Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep131: Do you judge yourself? Here's WHY.

Episode Date: May 15, 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.mayping.com. This is Mayping, your corporate leader turned career coach. I hope you enjoy, like and subscribe. Hello, hello, hello. Welcome back to my 30-day career live stream series where we will be talking about very interesting career advice

that I see online and also a chance for me to share some perspectives with you that are updated and may or may not be things that I talk about a lot on my content and so forth. So if you are new here, hi, my name is Mei Ping. I'm a professional career coach and formerly corporate leader working in the corporate world at some of the biggest brands in the world in senior leadership positions. So welcome to my live stream. And today is day 15 of the 30-day live stream series. And since we are at the midpoint, I wanted to talk about self-judgment, judging yourself and really bringing you through and also sharing with you some of my personal experiences,

as well as some experiences from my clients on feeling imposter syndrome, feeling like you are not good enough, feeling like others are better than you, feeling like you can't do anything because you don't have ABCDE. So if you are watching live right now, drop a comment and let me know where are you watching from. And the question is right here, do you judge yourself? And what do you define as self-judgment? Now, this morning on LinkedIn, I actually shared a post where I talked about the one-year thought process that I went through before I decided that I was going to dye my hair pink. So if you're watching live right now, or you've been following me for the past couple of weeks across different social

media, I think you realize that I sort of dyed my hair pink. But the story is not so much around what I've done, but I think the journey and the thought process of kind of like going through whether I should do it or not, and also some of the self-judgment as well as the expecting or rather expected societal judgment on a lot of the things that we say and do. So as much as we talk a lot about authenticity and doing whatever that you want to do, and just not caring about other people, I think it's really important to recognize that we are people. And psychologically speaking, most of the time, we do care about what other people say, about what we say, what we do, how we look and everything. So I think that's quite natural.

I wouldn't say that you can't necessarily stop other people from making judgments of you, but I think that only you can decide how it's going to affect you. Now, I just want to share a few examples. And I think that, you know, obviously, a lot of my clients and a lot of my connections are working in nine to five corporate jobs in the corporate world. So it's, I think, sometimes not as simple to want to be, you know, 100% authentic and sometimes feeling a bit frustrated

that you are judged at work. And sometimes you may feel like you are also unfairly judged at work, which is really, really frustrating. But in today's live stream, I just wanted to talk about two parts. One is what I consider the superficial judgment, and then the other part is more around the inner judgment. Now, I'm going to share a very quick story with you. In the past, when I was working in the bank um i used to have a team member who used to dye her hair blonde right so some you know some companies they do have like hr codes saying that you know

you should have a neck your natural hair color which i honestly do not understand because how is that how does that actually affect your ability to do a good job right anyway that aside so i used to have this team member who used to like dye her hair blonde right amongst other things and probably for her it's a matter of self-expression but the problem is that you know within the office environment it was never seen as a good thing and i never actually understood that because i felt that it's actually more important to assess this team member by her ability to do a good job like the quality of her work her skills and the other things I think that are more related to her performance goals but I think unfortunately sometimes like people do talk and people do judge as well so I think the way she looked, the blonde hair,

and then she used to wear slippers around, like a bunch of other things. I think people tend to have a bit of a judgment on your skills, expertise, experiences, and knowledge based on how you look. So anyway, back to my own story. The reason why I thought about it for such a long time before making the change was I felt that me being a professional career coach on a professional platform, a platform such as LinkedIn, and specifically talking about professional topics, right, such as corporate mindset, you know, skill set, communication, visibility strategies, job search, like all these things I consider are pretty boring topics. And I really felt for a very long time that like, will my decision to do whatever I want to do physically

or rather, you know, what you can see, will that significantly affect how other people saw me? So a lot of, you know, my clients come to me because they enjoy and they really want to learn from my corporate leadership experiences. Actually, a lot of my clients come to me saying that, oh, Mei-Ping, you have been in leadership roles. I want to learn from you, like, how do I handle people at work and how do I navigate the corporate world? I'm feeling really lost and I'm struggling with all this and that. Now, when we think about the corporate world, a lot of it is really black, white or grey, maybe blue and green are some of

