Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep97: Feeling stuck in your career. Here's WHY.

Episode Date: December 22, 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 and welcome back to another episode of the Grow Your Career Online Offline Podcast. This is Mei Ping. Today, I want to talk about a very passionate topic on my end

and it's really about why you are stuck in your career. So, are you stuck in your career? Do you feel lost? Do you feel like how come other people are progressing but you are not progressing? Then this is the episode that you should definitely listen to. So now, one of the biggest complaints I hear from working professionals is, how come other people are doing better than me? How come other people are doing better than me?

This is a fair question, and I wouldn't say that it's due to jealousy or anything, but it's just natural for us to look at what other people are up to and really compare, at least objectively, compare against what we are up to and really ask ourselves, what are these people who are doing well? What is it that they know that you don't know? That is probably a more objective question rather than just complaining about,

okay, why these people have it better than me. It's not fair, yada, yada, yada. So let's take a slightly more objective view on, okay, what are these successful people know that you don't know, right? And based on like conversations with so many people, right, having worked with like more than 300 clients

and personally for me, like in my, I guess, quote unquote, high-flying corporate career, I have worked with like more than 300 clients and personally for me like in my I guess quote unquote high-flying corporate career I have worked with multiple people high performers mid-performers low performers and all those people I find that there is one big differentiating factor between all these people that really determines the people who progress and keep moving onward upward in their careers versus those people who are sitting there wondering what has happened to them. And the biggest difference,

I guess the root cause is this. It's really down to mindset and ambition. And I know that this may sound a little bit woo-woo. You might be thinking, maybe what are you talking about? Like these things, isn't it like common knowledge? Yeah, I know, I know, mindset is important.

Fine, I have ambition, but things are just not working out. That, honestly, very fair comments. And if you feel this way, I get you also. But why I actually pinpointed to mindset and ambition, they are due to multiple things, right? So let's talk about mindset first

and then let's talk about mindset first and then let's talk about ambition so the first thing about the mindset portion you either have a beginner's mindset of wanting to embrace new challenges and wanting to learn new things and wanting to move forward or you can have a very stuck mindset of oh this is supposed to be a perfect job but how come it's not turning out this way it's not fair these people con me into it blah blah blah blah so just looking at your mindset in the first place will give you a much better indicator of are any of these things self-imposed and when i say self-imposed i don't mean it in a very rude way obviously you know

there will be certain career situations that it just happens to you, unfortunately, due to drama and all those things. But I'd say that in most instances, like 95% of the time, it could be that mindset block or limiting belief that you are not good enough. Other people are just naturally better than you. You don't even know how you get selected for this job

and you feel that you got lucky quote-unquote lucky and hence you have no there's nothing you can do to affect your future success because if you're consistently saying that you got lucky that means that you didn't know what you do the right things or the wrong things what you actually did to help you get to where you are right now so if you don't know what helped you to get to this point, to this career level right now, how are you going to replicate that? There's no way you can replicate that because you have no idea how you got here in the first place. So that really is the mindset bit.

And the simplest exercise for you is asking yourself whether are you starting with a beginner's mindset and always looking forward to gain new exposure, learn new things, right? Be exposed to new people, learning their perspectives, learning how to work better with them, learning their priorities and their thought process, or are you one of those people who think that you know everything and things just happen to you, life is unfair, you know, work is unfair, everything is unfair, yada, yada, yada. So that's really like

the first thing to think about and I find that for a lot of clients who come to me initially in a consultation session, this is really the biggest problem. So once they see through that to say, huh, some of these things,

like maybe there are some things that I have done that is creating this sort of like response I'm getting from my boss, my colleagues or my boss, my colleagues or my clients, then they are able to, okay, fine, let me stop having this sort of mindset. Let me stop doing these certain things because it's clearly not getting me the, I guess, the recognition or the visibility that I'm looking for. So now let's actually go to the second part. And the

second part is about ambition. And I find that a lot of people, unfortunately, this is one of the biggest mistakes. A lot of people, they don't plan their career or rather they don't really think their career in the long term. So what that means is that they only have very short-term goals in their career. They don't have long-term goals. And if you're one of those people, and if you only have short-term goals in their career they don't have long-term goals and and if you're one of those people and if you only have short-term goals that means that you can be in a current job or maybe it's your first job or your next job or you know it's like the multiple jobs that you have been in but didn't quite work out so if you have this sort of like mentality of like okay fine i'm

just here to do a quick job i don't really care care. It's the short term. I'm going to look for a job in the next six months. Then you will never have the sort of long-term and long-term successful mentality to really learn what it takes to succeed in the corporate world. Because guess what? And I'm not going to sugarcoat this because learning how the corporate world works

and applying the skills and learning the skills and implementing all those things these are not easy things and honestly if you're a person who cares about only short term you want short term wins you want all the rah-rah and stuff you are definitely not going to get motivated to fix your foundation because that stuff is not sexy at all right but that is where real growth happens because if you choose not to climb the mountain, then you will always be at the base of the mountain. You will always be at the base.

