Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep63: Do you say YES to every request at work?

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, this is Mei Ping and welcome back to my Got a Ping podcast, a podcast that you should listen to if you want to grow your corporate career. So we are still in my 30-day client success story series that I'm starting for this entire month. So for the next 30

Starting point is 00:00:47 days, I will be sharing 20 client success stories, either in improving their work confidence and work performance or improving their chances to land interviews as well as job offers. So some of these stories I'll be sharing with you are clients who have worked with me in a one-on-one capacity, as well as some of my workshop participants who have attended my training but have seen significant improvement in their work performance or job search process as well. So these stories, I hope that you will find them inspiring as well as empowering that there are people potentially in same situations like yours out there who have overcome challenges and really able to transform and grow their careers in whatever way possible and I hope that this series also inspires you to also believe and take action to make the same reality for yourself,

Starting point is 00:01:47 depending on your professional goals. All right. So today I actually want to share a story with you all for one of my clients who is a Dean's List high achiever in university and he eventually returned from the uk to malaysia and joined one of the main um okay i can't name the company name but he was accepted into one of the very prestigious management training programs at one of the biggest government-linked companies in Malaysia. So definitely a top performer, high flyer, somebody who had really done well in his studies and also received various scholarships as well. So when he first started in the management training program,

Starting point is 00:02:39 everything was pretty okay. And as you all know, those who make it in management training programs normally are very ambitious they are very motivated and dedicated which is really great but what was interesting is that when he first came to me the main challenge that he told me he faced was that he felt that he is not standing out in terms of getting that visibility that he thinks he deserves. But second thing is that he also thinks that he is struggling to really deliver what was required of him. Because for a management training program, most of the time expectations are definitely higher and he was also in the situation where he had to compete with other management trainees to come on top and eventually able to pick the

Starting point is 00:03:32 most prestigious department to to join so that was the main issue that he came to me with and what i did notice is that at the beginning even though he was a high performer at university and was accepted to this prestigious management training program, what I noticed is that he still faced imposter syndrome and he consistently felt that he was not doing enough. He consistently felt that the result that he was generating, the quality of work that he was generating was not good enough and he also consistently felt that he could have gotten more attention. So these three signs that I've just shared, actually these are really common things that top achievers feel and how they approach their day-to-day work in which they consistently feel like they should have done

Starting point is 00:04:26 more and they deserve more and when they feel like they are not getting that it creates a lot of frustration and it creates a lot of self-doubt as well so if you have ever been a top performer i'm sure you can understand and resonate with these inner conflicts and challenges that my client was facing at that time. So when we first started working together, what I did with him was to first try to understand, where are all these imposter syndromes coming from? Was there an expectation versus reality that was really not correct in terms of like perception because actually this is something that is very common for fresh graduates or those maybe who have worked for less than one or two years i find that actually it's such a common thing to think that

Starting point is 00:05:17 the corporate world think that the working world is supposed to be in a certain way. And when you join the company, you realize that, oh, it's not supposed to be like that. And this was not what I thought it's supposed to be when I graduated. And particularly for those who have done really well in universities, in most of the time, they might feel like they deserve that kind of success in the corporate world.

Starting point is 00:05:44 And when it doesn't really happen, it kind of creates a lot of self-doubt and frustration in there. And that's something actually I go into a lot more detail in my two-week Boost Your Confidence at Work training. But I just want to highlight here that these feelings of, you know, unmatched expectation versus reality, it is really very real. And a lot of people do face that. So the other problem that my client had that he didn't realize is that he was actually too focused on gaining visibility and developing his personal brand so if you've been following my

Starting point is 00:06:17 my content for some time i'm sure you you all know that i have a slightly different view on personal branding particularly for corporate professionals. So this client of mine, he also fell into this mistake of thinking that, oh, I need to make an impact. I need to get visible. I need to make sure everybody knows me. So what happened was he went out volunteering for a lot of work because he was trying to stand out amongst his other management trainees he was trying to get his bosses to know him he was trying to get his senior stakeholders to think that he is very awesome but the thing that he forgot to recognize is that he is still starting out in his career so what that means is that he is still in

Starting point is 00:07:03 the process of trying to find out how the company works, learning about the company culture, deep diving into the industry, really learning how to work with really these real experts at his company. And those are a lot of foundational work that he should have been focusing on, which is improving his industry knowledge,