the things that normally people associate with. And for a very long time, I felt that will this decision basically make my clients feel like I'm not a serious person that can help them in their career, which is going to be very upsetting for me? Or will they think that I am those sort of like woo-woo motivational coach that, you know, doesn't really teach anything and, you know, just making those like pretty videos and stuff like that? And I also thought a lot about how my existing clients who, you know, are, who have signed up to my program or, you know, will give me one-on-one for a long time. I also felt that, oh, what if I get cancelled?

And what if my clients suddenly think, oh, what's wrong with me paying? And all those things. So anyway, what I'm trying to say here is that I think there were kind of like a lot of things on my mind. Some are valid and some are like totally doesn't make sense at all but what i found was that um at the end of the day and i guess like after i dyed my hair and like whatever whatever in fact my clients were very supportive which is really interesting actually a lot of them actually texted me saying maybe i really love your hair like when can we meet next and i want to

book my session so anyway the point I'm trying to make in this story and I think it's also a big learning for me is that um we judge ourselves the harshest at the end of the day like a lot of the thoughts that we have in our mind on whether we are good enough and how other people think about us and all those things like a lot of it is actually in our mind so I'm not saying that you know whether how you see yourself is sort of right or wrong, but I think it's first important to have that sort of self-awareness to recognize that you may be seeing yourself in more negative light than necessary.

You may be overthinking, which is a problem, which is actually a really big problem. And the third one is that you may be experiencing imposter syndrome, but actually you don't really have to. So I'll share another story with you. And this was actually a client who worked with me at the end of last year, which was around November. And just a couple of weeks ago, she just started a new job in a new company. So basically, I helped her make an overseas move to the UK, and she just really started her job a couple of weeks ago as well. So this client has kind of gone through the entire journey with me,

starting from career consultation session, really understanding why her job search in the past seven months is not getting her any results. So in the first session, we really talked a lot about the mistakes that she's been making in terms of targeting the wrong jobs and the way that she's approaching her CV, her interview, everything's bad. And the thing was that after the first session with her, I also noticed that she had a very negative mindset in which she consistently said that,

you know, she thinks that she's not good enough, even though, you know, she's a high performer and she actually got promoted quite early compared to her peers. But she consistently told me that, oh, maybe I think I'm not good enough and like all these things, I don't know how to do this, ABCDE,

which I thought was quite strange, right? And after that one-on-one career consultation session, she actually reached out to me after that, asking me if I can help her a little bit on her mindset block. So she mentioned to me that when she was a lot younger, she was consistently laughed at and really told that she couldn't do anything. So a lot of it sort of like kind of goes back to her schooling days. So she asked me if that's something i could help her out with now i am not a therapist um so i think for her situation because it's actually fairly related to careers so uh we had a session where you know we really tackled through a lot of the fears that kind of came from her

teenage days of you know know, being laughed at, because she was actually a very introverted person, a little bit awkward. So she didn't really feel comfortable with herself. And I think that kind of like brought, you know, went along throughout her career. So even though, you know, she may be a manager right now, but that trauma or like that negative experience when she was younger kind of followed her through for 10 years. Obviously, it's not really a healthy thing, right? But anyway, that aside, so after that session,

we really worked together on her resume, LinkedIn profile, and everything else. And even throughout the process of working together for job search, she still had limiting beliefs in terms of like uh the fact that she consistently consistently judged herself saying that you know maybe i think i'm not good enough but how come i don't know how to do this i should know how to do this faster like all these

