Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep88: Saying goodbye. Minimalism + Change = WIN.

Episode Date: October 20, 2021

✅ Get My FREE '5-Day Career Growth' Guide + Training 👉 http://www.meiphing.com ✅ Grow your career in the 9-5 corporate world with clarity, confidence and opportunities! ⚡ 👋 Welcome to the Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing — corporate career coach, ex-corporate leader who has led multimillion-dollar projects across 43 countries and creator of the ultimate career course for 9-5 professionals, The Corporate Survivor™. On this podcast, you'll learn how to grow your career in the corporate world without getting stuck with Mei Phing's 3-step framework to gain career clarity, improve work confidence and attract new job opportunities. ✅ WEBSITE ⮕ https://www.meiphing.com ✅ FREE GUIDE ⮕ https://www.thecorporatesurvivor.co/5days ✅ COURSE & COACHING ⮕ https://www.thecorporatesurvivor.co ⚡ 📌 ABOUT MEI PHING: Mei Phing Lim is a Professional Career Coach and former Corporate Leader in the financial services and consulting industries. Mei Phing went from a shy quiet introvert to leading multimillion-dollar projects with teams from over 43 countries as the Senior Director and Head of Governance at Standard Chartered, and now teaching 9-5 professionals how to navigate the corporate world and grow their careers with her career coaching course, The Corporate Survivor™. Mei Phing has been featured as a LinkedIn Top Voice 2023, sharing expert career advice in guiding young professionals to plan, navigate and grow their careers. Mei Phing is a keynote speaker on corporate culture, work performance and career growth, and sharing perspectives on what truly takes to build a strategic and successful career without getting stuck. ✅ LEARN MORE: https://www.meiphing.com

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 the Grow Your Career Online Offline Podcast. This is Mei Ping. And just a heads up, today's episode actually is going to be a very light one.

And again, another heads up, this episode actually is going to be a lot more fun if you're watching the video version of it um because you might notice that my background is a little bit messy and the reason is because i'm actually moving houses tomorrow so um this episode that i'm recording right now actually actually at midnight for it to be issued, actually tomorrow, which is basically the day that I'm going to be moving. I think it just brings back a lot of, I guess, memories in this house.

So if you're actually watching the video version right now, or you've been following me on the video for quite a while, you will notice that a lot of times in my background, I have this like colorful wall decoration that looks like plates or like something in like round and circles or whatever. I think like that has become a little bit of my signature already during event talks, during trainings and workshops and all those things. Yeah, so I'll be moving houses. So one of the things that I feel a little bit sad to leave behind actually is my little iconic wall art, wall decoration that has accompanied I think about a hundred of my podcast episodes

or like my short video Wednesdays and other random videos that I share on LinkedIn and on a lot of other social media as well. So I think that's really the biggest thing that I find really quite sad to leave behind. Like a lot of times we, I guess don't really focus so much on our environment when we're very busy, but I really feel like I really love the wall decoration.

I think that that has really become a really, really big part of like what I do. At least from the beginning of this year, right? It's been almost a year, actually over a year at this current place. So I'll definitely have me miss this. This is a wall art and basically my default background for a lot of my events

and also when speaking to so many people as well. So I will be moving houses tomorrow and one of the things that really popped up and I've been actually kind of thinking about this for quite a bit recently. It's really about having too much stuff. And I'm not sure if you guys know, but I am actually a minimalist at heart. Like before the whole minimalist rara kind of like went out, like became really popular about a year or so. I actually started practicing minimalism since 2016

when I was actually really busy with my corporate job and I felt that I couldn't even breathe. There was just like so much going on. And I actually took a career break, partially family reasons. The other half is because I genuinely felt that I needed a break. And during that time, I actually explored a lot of, I wouldn't say relaxation concepts, but it's just like, I guess, self-care is the better word.

So I explored a lot of self-care methods. I also went on solo travel and all those things. And one of the concepts that I discovered and I learned was minimalism. So I've been gradually decluttering and like managing a very simple and I guess effective and efficient lifestyle. But I feel like recently, recently, maybe in the past few months or maybe even up to a year,

I can't really pinpoint, but I think the whole lockdown has gotten me a little bit like distracted in general and I feel like my stuff is really like um piling up again and that's actually not a good thing like sometimes you know you don't really realize that when you have a very um when you have a very messy environment like your external environment is really messy, actually that just means that like your mind, your mind is not calm.

