Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep135: FREE vs PAID Advice: What's the difference?

Episode Date: May 19, 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 enjoy like and subscribe we're live stream series where i will be sharing a few very interesting career perspectives the dms that i get from a lot of my clients as well as my connections across all these platforms as well so today you guys are in for a treat because I want to talk about one of my passion

topics and it's really around what is the difference between free advice and paid advice and specifically what is the difference and what is the value that you are actually getting when you are paying to get career advice versus you hunting around for free career advice across multiple social media platforms. So if you are new here, hi, my name is Mei Ping. I'm a professional career coach and formerly corporate leader who has worked at some of the biggest companies in the world, Fortune 500, in senior leadership positions. And in my last role, I was a senior director and head of governance and control at Standard Chartered Bank. So nowadays, I was a Senior Director and Head of Governance and Control at Standard Chartered Bank. So nowadays, I am a professional career coach and I work with a lot of 9 to 5 professionals who are in the corporate world.

So if you are new here, hi. And if you want to catch the replays of all the live streams for the past X number of days, the entire month of May, you can definitely check it out on my YouTube channel or on Spotify. So anyway, back to today's very specific topic around the difference between free and paid content. So what inspired today's live stream session was, as usual, as you all know, I receive a lot of messages, DMs, requests for help from tons of working professionals on multiple topics. It could be questions around career clarity. It could be questions around job search, right? How do I update my resume? How do I sell my brand? How do I improve my LinkedIn? How do I position myself and prepare

well for interviews? So that's more of the career clarity and job search portion. Then the other portion are people who have already gotten the job offer and now starting their journey, whether it's the first time in the corporate world or in a new job in the corporate world, really trying to set themselves up for success and really looking to learn from my working experiences in the corporate world of more than 10 years in leadership position.

So as usual, when I get a lot of these messages from my connections and clients, then usually they are sort of like two types of messages that I receive. So the first type of message are someone who is already willing to invest to get the advice and the solution from a credible expert, aka me. So I will get messages from nine-to-five working professionals telling me very clearly what their problems are. And more importantly, they also tell me what sort of free advice that they have gotten. Maybe it's on Google, YouTube, or they have already worked with another coach or mentor, maybe on a free capacity, but did not get the results they are looking for. So most of the time when I get messages from such professionals, it's normally pretty specific. They will tell me exactly what they have done and

why they are not getting the results they're looking for. And therefore, they are looking to work with me as an expert so that I can share some real corporate world insights and experiences with them. So this is more for the paid advice where after hunting around, spending hours, days, time moaning and complaining and nonstop around the free stuff, as you all know, sometimes when you look at a lot of free content, it's a bit all over the place

and it may not necessarily be designed for you in the nine-to-five corporate world. And you also may not be sure whether who you are learning from, reading from in terms of the free advice is actually correct. So generally speaking, that is the profile of clients who come to me after spending hours, time, energy, effort, yada, yada, yada on free advice. So they come to me asking me how they can work with me directly and so forth. Now there is the other group of people and I think that is the 99% of group of people who are more focused on or rather on their learning journey is still at the free content level. So when I mean free content level,

meaning that probably someone who is starting to focus on personal development, starting to focus on professional development, however, may not necessarily be ready to invest in themselves or not necessarily be ready to actually work with an expert to get the solution or the help or the

perspectives that they need in their career. So if you are someone who has, you know, been just starting to think about your career, just starting to do a lot of self-reflection or self-assessment, probably free advice is something that is a good start so you can go through blogs you can go to youtube you can go to google you can go to spotify all these platforms are really really great for you to get a quick taster or rather a quick snippet of some good tips or maybe some advice that you can implement but i think rest assured that you need to be also clear that a lot of times like in free content, it's a bit all over the place is one thing. And you may need to spend a lot of time trying to decipher

which one actually makes sense to you and which one makes sense to your situation. And the other thing is that you may need to also spend some time to research whether the coach, the mentor or the trainer that you're learning from actually has the right expertise to help you. Because I think that a lot of times on social media,