things are you know obviously not a good thing right for long-term success so anyway we went through the process but the good part was that she's she's an action taker so you know she has a lot of fears but she still did the thing anyway so that was the good part was that she's she's an action taker so you know she has a lot of fears but she still did the thing anyway so that was the good part and that was actually how she managed to get multiple job offers within a short period of time working together and but you know that was a the self-judgment was a recurring issue that um went on as we worked together so in terms of like execution because she really implemented all the steps and all the advice throughout the job search process. So in terms

of like getting the jobs, this was actually, it wasn't a problem. She was able to get it. And I also helped her negotiate a really, really good increment. And she also managed to move overseas. That was her dream job, dream company, and all those things, which was great. But like I said, there was this underlying issue around the fact that she still did not believe in herself. She consistently felt that she got lucky. She doesn't know what contributed to her success. And she also feels like one day somebody is going to discover that she's a fraud, right? All these are clearly not good things. So anyway, I think for her, what I eventually suggested to her is to rebuild her foundation. Because at the end of the day, I think confidence comes from competence. So if you feel like you are faking it to make it, I wouldn't really recommend that.

Because there will be a ceiling and the feelings of imposter syndrome, the feelings of self-judgment, the feelings of not good enough, that is not going to go away because you have not addressed the real problem that is happening in your career or in your life. And that real problem is the fact that you may have probably some lack of understanding of your own personality, your own habits. And therefore, because you don't really understand the nature of your personality, you know, what you're good at, your strengths, weaknesses, natural habits, the natural thing to do is then to feel like you're not good enough when you're looking at someone else, right? Meaning that you only see your weakness, you don't see your strengths. And you also don't know how to transition your weakness

into strengths. So when you don't know any of those things, then it's very natural to look at someone else and think that the other person is way better than you. But that person may recognize their strengths, but you don't see your strengths, right, which is a problem. So anyway, back to that particular client. So because she was in the process of moving overseas, so she kind of had a bit of time after her resignation to really prepare herself for the relocation as well as preparing herself mentally. So what I sort of suggested to her

was actually to go through my course. So in case you guys don't know, I actually have an online course and coaching that's at www.thecorporatesurvivor.co. So this is actually a course that is the three-step framework to help you get clear about the corporate world, the corporate mindset that also covers understanding your own personality and other people's personality. Then after that, we move on to getting confident by developing corporate skills. So assessing your skills gap and what you're not good at in terms of your soft skills toolbox, After that, we move on to getting confident by developing corporate skills.

So assessing your skills gap and what you're not good at in terms of your soft skills toolbox, and then improving it step by step. Then obviously, the last stage is then visibility, making sure that you get recognized for your hard work, get a good performance, as well as opening up more career opportunities for yourself. So anyway, for this particular client, in preparation of moving overseas, what she was doing then was actually just spending time with the course because she's just waiting to move overseas, right? And there was actually this one message that she sent to me in the process of going through the course. She just dropped me a message and said

that when she was going through Module three, and module three is all about assessing skills gaps that that's against the top 12 soft skills that I teach, right? So the top 12 soft skills, the in four buckets is something that I also share a little bit more in this retraining at www.guruacorporatecareer.com. So anyway, for this top 12 soft skills is something that I have used holistically throughout my own career and that has actually helped me become successful in the corporate world.

So anyway, module three is all where I actually go through step by step. How do you assess if you have gaps in each and every skill? So when she went through that module, module three, she actually texted me and told me that, oh, maybe I didn't realize

that I had so many problems and no wonder I kept feeling like I don't know what I'm doing. That's because I have a lot of problems, and I didn't realize that, and she also told me that I'm very surprised that a careers course can help me to understand more about myself, because she thought that she had to take some, I don't know, personality assessment class or whatever. So what I told her was sometimes, right, it's really, really important that, maybe not sometimes, all the time, it's actually really important that you understand, you see the full picture and not try to self-diagnose bits and pieces here and there, which is exactly what she was doing initially. So she you know failing in one part or she didn't feel that she was good enough in one part and she was like trying to fix her problems here and there and she realized that she's actually not really

