Job Search, Promotion, and Career Clarity: The Mid-Career GPS Podcast
Get Clarity. Get Promoted. Get Hired.
Are you feeling stuck, undervalued, or underutilized in your current role?
Wondering how to position yourself for a promotion, raise, or leadership opportunity?
Are you trying to figure out what’s next for your career, but not sure where to start?
You're not alone, and you're in the right place.
Hosted by executive and career transition coach John Neral, The Mid-Career GPS Podcast is your go-to resource to help you confidently navigate your job search, career advancement, and workplace challenges. Whether you want to find a new job, get promoted, or simply feel more fulfilled at work, this show will help you build the clarity and strategy you need to take your next step.
Each episode features actionable advice, insightful interviews, and real-world strategies to help mid-career professionals, typically managers to senior directors, design a career they love or love the career they have.
You’ve built a solid career. Now it’s time to build YourMid-Career GPS to figure out what's next and how to get there.
New episodes drop weekly. Subscribe today and let's start figuring out whatever is next for you and your career, together.
You can be talented, dependable, and exhausted from giving your best and still feel invisible at work.
After taking a two-and-a-half-month break from recording, I’m back with an honest look at what has been changing in my life and business. I recently had a coaching session that gave me the kind of clarity I could not find by working harder, overthinking my next move, or asking an AI tool to generate another template.
In this episode of The Mid-Career GPS Podcast, I explore what it takes to rebuild your confidence and career momentum when things do not go as planned.
I share what happened during my humbling experience competing on the PBA50 Tour. Tournament after tournament, I failed to advance beyond the first round. The experience reminded me of what many mid-career professionals face when they repeatedly apply for jobs, complete first-round interviews, and receive another rejection.
Eventually, disappointment can make you question your talent, preparation, and future. But failure does not have to become your identity.
I walk you through the three questions I use to turn disappointment into better decisions courtesy of two-time Olympic Champion, Lannie Basham:
What did I do well?
What did I learn?
What will I do differently next time?
This simple resilience framework can help you evaluate a job rejection, recover after being passed over for a promotion, prepare for an important workplace conversation, or regain momentum when you feel stuck in your career.
I also share why I decided to end the SHOW UP Leadership Lab membership. Simplifying my business allows me to focus more intentionally on helping mid-career professionals increase their visibility, strengthen their influence, and create meaningful career momentum.
If you feel undervalued, overlooked, or unsure about your next career move, working harder may not solve the problem. You may need better information, a clearer strategy, and more intentional conversations with the people who can influence your career.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
How to rebuild your confidence after a professional disappointment
Why repeated rejection can distort how you see your abilities
How to turn difficult experiences into practical career lessons
Why doing excellent work is not enough to get noticed
How visibility and influence affect career advancement
When you may have “crossed the bridge” in your job or career
Why honest conversations are essential for career clarity
How to stop waiting for someone else to recognize your value
You do not need to have your entire career figured out today. But you do need to stop waiting for your hard work to speak for itself.
If you are ready to become more visible, communicate your value, and create greater career momentum, join me for my free webinar:
Stop Waiting to Be Noticed: How Mid-Career Professionals Increase Visibility, Influence, and Momentum
Subscribe to The Mid-Career GPS Podcast, share this episode with someone who feels overlooked at work, and leave a review so more mid-career professionals can find the show.
Hello, my friends, and welcome to the Mid-Career GPS Podcast. I'm your host, John Narrell. This is the show for mid-career professionals who feel stuck, undervalued, or unsure what's next, and know that doing more isn't the answer. Here we focus on how you show up, and that means making clearer decisions, building influence, and taking control of your career. Let's get started.
