Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep98: Life lessons I learned in 2021.

Episode Date: December 29, 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 to episode 97 of the Grow Your Career Online Offline Podcast. This is Mei Ping and in this episode, I want to share with you some of the top life lessons that I learned this year and I want to share these lessons very candidly with you

and I hope that these are some of the things that you can resonate with if you're you know in your life and I also hope that our relationship stays the same at the end of this episode because some of the things that I may be sharing may not necessarily be the most comfortable thing but this has been my experience for this entire year and if there is one word I can use to describe this year it is it is has been a long year it has been a very exhausting year there's just so much going on and I feel like this year passed by very quickly but very slowly at the same time like I don't know how to express this feeling but that is just the sense that I get because I feel like a lot of things are changing a lot of things are happening but maybe it's because i have been working with so many clients about 200 clients this year slightly more than 200 clients this year

doing a bunch of trainings managing my you know my own life and like building a course spending time with family engaging with people on linked, so many things that's going on that I almost feel like every single day is passing me by very slowly. So there's this really weird sense of feeling like things are moving quickly, but also very slowly at the same time. So if you feel this way, definitely let me know. All right, so let's start with the first life lesson that I learned this year. And that is really the importance of setting boundaries. I realized that if I don't set any boundaries, people tend to push and try to really get whatever that they want for themselves. I know this is not sounding very polite right now,

but that has really been my experience. So I am a bit of a people pleaser. I don't feel very comfortable to say no or to say that I don't want to help or to ignore somebody. But I realized this year, particularly this year, that if I keep giving in, then I'm basically training these people's behavior of being very pushy, pushing the boundaries, insisting on stuff that they want without really respecting me

or respecting the boundaries that I have as a coach, as a person in general. So some examples that I can share with you. I receive a lot of messages from people every single day, asking for help and multiple things. And I try my best to reply. But I noticed that people who... It's like the more that you give, the more pushy some people become, which I think is really strange because you are the person looking for a solution, but you are behaving as if somebody owes you, which is very strange to me. And I also felt that I was being pushed around a little bit so aside from

those sort of messages i also consistently got messages from people who saying that um i needed to give them a discount or i should be more understanding of them or i should be volunteering my time to do free stuff because it benefits them or whatever. I just feel this is such a strange thing to me because I feel like if you're asking, then shouldn't you kind of try to understand that person, which is me, what is my situation before insisting?

But I realized that, oh, maybe the problem is me because I my situation before insisting but i realized that oh maybe the problem is me because i am not setting boundaries i'm not clearly saying no i'm not clearly saying that hey this is not acceptable so that was kind of most of this year but i think in the last couple of months i've actually taken a much stronger stand which clearly some people don't like especially the people who have been pushing me around, spamming me every other day, expecting me to reply to them within like, you know, 10 minutes or whatever.

And then they get really upset when I don't respond on time. And then they send me a bunch of crazy spam messages saying that I should be entertaining them and I should be replying and all those things. I used to say sorry, but as I reflect that, I'm like, why am I sorry? These are the people, they should say sorry but as i reflected i'm like why am i sorry these are the people should say sorry to me you know i'm the one like giving advice and like giving guidance for and really supporting them even though even though i have a lot of free content

even though i have a bunch of videos even though i have youtube even though i have blogs but these people they still think that they deserve personalized attention, but they are not willing to invest in themselves. So over time, I kind of came to the realization that, hey, it's really unfair to my clients who are willing to invest in me versus all these people who think that I'm their encyclopedia and they deserve to get stuff from me for free. And then they get really upset when I don't give them the answers that they are looking for and sending me crazy messages such as my advice is not helpful, my advice is too vague, it's not specific

to your situation. Yeah, of course, because you're not paying for personalized guidance, right? You know, if you want to look through all the free content, you can definitely feel free to do that. So anyway, that was really the biggest life lesson because I realized that, oh, I'm the one enabling this behavior and this is not okay. Now, moving on to life lesson number two, and it's very closely related to the first lesson, which is the fact that some people are extremely entitled. I don't understand, or I rather, I don't know why, but I feel like this year I seem to meet more of these people. It could be because of the pandemic, people are getting more frustrated or more desperate. I don't know.