everybody can just re-judge what they read from Google. And I think that this is actually, unfortunately, a lot of the content that I see on TikTok and Instagram. And that has been a little bit more unfortunate to have moved on to LinkedIn as well. I see a lot of copy and paste content online on LinkedIn right now, which I think is a little bit unfortunate. But just to give you a bit of context on what does free content come from, and I think that if you're somebody who's just right at the beginning

of like thinking about your career i think it's definitely a really really great start and i highly recommend that you do so like for example for me i create tons of free content for on youtube on spotify um i even have a blog i also share tons of tips on linkedin which is a little bit more long form and on instagram i share it in a more short form visual format as well so I share tons of free advice but it will never ever ever compare

to the paid advice and what I want you to do is that I want you to visualize like an iceberg right free content is just the top part because it's just for you to get a taster of all these tips and all this advice. But it's a lot more high level. It may not be necessarily tailored to your specific profile, which is someone who is working in the corporate world

and wanting success in your new 9-5 corporate job. And it's probably designed for a lot more people to consume and most of the time probably has a more inspirational angle, some education portion, but not necessarily in-depth. So that is usually the difference. And I also do think that if you are working with a coach, you are working with a mentor, and you are hoping to get free advice, then I think you may want to be a little bit more objective because most coaches and mentors, as I've seen, if the person really knows what they're talking about, you should be

able to find some free content online. Whether it's LinkedIn, it's YouTube, Spotify, Instagram, TikTok, you should be able to find some kind of free content online or free advice online that you can consume. Now, the difference then is, is the free advice, tips online enough for you to improve your career? Maybe it is, but I will say that for the hundreds of working professionals I have worked with as a coach, most of the time it's not enough. It's not enough because it's not connected, it's actually disjointed, it's a bit all over the place, and the worst thing is that sometimes the strategies may change over time. Some strategies and some steps may be outdated. But when you Google a

YouTube video that's like three years ago, how sure are you that that advice is still correct? Do you do additional research or do you just take it as is? Now, I'm going to give you guys another bit of insight that you might not be aware of. And I will tell you that 99% of my clients are working in the 9-5 corporate world. However, I do have a small group of clients who are actually career coaches themselves. They are in the training space,

but they come to me as their career coach. So basically, they're my clients learning from me, come to me as a career coach, and then actually clarifying with me a lot of the advice that they are giving online. And actually, what I realized is that a lot of the free advice is actually not correct, because for these people that I've spoken to, I'm not going to name any names here, is that they are also not really sure. And then guess guess you they are teaching you online things that they are not sure of things that may be theoretical but that's when it's really up to you to do your research and then the real question is then how do you do your research how do you know whether

the free content makes sense or not versus the mentality of a person who is ready to invest in yourself you know invest in themselves usually goes through a more objective thought process of maybe doing research, right? For example, if you want to sign up for a course, you are definitely going to look at like, what is the course going to cover? What am I going to get? Is it lifetime access? Is it not? What exactly does the curriculum look like? Is this course for me? What else is included? I want to have a look at like, who are the other people who have signed up?

Like you go through a very different thought process because you know that, hey, I'm ready to invest in that for I want to find the best. But when you're in the, you know, in the mode of like getting free advice, most of the time that there is no such thought process. It's just like, oh, this looks like a good idea.

Let me just like try to follow bits and pieces here and there and based on what i've seen from the hundreds of clients that i worked with most of the time the bits of content here and there is the one that's going to get you into trouble because um most of the clients that come to me when i ask them what they have done what they have looked at from a free content free advice standpoint they can list a long list of free stuff that they have done, what they have looked at from a free content, free advice standpoint, they can list a long list of free stuff that they have done. But the problem then is their problems are not resolved until we talk about it in a consultation session or we talk about it as part of my course program and so forth. So I think one thing is to really recognize that if you're going for free,

what you're going to get is bits and pieces here and there, which maybe is a good refresher, but does it actually solve your problem in the right steps, in the right order, relevant to your profile if you're somebody who's working nine to five, which is really where my clients and student profiles are mostly related to. Versus if you are somebody who is already choosing to invest in yourself, then that also says a lot in terms of like, how much do you actually want to grow in your career? How much you actually want to get the real advice that are implementable, practical, and things that allow you to move forward. Now, I'm very passionate about this topic.

