Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep122: What's coaching all about and can it help you?

Episode Date: May 6, 2022

✅ 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.meiping.com. This is Mei Ping, your corporate leader turned career coach. I hope you enjoy, like and subscribe. Hello, hello, hello and welcome to day 6 of my 30-day careers live stream where we will be discussing very interesting topics that are highly relevant to your career if you are working in a 9-5 corporate job and you have ambitions to grow,

you have ambitions to improve your skills as well as improve yourself professionally. Now, since we are already on day six, I wanted to talk about something that I think is a little bit closer to my heart. So in the past couple of days, you know, the first five days, we talked a lot about how, you know, the various processes within job search, right? How looking at business news can also help you improve your career as well so those were some of the things that we talked about in the previous episodes so if you missed any of those feel free to check it out on spotify and youtube where i have uploaded all the live stream replays but today i actually wanted to talk about

career coaching as a whole now career coaching is something that I think is not very common or rather very well known in Asia right now. So if you are from other parts of the world, in Western countries, probably coaching and mentoring is something that you are a lot more familiar with. But based on my experience, I think that in Asia, it's slowly growing, but I based on my experience I think that in Asia it's it's slowly growing but I still find that a lot of people don't really know what career coaching is and what career coaches do and so forth um understandably so I would say that even before I got into or rather I became a career coach in 2020 after I took a career break and then this was just something that um something that worked out so you want to find out a little bit more about my career story I did record it in a podcast after I took a career break, and then this was just something that worked out.

So if you want to find out a little bit more about my career story, I did record it in a podcast episode 100. But I mean, you know, having said that, I do think that career coaching is something that is kind of misunderstood. And I think that if you have been on, you know, different platforms, you have been following different people, different content, you may have like come to like a different um understanding of what career coaches do so the question for you maybe i have for you at this point is when you think about a career coach right what are some of the things that come to mind like how do you think a career coach can help you so a very very

quick um food for thought at the moment then now i kind of want to share a bit of experience as well based on what i've seen and versus you know some a lot of the stuff on social media also now when i first became a career coach right or rather thinking of you know doing coaching as initially as a bit of a free time i was told that it's very very important to go and get a coaching certification I think that's something that probably a lot of people are thinking of becoming coaches are probably doing out there right getting a certification just how we go through school right go through university getting a certification and then like things will magically work out now having, having said that, I am a certified coach by the ICF, which is the International Coaching Federation. But I do also think, and this might be slightly controversial,

and this is also a very similar opinion I have about paper smart, but like not so smart in life. So similarly, I always believe that, you know, education may get you through the door, but at the end of the day, it's like your skills, experiences, and your attitude that will really go a long way. And this is truly how I feel about, you know, coaches who promote the coaching certification, the fact that they have a lot of certification, but are unable to explain how they are going to help their clients get results or be able to you know show some you know testimonials and so forth you know share some client stories so that people can actually understand what they do so you know certification and obviously i think the actual

client experience is something that's quite helpful also the other question i also get asked is you know maybe there are a lot of very young coaches out there you know motivational coaches mindset coaches you know career coaches who are really really young they look like they have only been working some of them not even a year but they are already teaching careers content they are already teaching um you know career coaching right whatever that is like i do get a lot of a lot of times this question i do get asked but very privately in my dms now i'm going to share with you my personal opinion again you know you may agree disagree but my personal opinion is right if you are an aspiring career coach who is very

young you want to become a career coach because you want to inspire people and so forth my general advice is don't try to ruin or destroy somebody's career just because you cannot figure out your own career. Now, that's really my honest reflections on it. And the reason I say this is because a lot of times nowadays, people ask that, I mean, the younger generation is coming to me and say, hey, this whole career coaching thing is very cool. Can I become a career coach? Maybe how can I be like you? But the problem is that if you have not walked the path, then I'm not sure if it's in honesty or integrity

to go and teach somebody else. Now, you may say that, okay, you know, you just need somebody who has walked one step ahead of you and not like, I don't know, 10 steps or whatever. Now, this is also something I see a lot and my opinion is this. Now, if you are going to someone for career advice, I don't know, a career coach that is like,

maybe, I don't know, one or two years older than you or, you know, almost at the same career level where you are. So maybe you're a junior executive, the career coach is more or less in the junior executive level. Now, how sure are you that whatever advice that you're getting is the right advice? Not just the right advice for the short term, but the long term as well. Because if you are working with a very inexperienced career coach, and obviously experience comes from multiple areas, right? It could be from age, could be years of actual working experience in corporate, or the third one could be the actual successes that the coach has achieved