Well, hey there. Today is Tuesday, September 1st, 2026. And a lot's been going on. In fact, this is the first time I'm turning on the podcast mic in about two and a half months. And I'll tell you why in a moment. But I just want to say, I hope you've had a great summer. Your kids are either back in school or will be going back to school very shortly. I hope you've had a chance to make some memories. And I decided to turn on the mic at this very moment because I just wrapped up a phenomenal session with my coach. His name is Alex Alberti. Absolutely appreciate him so much. And we had so many aha's during that session that I had planned to record at some point today or tomorrow, anyway. But I wanted to do this in a very raw in the moment kind of a way, because this essentially is the power of coaching. When we get aha's and we get insights into what's going on, whether it be in our lives and our careers and our work. And I know this is not something AI can give us. This is what happens when you interact with someone and you have a dialogue and someone who is an expert coach to help you by asking the right questions to help you get the insights and the ajas that you need. So let me tell you what's been going on.
So I did something with this podcast I have not done in the six years that I've had it. And that is I batched two and a half months' worth of episodes. What that means is I got everything together, compiled, recorded everything over a series of a few days, got them loaded up into the podcast host, and essentially didn't have to worry about recording an episode for two and a half months.
Now, there were some fun things going on during that time. So one of the things was I had an opportunity to go out and bowl uh on the PBA 50 national tour. Now, this is something I have never really had an opportunity to do in the past. Uh, I entered into four events, I was able to compete into three of them, and literally got my butt kicked at every single one. And it was a very humbling experience. And I'll equate this to you in the sense of it's like going into a job interview and you never get past the first round. Okay, so in our professional tournaments, we have different qualifying stages and match play stages and then final stages. I never got out of qualifying. And I've I've made match play before at a national event, but this was hard. This was challenging. This was so different. And I was also dealing with a couple of physical things in my game that really, really dear friend and coach of mine was trying to help me with at the time and were trying to work through some stuff. But it was so defeating on some levels. But this is where we get to be resilient. This is where we sit back, and in the words of two-time Olympic medalist Lanny Basham, in his mental management systems, he says we reflect on our performances based on three questions. What did I do well? What did I learn? What do I need to do differently next time? And I kept reflecting on those questions because I drive to these tournaments and they were, they were pretty close in the sense of I think the furthest I traveled was maybe seven or eight hours. But you got a lot of time in the car and you got a lot of time to think about things and stuff. And there were things that happened over these couple of months that I thought, oh, this would be really neat to share an episode with you or whatever. But I gave myself permission to let the podcast run as it is. And I had the episodes done and thought, well, we'll get back in September. I'll I'll share with you some more insights. So in the Professional Bowling Association, we have a national tour. We have what's called a regional tour. And the regional tour essentially is a training ground for the national level. And the regional events only happen on the weekends. So a couple of weeks ago, we had an event in Allentown, Pennsylvania in a wonderful center that has hosted us for a number of years. Great staff, great proprietor, um, great event overall.
And I played so confidently that entire weekend. I came in second. I lost in the final match, 237 to 222. This was my fifth second place finish. But I was so happy with how I played that entire weekend. I was happy how I showed up in moments when I needed to make a really, really good shot or I needed to strike to win a game or a match. And that level of confidence was something that I hadn't felt in a while. So because our lives are intertwined, right? And we we have our passions and our hobbies and our families and our friends and our things that we do outside of work, we sometimes gain lessons and insights from those experiences. So after that event was over, my husband and I traveled to Disney to celebrate a 60th birthday for a very, very dear and close friend of ours. And we were there with his family and friends and in-laws and nephews and nieces and everything. I mean, they they truly are family of choice, right? And so if you've ever done the drive down I-95 to get to Florida, you know it takes forever. And there's nothing better than stopping for 45 minutes on I-95 around Raleigh, North Carolina, to wait for them to clear an overturned poultry truck. Can't even make this up. So one of the things Richard and I often do when we're in the car is we just have these great conversations. And we got talking about our jobs, his job, my work, and what's working and what we want to make better and everything. And I shared with him that I felt like my work is in a period of transition. Things are changing. You're living it, you're seeing it. We're all living and seeing it in the sense of things are just very different right now. And I say that in the sense of when we're trying to fill our gas tanks and we're trying to put food on the table, and we have expenses and bills, there isn't always a lot of money to go around. And that is just the reality for so many of us. And when I look at my business, I have to look at what I offer to all of you in terms of services and what's working and what's not.
