Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep218: I quit my 9-5 job (Update 5 years later...)

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

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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. I quit my 9-5 corporate job 5 years ago in June 2019. So the real question is, do I regret that decision? Well, to be honest, the answer is no.

And in this episode, I'm going to give you pretty much a life and career update of what I've been up to in the past five years. And it's just crazy talking about the past five years because it feels like time flies. But I also feel like time moves very slowly at the same time. It's a very weird feeling. It's very difficult for me to explain. And I'm just going to try my best in this episode. And maybe this episode is going to be a little bit different from what you would normally expect

from the Corporate Survivor Podcast, where we talk about all things corporate world. But I think it's so, so important for me to share this part of my journey because if I had not quit my corporate job, my career in the corporate world, I don't think we will be having this kind of conversations in the podcast every week.

I would not have the kind of like community that I have on social media and all my students in the Corporate Survivor course and everything else. So this is going to be a trip down memory lane. And hopefully there are some lessons that you can take away, whether it's career lessons,

it's life lessons or something, nuggets that you can take away from my life story, my career decisions, you know, my life decisions, I hope that you're able to do that. So back to what I was saying earlier, you know, do I regret that decision? 100% no. I still think that quitting my 9-5 job was the best decision I made in June 2019. The reason is because it gave me a very important 13 months to actually spend with my mom who was terminally ill with cancer. So she has since passed away in July 2020. And

it's already four years since she has left us. And I actually wanted to record this episode last week, but I couldn't do that because I felt very emotional I felt like I wanted to talk about it but at the same time I didn't feel like talking about it anyway again you know it's a very very weird feeling but to the point of okay you know it's it's really been four years since you know my mom left us in July 2020 and you know I actually had a conversation with my partner just that one day before. And he said that, hey, has it already been three years? And I said, no, actually, it's been four years. And that's why at the start, I said that, you know, I feel like time flies, but I also feel like time moves very, very, very slowly at the same time, because here's what I've actually been up to in the past five years. So in July 29, in June, 2019, I quit my corporate job.

After more than 10 years in the corporate world, I had a pretty high flying career. I was promoted every year. So everything was kind of hunky dory and stuff like that. So once I got the news, I quit because I knew that, okay, this is going to be important time. I need to make sure that I go back, you know, be a caregiver and really focus on family for doing the, you know,

basically for this time of my life. So that's kind of like what I did in 2019. I went back home. I moved back from Singapore to Malaysia, to my hometown of Penang, spent time with my mom, spent time with my family. Then in 2020, right, that's kind of like six months after I've quit my job. Then I started getting messages from people on LinkedIn, you know, my ex-colleagues, my friends asking me, you know, maybe what have you been up to? You know, can you kind of like give me some advice on my career and stuff like that? So I started doing a little bit of that in early 2020. And in fact, in February 2020, that also inspired me to create this Corpor survival podcast that you are listening to today

so this was also almost you know probably four to five years and because during that time as a caregiver and i don't know if you have that kind of experience but you know being a caregiver right you need to be really strong you need to be always very positive and very optimistic and really calm you be calm and really manage your emotions because you don't want you know the sick family member to sense that you are you're anxious you know you're worried you're stressed out because that's going to stress them out even more and that's kind of how i feel because i feel like i need to be very strong however there's also the other part of me that feels like I need to release,

you know, whether it's my energy, my thoughts, and basically I feel I need a release. And maybe that's something that's like not the most inspiring thing to say, but the Corporate Survivor Podcast started in February 2020 because I felt that I need to let go somewhere. And that somewhere was the Corporate Survivor Podcast. It's basically me, right, me being talking to myself. That was basically what my friend told me. He said, oh, maybe you're recording a podcast.

