I agree with what you just said, anita. My team mates did that initially. I am still the junior most. When I had joined a year ago, I was very afraid and it definitely showed. My mentor especially liked to be rude and critical and extremely disinterested in guiding me. I don’t blame her but for me it added to existing stress. I had to add her to a list of people I needed to please.

I also realized that fear comes out of being attached to external things. I still am in the same financial situation as before but I can’t seem to be afraid of losing my job anymore. I actually met with my manager and told him a few things about perhaps why ” the up and down ” was happening and he seems to be really philosophical and told me that losing a job will need a lot of things to go wrong and I just have to keep working and not worry about that. I don’t even know how I found the courage to do that. And it may seem like I set myself up for my manager to play with my fears but I sincerely don’t care anymore. I also realized that I had to have this meeting to let him know the real reasons for my under performance, which made me also realize that I cared more about what people would think if I lost my job than the consequences of losing the job because even I know I’m not hopelessly unemployable and only a year old as an engineer. Even the explanation I gave him was to “correct his perception” of me as a person, not as a team member. In fact, I’m able to approach other people for help now because I realized that this fear of judgement runs really deep and I need to step out of my comfort zone to overcome that. I want to know if that makes sense and if you have advice on this for me because my goal in writing here was not just to “fix” things at work but better myself as a person. There are so many people that do brave and courageous things, I want to at least break out of these fears which tend to nag me daily.