This week on Risking It All, I’m reflecting on my conversation with Joe and Prathiba Sullivan. Joe became one of the most recognisable names in cybersecurity after the Uber incident, but this wasn’t really a conversation about Uber. It was about what happens after the headlines fade. We talked about marriage under pressure, raising children through years of uncertainty, finding purpose after public failure, and why the people who carry the greatest burden during a breach are often the ones nobody ever talks about.

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You can’t pause being a parent because you’re in crisis.

One of the most striking parts of the conversation wasn’t about Uber at all. It was how they deliberately protected family life. Birthdays still happened. Holidays still happened. Dinner with the kids still happened. They made a conscious decision that the case wouldn’t become the family’s identity.

Your partner doesn’t need to solve the problem. They need to survive it with you.

Prathiba talks about supporting Joe without necessarily being able to fix anything. Sometimes the most important role isn’t having the answers, it’s simply being the person who keeps life functioning when everything else feels uncertain.

The public story and the private story are completely different.

Everyone remembers the headlines. Very few people think about what it’s like to live through years of uncertainty inside your own home. Behind every famous cyber incident is a family trying to work out how to carry on living normally.

Optimism can be a survival mechanism.

Joe admits he was probably “foolishly optimistic” about how things would turn out. Looking back, that optimism may not have been accurate, but it may also have been necessary. Sometimes leaders keep going because the alternative is emotionally impossible.

You are more than the worst thing that’s happened to you.

One of the underlying themes throughout the episode is identity. Joe’s career became defined publicly by one event, but at home he was still a husband, a father and a person. That’s a distinction we often forget when we reduce people to a single headline.

Life has a habit of testing us when we least expect it. Sometimes it’s a security incident. Sometimes it’s redundancy, illness, losing a loved one or simply a season where everything feels impossibly hard. We spend so much time preparing for the challenges we can predict that we forget the ones we can’t. You can’t control what life throws at you, but you can control who you choose to walk through it with.

One of the things I loved most about listening to Joe and Prathiba wasn’t how they talked about the legal case or the headlines. It was how they talked about each other. There was no blame, no scorekeeping, no “my career versus yours.” Just two people figuring out how to keep putting one foot in front of the other while raising a family in the middle of extraordinary circumstances. It reminded me that resilience isn’t usually an individual trait. It’s something that’s built between people.

I’ve been through incidents where I’d work until three in the morning, get a couple of hours’ sleep, then get the kids ready for school as if nothing had happened. I wasn’t getting through those moments because I was mentally tougher than everyone else. I got through them because I had someone beside me who quietly absorbed everything else life was throwing at us. Someone who made it possible to keep showing up.

We often talk about hiring the right people, building the right team and finding the right mentors. They’re all important. But the biggest decision you’ll ever make isn’t who you work for or what company you join. It’s who you choose to build your life with.

Because when life inevitably knocks you sideways, your greatest source of resilience won’t be your job title, your salary or your reputation. It will be the person standing next to you.

This week’s podcast with Joe and Prathiba Sullivan hit closer to home than I expected.

Listening to them talk about surviving one of the most public cybersecurity stories in history reminded me of a security incident I went through. The timing couldn’t have been worse. My wife was away, so it was just me and the kids. During the day, life carried on as normal. Breakfast. School runs. Homework. Bedtime stories. They had no idea what was unfolding behind the scenes. Once they were asleep, another shift began.

The laptop came back out. Calls with the team, executives and incident responders stretched long into the night before a couple of hours’ sleep and another school run the next morning. Looking back, I barely remember the technical details of the incident. What I remember is trying desperately to make sure my children never realised anything was wrong while quietly wondering how long I could keep going.

Joe and Prathiba reminded me that incidents don’t just happen to companies. They happen to families too.

The people carrying you rarely get the credit:
We often celebrate the incident responders, the security teams and the leaders making difficult decisions. We rarely stop to recognise the partners, children and families quietly carrying part of that burden. Behind almost every resilient leader is someone making sacrifices that never appear in the post-incident report.

Normality is one of the greatest gifts you can give your children:
The breach eventually ended. The school runs, bedtime stories and Saturday mornings are the things my kids will remember. Children don’t need to carry the weight of our professional problems. Sometimes the bravest thing we can do is protect them from them.

Resilience isn’t an individual sport:
We talk endlessly about building resilient organisations and resilient leaders. But resilience is often borrowed from the people around us. Your greatest source of strength during life’s hardest moments probably won’t be your experience or your job title. It’ll be the people who quietly help you keep putting one foot in front of the other.