Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep146: My biggest limiting belief.

Episode Date: July 16, 2022

✅ Get FREE GUIDE, newsletter, join career program 👉 http://www.meiphing.com ✅ Corporate Survivor™ is the ultimate career course for 9-to-5 working professionals, just like *you*, who want to enhance corporate world mindset, skillset and strategy so you can NAVIGATE + GROW your career with clarity, confidence & opportunities... 🚀 ⚡ 📌 ABOUT THIS PODCAST: Welcome to Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing — ex-Corporate Leader turned Career Coach & Founder of The Corporate Survivor™. On this podcast, Mei Phing shares her corporate world insights, experiences and wisdom so you can grow your 9-5 career with clarity, confidence and opportunities. ✅ WEBSITE ⮕ https://www.meiphing.com ✅ FREE GUIDE ⮕ https://www.thecorporatesurvivor.co/freeguide ✅ NEWSLETTER ⮕ https://www.thecorporatesurvivor.co/mondays ✅ CAREER COURSE ⮕ https://www.thecorporatesurvivor.co ⚡

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. Imagine if you went out with your friends, your colleagues or your family members and you saying, hey, I think my career has been really easy so far. Work is really easy.

Everything is smooth sailing. Everything is great. Now, what do you think your friends, your colleagues or your peers might say when you tell them that you think that your career has been easy? Now, I bet the likely reaction that you will get from them is one that's of confusion, one that is more of a question mark, one that may not necessarily believe in what you're saying, or even worse, and to the end of the extreme, you may be faced with a reaction of pure defensiveness and telling you that, hey, you know, work is really difficult, like you should not be dreaming, that work is easy, and if work is really easy for you, that means that you're doing something wrong. Now, why would you get such a reaction from maybe

9 out of 10 people that you meet is because of this huge limiting belief that a lot of nine to five professionals have, which is to be successful in your career, it's difficult. You have to work very, very, very, very hard. The path towards career success, the path towards climbing up the corporate ladder is one that is filled with obstacles, is one that is filled with a lot of struggles, that is one that is filled with a lot of drama. This is unfortunately a huge limiting belief that a lot of people have and when I say a lot of people, it's not just the juniors, it could be even up to director level or even general managers for the clients that I work with. I hear this a lot and the reason why I wanted to talk about it in today's

episode is because honestly, this is also one of my biggest limiting beliefs earlier on in my career. Now, when I first started in my career, as like maybe many of you, and if you were to reminisce in the first early days of your career, coming out and really facing the reality of the corporate world, facing the reality of the working world, maybe you might be excited for six months just like me. But after the six-month mark, it kind of slowly dawned onto me that, oh, okay, everything is going to be difficult. It's a struggle to communicate with people. It's a struggle to work with stakeholders. It's a struggle to get work done. It's a struggle to complete work on time. It's going to take a lot,

a lot, a lot of hard work and things will never be easy. Things will always be difficult. It will always be a struggle. It will always be difficult. It will always be a struggle. It will always be painful. Basically, what you're hearing and basically what I was telling myself at the time is a lot of negative words, a lot of negative words. And what I gradually realized over the years is this judgment that I have labeled to my entire workday, the company, the industry, whatever I was doing, my entire career was something that based on one, maybe one or two small instances and with the panic mindset,

with the judgment mindset that I was in and maybe you're in right now, jumping into that huge conclusion that, you know, in order for anything to work out, it's always going to be a difficult path. It's always going to be a challenging path. And there are many things that are not possible. Now, one of the worst things ever is, like I said, if you talk to 9 out of 10 people, most people will say that their career, they're stuck, they're lost, they're confused, they're stressed out, they're overwhelmed. And therefore, what I realized is that when I spoke to a lot of my friends, a lot of my peers and my colleagues, it almost felt like the negativity and the limiting beliefs and the fears are almost validated because when you talk to someone else and basically that was what I experienced at the time talking to other people

and them saying that oh yes exactly it's painful it's just difficult you just need to like deal with this and blah blah blah so what I gradually noticed and it's not like an overnight sort of thing, but I will say that there was that one conversation that I spoke to my mentor about four to five years into my working career, or rather, yeah, my working career. And let me tell you what my mentor told me. So for context, this mentor I had personally worked with in one of the biggest companies in the world. And after I left the role, we still kept in touch.