And earlier this year, I launched a membership program. It did not fill as I had hoped. It did not meet some particular goals as I had hoped. And for about two months, I had been thinking about ending that membership program. Um, and it's called the Show Up Leadership Lab. And in that moment, driving down I-95 and thinking about Mel Robbins' 54321 make the decision, because I had been thinking about this over and over and over again, I decided to end the membership. And I've let everybody in the group know, and we're we're closing things out so you can no longer join the membership, but they're they're gonna have access through the end of September, and and we're gonna have an extra call and things like that. But it was it was what I felt was right because of this reason. If you listen to last week's episode, and and that was the episode on what I called crossing the bridge. So that episode is episode 363. And I shared in that episode how in our careers we get to a point where we're ready to make a move. We've crossed over the bridge, over that apex of the bridge to get onto the other side. We have already crossed it over that the decision is made and things are happening. And in those decisions, we tap into our grit, our resilience, our confidence, our fears, our worries because we're ready to make that move, make that decision, and equate this to you're unhappy in your job. Well, you have two decisions at that point. You can stay unhappy and not do anything about it, or you can think about something that it
is you want to change. And in this job market, that change may not be you leaving your job. It may be, but it may not. You may end up having conversations that you didn't plan on having, but as one of my show-up strategies is called having intentional conversations. You go into that intentional conversation to get the information you need, not the information you want to hear. You get that information you need to make that informed decision about what's going to be next for you. And when I talk on this podcast about how it isn't about doing more work, we show up in ways that we get very strategic about the move we're going to make because we stop wasting time. And there has been a part of me this year that has felt as I've I've tried to navigate and think of different things to serve you, I might have wasted your time. I might have wasted my energy and your time because I wasn't as clear as I needed to be about what was next. I thought I had it. But looking back, what I realized is I didn't. And I just want to say to you that I appreciate you being along this journey with me to help me figure this out so I can serve you at my best. But when you run a webinar and you run a free webinar, and nobody expresses interest afterwards about anything you're offering, there's something in the messaging that didn't land. Either the wrong people came to the webinar in terms of what I was offering, or they got value from it, but they only saw the value in the free component and nothing else. Or that's what they could afford at the moment. And that was, and that's fine. But my value in my business is to help as many mid-career professionals as possible. There needs to be an exchange of value, right? So the exchange of value happens when you work more closely with me, you pay for those services, right? There are there are a couple of different ways we can work together, but there is an exchange of value that goes far deeper and far beyond the free stuff that you would get, say, on this podcast, or by subscribing to my newsletter, the Mid Career GPS newsletter. And so I've been I've been thinking about this, especially over the last two and a half months, because having these episodes batched, having the newsletters batched, gave me time to step back and look at things from a 10,000-foot view and looking at things from ground zero. So here's what I've learned and here's what I know. If you want to get your resume done, I can refer people for you for that. I have great people in my network who do amazing jobs at writing resumes. That's not what I do now. If you want to optimize your LinkedIn profile, I have great people in my network that can help you do that. That's not my primary focus. And there's so many great AI tools that are out there that you could use them to help you and pretty much get some results if you're doing it the right way, quote unquote. But you can do that without having to make a huge investment financially. I will offer you, you will make a huge investment in time and energy and perhaps some frustration, especially if you are not well versed at using some of these AI tools. But you can do that. When I talk about what it means to show up, I'm talking about serving you in that specific moment of where you are in your career right now. What does it mean for you in how you show up? What does it mean for you to have the conversation you've been meaning to have, but have been too afraid to have it? What does it mean for you to show up to be more visible inside of your organization than ever before? Because you are ready and ready to be strategically positioned for that new project lead, that new assignment, that new managerial role, or that promotion you have been desperately wanting, and you just need to know whether it's gonna happen or not. Crossing the bridge is recognizing that there is something different on the other side. Notice I didn't say better. Better is a judgment, and we're gonna withhold judgment for the moment. Crossing the bridge is about moving to something that is better or different for you. Crossing the bridge is going all in on what you believe is the next step and waiting to see what happens. Almost 10 years ago, it'll be 10 years ago this December, I left my job. I left my job to open this coaching practice full time, and in the month of December, I took the entire month off. And my best friend from college happened to be going on a work trip and she was going to San Francisco. She's like, Do you want to tag along? I'm like, heck yeah. And one of the things I did during the day was I walked across the Golden Gate Bridge, and I was scrolling through photos on my phone, and that popped up the other day. And that's exactly where I feel I am right now. I feel like I am on top of that bridge at the apex, crossing over into something different, and something different to better serve you at a different level than what I've done before. Yes, I'm still gonna do the podcast. Yes, I'm still gonna do the newsletter. But one of the things I promised myself I was gonna do this year was to simplify things, and I had gotten away from that over the last few months. But taking a step back gave me the clarity to figure out exactly what it is that I want to do to serve you better in an exchange of value that meets you where you are. So, what's next? More to come on that, but I am gonna tell you this.
