Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep62: Bouncing back after getting fired. Here's HOW.

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. Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of my God of Ping podcast, a podcast that you should listen to if you are serious about growing your corporate career. So welcome back to today's episode.

Starting point is 00:00:40 And today's episode actually is going to be a very interesting one because I'm actually kick-starting a 30-day client success story series. So over the next 30 days, which is four weeks, I'll be sharing with you guys 20 stories of clients who have worked with me directly, either to improve their work performance or to increase their success in nailing more interviews as well as more job offers. So this is actually a highly requested series by a lot of my clients as well as community to better understand how they could actually improve from where they are right now. So the main purpose of this series is really to inspire as well as empower you to really understand that no matter where you are in your career at the moment, you can get better and the situation

Starting point is 00:01:34 can always get better as well. So in today's episode, I'm kicking off with one of my, I think one of my clients who I personally feel has completely transformed and she is actually the first client I've ever worked with since I transitioned to become a career coach. So just a little bit of my client's background for you guys to better understand where she came from and where she is now so my client is um initially she faced a lot of struggles when she joined this new company in a new country she pretty much relocated for a better job opportunity from Malaysia to Singapore and over the one and a half years that she spent in that new company she really struggled to adapt and eventually what happened was she was fired from her job and when she came to me it was obviously a very frustrating situation and what she told me is that

Starting point is 00:02:41 like what can I do to make sure that I don't get fired again? Because it is definitely not a good feeling. And it really destroyed her self-esteem and self-confidence. So when she came to me, she was very lost. And I think that she didn't really believe in herself, which I understand because it's not a good situation to get fired. And that is not an experience that I wish for anyone um so when I started working with her I made it very clear to her that hey this is going to be maybe a slightly longer term process because we want to make sure that

Starting point is 00:03:20 foundationally we really fix whatever skills gap that you will have and then we can move forward so the approach that i took with her was not to put like a band-aid approach because i knew it wouldn't work but really look into the real foundations of what actually caused problems in that previous job where she got fired and make sure that we fix those gaps as needed so that she doesn't face any more problems in the future. So in her situation, we actually nailed down a couple of things that she was actually really weak at. Number one, she is a highly introverted person. So what that meant was that she was very shy and generally very quiet in a in the corporate world you know speaking up is something that is very important so she actually lacked that ability because it's just not in her nature but second thing is she was also really afraid because she did try in the past but coupled with her poor

Starting point is 00:04:21 communication skills every time she decided to speak up, it didn't go really well because she couldn't really articulate and express herself because of her poor communication skill. So what that eventually created was a lot of misunderstandings and also lack of trust with her boss at that time, who was a very, very senior guy. So there were a lot of issues in terms of working together and it really boiled down to i guess three main gaps in her case number one as i said she was highly introverted that meant that she didn't dare to speak up number two she had very poor communication skills so even when she did speak up it was just not clear in general in the way that she expressed herself either verbally and even in communication via written communication via email also so these two were

Starting point is 00:05:12 pretty significant problems and thirdly she also had another problem which in which she was a very disorganized person so the words that she, she always tells me that I am floating in the clouds. So if you're in a corporate job and you are also like my client who is floating in the clouds, it's not a good situation because no bosses like to deal with somebody who is floating in the clouds. And if you have that kind of personality, it is also very challenging for you to commit and deliver to any, and commit and deliver work that is promised or rather commit to certain deadlines, which can be a bit of an issue. So the other final thing that she also expressed to me,

Starting point is 00:05:56 and I also managed to identify during our sessions when we first started working together, is that she had a very messy mindset and her ability to have critical thinking and problem solving was a little bit weak so at that time she was an assistant manager and definitely problem solving clear thinking skills it's a requirement at that level so that's why overall she really struggled and when i first started working with her i told her that okay we're just going to go through this process which i think is really important number one i need to help you understand your personality because right now you have very low confidence and you start to think

Starting point is 00:06:36 and she started thinking that there was something wrong with her but what i told her is that i think you need a better understanding of your personality because you yourself don't know what your strengths and weaknesses are. So because you don't know what your strengths and weaknesses are, it's going to be very difficult to try to leverage those strengths that you don't know exist or try to fix those weaknesses that you are not aware they are there. That's creating problems in the first place. So fundamentally, I think understanding personality was one of the first things that we worked on um the second thing i also had to work with her to identify the extent and then pretty much how bad was the skills gap that she faced so i actually have a top 10 skills for career success that um use personally when I work with my clients. And you can also actually find it on my website, mingping.com, under work performance.

