Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep19: Talk less and listen MORE.

Episode Date: April 5, 2020

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

Welcome to the Corporate Survivor Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your career confidence, build your skills and value, increase your salary, and the many lessons we learn in the corporate world. For more career support, click on over to www.mayping.com. This is Mayping, your corporate leader turned career coach. I hope you enjoy, like and subscribe. In today's podcast, I want to talk about why as an extrovert, you should stop talking and start listening. Welcome to my five-day, five-part Extroverts Connect series.

And in these five days, I will be talking about little aspects of the extrovert personality type. And if you're an extrovert, welcome. And if you are someone who is learning how to deal with an extrovert, also welcome. All right, so let's get right back to it. So why do I say extroverts should stop talking and start listening? The fundamental is this. As an extrovert, you tend to think when you speak, or rather you speak before you think. So there is a lot of vulnerability in there because things will just, you know, you just blurt out something.

Or sometimes I use the word, word vomit from an extrovert. And this is something that's quite the default. And a lot of extroverts do behave like this. So when I was in the corporate world for quite some time, and I was in various leadership positions, I have worked with people from all sorts of different personalities. Extroverts, quite a number of them, because in the banking world, there are lots of relationship managers. And I think we all tend to attract people who are quite willing to kind of go out there and really focus on clients.

So some of the drawbacks I see from really talking nonstop is really the lack of listening skills. So if you've been following my podcast, I did a top 10 soft skills series where I talked about the power of listening. So if you've missed that one out, do go and check it out. So listening allows you to really understand at the deeper level what the other person is all about. So active listening is a skill that can be developed and it covers being attentive, asking open questions, paraphrasing, focusing on the non-verbal communication, as well as summarizing. The thing about extroverts is that their listening skills most of the time are not very well developed because they are very easily distracted. So their mind is not very focused,

they are very easily stimulated. So if you're an extrovert, do let me know if this is true. This is something that I've observed in the people that I've worked with. And interestingly, I think that extroverts also want to take action very quickly, just because they are very easily stimulated. So sometimes, you know, when you listen, you're not really listening to understand, but you are listening to react and you find yourself catching on to very specific words and maybe sometimes drawing your own conclusion on that, which may or may not be correct.

So this habit of making assumptions and jumping into conclusions is something that I see a lot as well. And that's definitely something that you might want to take note of. And I think that when you talk non-stop, are you really giving the other person a chance to communicate with you? Because it's a two-way street. And what if you have just spent your time listening? What other knowledge and insights could you have gotten?

Just by paying a bit more attention and spending a bit more time listening to, maybe it's your peer, colleague, your boss, your manager, your client, your vendor, your collaborator. So really think about it. How has that worked out? Did it help? How did you feel? Did you enjoy it? Are you going to do more of it? I think extroverts are very, very fun personalities and I have a lot of extrovert friends. But working with people who has a different personality trait from you can be quite challenging.

So it's very important to understand where they're coming from. And some of my extroverted clients have also told me that they find it quite difficult to build genuine relationships with people. And here's why. Because you're not spending your time listening. You're spending your time responding or thinking of what you want to respond. And sometimes, inevitably, you end up giving advice or jumping into conclusion and deciding for someone else. And worse still, you end up dominating the conversation and the other person doesn't feel heard.

So listening, while sounds very easy, but it takes a lot of self-awareness and it takes a lot of effort to be attentive, especially when you're not used to it. To make an effort to say, okay, pause, it's not about me now. It's not the me, me, me show, it's your show. So tell me what I need to know, tell me what information that that might be helpful, tell me your insights, tell me your perspectives. So listening, listening is a powerful, powerful skill that can propel you forward in your career. I've also seen various extroverts who always, it's great, right? I mean, as extroverts, you volunteer and you want to do things and you always want to move things forward, which is great, but be careful.

Because I've also seen cases where you volunteer for something and bitten off more than what you could chew. And some of it was because when an idea was being presented, as the next rover, you get very excited. So you put up your hand and say, you know what, I can do this,

I have the experience, I have the da-da-da-da-da-da. Perfect, great. But if you had hand and say, you know what, I can do this, I have the experience, I have the da-da-da-da-da. Perfect, great. But if you had paused and listened, listened deeper, asked clarifying questions, making sure you got it perfectly, you might realize that for some of these opportunities that you have volunteered for,

may not really be the right thing for you. It's not always the case, but it could be. It could be. So that's something to take note of. So now I want you to ask yourself, when you are in conversations with people, who is doing all the talking and who is doing the listening? If you can kind of quantify that to a percentage,

would you say that you were talking 90% of the time? Was it 80? 70? 50-50? It's a real valid question, right? Because at the end of the day, in our professional career or even in business, if you're an entrepreneur, it's about getting along with people, connecting with them at a

deeper level and creating win-win relationships. So relationships are also a two-way street. Same like how communication is a two-way street. And if you find yourself, you're the only person talking, then is that a relationship or is that a monologue? So that's food for thought. So how are you going to work on improving your listening skills. If you even recognize that that's something that you need to do. And if this is the first time you are thinking about it, then I highly suggest you spend some time resonating with some of the messages, deep dive and ask yourself, is this really important? And how can this really help you in your career?

Because I can promise you that it will pay off massive dividends. But the first step, like I said, the first step in many things is that self-awareness. It's doing an audit on the way you communicate with people now in terms of like the percentage of you talking and versus you listening and what insights that you can get from this little habit that you have and how severe it is so you know how much development that you need to do and how then you can incorporate some of the

practices into your daily lives so that you can improve on this listening skill that will pay off massive rewards down the line. And sometimes you might even see that the result is immediate in terms of the way how the people around you react to you, the way they somehow immediately get you that you might not have gotten the sort of like authentic feel authentic authentic relationship from before so i highly encourage you to try it out and do stay tuned for the rest of my podcast episodes on the extroverts connect series till then bye