The Best You - A Coaching Podcast: Personal Growth Through Real Conversations · Gary Gillan

Find Your Advantage with Tracey Nyholt

·40 min·2 clips
After watching her nephews celebrate goals, Tracey tested self-celebration and her confidence rose “exponentially.”
1. The Best You interview series centers on Tracy Nyholt and the topic of finding your advantage in business and life. 2. Gary hosts Tracy Nyholt, entrepreneur and founder of identity and access management company TechJutsu, whose cybersecurity experience shapes the discussion. 3. The episode asks how Tracy turned a difficult career path into a business and a personal operating system. 4. Tracy says she is “an unlikely person to end up in cybersecurity” because she studied English literature before teaching herself IT. 5. She describes starting in an entry-level help desk role and moving up by documenting other people’s work so they could pass it off as their own. 6. Tracy says she became an identity architect before deciding to start TechJutsu. 7. She calls her early business plan naive, saying she thought she would be a millionaire in two years and “on a beach drinking Mai Tais.” 8. Tracy compares entrepreneurship to a marathon rather than a sprint and says the company is now about 10 years old. 9. She says the business has been shaped by compliance, legal, and accounting demands that she calls “death by a thousand paper cuts.” 10. Quarterly strategic meetings with her team are used to map not only product direction but also the work-life design they want. 11. Tracy says she learned from men to establish hierarchy and respond more directly when someone talks over her in a meeting. 12. She uses the metaphor of a “velvet hammer” and a “chainsaw” to describe the different tools she can now choose from. 13. Tracy says watching her young nephews celebrate goals by dancing led her to try celebrating her own difficult email. 14. That experiment made her dance around her condo for 10 minutes and, in her words, feel “amazing.” 15. She says self-celebration increased her confidence exponentially and became a repeatable habit. 16. Tracy says people understand best through stories, so she shares business experiences as examples others can try on for size. 17. She explains that TechJutsu’s call-center verification product came from a local credit union asking how to protect online and mobile banking customers from bad actors. 18. Gary and Tracy discuss the pace of AI-enabled scams, including voice spoofing and the need for stronger organization verification. 19. The conversation is informal, reflective, and full of practical analogies, with both speakers using stories and workplace examples. 20. Best for listeners interested in women in tech, cybersecurity, and entrepreneurship; skip if you want only product specs and no personal narrative.
Listen to the show on