So what that means is that like your mind is likely very cluttered, very messy. It's just all over the place. So it actually translates in your external world. It actually translates. So I think like over the past few months, for at least a year i realized that hey my stuff is like out of control i have so many things and this is just like not normal to me

i don't know maybe it's normal to a lot of people but this is like totally not normal to me so i am the kind of person that like i could travel europe for six weeks on a hand luggage like a i could travel on like a 20 inch luggage and a long sham bag for like six weeks and like go to five countries in europe and all those things right i also like in the past when i move houses i could actually pack up all my stuff in two hours like right before the movers come i could pack up everything in two hours and then like it's like oh yep move and then i could just unpack in like half an hour when i reached a new place like that is the kind of like simple and um efficient lifestyle that i live because i don't really have that many things or rather i don't keep a lot of like extra stuff

because i like things to be light i like things to be fast like i don't like a lot of like extra stuff because I like things to be light. I like things to be fast. Like I don't like, you know, wasting time like this other rant, a lot of like random stuff that I feel like doesn't, shouldn't occupy my brain space because I just want to relax. So that's why the drama of actually packing to move this time. Yeah, disappointing.

I guess disappointing is the word because it's all over the place. I'm so disappointed. I don't know how many boxes I've already filled with my stuff. And this is actually terrible. So anyway, given that this is a careers podcast, so let me actually tie it back to how applying some minimalism concepts can actually help you in your career. And the first one, I think very obviously,

is maintaining a very clear mindset. A lot of times you don't realize that when there's just a lot of things going on and we are living in a very noisy world nowadays, when a lot of things are going on, you realize that you get distracted very easily because you can't tell apart what is important and then what is actually the noise. And let me tell you that most of the rubbish that you see out there, those are actually noise or rather advice that doesn't really make sense in your career at all. When your mind is distracted or your mind is cluttered with a lot of stuff,

it's very difficult to focus on the really important things that you should be focusing on or the really important pieces of work that you should be doing. And you may end up getting distracted by all these hacks and quick trips, quick tips, magic hacks, secret sauce, blah, blah, blah. All those things are, to be honest, like completely useless things that will not help you in your career. Sometimes we don't appreciate that the foundation of success, the foundation of like, you know, building a long-term, you know, successful career, actually there's like no magic sauce to it.

It's just like, it's the same stuff. But I can say it like in every single episode and you guys would be really bored of it but the reality is if you want to have a successful career you need to have a very clear vision a very clear career direction of where you want to go and you need to sharpen the necessary skills the foundational skills both technical and soft skills to help you get there like literally it's so simple but it's not easily done that's the thing right and the bigger the bigger question is then okay fine like i know i need to determine my career direction but there are so many options i don't know where to begin yada yada yada exactly so that's why you need to declutter your mind and if you find it very

difficult to get mental clarity the first thing you should do is please go and declutter your lifestyle declutter your environment and you may find that things may become a little bit clearer compared to before even like before speaking to a career coach or whatever like if you just want to like do it for yourself i would highly encourage you to start really decluttering your environment like just get get rid of stuff that you don't use um you'll find that you kind of have that mental clarity to be able to focus a little bit better on some of the options that you actually have in your career and where do you want to go maybe not like the final destination maybe you can't see that yet, but you at least can see, you know, some of the better options maybe versus, you know, totally not really knowing where to start or feeling like you're overwhelmed and all those things. And the second benefit I personally found is, like I said, focus, focus, focus. So I find that like, okay, how you can use this minimalism concept in improving your focus is particularly when you want to develop your technical or soft skills.

And one of the problems I see with people nowadays is that they want to learn different things, right? You know, every day, you know, learning is like the new cool thing. Learning is the new black. Sure. Great. things right you know every day you know learning is like the new cool thing learning is the new black sure great um however i think sometimes the problem is with like learning the wrong thing or learning something that is actually not the most helpful thing or really not the most important thing right now so i think that's just something to really think about and you know like i said i have personally found that um applying some minimalism concepts in my life have helped me focus a little bit better and rather than trying to like you know conquer the

whole world and like trying to learn like all these skills and all those things i just focus on like the top few skills that i really need to master and the top skill top few skills that i need to fix and that's really how you can really focus all your energy into the most important things, improve those first, and then move to something else and not try to like conquer the whole world and end up like not doing anything. So anyway, like I said, today's episode is kind of a light one and it's really in the middle of the night.

I actually made sure that I recorded this episode and I actually did not keep the light. So if you notice that this is very bright is because I haven't actually packed the lights yet. So, yeah. So like I said, this is actually going to be the final episode that I'm going to have this, my lovely iconic wall art background. So episode 88, that is. And yeah, if you're enjoying the podcast,

make sure that you check out the rest of the episodes. Nowadays coming to you every Thursday. So are you minimalist at heart? Are you applying minimalist concepts in your life, in your career? Let me know. Drop me a comment on LinkedIn and share with me your experiences. And I'll see you in the next episode. Bye.