And he's someone that I truly, truly admire. And I remember this one conversation that we had where I was telling him that everything is so difficult. Things are not working out. There are a lot of problems. And basically, the whole frustration talk that I used to tell my friends, and I'm sure that you can probably resonate as well. Now, there's this one thing that my mentor told me, and that has, I remember it till today, and it has also shaped a lot of the decisions that I've made

since that conversation with him. And he said that you are enabling that limiting belief, you are enabling that limiting belief, you are enabling that situation and not actually stepping out of it, looking at it and fixing it. So why he said that was because I was pretty much complaining about how everybody is being difficult,

people don't understand that I have very tight deadlines, this and that, everything's so difficult. Like I said, right, all the negative keywords that you can think of, you know, it's difficult, it's stuck, people are not cooperating, it's so frustrating, I'm really annoyed, I'm irritated, I'm da-da-da-da-da-da,

none of which are positive. So the realization he gave me was that, like, okay, if you are going to talk to other people who also have this limiting belief that everything's going to be difficult, then like, how are you going to get out of it? So I thought about it and I'm like, huh, okay. It's a new perspective. I've never actually sort of like thought about it that way, but made a lot of sense to me. And the other part of what he said was around me enabling that. Me enabling that because instead of taking actions on how I can better collaborate with my clients, my stakeholders,

my bosses, my colleagues, and so forth, instead of actually taking tangible actions, first it's like actually calming down and taking tangible actions to work together, I let this limiting belief that I had, which is everything's going to be difficult. So basically, as small situations come up, I automatically label it as, oh yeah, it's going to be difficult.

That makes sense. That is how it's supposed to be. Accepting that this bad situation is how it's supposed to be. And I think that stopped me for a long time to find solutions or you know take tangible steps and take tangible actions that allow me to move forward so that was something that I I'm very thankful to my mentor up to today because after having that conversation I think gave me a lot of perspective as to like, oh, okay. So just because everybody else is complaining that things are difficult

and for me to say that, hey, actually things can be easier and to receive that sort of judgment, it's okay. Because at the end of the day, I am in my own career. I'm in charge of my own career. I take charge of my own work habits, I do certain things a certain way at work, I have my own methods, I have my own habits, and whether someone else agrees with it or not,

like friends, peers, colleagues, and so forth, that is their experience, but I don't necessarily need to take on their experiences and accepting it as my own. So if someone's struggling in their career, I shouldn't feel like, oh, if this person is struggling, that means that automatically it's probably going to be a big problem for me as well.

In fact, what I should do instead, and thankfully something that I've been doing after that conversation with my mentor is, okay, this person is experiencing whatever the situation is. There are a lot of negative emotions that are related to it, but what has that got to do with me? And more importantly, how can I learn from this person's experiences? What can I learn from this person's situation? And how can I also make sure that I don't immediately tell myself no, just because somebody has had a negative experience? Maybe

somebody else didn't apply the right methods, or maybe somebody else did certain things a different way. It doesn't necessarily mean that I will also face a similar difficulty. But then again, if I decide to step out of it, not accept that things have to be difficult, and instead look at the flip side, looking at it on the other side and say, hey, how can things be easy? How can I make things easier? How can I get better?

How can I become more efficient? How can I be more effective? How can I deliver high quality work with less time? How can I stop working on weekends? How can I get better recognition on my hard work from my managers, from my team members, from my clients. How, how, how, how, how? Asking the how question was how I managed to move out of instantly labeling something that's going to be painful, something's going to be difficult, moving away from that sort of like negative stuck trap mindset to be able to move to a more positive point of view, to a more positive perspective and say, hey, how can I make things better? How can I achieve that work-life balance that I want? How can I still achieve top results, getting results at work with less stress, less time, less overwhelm, less confusion? How can

I do that? And I think these are really, really great questions that I started tackling one by one and I also noticed that once I shifted my perspective, I really moved away from just talking about my negative feelings because guess what? It's not helping me. It's not going to help my career. It's not going to help my work every single day. Instead of, you know, making myself feel miserable, I found it a lot more productive to actually just focus on how can I get better and how can I gradually achieve an easy career? It may sound very counterintuitive, but I think that's truly what propelled me to be a bit more creative and really learning the methods to help me make my work life more content, make my work life more satisfactory,

make my work life a lot more seamless as well. And I think that was the philosophy that I took on wholeheartedly, took on wholeheartedly. And as I continue to climb the career ladder, as I continue to emerge as top performer every single year. But the good news is that even though I continue to get amazing results at my job, but seriously, over the years, I just feel like everything is easy. It's easy because I want it and I'm committed to make things easy. And I've stopped listening to those negative words, those negative things, either it's from my subconscious or it's from

the people around me. So me taking charge and me deciding that no, I'm not accepting that. And now I really want to focus on how I can get better, how I can do better, and how I can make things easy for my career. So that's truly how I managed to overcome a lot of that. And up to today, a lot of students in my program, The Corporate Survivor, I'm also teaching the similar methods and frameworks to help them make their career easy,

make navigating the 905 corporate world seamless, and so that they can really enjoy less stress, overwhelm, confusion, feeling lost, and truly feel satisfied in their career. I think that's really, really important as well. So thank you so much for listening to this podcast episode. And if you enjoyed this episode, make sure that you drop a like, subscribe, leave a rating, share it with a friend, because this is truly how podcasts grows. And I hope that this perspective shift, this perspective transition is something that can help you and can also help

a friend that you choose to share it with. So tell me what is the one mindset block, the one huge limiting belief that you currently have about your career. Drop me a DM on LinkedIn or Instagram at mayping.co and let me know. So till then, I will see you in the next episode next week. All the best in your career.