It's because I feel like a lot of the clients who come to me and when they tell me all these things that they have done, I just feel like you have spent so much time hunting through the free stuff, listening to people who don't know what they're talking about, and the worst thing is they're implementing the wrong thing and not getting results and end up feeling demotivated, frustrated, high anxiety, feeling like you have low confidence and low self-esteem. And a lot of that really comes from the fact that you are not utilizing the right direction when actually getting advice.

Now, I want to share with you guys another example. And this is something that personally, I'm like super passionate about this. And okay, I'll share a story with you. This has happened a few times already. So I think it's okay to share. Usually, I will have this group of people who will come to me for interview coaching or salary negotiation coaching. And I think it makes sense, right? Obviously, you know, if you are changing a new job, you want to

increase your chances and obviously making sure that you get as much money as possible when you make the change. So that part I completely understand. What I do not understand is people who come to me and say they're May ping, can you do one-on-one interview coaching for free? Can you do a one-on-one free salary negotiation session? And if I'm successful, then I'm only going to pay you after. Or can you give it to me for free? That's actually the more common one. Can you give me free interview coaching? Can you give me free salary negotiation coaching? Now, why I'm going to tell you that this is kind of very confusing to me is because when you are trying to learn interview skills, when you're trying to learn

salary negotiation skills, isn't the main purpose to help you make more money. But if your mentality, your money mindset is so weak that you are not willing to spend any money to invest in yourself to gain the real skills to learn how to interview, sell your value, negotiate your salary, get paid your value, then how is anybody going to help you? Think about it. Think about it. Right? And anyway, back to the free coaching stories. So I personally found it very confusing. It's because you are going to a coach, you're going to an expert to teach you how to make more money, but you're not willing to invest in yourself, not willing to pay. And then you complain when HR, the new company, doesn't want to pay you more. Like, they are exactly behaving just like you. Because, you know, if you're not willing to

invest in yourself, then that is going to mirror in the companies that you're applying for. Because HR will then be like, oh, okay, then I'm not sure if I want to invest in you. I'm not sure if you're good enough. It's the same thing, right? I mean, if you think about it logically, actually, it's the same thing. So a lot of it actually comes down to money mindset. A lot of it actually comes down to what do you define as investing in yourself? What do you define as an investment versus an expense? Because if you think that everything that you spend for your career, career training, career courses, career lessons, tuition, if you think everything that is a cost, right, then that's your mindset. And just so you know, if you have those sort of like very cheap money mentality, that is also

going to come across when you negotiate your salary, when you ask for an increment, when you ask for a bonus, like that money mindset doesn't go away. That doesn't go away because you are not in the growth mode, you are in the cheap mode, if that makes sense. And I'm concluding this because like I have seen so many, so many, so many of these people. And I think it's okay, right? Because different people are sort of at the different stage but i think it's really important for you to recognize which stage you are at so repeating what i said at the earlier part of the live stream is that if you are at the beginning of like just starting to think about your career improvement career enhancement then sure right please please go and look at all the free content like i share tons of free content i definitely

think that you should check out and in fact when a lot of connections come to me saying that oh maybe you know um if i choose to work with you or like you know i pay for a session or i buy your course right um you know how can you guarantee abcde or how can you make sure that i know your style is and everything and i the way i answer them is very simple. I have tons of free contents. You need hundreds, if not thousands of hours to consume all of them. So please, before you choose to pay me or work with me or buy any of my programs

or my course, please take some time to review all the free content that I've done because I've put in tons of effort to give you the free advice on different social media platforms. So please look at all of those. And if you think that my perspectives, my methodology, my strategies make sense to you, then come back to me. I will never tell you that, hey, you need to pay 100% for advice. Never. Please go and look at all the free content. I have thousands of hours that you can binge on, no problem. But

when you choose to want to level up and if you are ready to invest and you are ready to level up in your career, then you can come and talk to me and let me know what your problems are, tell me your career goal, and then I can recommend what is the best method for you in terms of paid programs and so forth. That's usually what I recommend. And I will also tell you that free versus paid content, I share tons of free content, but that is only 2% of what you are going to learn in the paid program. The main reason is because everything that's free advice is I write it based on inspiration. It's not exactly a framework, right? Because one thing needs to be on the other