Or it could be that maybe people are stressed, is cultivating this sort of negative behavior. I don't know, maybe. But it's really unacceptable. So I consistently receive messages from people who insist that I give them detailed advice and then when they don't get what they're looking for, they send me crazy long messages or crazy long emails So I consistently receive messages from people who insist that I give them detailed advice. And then when they don't get what they're looking for, they send me crazy long messages or crazy long emails telling me that I'm not helpful.

I'm a shitty career coach. I gave them vague advice or the things that I said is not helpful because of this. And they're sending me crazy messages. And I'm like, how entitled can you be? You are reaching out to an expert you are reaching out to a professional who really knows the insights out and behind the scenes and you cannot at least be polite you're not even respectful and then you expect this other person to help you i'm like no i i mean probably i used to entertain but like i said over the past few months i really decided that this is freaking crazy behavior and I should not be the person who is enabling this behavior by

entertaining these people. Now it's a situation of like, I don't want to deal with you because I cannot help you, right? Bad attitude is one of those things that I can't be the person to help you. Like, I don't save people from their negative behavior. You need to go to a, I don't know, a psychologist or something. But I think to me that was like a really big realization this year that, oh, some people are really rude and some people really feel very entitled and they don't even feel that they should put in the effort or they should be respectful

when they are asking for help. They almost feel like, you know, I owe them the help and there are some people when I say, hey, I can't respond to this and normally how I work with my clients is either one-on-one

or there are these other options and then they get really upset and then they're like hey you know you're supposed to help me why are you not helping me and then they send me a bunch of crazy messages again you know kind of goes back to the pushing my boundaries and um yeah really feeling very entitled which is something that i anyway all right so moving on to life lesson number three and that life lesson number three is that copycats are freaking everywhere that is something that i definitely realized last year but

it has been so prevalent this year it's almost unbelievable so i i'm still on linkedin and obviously linkedin is where i share a lot of my content and some of the stuff some of the posts do go viral from time to time but I've been seeing a lot more passive-aggressive behavior as well as you know outright copycats and I've seen many times my content got basically plagiarized by people who come and snoop on my profile from time to time they snoop around but they don't reply when I send them a message or they just kind of snoop around from time to time. And then I see a piece of content that looks very similar to mine.

Obviously, you know, sometimes it's not just copy and paste, but it's just something very similar. Yeah, it's really annoying. And the realization that I got from this was that, whoa, people really don't have creativity skills right now. And I guess that is actually a bigger problem. Like if you want to get attention, but you don't know how and you end up plagiarizing,

you know, copying somebody else or like plagiarizing somebody else, okay, that says a lot about you. That says a lot about you. And for people who say that oh you know imitation is the form is the best form of flattery i'm sorry i disagree imagine if you are the one who worked really hard on your project or you worked really hard on a piece you know for a test but there is this one person who didn't even do anything and they strolled in hopped in and just copied your entire piece of work right your entire project they just copy paste and then submit it as

their own would you not feel pissed off like i would feel pissed off like if you don't feel pissed off then like good for you right nothing more to i don't have nothing more to say but um it's unacceptable and people who say that imitation is the best form of flattery they fall into two categories number one they either have not had copycats had to deal with copycats before so they don't really understand what it feels like right and yeah maybe if it hasn't happened to you, you know, it has never happened to you before, then, you know, it's very difficult to resonate. It's fine. But maybe category number two,

I'm just saying, maybe you are the one who's copying somebody else and therefore you feel the right to justify. Now, I'm not saying anybody's doing whatever, but I'm just saying that there is a possibility because some people can take inspiration too far. Unfortunately, they can take inspiration too far. So anyway, just saying.

Okay, now the fourth life lesson I learned this year is there are people who can display passive-aggressive behavior and they want to do something to you, but they don't accept the similar treatment, meaning they don't expect the boomerang effect, they don't expect the boomerang attitude, which to me, I think is completely ridiculous. If you want to behave a certain way,

you better be ready for somebody to behave the same way to you. So if you're extremely rude to somebody else, then don't be surprised when the person starts being rude to you as well. Like, you know, it's karma. Like, you know, things move both ways. It goes two directions, right? And I've had a lot of instances this year of people sending me messages, trying to get me to teach them stuff and teach them detailed stuff which

obviously gonna take up a lot of my time and asking in a very rude way and some of them are in use use a more passive aggressive behavior or use the what i call buttery approach so they come to me butter me up oh maybe i really love your videos oh maybe your stuff got featured on linkedin that's so cool but can you teach me this can you walk me through the entire process of how you created this piece of content i'm like who are you and i've also had instances of people say that hey i see you're doing really well like as a career coach and business i'm just wondering if you have a mentor who's that mentor where did you learn all these things i'm like i don't even know who you are and some of these people they completely not engage or network with me at all and that's something that i really hate i feel like if you connect with a person you should make an effort to send a message or trying to connect from time

