Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep07: Critical thinking for career success.

Episode Date: March 1, 2020

✅ Get My FREE '5-Day Career Growth' Guide + Training 👉 http://www.meiphing.com ✅ Grow your career in the 9-5 corporate world with clarity, confidence and opportunities! ⚡ 👋 Welcome to the Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing — corporate career coach, ex-corporate leader who has led multimillion-dollar projects across 43 countries and creator of the ultimate career course for 9-5 professionals, The Corporate Survivor™. On this podcast, you'll learn how to grow your career in the corporate world without getting stuck with Mei Phing's 3-step framework to gain career clarity, improve work confidence and attract new job opportunities. ✅ WEBSITE ⮕ https://www.meiphing.com ✅ FREE GUIDE ⮕ https://www.thecorporatesurvivor.co/5days ✅ COURSE & COACHING ⮕ https://www.thecorporatesurvivor.co ⚡ 📌 ABOUT MEI PHING: Mei Phing Lim is a Professional Career Coach and former Corporate Leader in the financial services and consulting industries. Mei Phing went from a shy quiet introvert to leading multimillion-dollar projects with teams from over 43 countries as the Senior Director and Head of Governance at Standard Chartered, and now teaching 9-5 professionals how to navigate the corporate world and grow their careers with her career coaching course, The Corporate Survivor™. Mei Phing has been featured as a LinkedIn Top Voice 2023, sharing expert career advice in guiding young professionals to plan, navigate and grow their careers. Mei Phing is a keynote speaker on corporate culture, work performance and career growth, and sharing perspectives on what truly takes to build a strategic and successful career without getting stuck. ✅ LEARN MORE: https://www.meiphing.com

Welcome to the Corporate Survivor Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your career confidence, build your skills and value, increase your salary, and the many lessons we learn in the corporate world. For more career support, click on over to www.mayping.com. This is Mayping, your corporate leader turned career coach. I hope you enjoy, like and subscribe. In today's podcast, I want to talk about clear and critical thinking and how it helps in problem solving. In today's world, we are all very focused on doing, doing, doing.

There's always something to do. There's always something that we need to take action on. That all is great. Taking action is obviously much better than just sitting around and waiting for something to happen. Doesn't work like that, guys. But the thing is, if you don't think on why you're doing something and what you're trying to achieve what are the likelihoods that you will actually achieve what you're set out to achieve so that this is the thing that's really happening right now in corporate as well as in business everyone is looking for growth everyone is trying to chase this magical growth out there without really getting clear on what their strategy is. So that's where clear and

critical thinking comes in. In my personal definition, critical thinking just means asking why, why, why. So thinking deeply about what you're trying to do and ultimately what is the impact. So I'm a huge believer in doing the right thing and getting the right things done, not just getting things done because that's just busy work. And busy work are essentially the things that get us really caught up and make us feel very exhausted without really delivering any outcomes. So thinking clearly is slightly distinct from critical thinking, but equally important.

Right now, there's just too much data going around, too much information. We consume too much information than we know what to do with them. It's good to learn more and get as much information as we want and to calibrate, to consider what works best for us. But it reaches a certain point that, you know what, information is just information. And it turns into noise quickly if we can't tell apart and pick up the information that we need versus the one that are just like extra stuff or it's not that relevant for us at this point. So getting rid of the noise clearly is key and clear thinking essentially is cutting through the noise and focusing on

what really matters. So although it sounds very simple, throughout my years in the corporate world and obviously running my own coaching business now, I'm still hearing a lot of people facing these challenges and I've also seen it firsthand. The thing is, when our mind is not clear and calm, we tend to jump on just the next trigger that we hear, whether it's a piece of information or situation that's happening or an event that's unfolding in front of us. I mean, it's great to react, right? I mean, don't get me wrong, but are you reacting to the right things? And maybe the better word to use here is responding because responding is more thoughtful and, you know, it achieves the better outcome. So clear thinking is minimalism in the mind,

is probably the way I would put it. Critical thinking, again, is in depth. So imagine the power that you can combine, if you can combine clear and critical thinking, which is focusing on the right topic, right? Identifying the right areas that you want to focus on after you cut out all the noise. And after choosing the right area to focus on, you go deep.

