Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep210: How to fix your work anxiety.

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

✅ Watch FREE WORKSHOP, newsletter, work with me ⮕ 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. Your mindset is not the problem. If you're feeling anxious, stressed out, frustrated, overwhelmed at your job right now, and you think that your mindset is the problem, I'm telling you right now,

your mindset is not the problem. Now, the reason we need to have this conversation today is because I receive so many messages from very hardworking people working in 9-5 jobs, extremely ambitious, extremely excited when they start the first job. But all this quickly come crashing down because they think that, oh, maybe I need a better mindset because right now, everything is very chaotic. I feel very lost. I feel very confused. My boss is like looking for me all the time. I can't handle all these stakeholders. My workload is just adding on and on and on and on and on. So, Mayping, can you give me a better mindset? No, no, no, no. You need to pause right

now because I'm telling you that the mindset is not really the problem. Now, the fact that you're listening to me in the Corporate Survivor Podcast means that you have a very good career mindset, right? Because not everybody is willing to spend time to learn all things about the corporate world, to listen to me, right? Someone who has actually been in the corporate world before,

ex-hiring manager, ex-head of department. Not everybody is really willing to do that. So the fact that you're here tells me that you really have a good career mindset. Now, what you are actually missing

is not the mindset stuff. It's not the motivational stuff. It's not the rah-rah-rah stuff. Now, what you are needing right now is clarity, focus, and a better work structure. Now, let me explain. Now, these three things are so, so, so, so, so important. Otherwise, whatever that you're going to be doing, whatever hard work that you're going to put in, it's just going to go nowhere, right? Let's talk about the first thing. Now, motivation, mindset is not going to fix lack of clarity. Now, imagine walking back into your office, right? Imagine going to work every single week and no matter how pumped up you feel, right? Looking at Instagram posts, looking at all these motivational content, reading all these mindset stuff. The moment you step into your

office, the moment you open up your laptop, you stare back at your work, right? That mindset positive, mindset thing will go out of your mind immediately because you are still faced with unclear job scope. You are still faced with things that you don't really know what to do. You're looking at the task list, a list of responsibilities and thinking to yourself, what am I going to do? How do I start? And I think my boss is going to come and look for me again. And what am I going to tell my boss, right? All these feelings, all these thoughts are not going to be resolved with a better mindset, right? What you need is actually clarity, meaning knowing exactly what are your roles and responsibilities. What does your boss expect of you? What is the step-by-step task? What do you need to focus on first? Now that all is around job clarity, getting clear on your roles

and responsibilities, aligning expectation, then managing expectation, then meeting expectation. Now, all this is a step-by-step process, right? And you can't start if you don't know what the goal is, right? You can't do well at your job if you're not even clear what the job actually is. So the hard way is definitely not going to help. The mindset every single day is not going to help as well. So job clarity is the first part. As I said, right, once you have clarity on actually what you're supposed to be doing, so you can direct your energy in the right place, that allows you to tackle the second part. As I said, right, once you have clarity on actually what you're supposed to be doing, so you can direct your energy in the right place, that allows you to tackle the second part. And that's really all about focus because you can put in 40 hours a week.

And maybe for you, you're doing 50 hours a week, 60 hours, 70, even, you know, to the point of like crazy 80 hours. But is that time going somewhere? Are you being effective? Are you being efficient, right? Meaning that the time that you're investing, which is clearly sacrificing your personal time, you know, sacrificing your work-life balance,

is eating into your weekends, is eating into your family time. Is it actually worthwhile? And it can only be worthwhile if you're kind of focusing on the right thing. Because if you're focusing on the wrong thing, then spending 50 hours on something that doesn't really get you closer

to the performance goal or doesn't allow you to complete your responsibility or deliver your deliverables faster and the right way, it's not going to help as well. So having the right focus is definitely the second thing because I can see and I know, right, from all the conversations that I have on my social media, my community, even clients in my career program,

when they first join, they always tell me that, I don't really know what to focus on. Everything is just overwhelming. And what I tell them is more like, okay, you need to pause and you need to go through step-by-step. The three-step framework, that's why in step one, it's all about clarity. It's about knowing what the job is so that you can focus and step-by-step and not rushing it, not expecting that more hours is going to fix it. I'm telling you right now, it's not going to fix. So what we need to focus on is, okay, what are the key priorities that I need to focus on is, okay, what are the

key priorities that I need to deliver this week, this month, this quarter, this year? And what does my boss expect? So you need to really start from that point. Once you have job clarity, once you have focus, then the next thing you need, and this is something I think a lot of people forget, is better work structure. It's not just working hard, it's better work structure. Meaning, do you have a step-by-step process to deal with a specific situation? Or are you just dropping everything the moment your boss calls you, the moment a client calls you, the moment a stakeholder calls you, you forget everything and then you'll be like, okay, let me rush to this one first. Let me deal with this email first. If you're operating in this sort of like chaotic environment, you are kind of creating that chaos. You are creating that snowball of chaos that is not going to go away.