No matter what you say, no matter what rara you can give yourself, you will always be at the base because you are unwilling or you are afraid, you fear facing that challenge, you fear climbing that mountain and you are not even giving yourself the chance because you're just afraid that you're going gonna fail and somebody is going to judge you but you forgot to realize that um the

only person who is judging yourself is you is you yourself that's judging you and eventually when you don't grow in your career you don't move forward you get stuck like the only person who experienced that impact is you not the other people you think are looking at you all the other busybodies out there who cares about them right it's really about you so if you're afraid you don't want to move forward you want to climb that mountain even though there's like probably something really exciting and like really fun at the end of it then um you are ultimately responsible for the choices that you make in your career and like i said there could be certain things that you are doing right now that is causing you to get

stuck including having a very blocked mindset of fear of judgment and even fear of success to a certain extent and the second thing is not having career goals or ambitions that could really stretch yourself to motivate yourself to get to the next level no matter what that next level looks like for you because i always tell my clients and a lot of my connections and basically all my listeners that career growth looks different from one person to the other right so for you it could be a job promotion, it could be maybe taking on new projects, maybe working with new people, or it could mean new career opportunities, maybe in a new position, maybe in a new role, maybe in a new industry, maybe in a

new department, in a new company, or it could just be something as simple as deciding that, hey, I think growth in my career should also equal growth in life and that means that maybe I want to have more work-life balance, I want to spend more time with my family and all those are fine. But because at the end of the day, you have a goal, you have thought about it, you have thought about what your career growth plan looks like and then this is where you can actually take the next step to move ahead which regardless of whichever direction that you have chosen based on the the list that i've just shared with you but the people who stay stuck

are the people who don't even want to think of any of those things or the worst thing is that they just feel like their boss is responsible to plan their careers and they get severely disappointed when they are broken promises empty promises some things don't quite work out because obviously in the corporate world, a lot of things changes. So if you're basically relying on one person to plan your career for you and that person is your boss, then you want to be really careful about this because it could be extremely dangerous to put all your eggs in one basket. So like I said, these are basically the two main reasons

why I find people are really stuck in their corporate career and that feeling is not a good feeling. So eventually you'll find yourself getting in a bit of a downward spiral and also wondering like what has happened and you wake up one day feeling like, oh, how did this

happen like how did i get here and how have i been staying here for the past few years it's not a good feeling at all and it will eventually hurt your self-esteem your self-confidence and all those other things that are extremely important for you to be successful so now today's episode is just a very high level sharing on why people are stuck. And I share this in a little bit more detail in the free training that I very recently launched on how you can grow your corporate career, where I share a little bit more on how you can get clear and basically why you're stuck because you're having the wrong corporate mindset. So if that's something that you think you want to deep dive a little bit more, make sure that you check out the free training that I have. And the other part of the training, I also talk about why you should not put all your eggs in one basket and rely on that one person to plan your career for you because you're making this crucial, crucial, killer mistake

of outsourcing, outsourcing, quote-unquote outsourcing, your career success to somebody else. And that is never a good idea. So I hope that you find this episode insightful. And if you have learned something from this episode, definitely drop me a message on LinkedIn at Mayping, or you can also drop me a message on Instagram at Maypingco and tell me what is the biggest lesson that you learned from this episode.

And are you making any of these two mistakes that I've just mentioned? Are you having a mindset block, right? Number one, mindset block or are you having like a small ambition or even no ambition, no career goal whatsoever? So definitely share that with me and I wish you all the best. So like I said earlier,

if you want to learn a little bit more, you can always check out the free training where I share in a little bit more detail why most corporate professionals are stuck at their job and they don't even know it, unfortunately. So with that, I wish you all some good self-reflection time and some good self-assessment time. And I'll see you in the next episode. Bye!