First job as FA made me a spendthrift?! 🥲

My unpopular opinion pls beware 👍🏻 does not mean all FAs are me and also I ❤️❤️❤️ my FA friends a lot because I understand what they have went through. This is supposed to be my first big girl full time job and your girl thought she was set for life, will do this for life (omg didn’t work out for me tho)

Why:

1) I was struggling to keep up with appearances

In order to recruit effectively you need to look good first right? (If not there’s not going to be any way you can establish a relationship with your target - sorry, realistic sales talk). That meant new wardrobe, all kinds of things to maintain appearance etc & it got tiring after a while.

2) Transport

In order to be efficient and balance between school and financial advisory and my business, that was a lot of money spent on Grab. Sometimes I’d end up making a loss if the prospect did not buy.

3) Expectation issue

I lost my goal halfway (which was actually just to get useful certificates if I’d want to go into finance), and ended up chasing targets I didn’t completely believe in. If I didn’t hit them, I still ended up executing what I originally decided to do alr ☠️

4) Spending on building relationships

Not sure if I was wrongly taught to wine and dine people, but I found myself buying meals left and right and lots of freeloaders happened, they took more from me than I’d ever received from them and I opened myself up to a lot of… messed up people who’d try to get free meals or other benefits out of me. But didn’t get referrals = a loss on the meal especially if you have 0 trust with the other person

5)Believing this would be my permanent job

It is literally quite impossible to get retrenched or fired from FA unless you do something wrong (embezzlement, falsify things, churn customer) or you don’t get along with your management. Second thing happened with me and after that I was quite turned off recontracting with any other agencies too. Hence a lot of opportunity cost in my final year of uni… a bit hard to switch out to something else (I decided to push my biz to the next level)

6) Body image issues

A lot of these customer facing roles place a lot of pressure especially on women to look good at all times (yes you pretty folks have a better chance at this, it’s statistical). It got really tiring and I started doubting myself and how I looked and picking on myself negatively in terms of achieving that specific image. Oh and amidst the stress, instead of losing weight or looking better, I began gaining weight (ik makes no sense).

Some pros though:

1) I made really good friends from my internship and am still in touch with some of them now!!

2) I learnt a lot of people skills - including the weirdest hardest craziest most demanding customers (who think they’re buying Hermes & expect top service but only want to pay you $3 - and how to SAY NO) and as a result most people don’t faze me

3) stepped out of my comfort zone - not a very salesy person, nor do I like to be directly sold to, so having to learn how to do that…. Really the discomfort

4) Networking - because you have to get new clients, I started getting into effective networking habits to make the best use of my time and also to meet new people from all walks of life. It expanded my network & did me good.

5) Rare medical conditions - I served quite a number of customers with rare medical conditions eg congenital heart defect, enlarged liver, brain aneurysm etc and managed to get them insured so at least they’d benefit from having something comprehensive

Same thing I always stress-

Know what you want! Not everyone has the same experiences in life and it doesn’t guarantee you’d do well or badly in a career. End of the day, a job is just a job and it should not become the only thing in your life!

#RealTalk #MyFirst #CareerJourney