Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep213: My "one word" career strategy.

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 the last 30 days, what have you done to demonstrate confidence in yourself and in your skills? It's not about, if I say I'm confident, I'm confident. The actions also need to align so that you don't feel the disconnect.

Starting point is 00:00:42 It's like some people, right, they will say, I focus on personal growth. But at the same time, everything that they talk about is like, cannot, cannot, oh, I'm scared, I'm scared. It's not about just what you say, right? What are you acting and doing, right? Action over words. A lot of people look at my career and they think that, maybe you climb the career ladder, it seems so easy and you could easily move from the professional services to banking and you move from a small company to a big company. But actually what they don't see and if i actually were to think back about my entire career journey i think the word that i always focus on is courage is courage so let me share some examples with you i'm not

Starting point is 00:01:17 sure if i shared any of these stories before now when i um when i graduated right i worked in a very small company and i think i was only paid like 300 US dollars for one month. So I worked in a very small company in 2008. And when the economy improved in 2010, I actually applied for multiple companies. And one of the companies I applied for was in Singapore. And during that time, I actually already got the job offer in KL. And literally, I was like two days away from signing the job offer in KL. However, during the two days, I actually got an interview request from Singapore,

Starting point is 00:01:55 who basically, I got a call and they said, hey, do you want to come for the interview? Can you come tomorrow? So at that time, I have not been to Singapore before. I was in Penang, Malaysia, and I've also never traveled alone. I've never traveled in a plane alone before. I have no idea, right? Like the Singapore CBD area and like where's Raffles Place, I have like no idea. But when I got the call, right, they said, hey, do you want to come for interview tomorrow? It's going to be at like two o'clock. And it was like the day before in the morning.

Starting point is 00:02:30 So I decided that I'm just going to go. Even though I didn't have a plan and anything else, but the thing that I actually had in my mind was more like, it's like the 10 seconds of courage. Like if I have the opportunity already and what's stopping me is all this overthinking, right? Then will I regret the opportunity because I didn't try. is all this overthinking, right? Then will I regret that opportunity because I didn't try? Not because I wasn't good enough to get in,

Starting point is 00:02:48 but I didn't get it because I didn't try. Like when I thought about it, I'm like, this is stupid, right? We should, I should just do it. So I booked the flight and literally the next day, I flew to Singapore, I did the interview

Starting point is 00:02:59 and obviously I got the job. So this is a demonstration of, it's not the talk, it's about how do you feel and can you actually take action based on that? Then after that, when I joined this company, I had to start as a fresh graduate,

Starting point is 00:03:14 which is very irritating given that I've already worked for about a year already. And I started as a fresh graduate, but I had to serve like 18 months before the next promotion cycle. But everyone else would come in, right? They only need to work for nine months. So obviously it was a bit annoying.

Starting point is 00:03:29 So for the first few months, I felt a lot of negative talk. It's like, hey, actually I have more experience. How come, you know, I need to be working more months? How can I need to start from the ground level? Blah, blah, blah. So it's like, there's a lot of like negative stuff. But later, I sort of like looked at the situation so the one word i chose was actually competence and when i chose the one word i decided

Starting point is 00:03:53 that you know what actually the fact that i've already worked before and i've been here longer it actually makes me more competent compared to the other people around me. So of course, I can't change my situation. I can't change how the company promotes people and the cycle and stuff like that, but I can change the focus and how I see my situation. So the word that I chose at that time was competence. So I started focusing on doing better and communicating better with the managers, the team leaders, and and so forth so that year and the subsequent years i was in ernst and young i was the top performer it wasn't because you know the fact that i was there longer because obviously if you've been at a certain place for a very long

Starting point is 00:04:35 time it's very easy to be very unhappy but i think it was that like mindset reset and that one word that made me that also reminds me that like yeah i'm not i'm not bad because i didn't get promoted it's just a cycle that i cannot change but at the same time i'm working on my competence and it's my competence that makes the difference between me and everyone else in my batch which is like i think there were like 30 35 people at that time try my career as well so it's always picking that one word but actually committing to it for maybe three months or maybe up to a year, if that's really what you focus on. And to me, that's something that helped me because sometimes when we think about mindset reset, it's like, whoa, I need to come up with all this motivational stuff,

Starting point is 00:05:18 or you find yourself binging on a lot of motivational videos videos or like content, I actually think it's very confusing because once you depend on motivational videos, right? Like how I see it's more like, if you depend on those, right? It kind of like, it's like an addiction. You need to go and watch the motivational video and then you feel, oh, okay, I feel better. But you're not really feeling better because you haven't done anything about it yet, okay?

Starting point is 00:05:44 So I think that one word, like actually choosing that one word is really, really important. So whatever the one word that you have willingly shared in the chat box, or maybe you have just written it down on your notebook. I hope that you use it as like your motto in the next three months and in the next 12 months as well. And I think this is something definitely we'll do a bit of a follow-up in our monthly mentoring course, because I think three months and in the next 12 months as well. And I think this is something definitely we'll do a bit of a follow-up in our monthly mentoring course, because I think three months is usually enough time to actually see the change and to see the fruits of the effort that you put in.

Starting point is 00:06:13 Because the day that you do the thing, it's not the day that you get the results, right? Especially with like skills development and like corporate workplace, usually the one word really helps. Now, it's not so much about telling everyone what you want, but it's about, are you focusing on getting what you want and actually seeing that progress,

Starting point is 00:06:33 whether it's like growing in terms of like your courage or confidence or like competence or self-belief, every step along the way, you should be feeling better now as compared to when you first joined the program or as compared to the like 12 months ago, like three years ago. We should be always be in a much better place now than before.

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep213: My "one word" career strategy.

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