You spend your time in the RHS learning what type of skipper you want to be. I’d be mortified if someone described me as harsh, mostly because all it takes is to be harsh/aggressive (which is entirely different to being assertive as appropriate) to someone and you’ve lost your PM having the interest or confidence to point out when you’ve made an error - and people have died for less. Indeed FOs have sat and let captains make very egregious errors purely out of fear of their reputation alone.
As a senior FO I enjoyed a reputation as someone who was a good handling pilot, who knew the RIM well and who was very well suited to easing new skippers into the LHS when they joined from other fleets (and I had hair
). Being a good FO is something you need to master before you move to the LHS in part because then you know what you want out of your colleague. They are very different jobs - I’d argue the LHS has a great deal more about soft skills in it than the RHS, which is where you learn your manuals inside and out.
Enjoy the journey, if you get 4 stripes early on then I suspect you’ll be constantly searching for a fifth one…