Building relationships requires vulnerability. And vulnerability comes from speaking your truth and not knowing how the other person is going to respond.

I graduated coding bootcamp in 2019 and moved from junior to mid to senior engineer during the pandemic.

A few tips that can be helpful:

- **Develop a consistent support system inside and outside of work.** You want to fill these 4 buckets:
  - (1) Network Horizontally - find peers who are around your level who you can speak freely around. And then make sure these are people who don't one up you when you have positive news and people who don't tell you about how much worse they have it when you have negative news. **Find people who can just listen to your struggles and speak with empathy.**
  - Networking Up - Mentor Buckets
    - (2) - Find someone 1-2 steps ahead of you. Ideally this will be another junior developer who is crushing it and on their way for a promotion or a mid-level engineer. **There's an abundance of people in this category on Taro.**
    - (3) - Find someone 3-5 steps ahead of you. **This should be a senior+ engineer.**
    - (4) - Find someone 10-15 steps ahead of you. **This could be a SVP of engineering, CTO at a mid-stage company, a staff software engineer that has super high impact at a larger tech company.** *This is Rahul and Alex for everyone in Taro.*
- **Get comfortable with writing.** Most engineers aren't strong with people skills. Many engineers have little tolerance for mistakes and especially repeat mistakes. Structured writing exercises is your best option. I always recommend the [full Self Authoring suite](https://www.selfauthoring.com/) by Dr. Peterson.

Senior Software Engineer @ Auditboard

Jai Bhagat

When I need to communicate something that is difficult to put into words, I follow this recipe:

1. What question(s) am I looking to answer?
2. Why are is it important to answer?
3. Break the question(s) down to smaller bite-sized pieces.
4. Answer each sub question using simple words.
5. What would someone who disagrees say? What's your rebuttal?

This is exercises clears the mental clutter of your mind and organizes your earned secrets into a simple, digestible explanation that you can use in design docs, PR descriptions, explaining why you're facing a blocker if pressed during standup, 1:1's where you need to give critical feedback and chatting with XFN partners.

I was in a very similar situation 2 years ago. There's 6 things I did to lift myself up out of the situation:

1. **Prioritize sleep:** Ensure you get enough restorative sleep by maintaining a consistent sleep schedule and a calming bedtime routine. Personally, I use a Whoop to track my sleep and get nudges on when to set my bed time. I went super deep here and got blackout curtains, taped my mouth shut during sleep, set temperate to 60 degrees and created an evening routine rather than a morning routine. My friends think I'm aging backwards now.

2. **Deep breathing & mindfulness:** Practice deep breathing techniques, such as "box breathing," to manage stress and help you feel more grounded. The Whoop app has a section on how to calm yourself down and tracks your stress. Personally, I developed a meditation, breathwork and other mindfulness practices (e.g. yoga nidra -- which Sundar Pichai also practices) that I can do in 1 minute or 20 minutes depending on the day.

3. **Exercise:** Incorporate regular physical activity into your routine to boost your mood and improve mental clarity. Plan your days around your workout. Group fitness classes like Barry's Bootcamp are so beneficial for being around other high achievers who are looking for a way to rise out of stress.

4. **Pursue hobbies:** Dedicate time to personal growth, hobbies, and self-reflection to maintain a strong sense of identity outside of work. For me this was boxing. But for you this could be cooking, learning an instrument, photography, hiking or creative writing.

5. **Set boundaries:** Establish clear boundaries between work and personal life, and communicate these boundaries to coworkers and supervisors. I highly recommend reading Connect by Dr. David Bradford and Dr. Carole Robin at Stanford. These techniques ares so applicable to our situation.

6. **Seek support:** If needed, consider seeking support from a mental health professional. I also hired a contemplative counselor to help me work through challenges that I'm facing at work and work on my own emotional regulation.

UI Engineer @ HashiCorp (Nomad)

Here's a list of every public career ladder:  <https://www.swyx.io/career-ladders>

I faced this struggle recently. This is a very challenging situation. I nearly got myself put on a PIP because of mental health challenges. What I found to be helpful was:

1. understanding my personality

2. using that understanding to address my shortcomings at work and in life

3. creating super short term goals based on these on communicating them with my manager and team

4. learning the appropriate methods to be vulnerable with my professional relationships without getting myself into the danger zone

**Understanding Personality**

Personally, I used two sources:

1. [Ray Dalio's Principles You website](https://principlesyou.com/) (free). This helped me understand my archetypes and how I work with other people. From there I used his Principles Journal ($30), this helped me identify my goals and create systems around them. I also used his method for creating an issue log to start tackling the problems that were immediately in front of me.
2. [Dr. Peterson's Understand Myself](https://www.understandmyself.com/) ($10) and [Self Authoring suite](https://www.selfauthoring.com/get-self-authoring) ($30). Dr. Peterson used the Big 5 Personality Test to help people understand their personality and this will help you understand the benefits and drawbacks of your personal nature. Once you understand the drawbacks of your own nature you will have prioritized list of what your short-term areas of improvements should be. From there, I completed the Self Authoring suite to help me gain perspective about my behavior and a set reasonable goals. Anecdotally, I gave this to my college students where 40% of them were considering dropping out and it had a profound impact on keeping them engaged throughout the semester.

**Addressing your Shortcoming At Work and Life**

Once you have a set of goals that you want to improve on, you'll want to find the relevant ones to communicate with your team and manager so you can be held accountable.

**Learn the appropriate methods to be vulnerable at work**

David Bradford and Carole Robin teach a course on Interpersonal Dynamics at Stanford. They recently wrote a book called Connect. The book helps you identify and work through 3 relationships in your life.

Personally, I had a very challenging time adjusting to my new tech lead and my new manager. Often times, I felt unheard and unappreciated. By leveraging a few techniques in the book, I learned how to appropriate amount of what to reveal at work and how to communicate it.

Its been 3 months since I've made these changes, I had to really dig deep to make changes however I went from someone who was nearing a PIP to someone who is now leading a project at work. My relationship with my tech lead and manager is very enjoyable. I still have moments at work that bother me and stress me out, however, I've learned the techniques on how to address them and get people to be willing to be flexible for me (and I reciprocate). My next step (in this current project) is going to be exercising autonomy (read as: can we please do what I say this time?).

If you only take one thing from this post, I would HIGHLY recommend Dr. Peterson's Self Authoring Suite because it drove about 80% of the impact for me (and my students).