getting any results so it's really important that you see you know the entire corporate jigsaw puzzle like how the corporate world actually functions and how you sit inside there and for me that's why I designed the three-step framework because it actually kind of covers like every part from corporate mindset corporate skill set and then visibility strategy and that's how you can actually develop a more holistic understanding of how everything operates and then develop the skills to better navigate the corporate world so that's kind of like how you should go about it. And because she was kind of like going about it in bits and pieces, even though she put in a lot of effort,

she didn't really feel like she was getting any results. Now, I also want to address right now for people who have been asking me, oh, Mei Ping, do you think that I should sign up for just a communication class? What about I sign up a goal-setting class? What about I sign up productivity class? Now, all those are good, right?

But the main question that I have for you is that how is everything connected? Because a lot of times, like, one skill do not exist on its own. Do not exist on its own. Now, I'll give you a different analogy so you can visualize what I'm saying. Now, do you need to be productive to be successful? Right, so do you need to be productive? Do you need to master productivity skills to be successful in your career? Yes, I'm sure you all agree yes, right? But on the flip side, is productivity skills alone enough to be successful? So is productivity skills alone enough to be successful?

The answer is no. Because in order to actually be successful and climb the corporate career ladder, you need way more than just productivity. Because if you are working on the wrong things, it does not matter how productive you are because you are working on the wrong things. So I'll give you another example over here. Let's talk about LinkedIn, right? A lot of my followers, a lot of my connections, a lot of my clients actually are connected with me on LinkedIn. Now, we all know that LinkedIn is a really, really good platform to get more career opportunities, to get more job opportunities for you to grow your career. I think we all know that. So the similar question style is, is LinkedIn important for your career? So can LinkedIn help you grow your career?

Yes, but just LinkedIn alone, is it enough to have a successful career? The answer is no, right? Individually is a good thing, but how is everything connected and does everything actually make sense? That is a very important question that I think a lot of people do not think about. And actually, when I first designed this course, you know, obviously, you know, I have other peers in the industry and when I first designed this course, right, which obviously, like I said, covers career mindset, career skill set, as well as networking and visibility strategies. And when I first designed this course, there were actually a lot of very kind-hearted peers who came to me and say that, oh, Mei-Ping,

you shouldn't design your course this way because people only want to learn LinkedIn from you, or you should only teach communication, or if you just teach productivity, I think it's better. But the problem is then, back to the question that I was talking about, right? I don't want to give you guys like piecemeal stuff because if you don't know how everything sticks together, then your results is going to be limited. So if you, for example, if you go and sign up to a productivity class, and then you have an English class, and then you go to a communication class, and then you go to like a personality class, sure, you can, but how is everything connected together?

And the other question is then, because different people are teaching all these things, then all these mentors that you're going to, all these trainers that you're going to, they have their own methodology, right? They have their own strategies on what works. So now what you are then trying to do is that you are trying to then piece all these things into one thing. And that is going to be a problem because I think a lot of times, like when people go to workshops, like they are being taught certain things. But I feel like not everybody actually understands how certain things are designed. Because there's always a logic behind why a certain strategy

needs to be done in a certain way, in a certain sequence, in a certain order. Do you understand that in the course that you've bought, in the workshops that you've attended? Because if you don't understand that, then that means that you're just doing for the sake of doing. And the moment that, you know, the moment that you step out of the, I don't know, the workshop or the class, and you don't really know what is the intention, or I guess how the strategy is designed, and why the method needs to be done this way, then you're not going to be motivated to do it. You don't know

the logic, and then when you implement it, probably it's not going to work motivated to do it you don't know the logic and then when you implement it probably it's not going to work right because you don't understand the logic or rather the logic is not being taught to you now all this sounds a bit morbid but it's not but what i'm just trying to say here is that you really need to understand why certain things are designed in a certain way if you really want to be successful otherwise Otherwise, you can pay money for a specific, I don't know, one-day workshop or something, but what you are learning then is still a standalone, it's still a siloed piece of method or skill. And now you try to patch everything together, and then it's going to be a mess. And I think a lot of people sometimes do not appreciate that there's a reason why a roadmap is important to move towards success. Most people, they want to

