I am blogging everyday (or nearly everyday) on The Daily Stoic.

Poise is the stoic for today. Not allowing emotions to interfere with our responses. This is huge for people in security. I see a lot of things in my line of work that can drive a person crazy. The more you get into the field the more you can identify issues. These are technical, regulatory, and political in nature. Prior to studying stoicism I would provide emotional responses to a lot of these things. It’s one of the reasons why alcohol is an issue in our industry. We rely on it to take the pain away. I relied on it. To a point I still do. I’m working on that.

One of the things that has helped is keeping my composure when bad things show up. This has helped me sleep better at night and hopefully made me a better person to be around. I still do get fired up, just not as much. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in IT, is that I can’t do anything about what’s happened. I can look toward fixing it and moving on. Three months from now our security team will find something that we’ll need to respond with poise.