Days 30-34: Ups and Downs

Emotions

This week was full of emotions. There were a lot of happy moments but I also had some days where I was frustrated or angry about some situations. Part of becoming a manager means interacting with a lot of different people and even for the people that you worked with previously, the relationship is likely to change. In the end, this is all goodness but the relationship building phase is difficult. Everyone has different work styles and understanding how to interact with all those working styles is a very important art to learn. I’m confident that I’ll be able to figure it out over time, I just had a harder time than I thought I would this past week.

Tasks

There was a lot going on this week! I started planning for our next milestone and continued to work on cleaning up what’s left of the current milestone. I had been involved in planning previously but it felt different being more on my own this time. Things are a little more in flux because of the work-from-home situation that everyone is in so it’ll be interesting to see how my planning progresses in the coming weeks.

I had some frustrating moments during some discussions and it was definitely a mix of me being frustrated at myself and me being frustrated at the situation. This frustration definitely pulled me towards feeling self-doubt but I was able to push those thoughts away and understand that I might be making mistakes and that’s okay. These were meetings where the discussion was a little more heated (at least in my mind) and I had to go take a breather for 5 minutes afterwards to relax.

There’s still a small amount of IC work that I had to work on throughout the week, I managed to find time in between or even during meetings to make progress there. Being in this in between phase for our milestones, there were a lot of code reviews flying around too as some people were starting work on the next milestone.

Learnings

I will need to be patient as I build relationships with everyone that I’m working with - both new and old. Some will be easier than others and for the more difficult ones, I’ll need time to figure it out. I do feel good about my mindset though, I’m excited to be working with a variety of different people and understanding what makes them tick is something that I’m very interested in learning.

Emotionally, I had more and different negative emotions this past week than previous weeks and it’s going to be even more turbulent in the future. It’s going to be emotionally taxing for me but each time I go through difficult moments, it’s a chance for me to improve. As long as I can keep that growth-mindset attitude, I’m confident that I can succeed.