self-diagnose, they want to do whatever that they want to do, which to me is actually a big problem. So anyway, so for my course, I actually have a five-minute video right at the beginning and I say that please watch this first before you open up any single lesson in this course. And that particular video is all about how the course is designed and what you need to do first, and then the goal of each and every phase. Now, this is very important to set expectations so that anyone who joins my course know that this is how things are designed. And then if they want to get the best results, they need to follow the steps and they need to follow the sequence. Now, if you are somebody who signed up for a course,

like it can be my course, it can be somebody else's course, but then you skip around and you do whatever that you want to do, then what is the point? Yeah, maybe you can still learn something, but maybe you cannot maximize it, I guess is what I'm trying to say, right?

So for me, as a career coach, as a course creator, I have put in 200% in designing the framework and to really lay out step by step to teach you what I've done. And it's actually not very easy to dig out. And actually, everybody is a genius, right? But it's not easy to teach the genius, if you get what I'm trying to say. So it kind of took quite some time to kind of come out of it.

But as a career coach and as a course creator, I can give you the best strategies, methods, steps, but it's really up to you how you want to maximize it, is I guess what I'm trying to say. Because it doesn't matter if it's my course or somebody's course or you're attending some free webinars. And I also have free webinars as well. But I find that

people who hear what they want to hear they do what they want to do at the end of the day like you should realize that you are you are limiting your own success if you get what I'm trying to say and if you do what you want to do even though you know you go to an expert you ask for advice you try to learn the steps but you still decide do what you want to an expert, you ask for advice, you try to learn the steps, but you still decide to do what you want to do, then you should recognize that, you know, back to today's topic is the self-judgment may continue because you may continue to feel like you are still not getting the results that you want and still feel like, you know, things are not changing. But you should also then ask yourself, aside from judging yourself, are you also self-sabotaging yourself?

Are you also, you know, insisting to do something your way versus if you are already investing in a course, in a coach or a mentor to be open to other perspectives, to actually learn from somebody else's experiences, knowledge, and insights to really elevate your success. So I think that is the only question that only you

can answer. And I think, you know, for a lot of times, like things like self-judgment is you need to be aware of it. I think be open to taking the step by step to delete it, maybe not delete it, I think be open to taking the step-by-step to delete it, maybe not delete it, you know, to overcome it, I guess a better word, yeah, to overcome it and really celebrate the step-by-step progress because it's really not something that's overnight and, you know, if you still feel like you are not good enough, then we need to really spend a bit of time to do self-reflection. Whether you want to self-reflect every day, every week, every month, every year, but that should be a process that you have implemented to objectively evaluate where this negative self-judgment is coming from, and more importantly, what are the actions that you can take? And even if you choose to improve your

mindset and your skill set, it's also not something that can, you know, change overnight. Particularly, maybe your mindset can change overnight, but your skill set definitely will not change overnight because it requires a lot of practice, it requires a lot of tweaking, and so forth. And even in my course itself, aside from, you know, besides the main module three, the skills gap assessment, there's also another separate lesson to actually have a matrix to evaluate your skills improvement every three months.

That's actually what I recommend and I also share a matrix with my students as well. So anyway, anyway, I think self-judgment is something that is becoming a lot more prevalent

in the times of social media and even on professional career platforms as well we may see that you know the influences of social media or i guess rather the social part of social media is really becoming more prevalent so i think entertainment over education is something that I see a lot of. And I hope that you also be aware of how all these things are impacting you. And more importantly, whether are you ready to step out of your comfort zone to really objectively evaluate and reflect as to why you feel that way and take actions to get out of your comfort zone if necessary. So with that, thank you so much for listening today and I'll see you in the live stream tomorrow.

Bye!