Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep67: Get along with co-workers. Communicate better.

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 Gotta Paint podcast, a podcast that you should listen to if you are serious about growing your corporate career. So welcome back to another episode of my special 30-day series where I'll be sharing with you some client success

Starting point is 00:00:45 stories. So these are clients who have worked with me in a one-on-one capacity or participants who have joined my training workshops and really saw a lot of improvements in their career as well as in their soft skills. So in this series, I'll be sharing with you the client successes and basically some of the challenges that they faced when they first came to me, some of the focus points that we worked on during our sessions together, and the results that they managed to achieve at the end of our session or our program. So today, I want to share with you a story of a client that I work with who was a student at one of the top universities in Asia. So I think what's very positive about this story is that even as a student, my client was really focused on his future career and his professional development to really take

Starting point is 00:01:40 the step forward and reach out to pretty much improve himself and get career coaching even before he started a full-time job. So when he first came to me, one of the challenges that he shared with me was that he felt that he is always very enthusiastic and he always wants to advise and help out his friends. But one thing is that he couldn't really understand why even though he put in a lot of effort to help them and give advice and give guidance and all these positive things he felt that his friends weren't really taking action or rather implementing some of the good advice that he was giving them right because you know he felt that he could help his friends and he really wanted to really give them that kind of guidance that they need, right?

Starting point is 00:02:31 The other challenge that he also shared with me is that he felt that when he was doing his internship and he was in group projects, he found it very difficult to engage with other team members he consistently felt like he needed to give them instructions but he's always he he felt that there was a bit of a distance between him and the other team members so even though they were kind of doing what he had told them to do as the project lead but he didn't really feel that he managed to build a good working relationship with them. So those were really the two problems that he came to me with. And he did ask me, like, you know, what is he doing wrong? Because he felt that he is such an enthusiastic guy and he's always like willing to help

Starting point is 00:03:18 and like willing to volunteer to initiatives. But he just really couldn't understand why even with that kind of enthusiasm he couldn't really um build i guess a closer working relationship with his team members and with his fellow peers and i think that kind of um made him feel like um that he wasn't included in a group which um obviously is not a very good feeling to feel particularly as a student and for him is a student leader right so what i actually did with him was to deep dive into his personality a little bit so as usual if you have been following me for some time you will notice that i always talk about the importance

Starting point is 00:04:05 of understanding your personality and how your personality can really impact the way that you approach your studies you approach your projects and how it truly affects you at your job and your future career as well so that's something that I consistently focus on and that is usually the main point that I start with when clients first start working with me. So I got this client to share with me some examples of where he felt that he faced such challenges and basically what did he exactly do, what kind of responses that he got and basically understanding the flow of what happened so that I could better see if there's something that he was doing but he didn't realize that was maybe creating that kind of impact or maybe reaction that he didn't really um he didn't really expect

Starting point is 00:04:58 and that kind of eventually hurt his self-confidence a little bit. So after like, you know, one or two sessions, I managed to pinpoint a problem and I told him that his biggest issue is that he's actually an extrovert. So what this means is that if you're an extrovert, most of the time you are busy talking, but you are not listening. and that is actually a really significant problem for introverts and how i managed to identify this was when he told me that he always gave advice to his friends one of the things i asked him was okay but like what have your friends said to that advice and he actually couldn't remember what his friend said and he couldn't even remember if his friends responded to his guidance and advice so what this shows me is that he was so

Starting point is 00:05:53 busy talking and sharing like he didn't really pay attention to his friend who whether his friend actually understood what he was trying to say whether what he was trying to share really made sense and fit his friend's situation so to me these two right are just very simple signs to tell me that he wasn't really paying attention because he was just so focused on telling his story or you know he was really focused on what he wanted to say but he forgot that a communication is a two-way street right if you're if you're just talking and the other person is not listening then pretty much you're in a monologue it is really not a communication thing so that was a bit of an aha for him because he never really thought about

Starting point is 00:06:36 it that way and one of the things i really needed to work on with him was um how to develop develop active listening skills because if you don't know how to listen actively and really be able to catch the intention of the message that's being conveyed, then you're actually losing out on a lot of information as well as opportunities also. So in fact, developing active listening skills and really understanding your personality and the natural skills gap that are caused by your personality type is something that i cover in my