Starting point is 00:07:30 So I had to assess her skills gap against the top 12 skills. And I think, like I said, right, at the earlier part, there were a couple of pretty obvious ones. So we spent quite a lot of pretty obvious ones so we spent quite a lot of time working on her communication skills as well like you know understanding the intention how to listen better how to express herself very clearly what words to use what words to avoid how to identify emotions in other people how to read body language like all those things are just so critical part of communication

Starting point is 00:08:05 and those were some of the root causes why she struggled at her job in the first place because she really couldn't identify any of these things right and because she couldn't identify any of these things it became almost impossible for her to understand what her boss wanted right really manage expectations and deliver on what was expected. So those were really the two main things that we focused on. And of course, gradually as she improved, then I gave her some suggestions on how she could check in or catch up with her bosses, what's the structure that she should go through like basically this step-by-step guide on how to survive in the corporate world for lack of better word so i do really want to have

Starting point is 00:08:51 you know say kudos to this one client because she really really put in the effort and when we first started working we we had sessions every two weeks because her problems was just so significant that if she had gone on on her own she consistently felt lost and i think it took a little bit of time for her to gain that confidence and say hey i know what i'm doing and i'm actually regaining and trusting in my own skills and abilities and that took a little bit of time but eventually she did get there so after working together for about 12 months and this is basically the 12th month that she's in this new company already um i'm so happy for her when she told me that she got a really good performance rating from her new boss in this new company and her boss even gave her a lot of um praises on how um how prompt she was how how organized she was, how clear she was in her communication,

Starting point is 00:09:48 which really is a complete turnaround from where she started in the first place, right? So really want to say kudos to this client of mine who really showed a lot of dedication. And after every single session, she always took on board these suggestions and what we have agreed and always implemented it so that when she came back in the next two weeks we had some

Starting point is 00:10:09 examples of really real life situations that she faced at the workplace to then give feedback and continue to improve from there so just a lot of dedication on her part and i think at the end of the day she really regained a lot of her confidence and even nowadays her friends are also telling her that she is a lot more clear in her communication she doesn't just agree to anything which was you know one of her habits in the past and she now feels comfortable to share some of her opinions as well so from a work-wise she did get a good performance rating last year in her new company she also got an increment which is really positive news um and this year her boss also told her that she will be positioned for a promotion which to

Starting point is 00:10:59 her it was something that was impossible in the past, but right now it's really turning into a reality. So that's really, personally to me, a really, really big client success story because if you have been in a situation where you were fired and you would definitely be able to understand the kind of emotions of feeling low self-esteem low self-confidence generally just low self-belief and not be able to pull yourself out of that hole but i was really glad that she decided to give herself another chance and really make the effort to try to fix the um the skills gap that she had and really understanding her personality and even nowadays during our sessions she is able to analyze to me why certain why she thinks certain things happen then really able to

Starting point is 00:11:52 bounce with me and to better understand what am i potentially seeing that she's not seeing so that she can continuously grow so i think definitely it's a really important step forward and particularly this year our goal together for the end of this year is to make sure that she get that promotion that her boss has suggested to her so that is definitely a big goal that we are working towards so i definitely look forward to helping her grow in her career as she deserves because after putting in that amount of effort and you know regaining her self-belief i think she is really ready to move forward in the next phase of her career so that's it for today's um client success story sharing um i hope that this story has inspired you that no matter how low you you know how rock bottom low that you

Starting point is 00:12:38 have hit in your career that is always a way to bounce back and it starts with you and it starts with you reaching out for the right help if needed and really being brave and wanting to improve yourself right because that's really like the most important thing so again with that i hope this story inspires you i hope this story also empowers you to take action to move forward because at the end of the day it's really up to you to decide how you want to grow your career and what you want to do and what you want to achieve so take action if you need to and really think about how you can continue to grow your career in the corporate world and take charge of your own career journey again, thank you for listening to the first episode in my 30-day series

Starting point is 00:13:26 of sharing client success stories. And I hope that you will also go out there feeling empowered and hopefully your own career journey and your own career story can inspire somebody else in the future. So with that, I'll see you in the next episode. And in the meantime, stay inspired and stay empowered.

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep62: Bouncing back after getting fired. Here's HOW.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.