Like, what's that? That's the first thing she asked me. The second thing is like, oh, so that's like you talking to yourself. So it's kind of funny thinking back because during that time, you know, podcast is not really like a big thing. And I think that, you know, probably mine was like the first like Malaysian or Singaporean like careers podcast that actually appeared during that time but anyway so that was 2020 I started sharing my thoughts around career the corporate world you know job search navigating the career ladder and so forth in the podcast itself so I

think that the kind of like the big thing that inspired me to just really, really start sharing with the community online was through the corporate survival podcast. Then that kind of like went on with, you know, I did a little bit of like one-on-one coaching, you know, I connected with people online, mainly on LinkedIn and Instagram.

Then in July, 2020, my mom passed away. So that time, you know, I kind of like took a little bit of a break past social media and everything else. I didn't really do anything. I say for the, for most of the second half of 2020, I didn't really do anything. I think I ran like one or two workshops that I committed previously just to experiment, but you know, I was not really

in the mood. I think I was kind of like more in the grieving mode, grieving mode for most of the time. Then six months later in early 2021 i decided that like okay i need to find something that is purposeful i need to find something that i can actually focus and give my energy to because i cannot be feeling upset and i feel like i cannot be reliving memory lane every single day because i think that's very unhealthy for me and at the same time i also ask myself whether hey you know am I ready to move back to corporate because that's like the natural thing and I think a lot of my colleagues also expected me to go back and during that time I had like a lot of ex-colleagues asking me hey maybe do you want to really come back because

we have positions for you and stuff like that so that was in early 2021 but I still felt like I wasn't ready to go back to the corporate world so what I did during that time was that I was like okay since I'm doing so many you know one-on-one coaching calls it's something that was I started in early 2020 so I thought okay you know why not give myself a bit of a chance to maybe work with more clients to get a much better sense of like how people are feeling and if there's any way that I can help them. But the other part also is because my dad is, he's an old man, right? Like he's getting older too.

And I really, really worry whether he's going to be okay. Because my sister doesn't live in Penang. She works somewhere else. So that time I was back and I was like well do i really want to leave the you know my dad alone and like he's kind of old and stuff like that so i felt that like okay you know what maybe i can still continue career coaching and maybe i can still do some kind of like online career workshops that allows me to have that kind of like flexibility to you know monitor my dad a little bit and i think for myself to kind of like find that space to um to grieve

and you know to find my space for myself and to find out like what what really is next so that's something that I did in most of 2021 and actually to my surprise um my social media accounts actually grew quite a bit I think particularly my LinkedIn grew quite a bit and I got a lot more people who reach out to me wanted to work with me one-on-one, wanted to join my career programs and so forth. So during that time, I'd say that I ran it a little bit on more of an ad hoc basis because I still wanted to have space for myself. So I didn't overcommit. So I took some one-on-one calls and I did some workshops, but it wasn't really like a 100% sort of thing.

But I think for me, the mindset that I have was like, it's like never say no to corporate because that's really an area that I'm really good at, right? I did very well in corporate. I climbed the career ladder. I really understand the corporate game. So it's really natural for me to want to go back. But I also felt at that time, like that kind of like personal space for me

and, you know, headspace and like emotional space was so important. So I told myself, you know, give it every 12 months and I'll decide at the end of every year if I want to go back to corporate or I should continue doing career coaching, which is what I found really interesting. And I'm not sure if I ever told you this, but both my parents were teachers. So my dad, he's a retired headmaster. And my mom was also a teacher. They worked for the government. So they were teachers in government schools. And it's kind of funny because when I was younger, I remember that I think when I was five, you know, when people ask me, you know, what do you want to be? Maybe what do you want to be when you grow up? I've always said that I wanted to be a university professor and if you ask me now how did that idea come about honestly I don't know

maybe it's because my parents were teachers so I'm kind of like in the education space as I grew up like so many years ago maybe that was what inspired me but yeah I mean thinking back it's kind of interesting because I guess like life comes in a circle or rather you know we eventually circle back to what we are really good at and eventually i ended up being a career coach a corporate mentor and basically educating maybe not in the sense of like a tuition teacher or the university professor or not like a government school teacher but still in education still you know teaching working professionals how to plan navigate and grow their careers which is kind of interesting how things circle around because if you really ask me this like five to six years ago and say that maybe would you quit your corporate job to to be