Starting point is 00:07:10 two-week boost your confidence and soft skills at work training where i go into much more detail about understanding personality the dynamics the skills gap that are naturally created and of course some of the step-by-steps on how to really communicate in a two-way street in developing active listening and how to convey your message in a way that another person can understand you so that you're not talking to yourself pretty much so that was really one of like the biggest struggles that he faced the other struggle he faced was the fact that he felt that he couldn't build a close working relationship with his peers and i think that that hurt him a lot because he felt that he's such a friendly guy but how come people people didn't really i guess see him as part of the clique of

Starting point is 00:07:59 part of the group so that kind of hurt him a little bit and again i tied it back to his personality so if you have been following me for some time you also notice that i consistently talk about the four personality types and that is also something i go into a lot more detail in my training but for him one of his personality types was that he was a thinker so thinker is a person who is like very logical and they are very focused on like solving solving problems providing solutions and taking action so he had that kind of um personality but one of the problems that thinkers tend to have is that they can appear kind of transactional so what that means is that they find it difficult to connect with the other person and the other person that they're talking to may not feel like they are being heard or listened to and that was how they

Starting point is 00:08:53 probably you know his friends felt that you know he he was just focused on getting the job done but he was really not there to listen to their views or opinions, which again created a bit of a negative impact for him. So what I also focused on working with him was some of the practical things that he can do to build that kind of connection as a thinker. Because personally, my own personality, I'm also a thinker. And how I managed to, you know, build strong working relationships with people, particularly when I was in the corporate world,

Starting point is 00:09:31 working with people from 43 countries. Of course, there are some tips and tricks that can be used to develop closer bonds and like making sure that all your stakeholders, everybody in the meeting room can really understand that, you know, you are ready to listen to them and you are ready to listen to their opinions as well. So I actually had to go through that a little bit with him so that he understands that, oh, there is a solution to this because otherwise what will happen is that he will continue

Starting point is 00:09:56 feeling very hurt and feeling like there's something wrong with him and that could really mess up his self-confidence and self-esteem, particularly when he's a person who is very energetic so we just want to be careful to make sure that we don't kill that kind of like enthusiasm and energy because that is actually a plus point for him not everybody's as enthusiastic as him and that is really his superpower what he needed to learn was that how to identify some of his natural weaknesses that could occur from his personality type and really applying some tips and strategies so that he can better manage that so that the impression that he's creating to other people is going to be either neutral or positive and not swaying into the negative side of things if that makes sense so with that you know of course i'm really happy to also share that over the number of sessions that we did together eventually he felt that it was a lot easier to engage and he also told me that over time he felt that his friends actually listened to his advice a little bit more and that was something that actually gave him a lot of

Starting point is 00:11:01 satisfaction because that was the reason why he started helping out his friends and giving advice in the first place and that was really only possible for him to achieve once he learned how to listen well and making sure that the other person feels like um he takes into account their views and opinions so like both of the skills actually come in together at the same time but of course foundationally is to make sure that he understands how his personality affected the way that he communicated with other people so that is a client success story that i want to share today and i think what is really positive in this story personally for me is good to always see young people, particularly students and undergraduates, really reaching out for, you know, for help, you know, coaching, mentoring to better prepare themselves for their future careers, particularly improving their soft skills, which is really going to be the foundation when, you know, when you start your corporate career. So if you want to find out a little bit more on the kind of soft skills that I help my clients or training participants to develop,

Starting point is 00:12:09 definitely check out my two-week Boost Your Confidence at Work and Soft Skills training where I go to a lot more detail on a lot of things that I teach my clients, even in one-on-one sessions also. So with that, I hope that this story inspires you. I hope that it also empowers you to really take charge of your career

Starting point is 00:12:27 and grow your career and meet the professional goals that you have set up for yourself. So like I always say, if my clients can improve, I'm sure that you can also improve. And the real difference is taking the first step. So I hope that this episode inspires you to take that first step and I'll see you in the next one.

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep67: Get along with co-workers. Communicate better.

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