with clients or in his or her own career. That also makes an impact. And one of the things that I always find very interesting is that, okay, let's say you get advice from this very inexperienced career coach, a very young career coach. Now, what if that coach, right, moves up in their career and then they face more roadblocks? Are they going to call you up and tell you that, hey, you know, by the way, this advice that I gave you is wrong? Think about it. Personally, that's kind of how i feel and i also want to let you guys know that

just because you see inspiring content on social media by career coaches okay maybe not just career coaches like like coaches in general inspirational content does not mean that people don't have problems because for me right most of my clients are working in a nine to five corporate job most of them however i also have a certain group of clients who are actually career coaches so yes i am a i am a career coach to career coaches who are maybe coaching you right now so i just want to let you know obviously you know everything's confidential i'm not going to reveal names here because you know they also run the business um you know they are really actively doing career coaching out there but i just want to say that like you know you don't see your own blind spots and like you know coaches maybe need help too

because you know like i said if they are a little bit younger they are also in the process of like going up the career ladder right they can only teach you what they know at that point but until they reach that top pinnacle when they can see the full picture then that's a very different story that's a very different story so i mean you know if you're watching live right now let me know if i'm making sense to you like okay like am i actually making sense to you um and i guess what are your feelings when you see someone uh who says, you know, they do, I don't know, career coaching, mindset coaching, whatever coaching, but they maybe look really young or they look like they're a fresh graduate. They look like they don't actually have any corporate world experiences, giving you a lot of like motivational advice, career advice or posting a lot of motivational content. So how do you feel when you get,

I guess when you see such content? Yeah, but anyway, like I said, a lot of times I find that, you know, for these sort of career coaches, they are also my clients. They do come to me for career consultations. They do come and ask me what i think that they can do to strategize their career which then tells me that oh they don't know it either because if you have not you know exactly been there done that then like you know they can't teach you what they can

teach you right so you may not necessarily get the um full picture or you may not necessarily get the umbrella view um that you might need so um yeah so anyway that's that so the other part i actually wanted to share about is one of the other questions i get asked a lot also is oh so maybe um does it only mean that when i have big problems i can go to a career coach right because some people think that it's like a bad stigma right it's like oh if i'm sick i go to a doctor but they don't think that hey what about like routine health checks? Like, wouldn't it be better to diagnose, you know, like a dual, like a maintenance, right, to make sure that there are no problems

and making sure that you keep on track. So I think this is like a different school of thought. And the first one where, you know, when the building is on fire, when you're in big, big, big, big trouble, then you go to a career coach. I think that that is the more um traditional mindset of thinking about um getting career help right when there's a big problem then you go to a career coach um for solutions to help you fix the problem which i think is is good but i think for some people maybe they come to a career coach too late and that might be quite a bit of a drama as

well so i'll share some examples later. So the second reason why people come to career coaches is to get strategy. So like I said, right, problems is, I think, past, right? Strategy is for the future, right? So you're taking proactive steps to strategize towards a better career future. So that's the strategy portion. So coming up with the action plan,

what are the steps to get there? And these are quite similar things that I do with one-on-one clients who are wanting to do their job search in the right way, like having the right strategy, right steps, and making sure that they're not going back and forth doing the wrong thing. So getting some strategies around that. And then for some of my other students as well who sign up for my online course the corporate survivor that's more to help them prepare to adapt either in a new job or a first time in a corporate world or adapt to a bigger corporate so like you know from maybe your startup to SME and then gradually to MNC is quite different so that's something that I cover a lot more in my online course, The Corporate Survivor.

But anyway, as I was saying, the second one is strategy, right? Then the third one is to get a perspective. So a perspective, you know, doesn't necessarily need to relate to a big problem. It doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, you need to come up with this brilliant plan to, you know, reach the peak of Mount Everest and so forth.

But sometimes a different perspective could be helpful if you have blind spots because like honestly we all have blind spots like maybe I also have blind spots in certain areas of my life right so there are also there are also clients who come to me saying that they just want a different perspective they want a second opinion or sometimes they do come to me saying that oh I want to listen to your perspective as a hiring manager. So what should I know for my interview? How well are my interview answers? How should I negotiate?

What's going on behind the scenes? They want to know a little bit of that. So that is probably a perspective that can help in making some decisions. It may not be like a really, really big goal, but it's just like to help clarify some of the messy thoughts and so forth so these are probably some of the areas that a career coach can help then the next question then naturally comes is like okay but like how do i um how do i pick a career coach right have you ever wondered of this question how do i pick a career coach and i can tell you for me, right?