like a career coach definitely the answer is going to be no i'm like what are you talking about it's not really something that crossed my mind but yeah i guess funny how funny how life works i guess so after that in 2022 that was when you know at the end of 2021 early 2022 i decided that i'm going to give it another 12 months to really focus on growing and working with more people in career coaching right In helping people to navigate and grow their careers. And one thing I did notice from, you know, the year 2020 and 2021 of like working with so many one-on-one clients, I realized that, hey, everyone's kind of talking about the same thing. Like the problems are very similar, right? Issues around like, you know, career clarity, work confidence, you know, competence, and not knowing how to talk to their bosses, not knowing how to position themselves

for promotions, not knowing how to seek new career opportunities. I feel like even though I'm having one-on-one conversations with different clients, it feels like I'm talking to the same person because the issues and the challenges and the situations that my clients are talking about, I'm like, you guys are all having more or less the same problems. It's like I'm having the same conversation

with the completely different people. So that inspired me to actually create my career program, The Corporate Survivor. And it's also kind of funny how this sort of came about because at some point of me doing the one-on-one calls, I feel like I can just close my eyes and I can just give the exact same advice because I know what you guys are going to say because I understand you really well. I've also been there. I've worked in that exact situation that you're in. I understand how you feel. So it was really that time that I was inspired to actually create the program. So, you know, I am a trained accountant. I worked in corporate. I worked in like, you know, governance, risk and compliance. So I'm not like a, you know, branding, marketing or whatever sales expert, like totally none of that. So the whole thing

started really slow. It really came from me designing a program that I feel that I would have wanted if I had been a fresh graduate, because in the first five years of my career, it was kind of chaotic, which is why I say up to today, like, you know, if you have worked for less than three to five years, it is going to be chaotic. And just don't like, don't feel bad that it's chaotic. Like you should expect it to be be chaotic which is how you're going to get better then 2022 i created a program then you know it's kind of like available and you know when people ask me about it you know i share how the program can help them but also doing a lot of like one-on-one coaching calls so that was most of 2022 then in 2023 i realized that okay one of the things that a lot of my corporate

survival members and clients are looking for is that aside from dealing with their own problems, they also told me that maybe I also want to learn from other people's problems. So sometimes it's the situation where you don't know what you don't know. And sometimes if you take a look at other people's issues, it kind of gives you a slightly different perspective, which is always very interesting. And that was when in late 2022, 2023, I introduced the group mentoring calls

to the Corporate Survivor Program. So basically, you know, you can participate in the live mentoring calls or you can watch the recording where I would discuss different members, you know, career,, or job search challenges. And then we would kind of like brainstorm together. And more importantly, I would break it down to help you understand the root cause

and to really share different perspectives and some solutions and how we can better problem solve. So that was actually something that came out from what my members wanted. And as I was telling you a little bit earlier, I think the way that I've been approaching my career coaching, I guess, you know, my career and my life is really 12 months at a time, right? So at the end of every 12 months, you know, I look at how I feel, you know, do I still feel that I'm helping my clients? Do I still feel like, you know, I'm helping my members in my career program? And I also look at my family as well. I'm like, okay, my dad's, you know, looking

more frail than usual, like he's getting getting older and all that usually helps me make that decision of like okay is it worthwhile for me to continue as a career coach and as a mentor like going down this path and like they know this you know brand new career path for another 12 months or it's something that i should go back to corporate because that door is always open i'm still even getting like hr recruiter messages even though i've quit for five years so i think the good thing is that you know whatever strategy that i have applied in the corporate world it still works like even though i have sort of left so i say that that back door is always open but i would say that as of this point right now it's been five years so now we're in like july 2024 i still feel like it was the right decision. And more importantly, I felt like I eventually got

to be the educator that maybe, you know, younger Mei Ping had wanted to do, right? The five-year-old version of Mei Ping had actually wanted. Maybe, like I said, you know, not in the sense of like a school teacher or a university professor, but a career coach and mentor all the same. And I still feel like it's kind of interesting how things come a full circle. It's kind of interesting how, you know, you may not know, you know, what life or which part of, you know, how your career, you know, would lead to, like, from one thing to the other.