The reason is because it's not because you're not hardworking. It's not because you have the bad mindset or anything. It is just the fact that you don't have a good work structure, meaning you don't know what to focus on first. You're not clear on what exactly is the big thing. And therefore, you don't know the actual steps, right? You want to do everything at the same time, which I can tell you is a very bad strategy.

Trust me, I've tried it at the beginning of my career. It didn't end up well. Work structure is all about knowing the key goals, key priorities, and making sure you can break it down into step-by-step so that every time something comes in, you know exactly how to tackle it. Not each time,

well, this is a new thing. Let me go and rush. Let me go and rush, rush, rush, rush, rush. Now, that is not going to get you anywhere. The analogy I like to tell my clients and community is that imagine yourself driving a sports car you are the sports car right but if you drive in the wrong direction no matter how fast you speed but you're kind of getting to the wrong destination if you even get there in the first place right we don't want to do that we want to make sure that

we pinpoint specifically the gps the destination we know exactly where we are going which is basically your key performance goes at aligning it with your boss. Then you have clear job clarity. You can fully focus your time, energy, hours. Even if you're going to work late, you're going to sacrifice a little bit of your personal time to grow a career. You are at least sure that you are moving the needle. You are actually progressing forward, not putting more hours and not progressing. And finally, work structure is going to help you maintain that peace of mind, the feeling of in control and to not go crazy. Imagine what it's like to go into your office every single day and maybe for you it's five days a week, six days, or maybe some of you seven days a week to not know where to start.

That is not a good feeling. And this was what I felt at the beginning of my career. And now for the rest of my career, right, the past 10 years in corporate, that's never really popped up again because I've already dealt with it. I know what to do. I'm very structured. I'm very organized and I can focus. So the goal is not just about getting more mindset stuff because yes, mindset is important. Now, I just want to be very clear here. I'm not saying mindset is not important, but mindset is that first 10%. But guess what is the 90%? The 90% is having structure, having clarity, having focus, having the right corporate skills to deliver performance goals. It's to have the right people skills to make sure you can handle any stakeholder, whether it's your boss, your senior, your client, your juniors, your interns,

whoever else. You can work with anybody and everybody. And you have a clear structured way so that you don't feel confused. You don't feel nervous. You don't feel anxious. You always know that, okay, when this thing comes, I'm going to follow Mayping's three-step framework, get clear, get confident, get visible, starting with particularly phase one, which is get clear on the corporate world, all about corporate culture, corporate mindset, understanding the core corporate world structure, step-by-step, all those things are really, really, really important. I hope that this episode gives you a fresh perspective, a new perspective, or maybe a different perspective to think about your career struggles. And if you feel lost, confused, overwhelmed, frustrated, stressed out, don't give up. Okay. It's not your mindset.

Actually, the good news is that it's a skill set. You have a skills gap, which is a good thing because skills can be improved. Skills can be developed and you can get better at it. And I think that is really the silver lining. That is the good news. Regardless of like whatever crazy situation and chaotic situation you find yourself in, there is a way out because I figured it out and this is why currently in my career program, I teach just step by step.

In my three-step career growth framework, get clear, get confident, get visible. I teach that in mentoring sessions, we actually break down practical real-life career challenges to get to the root cause issue and knowing that, okay, this is how I'm going to solve this problem. This is exactly the problem I'm trying to solve. I have clarity, I have focus,

I have structure, and I can deal with any situation that comes my way. So finally, the formula, right? If there's like one thing you take away from this episode, it's 10% mindset, 90% skill set and action. I repeat that, 10% mindset and 90% action and skill set. Now, the mindset 10% starts at the beginning and the fact that you're listening to this podcast, you're following me on social media,

you're following so many other people and learning, getting all this mindset stuff, I think you're already fine. What you need to focus on is the other 90%. Understanding the corporate world,

how to navigate the corporate world, more job clarity, more focus, more structure. That's what you need. So if I've managed to convince you

that mindset is not everything, then make sure that you drop a comment if you're watching on YouTube and make sure that you subscribe if you are listening on any podcasting platforms. Second thing, if you want to learn, this step-by-step has helped me gain confidence and competence in my career. You can download my five-day career growth guide at www.mapin.com. And for those of you who are super serious and you're like, I am done with all the mess. I just want to learn the step-by-step. Give me the structure right now.

Maybe I want to learn the exact structure from you. Then you can join my career program, The Corporate Survivor, again at www.mapin.com. So if you have any questions, you want to know

if the program works for you, drop me a message on LinkedIn or Instagram. So with that, I'll see you in the next episode. Bye.