Most people who seek out a career coach arrive with a job problem. They want a new role, or a better one, or they feel stuck where they are. And so, predictably, a great deal of career coaching begins there: the resume, the LinkedIn profile, the interview prep, the networking scripts.
Julia Toothacre has spent fifteen years watching what happens when it starts there. She has drawn a different conclusion.
The practice she built, Ride The Tide Collective, operates on the premise that a career is more than a job search. Her five-stage Control Your Career process follows directly from that. Before any tactical work or advancement strategy can actually hold, Toothacre argues, something foundational has to happen first: a person needs an honest account of where they actually stand, a clearer read on who they are, and some considered view of what they want the next phase of their career to look like. Get that right, and the tactics tend to stick. Skip it, and even the most carefully revised resume rarely moves things.
Toothacre came to that position the long way. She spent eight years in university career offices, including positions at Azusa Pacific University and the Drucker School of Management, coaching everyone from undergraduates to doctoral students to mid-career alumni, and applying career theory in practice every day. What she found was that the dominant frameworks were built for a narrower slice of the professional population than the people sitting across from her. Working adults managing family obligations, shifting values, and organizational complexity that didn’t cooperate with any existing model were finding the available theory only partially useful. She was filling the gaps by instinct.
She wanted to make those fills explicit.
The Control Your Career coaching program is the result. The five stages move through what Toothacre calls Realistic Reality, which involves an honest evaluation of a person’s past and present circumstances, including what they cannot control; Identity Analysis, which explores personality, values, and strengths through assessments and structured reflection; Purpose-Driven Plan, the strategy stage; Initiate Action, where execution begins; and High-Impact Habits, which focuses on the routines that sustain career growth beyond the program itself. The order is not accidental. The first two stages do foundational work that most tactical approaches skip past entirely, which is the gap the framework was designed to address.
Toothacre holds MBTI Step I and Step II certifications, according to her professional biography, and treats personality and values assessments as a core element of the Identity Analysis work. The assumption built into that stage is that a career strategy has to be designed around the person carrying it out. Personality traits, professional values, and the specific conditions under which someone tends to do their best work are not background detail; they are the material any useful plan has to be built from.
She holds a Master of Science in College Counseling and Student Development from Azusa Pacific University. At the Drucker School of Management, she served as Career Strategist and director of the career office, according to Toothacre. She currently teaches an undergraduate career course at USC and serves as Chief Career Strategist at ResumeTemplates.com, contributing expertise to workplace research and career content. Her commentary on career and hiring trends has appeared in publications including Fortune, Fast Company, CNBC, and The Hill, according to her professional biography.
The coaching program at Ride The Tide Collective runs across 12 one-on-one sessions, offered in three-month, six-month, and nine-month formats. The range reflects a practical reality: someone who needs immediate career clarity is in a different position from someone managing a slower, more deliberate transition. A complimentary call before enrollment helps determine which structure actually fits the client’s situation.
The Control Your Career podcast covers career growth, workplace dynamics, career transitions, and the external conditions that shape professional lives. It alternates between solo episodes, in which Toothacre works through frameworks and strategies directly, and conversations with hiring professionals and career experts. Topics across its run have included what recruiters look for when evaluating candidates and what experienced managers expect from their teams. Three career journals from the Control Your Career Collection, addressing advancement, management, and exploration, were published in November 2022 and are available on Amazon.
Ride The Tide Collective appears on several independent career coach lists, among them CareerAddict’s 25 Best Career Coaches, Find My Profession’s recommendations for career coaching services for women, and Novoresume’s career coach selections.
A book, also titled Control Your Career, is scheduled for December 2026, according to the company. The intent, Toothacre has indicated, is for it to function as a resource people can return to across different career stages rather than advice calibrated to one particular job market cycle or hiring moment. On LinkedIn Learning, a course called “Taking Ownership in Your Career,” released in October 2021, extends the same thinking to a broader audience; by Toothacre’s account, it has drawn more than 60,000 learners.