A lot of my clients come to me. They always tell me that, oh, maybe I've been reading your LinkedIn post for a very long time. I've been watching your YouTube videos. I've been listening to your Spotify podcast. I've been reading your blogs. So I've got a really, really good sense of how you can help me. But then specifically, right? What ways that you can really um consider right because you

know nowadays everybody can write inspirational content and i'm honestly not a big fan of like writing this like toxic positivity content that's another story um but i do think that there are three ways that you can decide and i call it my PEP formula. So when to go to a career coach is my PSP formula, which is problem strategy and perspective. And now we're going to move into the PEP formula, which is my own suggestion on how to choose a career coach. So the first P is process. So if a coach does not have a process, that means you are an experiment. And would you like to be an experiment? I don't freaking think so. I need solutions to my problem.

I need a strategy and I don't need to be experimented upon. So what is the process? I'll give you an example. So when clients come to me saying that they want to do their job search, this is what it is to work with me. 30-day job search. First session, we're going to do this. Second session, we're going to do this. Third session, we're going to do this, third session, we're going to do this, fourth session,

we're going to do this. Like, it is sequential. It is sequential because it is a proven process that has gotten hundreds of my clients' results. And if you want to work with me and get the same results, there's a much higher chance if you follow the process, right? So this is actually something that I cover in the free training. So this is the six-step career planning training that if you want to learn more, you can go to www.growyourcorporatecareer.com. But as I was saying, for the job search portion, when a lot of my clients come to me, they will ask me, you know, I have this situation, that situation, like what should I do? So as a career coach, right, if I'm confident that I can get results,

then I must have a process because you are not an experiment. I don't think you would like appreciate being an experiment as well, right? Obviously, you want to get results, but you want to get hired. So it's going to be very clear. So first session, we're going to talk about your exact career situation, your options, your direction, and more importantly, the mistakes that you have been making so far in your job search, which you don't even know.

So that's the first thing that we do in the clarity session or consultation session. Then after that session two, we go into resume writing. Now, after you know what you want, then we can write your resume together. Otherwise, your resume is going to be a mess. Then after that, the third session, we'll look at your LinkedIn profile as well as LinkedIn job search strategies amongst other things. Then once that step one, two, three, first one, two, three sessions are done well, then we can go into interviews.

So it needs to be in this sequence. And obviously, with interviews, it kind of depends on how many interviews you have and a few other things, salary negotiation and so forth. But the actual foundation is that it needs to be in this actual sequence. So that part is very important. And I think that sometimes when people want to skip the steps, they want to skip the process. I can give some example. There are some very, very small handful of clients who come to me who want to do their own thing.

Or when they send me a DM, they say, oh, Mipin, I don't want to do this part. I want to only do this part because I think I want to do this, this, this. Now, if you don't follow the process, then how are you going to get results? And if you want to do your own thing, then how much a coach can help you

is going to be very limited, right? Because if you want to dictate what you want to do, then how can this expert help you? going to be very limited, right? Because if you want to dictate what you want to do, then how can this expert help you? Does that make sense? I mean, it actually annoys me a lot because I know that what I have can get resolved, but sometimes it can be really frustrating to hear from clients or connections

who want to do their own thing. Then they get very frustrated and say like, hey, how come this and that? So right nowadays, I'm very, very clear. Either you follow the process that is like proven for hundreds of my clients or you know um maybe you can you can um check out my free content first and see whether you know my method is suitable for you so job search aside right aside i mean aside from that like for somebody who tells me that hey maybe i want to

do better at my job now that's a very big goal right like if there is no process there's no framework how are you actually going to get there so for that one i actually have my three-step framework from understanding the corporate mindset people then getting confident assessing skills gap fixing all the important skills relationship building communication productivity critical thinking all those things then only getting visible so that is my three-step framework that's more for like those people starting a new corporate job starting a new job or want to actually do better at their current job so there is a process and there is a framework if you want to get results then that's the one that came from like more than 10 years of my leadership experience

so anyway long story on the process so the second one is experience so you also may wonder at this time like oh maybe when you say experience right what does that mean because um i've been told that you know as long as the coach has a certificate then you know it's good so how i define it is this does this person that you um want to engage as a coach right you want to you want to learn from or you want to reach out to as a. Does this person that you want to engage as a coach, right? You want to learn from or you want to reach out to as a coach. Does this person have the success that you want? So that's what I define as experience. So experience may not necessarily be X number of years in coaching or I don't know, X number of years in whatever. But I always believe that like,

does this person have the success that you want so for example um you know when i left the corporate world i was senior director so for me if i if i personally am looking for a career coach i may want to look for somebody who has been like a ceo at a big company because that that's where i want to be right versus like if you just go to a random person, then like how much can this person coach you? Because like I always believe that, you know, if the coach has only very limited knowledge or perspective, then how can the coach understand your situation and bring you to the next level that he or she has not even been?

