I had the opportunity to sit down again with Peter Wallace, CIO of the City of Virginia Beach, as part of the 757CIO mentorship program. Every conversation lands differently depending on where I'm at, and this one was no exception. Selfishly, I came in carrying some personal challenges I've been working through and was looking for a bit of perspective alongside the usual career talk. We ended up covering things that I've been turning over in my head ever since.

Read the Room. No, Actually Read It.

This sounds obvious until you realize how often people don't do it. Peter and I talked about the art of knowing when to speak, when to hold back, and when to share information in a way that actually lands. Not every meeting is the right time to drop everything you know about a topic. Context matters. Audience matters. The goal isn't to show what you know, it's to move something forward.

I've been guilty of this and have been told this term in the past. You walk into a conversation loaded with information, ready to unload it all, and you end up talking past the room instead of to it. Reading the room means paying attention to what the moment needs from you, not what you're prepared to deliver.

Step Back to Leap Forward

This one hits home, especially with the recent career moves I've had over the past year. The instinct in your career is always to push forward, add more, do more, take on more. Peter challenged that a little. Sometimes the move is to intentionally slow down, reassess, and position yourself for a bigger jump later.

It reminded me of how you'd approach a problem in a process redesign. You don't always patch your way forward. Sometimes you tear it down cleanly and rebuild it right, and the end result is far better than anything you could have bolted together in the moment. Careers aren't that different.

Your Creative Skills Are an Asset. Use Them.

This was a good one for me personally. I spent years in the music industry, and somewhere along the way I convinced myself that creativity lived in that world and the technical work lived somewhere else entirely.

The same instinct that helps you arrange a song, figure out what a listener needs to feel, or know when something isn't landing, that translates. At the end of the day, it's all storytelling. The way you visualize a problem, build a diagram, write a slide deck, or frame a concept for a non-technical audience is a creative act. You're still reading an audience. You're still figuring out how to make something complex feel approachable and worth paying attention to. The medium is just different.

And it's not as common as you'd think in technical roles. If you can make complex information digestible and compelling through a good story, that's a career advantage. Lean into it. Don't treat it like a side trait from a previous life.

Open Up the Curtain on What You Know

Peter talked about the value of being transparent with your knowledge. Not hoarding it, not weaponizing it, just putting it out there in a way that helps the people around you. He put it simply - "Good looks like..."

That stuck with me. It reframes knowledge sharing from a passive thing you do into something intentional. You've seen what good looks like in your field, your team, your work. Show it to someone else. Put it on the table. This isn't about giving everything away with no filter, it's about building trust by being the kind of person who contributes freely and genuinely.

The people who do this well become the ones others actually want to work with. It's a long game, but it's a good one.

Better Questions

Every time I leave one of these conversations I feel like I've got better questions than answers, which is probably the point. That's actually what good career feedback does. It doesn't hand you a roadmap, it makes you think differently about the road you're already on.

What I appreciate most about these sessions with Peter is the perspective shift. It's easy to get heads-down in the day-to-day work, tickets, changes, projects, and lose sight of the bigger picture of where you're heading. A fresh set of eyes from someone who has operated at a completely different altitude has a way of reframing things you thought you already understood.

I'm walking away from this one thinking about how I show up in rooms, how I'm positioning myself for what's next, and whether I'm sharing what I know in a way that actually builds something. Not bad for an afternoon conversation.

More to come as this mentorship keeps moving.