Ep209: Mei Phing – To Make The Change You Want You Must Take Action

By Andrew Stotz | 04/08/2020 |

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Guest profile

Mei Phing is the founder of Got A Phing and a passionate advocate of youth leadership. She has been recognized as a high performer and was fast-tracked to senior positions in multiple global multi-national companies whilst only in her 20’s.

Nowadays, Mei coaches high-performing young executives and entrepreneurs to level-up future-ready skills to navigate complexity and thrive in tomorrow’s world. She regularly speaks about the skills of the future, youth engagement, and multigenerational workforce inclusion–as a TEDx Speaker and featured speaker for international events, conferences, and podcasts. Mei Phing is a culture enthusiast and has traveled to 37 countries and counting.

“Leadership is self-management. Before you lead and manage other people, you need to learn and be yourself.”

Mei Phing

Worst investment ever

For the love of helping people

For Mei, her worst investment ever was investing time and energy, trying to convince people to take actions that they weren’t ready to take.

Mei has done very well in her corporate career over the years and always been one of the fastest rising stars in whichever company she was in. It’s, therefore, not surprising that she regularly get questions from people looking to also advance their careers. For the love of helping people, she’d spend hours giving them advice.

Just in need of a sounding board

After doing this for so long, she noticed a pattern. No matter how good her advice was or how much time she spent talking to these people, they wouldn’t take any actions to change the situations they were in. They would just continue to whine and complain. She realized that all they wanted was a listening ear and a sounding board for their frustrations.

Learning from her bad investment

Giving her time to people who never quite needed it got Mei quite frustrated because, as an introvert, she’s very protective of her energy and time. She regrets having wasted all that time on people who didn’t see the importance of taking action. Mei wishes that she could take back all that time and do something more magnificent.

Fortunately, this came with lessons on how to handle people, and it has helped her run a successful leadership company.

Lessons learned

You can’t force someone to take action

A person is only ready to take action when they want to. No external advice or motivation will make them make changes in life if they don’t want to.

They’ve got to want change badly

For someone to take action, they’ve got to want to achieve their goals and be passionate about it. If they’re not, all the motivation and advice given will be a waste as it will wither off at some point.

Understand yourself first before you help others

You need to understand yourself first so that you can better understand someone else and help them understand themselves.

Andrew’s takeaways

You only have four productive hours in a day

We only have a certain amount of concentrated energy in a day. You’re most productive for only two to four hours a day, and it’s impossible to expand that amount of creative time. So make sure you maximize it.

Confirm that people need your advice before you give it

Before you give any advice, always ask your recipient what they want. Get people to confirm that they’re asking for advice. This permits you to give it hard and fast.

Quit complaining and take action

One of the best ways to take action is to quit complaining about your situation and do something about it.

Actionable advice

You need to develop self-awareness, and the first step is to take a personality test. Then have a look at the result and ask yourself, is this you and to what extent? What are some of the strengths that you see, and how can you work on them one by one?

No. 1 goal for the next 12 months

Mei’s number one goal is to spread more awareness and impact on future-ready skills because we’re in the era of digitizing, and the world of tomorrow is pretty much happening right now. She’s focusing on human skills such as how to communicate, how to work better with people, and how to create win-win relationships. She believes these skills are pretty much lacking with many.

Parting words

“Keep learning and growing. More importantly, take action because learning is just learning, and knowledge is just knowledge. If you don’t take action, then nothing happens.”

Mei Phing