to time but these people completely m.i.a but they only come to me when they want stuff and then when i tell them that okay you know I can't really give you this or sorry I can't share then they get really upset then they get very passive-aggressive and then now the real the real words come in now they're like well you know um you you're supposed to help everybody and blah blah and and I specifically remember there was this one person who is the founder of an NGO, has been trying to entice me to join his leadership NGO. Now, I'm not going to tell you what is the name of the NGO,

but what I can say is that I have clients who are working with me right now who have attended the NGO's mentoring programs, like quote-unquote mentoring programs, but not really getting the results that my client is looking for. And Henshik is working with me right now. But anyway, what I mean by passive-aggressive behavior is, you know, sending me messages or like replying to like my posts saying that, oh yeah, you know, good for you that you're a career coach right now. It would be even better if you could volunteer your time at this mentoring,

you know, at my NGO, at my mentoring platform, because this is the best way that you can use your time at this mentoring, you know, at my NGO, at my mentoring platform, because this is the best way that you can use your time. Or, you know, you shouldn't waste your, like, knowledge by, like, not giving free stuff to my mentor, to my NGO. I'm like, I give a ton of free stuff. Like, I do a lot of, like, videos. I do a lot of podcasts. I do a lot of blogs that help thousands and thousands of

people like almost every day i receive messages from people saying that they really managed to gain a lot from my free content not not even the paid trainings like not even the paid coaching it's just the free content right so i feel like there are some people just yeah anyway they want something for themselves and then they try to guilt treat me into doing something again kind of goes back to lesson number one no boundaries so i used to kind of entertain those things but now i'm like yeah i i don't want to deal with you because it's just really not worth my mental health and if you recall the past four that i mentioned is like kind of similar problems as well but But anyway.

Okay, on to the fifth life lesson, which I think is going to be the last one. And if you're watching this episode on video right now, you'll notice that I look really tired. I have like eye bags and all. That is because I am actually really tired. Because the fifth lesson I learned this year is if you really want to make something happen, you have the ability and you have the magic superpower to be able to do that.

So what I have been up to in the past couple of months really was to take a step back from the first nine months of this year. So this year, like up to the nine-month mark, I probably worked with about almost 200 clients because I had a lot of one-on-one clients and coaching sessions going on and further to that i'm also working with the university of hong kong so that means that i'm working students every single week in the master's program and then i also launched a bunch of trainings this year so from january to april i launched two-hour trainings you know for linkedin and for soft skills and for job search then in june to september i launched two-week

trainings now these are like four to five hour trainings uh you know going a little bit deeper on like work performance like soft skills right you know strategies and all those things so basically i've been like running a bunch of trainings that is getting deeper and more complicated, I guess more extensive as the months go by. And when it came to October, I decided to pause a lot. Basically, I paused all my trainings

and I really reflected on how I wanted to work with my clients next year. Because one of the things was that I realized that, okay, I worked with 200 clients already as of September. And if I were to work with 500 clients next year, I'm not sure how that's going to work out because it can be very tiring. Like one-on-one sessions can be really exhausting. So for those people who say that, oh, one-on-one sessions can be really exhausting. So for those people

who say that, oh, one-on-one sessions, you know, the coach is just talking a bunch of stuff. I'm like, try talking if you have like zero knowledge. Now that's a big challenge, right? So because a lot of times

in one-on-one sessions, I have to do a lot of thinking because there's a lot of strategizing and I also want to make sure that like the advice and the direction really works for that specific client so it's kind of um really needing to understand the client my client as a

person first right personality first and then we work on like the other stuff so it's kind of exhausting and i also have this um bigger mission of wanting to work with more people. So, kind of reflected on it a little bit and I sort of decided that, okay, maybe I'm going to combine a lot of the trainings that I've been doing, right, you know, since January and even like in, I think since September 2020, I've been running like a bunch, no, June 2020, I've been running a lot of trainings,