Go deep dive into every single area of what you're supposed to be considering. A lot of times when we think, it's always at the surface level and worse still, you would tie it to an emotion. So if you miss out, you can check out my video on my podcast on the emotional intelligence bit. We tie it to an emotion and that's where we are trapped because you can't possibly think very clearly when emotions are involved. That's like a completely separate entity on its own.

So that's actually what has happened. And to a lot of people, because if you look at the way that a lot of media, TV, radio information are presented, it's very emotional. There are a lot of emotive words that are being used and that's when we get very caught up and tend to react instead of you know really thinking clearly critically logically objectively and these are some of the skills that you definitely have to learn yes we follow our intuition follow follow our heart, completely get that. But a certain portion of it, we need to be very clear as well. We need to think deeply, make sure that we are taking the right actions also. The other component to this is problem solving. Problem solving is, of course, a very, very big thing in your career as well as business ultimately we are all here to

solve some problems either it's our own problems or your boss's problems your partner's problems your spouse problems your friends problems we're all here to listen, to think about solutions that, in terms of how we can help. So this ability to think clearly and critically aids us to do just that. So imagine you go to your boss with a bunch of problems, with no solutions. How do you think that conversation conversation is going to go? Probably not that good. I think we all know it. Versus, yes, issues will pop up. I think it would be extremely naive to think that there will not be issues ever. Humans, we thrive on solving problems. So imagine if you go to your boss and say, okay, this issue has happened and I've thought about it. And this is the solution that I'm proposing because of whatever justification that you have thought of.

How do you think that would look as compared to the first one? Probably a lot better. Would you agree? So that's what i'm saying people are looking for solutions but the most valuable and impactful ones are not the band-aid approaches not the band-aid tactical let me just patch it patch this up and then we'll see how it goes. And when the problem comes up again, I'm just going to fix it later on. This is an extremely detrimental approach and something that a lot of people do all the time. So I can give you some examples, given that I was in the corporate world for a really long time. And I would say that this happens across the levels, right?

So from a junior executive up to some very, very senior leadership positions, everybody seems to have this default. And perhaps it's something that we naturally jump into, but of course, an important piece to be self-aware of about how we are driven to not spend the time to think clearly and deeply just because there's just so much going on everyone's very busy very overwhelmed but a project or a a problem in which we prescribe, that's not, I guess, adequately solved, will come back and bite you.

That is a fact. And I've seen it happen a lot. So when I used to lead teams, I attended a lot of project meetings. And it's always very interesting to hear how meetings are conducted and the thought around it. And sometimes, you know, for some team leads and I guess the way some teams operate, you can clearly hear that they just want to get something done quickly so that they can show, I don't know, maybe the project sponsor or the responsible executive that some action has been taken.

But they well know that the actions don't work or it's some sort of band-aid approach that they can buy some time. And it doesn't actually make an impact. But the drive to demonstrate progress, to demonstrate fast results, is what is actually driving this bad behavior. So really think about what is happening in your organization, your department and your team. And is this happening? Right? The question is really why? Why, why, why? So when I work with my coaching clients, I always ask them why. And we talk about the whole why thing for a really long time.

And that is ultimately to help them to think deeper and to think clearer so that naturally they become better at solving problems. Solving problems is not this whole woo-woo concept. Everyone talks about, oh, we need to solve problems, we need to solve problems, but do they actually know how to get there? So that is why today I am sharing this secret with you. Sounds really simple, but it's not that easy to do. So I highly encourage you to practice, just test it out, see how that works for you, and then pivot from there. So I'm a person who has based my entire career with my ability to solve problems, and that has propelled me forward very, very quickly in my corporate career,

and now I'm doing the same in my coaching business. So the ability to solve problems through clear and critical thinking is something that will immensely reward you, either in career or business. So something to really start right now. Don't wait. Start right now.