitch.

You can go with someone on the lift and you have two minutes to pitch them , and if not, you go separate ways. But the idea was you’re going to a conference. So you’re going to go to a marketing conference in a couple of weeks, or maybe the last panel is going to be aired. How do you you talk to the person standing in front of you?

You just you need to talk, like a hook. But if you’re going on a ski hill and you’re going with someone on a lift, it’s completely okay. “Is this your favorite mountain? Is this your home mountain? Oh, I see you have the skis. Do you like the skis? I was thinking to buy the skis.” This is native. What if we take practitioners in cybersecurity, put them in a place where they will be in a ski and snowboard gear, without suits? Give them food and some beer and leave them alone. Guess what? Amazing thing will happen. You know what happened? People going on a lift, taking ski poles, and doing freaking network diagrams on the top of the hill, talking about how SASE and NSSE works.

And it always blew my mind about ” Oh, marketing, we really need the number of people that are going to be there. And we need to know all the content.” It’s like why? just come and connect. Talk to everyone. You’re here the entire day. The amount of talks is very minimal. You can go and talk to everyone.

So this was a very unique opportunity. And it’s a very long way to answer your question. How do I connect? And how do I keep my passion. 

Joel: I’m seeing so many niche, small little community events coming up and I think this is where we’re headed, even as an industry; more human connection, more community, more events I will keep my eye out for the next one, because that sounds I haven’t been on a snowboard in years, but I…

Evgeniy: February 27. You’re welcome to come. We have rental gear and we have training as well. We have going to have instructors help you learning.

Joel: That sounds like fun. I want to close just with a closing thought. If you could give one piece of advice to the listeners out there and again, it’s a technical audience, it’s people who maybe they have those nerves, maybe they have that fear you shared some very practical advice on preparing to speak but maybe just about that mindset.

Evgeniy: Find the curiosity, not just to learn new tools, new AI tools, new language, but also learn about human being. So be curious enough to get out of your comfort zone and slowly push the boundaries to learn more about others and connect to others.

Joel: I couldn’t have said that better myself. That is so true. We are all people, and we’re people talking to people. We just happen to be talking about technology. Thank you so much. This has been an absolute pleasure. Hopefully I’ll be able to make it up there for the ski trip.

[outtro music]

Joel: We’re just two weeks away from the cybersecurity marketing conference in Philly, December 8th through 11th. Go to cybermarketingconference.com.

If you want links to the resources mentioned on the show, head on over to the episode page. And for information on booking a message therapy workshop, getting your hands on the MessageDeck, to check out my upcoming book, or just buy me a coffee, go to nerdthattalksgood.com/podcast.

Until next time, remember, you don’t have to speak well, you only gotta learn how to talk good.