if you really want to become successful and climb the career ladder. That's just how it works. If everything is like everywhere, then go to YouTube. Tons of YouTube. Please follow me on YouTube. You can go and follow me on Spotify

and everywhere else. That's fine. So I think that at the end of the day, it's you decide whether you want to go and figure it out on your own. But one thing is that do not forget that free is not always free because your time is worth something. Your effort is worth something. Your mental energy is worth something. And your emotional health is also worth something. And I can tell you that for a lot of clients who come to me, whether work with me one on one or they sign up on my program, usually what I do is that in my booking form, I will always ask

them, what have you done before booking this session with me? What have you tried but didn't work out? And even for my, for my online course, The Corporate Survivor at www.thecorporatesurvivor.co, when my students sign up, there is an intake form. And in that intake form, I also ask them, please explain your career, you know, what have you done? What has worked? What has not worked? Why did you choose to sign up to my course? And what are you hoping to learn from me in my program? Because those questions are really, really, really important. Because these are the things that my hundreds of clients are unable to find in the free advice. Because these things are, it's worth something. And I think that if you want that level up knowledge you want that level up insights then

it's really up to you whether you want to invest or not or you want to continue to hunt around and try to figure it out yourself and that's okay too but like I said just remember that there's a cost in your time and your time is worth something and there's also a cost in your emotional and mental energy because people that I have spoken to who have spent hours trying to figure it out, normally they are very exhausted and the worst thing is that they stop believing in themselves. So it actually hurts your self-confidence, it hurts your self-belief, it also hurts your self-esteem and the other thing also is that I'll give you a real example over here. Now, let's say you have filled multiple

interviews, but you want to save your money. You don't want to pay for interview coaching session. Now, what is the opportunity cost? And we're going to talk about opportunity cost because I'm actually a qualified accountant. So let's talk about numbers now. So what is the opportunity cost of not landing the new job for another X number of months? Probably a lot. So, if you're unable to pass an interview, you are nowhere closer to landing the job offer and the job offer may mean thousands more in your overall compensation package, right? So, if you're able to pass the interview and get closer to the job offer in two months versus in 12 months, then it's an additional 10 months that you could be making

a few thousand more every month. And therefore, the overall opportunity cost may be worth like 20 or 30k. Maybe. And you're only paying a coach a fraction of that number. So just think about it from a very pure numbers perspective. And I can be very numbers driven if need to be because obviously I'm an accountant also but I think the point here is that I want you to remember that there is an opportunity cost to everything and time is also money and I'll share with you some

examples here of clients that I've worked with on job search and most of the time when clients come to me for job search they are somewhat in two categories. They either cannot get interviews or they cannot get job offers. Separate problems. One group, they can't get interviews. Second group, they cannot get the job offers. But the major blocking point that they notice is most of the time is around interviews. And I have had clients and these are like pretty extreme stories, and if you want to learn more, you can just go to my YouTube, where I have playlists of client success stories.

I have had clients who applied for 800 jobs, 10 interviews, zero job offers. And working with me, within a few months, he managed to get an elevated role in the industry that he wanted, getting paid his value. And I also had another client

who for eight months tried to find a job. She believed that she was very good, but she couldn't understand why she couldn't pass interviews. So she got a lot fewer interview invitations than she thought because she had a good profile, but she didn't understand why nobody wanted to call her. And the other part is that she also didn't understand why she was unable to get the job offer and really unable to progress.