Go to my website at johnnarrell.com forward slash webinar. I'm gonna be hosting a webinar in the month of September at multiple times. The webinar is called Stop Waiting to Be Noticed. How mid-career professionals increase visibility, influence, and momentum. Johnnarrell.com forward slash webinar. You can check the show notes as well. I'm gonna tell you there's gonna be three dates I'm gonna do this webinar. It is a free webinar. I want you to sign up for it. And I want you to join me live. I'm gonna do all three live. I want you to join me live to show up and do one thing. That you are committed for your career and professional development and advancement by giving me 30 to 45 minutes so we can talk about what it means for you and your next steps. I'm also gonna tell you, I'm gonna make an offer at the end of that webinar. So you come to a free webinar, you stay for the pitch, right? But I'm gonna offer you something that I'm so much clearer on this than ever before. And that is gonna be, I'm not even gonna hide it. I'm not gonna hide it. There's no point in hiding it. You come to a free webinar, you expect someone's gonna be selling you something on the webinar. I'm gonna offer you something. You can decide whether you want it or not. But if you're looking to get noticed, this is the thing for you. This is the thing that I am so excited about offering you. You're gonna hear more about it and what leads to it all in the webinar. So johnnarrell.com forward slash webinar. Sign up for one of the three sessions. Do your best, please. Join me live. Yes, I will offer a replay because I can hear some of you right now. Well, I can't do it at that time or whatever, because it's not convenient for me. Are you gonna give me a replay? I will give you a replay, but for no more than 72 hours. So if you're gonna watch it, you gotta watch it. Because after that, I'm taking it down. And we go from there. But I've already crossed the bridge, I'm already on the other side, and I'm I'm starting to get that downhill momentum and walking quicker because I don't run anymore. Blew out my foot. I can't run anymore. Um I I'm walking faster and faster to this goal, and I'm so excited to have you join me with this and and come along for the ride with me on this. Okay. So glad to be back with you. Um, we got some great things coming up on the podcast, too. So just just saying there's there's some some really, really good things coming up. I look forward to sharing them all with you. And this is all part about building your mid-career GPS and how we show up. So, my friends, remember this. You will build your mid-career GPS one mile or one step at a time, and how you show up matters. Make it a great rest of the day, and I'll see you at the webinar. Bye for now.
If you enjoyed this episode, don't keep it to yourself. Kindly share it with someone who needs it. And if you're tired of feeling stuck, overlooked, or underutilized in your career, go to my website, johnner.com to get started. There you'll find free resources, ways to work with me, and details about the Show Up Leadership Lab, my signature membership for mid-career professionals who want to lead better, get noticed, and elevate their career. All the links are in the show notes. You can grab what you need right there. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, and if you're getting value from the show, take 30 seconds to leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform. Remember, how you show up matters, and I'll see you next time.