Food for thought, like not to sound a bit depressing here but um i think it's really food for thought and i think that for me a lot of my clients come to me and tell me that they actually want to learn from my leadership experiences they want to learn from my corporate experiences as well as me as a former hiring manager so that to those to me are very interesting because these are things that is like nothing in the certification that I've gotten, nothing in the years of experience that I have as a career coach or official years as a career coach, if you will. So yeah, I think that that's why I think you should spend a little bit of time, right, looking at the coach's profile, like professional profile, the kind of working experience that the coach has,

or maybe understanding the client profile. Like for example, like if you are running a business and you come to me saying that, hey, Mayping, like can you coach me on my career? I may actually say no, because like, you know, I'm not 100% sure whether I'm the right person to help you versus somebody who's working in a nine to five job and wants to do better at their job, wants to upskill, wants to have a better relationship with you know their bosses, want to get visible on LinkedIn and find a job or whatever. I'm like okay this one I know how to do because I've been doing that for so many years for myself and now I'm just teaching that to my clients. So that would be what I consider the area of expertise okay moving uh to the last one and the last one i i i think in my pep formula is personality because um let's face it right if

you don't like the coach how are you going to be honest with this coach if you don't feel like you can feel it's like if you don't feel comfortable with a career, how are you going to be honest and actually share your problems? Because sharing your problems and expressing yourself takes a lot of trust. Do you agree? Personally, it takes a lot for me to want to share my problems and want to really trust in someone to listen and be able to help me. I think there's a lot of element of trust there. And I think that personality is something that is really,

really, really important, really important. And personally, like I feel that if you want to be as effective or productive from a coaching session, then again, as I said,

like go and check out the coaches free content. Like if you already don't feel comfortable watching the coach talk or you don't feel comfortable listening to the coach or you feel like when you're you know watching the video or you're listening to the podcast or you're reading the post that the coach does it really feels a little bit awkward then rest assured like the actual one-on-one coaching session is going to be worse do you agree do you agree so um personality obviously you know may not necessarily mean that you know we are all very happy all the time it's not it's about whether you see yourself um resonating with the points like you know more or less you feel that hey this is actually a person

i can learn or you know this person appears friendly enough i probably feel a little bit comfortable um talking to her or him or her then yeah that's probably um how you can make that decision so i will share with you a very quick story um i actually had a client who worked with me the later part of yeah the last part of last year so she is a very very introverted person and when she first reached out to me she very honestly told me that um i'm not sure whether the session will work out because i'm very introverted so i'm not sure whether i can um i can open myself up to you right but i want to give it a try so it's a very good attitude on her part and obviously you know the first probably a few minutes was a little bit um you know she felt very self-conscious she felt very

awkward but um honestly i'm very experienced with working for a lot of people because in the past i worked with people from 43 countries so i'm fairly familiar with how you know people think operate the personality part of it is quite easy for me to engage so yeah in the end it actually worked out really really well i worked with her throughout the job search process that eventually she managed to move to the uk and in a really really good job exactly fits her career goal that she wants and more importantly i also helped her negotiate an additional 10k 10 000 pounds in the original offer so maybe she bumped that up so like really followed her from the journey of thinking about career opportunities.

So actually, this first session we started in the clarity session was just drilling into the mistakes that she has been making in her job search. Because she's been job searching for about, I think, six to seven months at that point. She didn't get anything. So we talked a lot about the mistakes that she made

and really getting clear on what she wants after that as i said right she just followed the process which is this process that i talked about here the plan your career in six steps which i kind of go through in this training here so went through everything and obviously we worked on additional sessions for salary negotiation and so forth and she has officially started her new job overseas last Monday. So super duper duper happy for her. And right now she's on my online course, The Corporate Survivor, because she is in her probation period.

