Purpose, Burnout, and Career Clarity with Jen Margolis
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
Release Date: 09/22/2026
The First 90 Days After a Layoff: A 4-Step Plan
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
A layoff can create an immediate urge to update your résumé, start applying, contact everyone you know, and do anything that feels productive. The problem is that what makes sense during the first week may be very different from what you should be doing 30, 60, or 90 days later. In this solo episode, Julia Toothacre breaks the first 90 days after a layoff into four stages: assess your reality, build your search, evaluate the evidence, and adjust your strategy. The goal is not to create a 90-day deadline for finding another job. Instead, the framework provides checkpoints so you can respond...
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How to Track Your Accomplishments and Prove Your Impact with Orlando Haynes
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
Most professionals know they should keep track of their accomplishments, yet the habit often disappears until a performance review, promotion conversation, résumé update, or interview makes that information suddenly necessary. By then, people are trying to reconstruct months or years of projects, problems solved, responsibilities added, and results achieved from memory. In this episode, Julia Toothacre welcomes Orlando Haynes back to Control Your Career to discuss how professionals can build a more useful record of their work before they need it. Orlando draws on more than 20 years in talent...
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Your Career Decisions Need Context
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
Career advice can sound universal until it collides with the realities of your actual life. A recommendation to leave a job, accept a promotion, take a pay cut, negotiate, or change careers may be perfectly reasonable for one person and completely inappropriate for someone facing different financial obligations, professional circumstances, or market conditions. In this solo episode, Julia Toothacre introduces Realistic Reality, the first stage of her Control Your Career process. She explains why career clarity should begin with an accurate understanding of three areas: your personal reality,...
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Purpose, Burnout, and Career Clarity with Jen Margolis
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
Meaningful work can provide a strong sense of purpose, but it can also make career decisions more complicated when a person begins to equate the mission of an organization with their own identity. In nonprofit and mission-driven work especially, commitment to the cause can influence what someone is willing to accept around compensation, workload, emotional demands, boundaries, or long-term sustainability. In this episode, Julia Toothacre speaks with executive coach and consultant Jen Margolis about the relationship between personal purpose and organizational mission. They explore why an...
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How to Grow Your Career Without a Promotion
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
A lack of promotion opportunities does not necessarily mean your career has stopped moving, but it does require a more deliberate approach to growth. Before taking on additional responsibilities or immediately beginning a job search, it is important to understand whether advancement is being limited by the organization, by a gap in your readiness for the next level, or by some combination of the two. In this solo episode, Julia Toothacre explains how to evaluate what is preventing advancement and identify forms of career growth that can strengthen your position even when a title change is...
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How to Shape Workplace Culture Without Being the Boss with Natalie Johnson
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
Workplace culture is often treated as something leadership or HR creates and employees either enjoy or endure. Natalie Johnson sees it differently. Culture exists anywhere people are working together, and every person contributes to it through how they communicate, respond to conflict, support colleagues, handle disagreement, and show up when things get difficult. Natalie joins Julia Toothacre to discuss workplace culture as a career skill. They explore how much influence individual employees actually have, why culture can vary dramatically between teams inside the same organization, what...
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Career Compromise: What Are You Giving Up and What Are You Getting Back?
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
Every career involves trade-offs. You may take a longer commute for better pay, give up flexibility for a promotion, accept fewer responsibilities for more stability, or stay in a role because your life requires predictability right now. A compromise can be a reasonable decision when you make it and still stop working for you later. In this episode, Julia Toothacre looks at how career compromises accumulate, how to distinguish a preference from a genuine non-negotiable, and what can happen when a temporary trade-off quietly becomes permanent. She also explains why feeling frustrated at work...
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What job seekers get wrong about hiring with Tank Rhodes, Part 2
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
A job description can look specific, but that does not mean everyone involved in the hiring process agrees on what the company needs. A candidate can meet the stated qualifications and still lose out to someone with a referral, a particular background, a degree the job may not require, or a profile that better matches what a hiring manager has in mind. In Part 2 of Julia Toothacre’s conversation with Francis “Tank” Rhodes, they continue examining assumptions about hiring from both the candidate and employer side. Tank draws on his experience in recruiting, HR systems, and hiring while...
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Why Is It So Hard to Get Hired in 2026? Job Search Reality with Tank Rhodes, Part 1
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
Hiring has always been complicated, but for many professionals, the process feels especially difficult to understand right now. Candidates are navigating long hiring processes, inconsistent communication, changing expectations, conflicting advice, and technology that isn’t always well understood. In this episode, Julia Toothacre is joined again by Francis “Tank” Rhodes, a human resources professional who is also experiencing the hiring process from the candidate side. Tank shares an update on his own job search, and the conversation uses his experience to explore some of the larger...
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Questions to Ask Before Changing Careers
Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals
Thinking about making a major career change? Before you update your resume or start applying for jobs, it's worth taking a step back. Career frustration doesn't always mean you need a new career. Sometimes it's your company, your manager, your work environment, or a shift in your own priorities that's making you question what's next. In this episode, I walk through the questions I encourage professionals to ask before making a significant career move. We'll look at what's happening in your current role, why you're considering a change, how your personality and values influence career...
info_outlineMeaningful work can provide a strong sense of purpose, but it can also make career decisions more complicated when a person begins to equate the mission of an organization with their own identity. In nonprofit and mission-driven work especially, commitment to the cause can influence what someone is willing to accept around compensation, workload, emotional demands, boundaries, or long-term sustainability.
In this episode, Julia Toothacre speaks with executive coach and consultant Jen Margolis about the relationship between personal purpose and organizational mission. They explore why an organization’s purpose should not become an employee’s entire identity, whether everyone needs to find meaning through work, and how professionals can clarify what they uniquely contribute without assuming that contribution must be expressed through one employer or career path.
Jen also shares practical ways to create separation from emotionally demanding work, reconnect with what matters now, and reconsider a career that may still feel meaningful but no longer fits the person you have become. ep173 Jen Margolis 4k.txtTXT
What Julia and Jen Discuss
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Why mission-driven work can provide meaning while also creating complicated career trade-offs
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The distinction between an organization’s purpose and an individual’s personal purpose
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Why purpose is broader than a job title, role, or employer
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Whether everyone needs to find purpose through their career
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How strengths, interests, values, and life circumstances contribute to career clarity
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Why caring deeply about the work can make burnout harder to recognize
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How boundaries and recovery practices can help create healthier separation from work
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What to consider when the work still matters but the career you are building no longer feels sustainable
About Jen Margolis
Jen Margolis is the founder of Amberwood Practice, where she works as an executive coach and consultant helping leaders build purpose-driven futures, create meaningful impact, and find greater alignment between work and life. Her work draws on experience in organizational design, positive psychology, leadership development, strategy, and planning.
Jen holds graduate degrees in social work and positive organization development from Case Western Reserve University, a certificate in Positive Psychology from the Whole Being Institute, and an ICF Level 2 coaching certificate from the Center for Executive Coaching. She lives in Cleveland, Ohio, with her husband, two children, and rescued cattle dog.
Connect with Jen
Amberwood Practice:
https://www.amberwoodpractice.com/
LinkedIn:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-margolis-0247803
Purpose in Practice workbook:
Mentioned in the episode. Add the direct link when available.
Control Your Career Resources
Read The Blog:
https://ridethetidecollective.com/2026/09/22/purpose-burnout-career-clarity-jen-margolis/
Explore all episodes:
https://ridethetidecollective.com/podcast/
Connect with Julia on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliakrussell/
Visit the website:
https://ridethetidecollective.com
Get career resources:
https://ridethetidecollective.com/free/