I spoke to a trainee today who is having a tough week. I could really relate to how this person felt, which is why I wanted to write this post. I wish I had written this post sooner because I have buried so much, but I will try to piece together what I remember.Soon after I started in my department, I was working one-on-one with a senior lawyer because my supervisor was away on holiday for an extended period of time. I don’t think he was quite aware of how little I knew as a first-seat trainee, or perhaps he did, but he wanted to challenge me anyway. I remember being very embarrassed with the fact that I was struggling to run what seemed like a simple redline of two documents. He was kind about it at the time, if not a little alarmed at how long it was taking me. This was my first feeling of being inadequate in my seat.Two weeks later, I worked directly with a partner in my department to organise the signing of documents before a closing. Before the partner left for the day, he asked me if I had received the signatures for all of the parties. I quickly said yes, knowing that I had received many emails from many people. The partner had been managing the correspondence at the time, and I remember feeling overwhelmed by the volume of emails I was copied into. I didn’t thoroughly check each signature to confirm.I worked until the early hours of the morning, spending what felt like a disproportionate amount of time trying to work out how to organise all of the signatures onto one document. I was already in a state of panic when, at about 1am, I realised I was missing a signature. I was terrified about the consequences of my mistake, and I had no idea what the etiquette was here. Do I find a way to get the partner’s attention…in the early hours of the morning? Was my mistake going to lead to the collapse of this deal?

The next month, I was glad my supervisor was back. I felt I would have someone to slow things down. On the first day, things quickly became tense because I did not tell my supervisor when I had completed the task I was working on. Over the next few weeks, I often felt like I was an annoyance. I took this personally.By the end of the month, I worked many late nights on a closing with a lawyer. On the last day, I was feeling pretty good about how things had been, until the lawyer noticed the incorrect way I had named the document, which I had circulated to all parties. This was a good example of a situation where I knew I hadn’t understood something, but I felt like I had passed the point of asking how to fix it, for fear of seeming incompetent. This ruined the day for me, despite the fact that we had finished a deal we had spent months working on.For many of those months, it was a rollercoaster. There were good days, and there were days where I felt like I was getting everything wrong. I was very self-conscious about things like picking up the phone to call the associate on the other side of the deal. (I remember writing down what I was going to say and rehearsing before I made the call!) I also felt I wasn’t a very fun person to be around, and so I felt bad for the people around me. I’m aware this is painting a negative portrayal of my experience, but there were many great moments. The reason I’m focusing on the negative here is because I think it helps to know that there will be times during your training contract where you will make a lot of mistakes. If you’re anything like me, you will also take this really hard because you want to do a good job, you want to make a good impression and performing well is closely tied to your feeling of happiness.So many of my mistakes were down to me, my inexperience and insecurities. I look back now and I know that I contributed to the tense feeling with my supervisor because I was extremely sensitive to negative feedback. Recently, with the help of therapy, I’ve been working through how my own upbringing contributed to this sensitivity, where doing something wrong led to a disproportionate reaction. If I had a better understanding of this at the time, I feel like I would have been able to understand that feedback doesn’t mean I’m not good enough. Rather, it’s exactly what it says on the tin: there are specific things that I need to improve on. And the only way you will know what to improve on is by receiving this feedback.I also want to stress the importance of taking care of yourself during those first few months. It’s very hard to move from a situation where you are doing well to a completely new environment where you can’t be perfect. I made the mistake of locking everything up, which then made me feel quite alone in the struggles I was facing. During the times I did share, it made me feel a lot better to know that other trainees were going through something similar.

Note, I originally wrote this post for our new Junior Lawyers’ Community.