So she wanted to use the course to kind of guide her through along the process as well. So all in all, I do think that there is value in career coaching, in mentoring, in getting advice, in getting different perspectives, and learning from a different person who has walked the path or has had the long-term success that you want. However, I am not the kind of person that will tell you that, hey, you know, you need a coach, you need this, you need that. Like, I'm not the kind of person that will tell you that, hey, you know, you need a coach, you need this, you need that. Like, I'm not the kind of person to tell you that because I don't believe that anybody can tell you what you need. I think only you can decide what you need and you can decide what you want and you can,

you know, decide for yourself whether it's something that you want to invest your time, energy, money, commitment in. Personally, one final point before we go into the questions is, personally, I actually don't like people telling me what I need. I honestly don't like that sort of content that says that, hey, you need a career coach because of A, B, C, D, E. I feel like it's the individual's choice personally personally however i also do understand that there are also a lot of people who

only stick around the free content and they are not willing to invest in one-on-one sessions or paid programs preferring to read blogs you know know, Google and YouTube, which I think is okay. But I think at the end of the day, like, you know, you get what you get, right? So there is a difference between, you know, free content and paid content. If you guys are interested in this topic, right, what's the difference between free content and paid content? Let me know in the comments. I'll probably cover it in an upcoming live stream. If you guys are ever curious of like, hey, Mei Ping, you have like a you know paid one-on-one coaching you have a paid online course but you also have like a bunch of

free tips like what is the difference like does it even like you know make sense like you know is there going to be any value if i invest in you or should i just like read your linkedin like is there any value in that yeah let me know if there's something that you um are interested to learn more maybe i can talk about it in an upcoming live stream and before i get to the questions um if you are new here hi my name is may ping i'm a professional career coach and formerly corporate leader working in global multinational companies and nowadays i help nine to five working professionals to plan and grow their careers so if you're new to this stream, we are doing this 30-day live stream every single day in, yeah, every single day in May at nine o'clock Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong time. So if you

have any interested topics, suggestions that you want to hear more about, drop me a DM on LinkedIn and let me know. And if you find this live stream super duper helpful, feel free to share it with a friend. We really appreciate it. All right. So thanks for listening. We have a couple of, a little bit of time for Q&A. So let me have a quick look at it. All right.

Hi, Alif. Good to see you here. And always, always a welcome to Marco. All right. Question. Does life experience more important than certification always a welcome to Marco. All right, question. Does life experience more important than certification, or is it a complement to certification? OK, so as I already mentioned earlier, at the end of the day,

it's the expertise and the number of experience in the area that you are looking for. So it's really for you to decide what kind of area are you looking for, So it's really for you to decide what kind of area are you looking for, perspective, strategy, or problem solving, or solutions, then you can really decide from there. Because I don't want to say that a certification is good or not. I have my own opinions, but I do think that a lot of times for career coaching, you make the decision for yourself because it's not just one criteria. That's thesp formula the pp formula i shared earlier that you you should you know consider it thoroughly

all right hi ray good to see you here all right exactly same as the mental health which most have ignored yeah absolutely i think sometimes like there are very important things that people tend to sort of like gloss over because there's just so much happening on social media right now. But I think at the end of the day, like, you should always reflect on what's important to you, right? And, yeah, I mean, take steps, you know, do time, you know, spend time, research and everything else. Like, a lot of times, like, when my clients come to me, like, they have been following me on LinkedIn for a very long time. They have been following me on, like, Spotify following me on linkedin for a very long time they have been following me on like spotify youtube multiple platforms for a very long time so yeah um you know if you care about something then i think you can put in an extra bit of time

to really you know do some research and then you know so that you can make a better decision for yourself on like who can help you the best hello dr alex good to see you here all right all right hi oliver good to see you here as well right okay so there's a bit of a bit of a rambling here today but i think uh hopefully this answers a lot of the questions that you may have on your mind with regard you know with regards to career coaching know, when to find a coach, you know, how to find a coach and some other questions that may have been discussed. And some of my personal opinions that you may feel free to agree or disagree with. But aside from that, you know, if you want to learn more about what I do, you know, I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on YouTube, Spotify, Instagram, TikTok now. And I do run live streams here and there.

But for this month, I'll be running it every day. So in May 2022, I'll be running it every day at Nile Cloud. So feel free to join in if you want to participate in the conversation, participate in the views. I think that would be great. And yeah, if you have an interested topic that you want to learn more about, or you come across a piece of advice online, you're not sure if it's right or not, drop me a DM. Let me know that this is a topic suggestion for the live stream. Then happy to consider it in an upcoming episode.

So just to wrap it up very quickly, for those of you who are dropping me messages on the processes and so forth this is something that i actually cover in my free training how to plan your career in six steps so you can just go to www.guruofcorporatecareer.com to go through the training or those who are asking me about the actual corporate job that you want to do well, you can find out more in my online course, which is at www.thecorporatesurvivor.co. So hopefully it's something that you have learned from today's session or find insightful. And with that, I will see you tomorrow. Cheers. Bye-bye.