But things will work out as long as, like, you are very, very sure that the decision that you have made at that point in time is still the right decision it's an important decision and you would still do the same if you could rewind time and go back to that point you would still make that same decision because or at least that's how that's how i felt and taking that one step forward every month you know every quarter and every year it kind of becomes like a conscious decision of actually taking that step and making that next step better than the step before. Because sometimes like, I feel like we try to plan

ahead. And like I said, if someone asked me, maybe, you know, five years, maybe five years ago, someone asked me, Hey, you know, five years later, what do you think you'll be doing? I don't think I would say that like, Oh, well, you know, I would have quit my nine to five job, you know, my mom would have passed away and, you know, I would have like been in some kind of like career coach. I would like run my own programs or like, you know, build my own company or whatever. I don't think I would ever, ever say that. Probably what I would have said at that time was like, well, you know, I think, I guess I'll still be like working in the bank, you know, I'll probably be like a managing director or something like that, which is like kind of up the career ladder if I had continued on that path.

But then again, you know, looking at the path that I've taken right now, I still feel happy. I feel proud. I still feel that it was the right decision that I made at that time. And it's still the right decision that I would have taken again if I had to take that again. So, yeah, I mean, it's interesting. Like, I guess, you know, when you look back, it sounds like it makes sense, it worked out. But at the same time, when you're at that point, it was scary, I'd say, it probably, yeah, it was scary.

I won't say that, you know, oh, it's so hunky-dory, you know, I was really inspired and I didn't care. I had care everything else and just that, you know, oh, it's so hunky-dory, you know, I was really inspired and I didn't care. I had care everything else and just jump, you know, jump into it. It wasn't like that at all. And just a final point around, some people ask me like, oh, Mei Ping, you know, how come, you know, you're not like bashing corporate? Like, you know, why are you not saying that? Oh, yeah, you know, entrepreneurship is better and the corporate is bad. I mean, honestly, those are good questions, but I have never once felt that way. It is because

of the way that I have planned and navigated and grown my career in the corporate world that actually allowed me to have that career break and allowed me to take that time off to spend time with my family and more importantly, spend the crucial 13 months with my mom back at home before she passed on and more importantly, given me the space and the confidence and as well as the transferable competence to a certain extent to be able to do what I'm doing right now. So I guess if there's like one piece of advice that I can share with you or one piece of advice that I feel that I've learned is that everything that you have done and you have learned and you have gained to this point is something that you can take on for the future

part of your career journey or your life journey, even though it may not necessarily feel that way, but it definitely is. So the fact that I'm a fairly structured person, I think big picture, I learn how to communicate well. I'm very organized. I'm very productive. All these things that I have learned, mastered and refined in corporate is the same thing that I use to run my coaching sessions,

to work with clients in my career coaching program. These are the same qualities, the same attributes that I bring on and I feel like I can continue to enhance on them. Because at the end of the day, it's not about the career. It's not about the company. It's not about the job.

It's not about the role. It's actually you. It's the person that you have become, knowing that you have the confidence, you have the competence, and more importantly, you have the courage to take that next step forward. And I hope that this live update,

for lack of a better word, this live update probably given you some nuggets of maybe insights or lessons or anything that you can take away from this conversation today. I hope that you do that. I hope that you're able to reflect

and apply that to your life or your career, whichever that you see fit. And as for me, just to wrap up, five years on after quitting the My905 job, yeah, I still think that it was the right decision. So with that, thank you so much for being here with me and listening or watching to the Corporate Survival Podcast. Or if you're a member of my Corporate Survival Career Program, I really, really appreciate you. If you're someone

who follows me on social media, I truly, truly appreciate you as well. Without you, there would be no Mayping, the career coach. Without you, there'll be no Mayping, the corporate career mentor. Without you, basically, there'll be no version of Mayping that you see and hear today. So with that, I really, really thank you. I appreciate you and I hope that we can continue on this journey forward. Take care. See you soon.