Starting point is 00:07:22 improving his soft skills, improving his technical skills. These three important things was what he was supposed to focus on. which is improving his industry knowledge, improving his soft skills, improving his technical skills. These three important things was what he was supposed to focus on. But what he ended up focusing on because of the whole personal branding thing is, I just want to get visible. I'm just trying to put up my hand and volunteer for everything. So consequently, what happened was that eventually, clearly he couldn't deliver because he lacked the foundational skills which is industry again industry knowledge technical skills and the core foundational soft

Starting point is 00:07:50 skills that are required to do a really good job so what happened was eventually everything blew up in his face because his boss was really unhappy and he also couldn't deliver on a lot of the promises that he made and that kind of dented his professional reputation a little bit, which was not a really good situation for him because he, you know, came in pretty, he pretty much beat out hundreds of applicants to make it to like the top 12 management trainee program. So that kind of hurt his reputation a little bit. So I really had to work with him around really going down to the

Starting point is 00:08:26 ground level and how to really schedule his day and schedule his goals over every you know schedule his goals every um every month or so like every four to six weeks what are some of the things that he needs to focus on how to give regular updates so that people know that he's progressing on his work right how to approach presentations so that he doesn't get annoyed when people don't agree with him and just so you guys know top performers do have this problem they think that everybody is supposed to agree with them and when they they don't get that kind of agreement they feel very frustrated and sometimes they cannot control their emotions and they have bad temper. That's not good.

Starting point is 00:09:09 And that also happened to my clients as well. So multiple problems. But over time, after working on a lot of the communication with the bosses, really scheduling his work, how to manage workload, how to focus on which skills to improve, and so forth. I'm happy to announce that eventually at the end of his management trainee program, he was accepted to the top departments that the company has to offer. So it's a really, really good win for him. But then the next challenge now begins which okay now he made it to the top now how do we stay there so we are still definitely still working together on how to better manage expectations managing workload so that he does not necessarily volunteer for new things and

Starting point is 00:09:58 i think if you are a very young professional who has worked for two years two years or less this habit of constantly volunteering for things or getting caught up in personal branding, definitely it is an ongoing process to align between what is out there on social media telling you guys what to do versus what you can implement at the real world, at the real corporate world. So I think that really the biggest win for this client is really able to help guide him navigate through what actually happens in the real workplace by upskilling some of the core soft skills that is required. But I think more importantly, helping him better understand how to leverage his achievement as top performer,

Starting point is 00:10:49 his natural habit of being motivated, being assertive, being dedicated, and not let that turn against him. Because if you're not careful, it can easily turn against you. And I understand this because I used to be top performer every single year when i was working in corporate so some of these challenges i have faced before and it did take me some time or rather at that time it took a little bit of time for me to learn okay there are some boundaries there are certain things that i could do to better manage my work there are just certain boundaries that i can focus slash not focus on.

Starting point is 00:11:25 So those were, I think, some of the main things that I could really impart to this client of mine. And because he's so young in his career right now, I think that there is a lot of room for him to grow. And I think if he is really able to navigate it more thoughtfully, then his career will definitely be a lot more smooth and he's really able to leverage his status as top performer to move forward in his career and make sure that it doesn't hold him back so that's it for today's story on my client success in the corporate world and i hope that this story has inspired you and also empowered you to really focus on the different perspectives and particularly the expectation versus reality if you are a young professional who just graduated in less than a couple of years and you may feel that you are struggling in the workplace rest assured there

Starting point is 00:12:17 are a lot of other people like you out there also feel like they're struggling but i'll tell you right now that a lot of it actually comes down to expectation versus reality so you might want to go and speak to people who have actually been in the working world for some time so that you can get something a little bit more objective and practical as to what actually happens in the workplace but aside from that i also do run a two-week boost your confidence and soft skills training where i will actually go through better understanding personalities different people at work the working dynamics some of the soft skills as well as the expectation versus reality bit that hopefully will give you a little bit more perspective and be able to better navigate the challenges at the workplace so again i hope that

Starting point is 00:13:00 you have and you have enjoyed this client success story series and these stories have inspired you and empowered you to really take action to grow your career because if my clients can do it, I am sure that you can also do it as well. So with that, I'll see you in the next episode in this series and in the meantime, keep inspiring and keep growing your career. Cheers. Bye.

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep63: Do you say YES to every request at work?

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