but kind of slightly different topic and initially started with like 75 minutes and then it goes in, it's like and then it goes in it's like two hours and now after it's like two weeks and probably something a little bit longer so that was when i decided that okay maybe i should um package all the um trainings that i have been doing right you know since september 2020 and really enhance a lot of the content and also pumped in pumping a lot of the um the corporate knowledge that i've really gained in terms of of the content and also pump in a lot of the corporate knowledge that I've really gained in terms of the strategies and methods that I use, but teach it in a more

detailed manner because there's only that so much that you can teach in a two-week training, right? So I decided that, okay, I'm going to work out an online course. So that was an idea that sort of came about and I decided to do it in November. But at the time, it was, I would say in early November, it was just a rough idea. And I thought that, okay, maybe this is something that I will do in, I will launch in, you know, June 2022, and we'll see how it goes. But somehow, over the Thanksgiving weekend, I kind of had like some bursts of inspiration. And I just decided to build the course. So I kind of looked at a lot of the training material that I already had.

And then really started outlining the course. And yeah, I really started working for that. I also designed like some career, a six-step career planning pdf and i also worked on free training on some of the biggest mistakes that corporate professionals make and i shall bring a little bit more about my three-step framework to go into corporate work so there were a bunch of things that i did but interestingly um i think initially i kind of gave myself a probably a nine month mark like to you know launch some to launch the course the corporate survivor course in June 2022 but I don't know I think I probably went crazy or I was so inspired I was so motivated that eventually I just

sorted out most of the course and I really started working after Thanksgiving which is late November I really decided that okay i think i think i can launch on first of january and just kind of like try to make 2022 awesome so that was that was basically what i did um and therefore i'm really tired i'm really really tired because i i don't know i always feel like if we were to start on the first it's always something very positive because everything everybody's on a high so i've were to start on the first, it's always something very positive because everything, everybody's on a high. So I've been really working on the course and it's on track on the first of

January, which is really going to be the next couple of days. I'm really excited about that. Obviously there's still some other stuff that needs to be done, like aside from the full course, there are also some booster modules that I want to put in, just some of the resume interview job search stuff that I'm still going to pump in as well. So still quite a few things

that needs to be done. But yeah, looking forward to really release the course to all of the students who have already signed up. Probably I will do another free live training in early January, just to share a little bit more about what's been going on but hopefully you know I can get a little bit of rest towards the end of the year and really enjoy the year like it's been a very long year I feel like the year passed very quickly but it also passed very slowly as well I don't know how to explain it but it it probably passed very quickly day by day because there's just so much going on like i mean aside from my one-on-one clients i also had a bunch of trainings and then i also had a lot of events like mostly paid events

i have a few brand deals here and there just so much going on so So I've been extremely busy, but the year also felt very slow at the same time. Maybe it's because on a day-by-day basis, I am working very long hours, clearly going to try to squeeze all the one-on-one sessions with the trainings and then with the events. And then there's the content creation across multiple platforms. And then there is this other thing,

because obviously I also have other businesses, which is crazy. Yeah yeah i'm so tired but i think the real lesson that i learned this year is um if you really want it if you really desire it you can make it happen uh you may need that burst of inspiration but inspiration is just one thing at the end of the day it's really the commitment of wanting to get there that is the thing that brings the end of the day, it's really the commitment of wanting to get there. That is the thing that brings consistent action every single day. I'd say that,

you know, the burst of motivation, inspiration and empowerment, that's just the first part, right? That is like the first 2%. That is the first 2%. After that, the 98% is all hard work.

The 98% is like a lot of brain juice thinking, a lot of things going on and a lot of like trial and error, a lot of reflection, you know, reflection on the stuff that I have done, what has worked, what has not worked. There was also a lot of like community engagement, learning from different people, what my clients really want, what my students really want, a lot. Anyway, if I can sum up 2021 in one word, it is woe.

Woe as in good, but woe as also in a little bit bad because it has been a really long year. It's been very frustrating. It's also been pretty crazy as well because at the beginning of the year, I was also sort of grieving in a way because at that time, my mom had passed away for less than six months. I wasn't really in the mood to do anything, but somehow I had a lot of engagement

and my LinkedIn account really grew a lot in January and that was just something that happened. I wouldn't say that I paid a lot of attention to it, but I'm very grateful that my LinkedIn community has grown from probably about 11,000 people at the end of 2020 to about 17,000 people right now. So I'm grateful about that every single day. And I just want to take this opportunity to thank every single one of you for your support. And I wish you all the best in the new year

and I hope that we can grow together in the new year. Cheers and I wish you a happy new year. Bye.