So we worked together for a couple of sessions. And usually for job search, I have a separate program for that. And she managed to move to one of her top marketing agencies of her choice. And she's there right now doing really well. And aside from that, I also used to have, I also actually have clients who didn't understand what career coaching is, didn't understand what interview coaching, didn't understand what salary negotiation,

and actually told me directly saying that, hey, Mei Ping, I just wanted to give this thing a try because i'm so new i don't know what i'm supposed to expect and um i want to give it a try because i've really spent hours on youtube i can't find the answer i spent hours on tiktok i can't find the answer now that is because there are probably two reasons right first the the the tips or the advice are too generic. And number two, the people who are teaching it don't know what they're talking about. So I think at the end of the day, if an expert truly believes in their value and their ability to help you move forward, I think that the person deserves the charge and really it's up to you whether you are willing to invest or not

just like how you guys go outside and buy a bag or like buy a car or buy shoes buy watches and so that is also an investment at the end of the day like you choose what you invest in and what is really the most valuable to you but like i said um there is an opportunity cost and if you choose to figure it out on your own what you are going to waste is time energy and maybe money as well because there's an opportunity cost of actually not making that money back or not making that money as fast as you can versus something or work either on a program or getting the right advice to help you avoid mistakes and be able to move forward faster. So at the end of the day, the choice is yours, but never forget that you get what you pay or not pay for. And, you know, if you're looking at someone who is moving faster in their career, moving more ahead, getting more opportunities, they may be investing in themselves that you may not know of.

And I can tell you this for sure because I work with a lot of clients working in the 9-5 world. And I can tell you that private and confidential is like one of the biggest virtues. And a lot of my clients who work with me directly, normally they don't really want to let people know that they are upskilling and they are getting advice. And the reason is because they want to present their reputation

as intact as possible. And I completely understand that because I used to work in 905, I used to work in leadership positions and I completely understand how branding yourself correctly, having that professional reputation really matters.

So I tell my clients like, that's fine. We just focus on helping you advance along the career ladder and that's really the most important thing. So that's a bit of a long story and I just also want to share with you guys some free slash paid resources depending on where you are in your career. So if you are looking for free resources, you can always check out my free training at www.growyourcorporatecareer.com. So for those of you who want a more step-by-step framework on how to look for a job starting from career clarity resume review um resumes linkedin job search interviews as well as improving your job skills and career growth strategy you can definitely check out the free training how to plan and grow your career in six steps where i walk you i walk through if you step by step so that you know what not to do and also what to do in the right sequence to improve your

chances for success. And for those of you who want to deep dive a little bit more, I do have an online course, The Corporate Survivor at www.thecorporatesurvivor.co where we will be focusing on helping you get confident and visible at your 9 to 5 job in nine to five job in 90 days so this is the one where i talked about where a lot of my students are working in the corporate world and a lot of them choose to join because they want to learn more about the corporate mindset how to navigate their career in the corporate world and continue to rise up the career ladder so paid resource and there's also the free resource and And of course, if you want to get more free tips, you can always check out the free content, the free advice on my YouTube

channels. I also have a blog. Newsletter is an ongoing process. And of course, you can choose to follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, and maybe join some of these live streams that I am doing right now. So tons of free resources if you need to. But as I said, you know, if you are someone who is ready for the next level of knowledge, next level of insights,

then definitely invite you to check out my course and one-on-one coaching. And this is something that a lot of 9-to-5 professionals in the corporate world sign up for. Otherwise, if you are really, really new in your career journey, then feel free to check out tons of free content. And at the end of the day, it's really, really helpful to know

that there are two options available. But I will say that 99% of people, maybe 99.9% of people will go for free. So if you check out free content, just like 99.9% of people will go for free. So if you check out free content, just like 99.9% of people working in the corporate world, then that kind of shapes your mindset and probably, you know, what they learn, you learn and, you know, competitive advantage. I leave you to think about it. But if you are ready to sort of take the next step, then it's also up to you as to how much you are really willing to grow your career. You're really ready to boost your own confidence as you move up your

career journey. And this career journey is not one year, three years or five years. You're talking about value that you are going to get 10, 20, if not 30 years, depending on where you are in your career. And for my course, it's lifetime access. So basically, you get it as long as the course exists, as long as there are new students who will be joining the program, the program will be available for you. So that's that. I hope that you got some really good value from today's chat. And I hope that you make the right choice for your career for the long term.

And that may sometimes include investments or rather what you define as investments and really understanding the difference between free versus paid. So till then, I wish you all the best in your career and see you in tomorrow's live stream. Bye!