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Your Career Decisions Need Context

Control Your Career: Career Growth and Strategy for Ambitious Professionals

Release Date: 09/29/2026

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

More Episodes

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, your current career reality, and the external conditions affecting your options. Rather than using these factors as reasons something cannot happen, Julia shows how they can provide the context needed to make more informed decisions about timing, risk, opportunity, and what comes next.

What Julia Discusses

Why Julia begins her career decision-making process with reality before moving into identity, strengths, values, and interests
How finances, caregiving, location, capacity, lifestyle, and risk tolerance influence career choices
Why two people can face the same opportunity and reasonably make very different decisions
How to assess your experience, qualifications, reputation, network, compensation, and advancement opportunities using evidence rather than assumptions
Why professionals often underestimate or overestimate where they currently stand
How organizational conditions, industry trends, hiring activity, technology, geography, and the labor market affect career options
Why broad statements about the job market rarely describe every profession, industry, level, or location accurately
How the three realities can help you evaluate a decision such as whether to leave your current job
Why generalized career advice needs context before you decide whether it applies to you

The Realistic Reality Framework

Personal Reality

Your personal reality includes the circumstances in your life that affect what is reasonable or possible right now, including finances, caregiving responsibilities, location, time, capacity, lifestyle, risk tolerance, and other commitments.

Career Reality

Your career reality reflects where you currently stand professionally, including your experience, skills, qualifications, compensation history, career stage, reputation, network, responsibilities, and available opportunities.

External Reality

Your external reality includes conditions you may need to account for even though you cannot directly control them, such as organizational decisions, labor-market conditions, industry trends, technology, hiring activity, economic conditions, and geography.