Career Advancement, Leadership and Promotion: The Mid-Career GPS Podcast
You’re doing great work. So why are you still being overlooked for promotions, leadership opportunities, or your next career move?
The Mid-Career GPS Podcast helps mid-career professionals build the visibility, influence, and career strategy to move forward. If you’re a manager, senior manager, or director who feels stuck, undervalued, or uncertain about what’s next, you’re in the right place.
I’m John Neral, a leadership and career coach. Each week, I share practical strategies and candid conversations to help you communicate your value, strengthen your leadership presence, and make more confident career decisions.
You’ll learn how to position yourself for promotion, navigate difficult workplace conversations, build strategic relationships, and lead with greater impact.
We’ll also tackle job search strategy, interviewing, and career transitions when your next step means moving to a new organization.
At the heart of this podcast are my SHOW UP strategies, helping you take an active role in your career instead of waiting for someone else to recognize your potential.
With more than 360 episodes, you’ll find guidance for the challenges and opportunities that come with this stage of your career.
Subscribe to The Mid-Career GPS Podcast and start building a clearer path to what’s next.
Explore coaching and free career resources at https://johnneral.com.
Feeling stuck in your mid-career is not a character flaw. It may not even be an information problem.
If you are dissatisfied with your job, struggling in the current job market, or uncertain about your next career move, your instinct may be to gather more information. You read another book, listen to another podcast, research another opportunity, or give yourself one more weekend to think about what you want.
That can feel responsible. But sometimes, gathering more information is simply analysis paralysis disguised as preparation.
In this episode of The Mid-Career GPS Podcast, I explain why smart, capable, and experienced professionals often delay the actions that could improve their careers. At mid-career, you have more to protect, including your reputation, professional identity, income, and responsibilities. That can make speaking up, networking, pursuing a promotion, or starting a job search feel riskier than continuing to research your options.
I also explain the important difference between clarity and certainty. You do not need to feel 100 percent certain before taking your next step. In many cases, career clarity only emerges after you take action and learn from the result.
I will walk you through a practical career-growth framework: Insight leads to action. Action creates feedback. Feedback drives adjustment. Adjustment leads to your next action.
This cycle can help you make better career decisions, strengthen your leadership presence, increase your visibility, and regain momentum without making a reckless career move.
I will also challenge you to identify one small career experiment you can complete within the next seven days. That experiment could involve contacting someone in your network, requesting feedback, exploring a new role, speaking with your manager, or making your professional value more visible to decision-makers.
Small, intentional actions can give you better career information than weeks of overthinking.
In This Episode, You Will Learn
How to define what feeling stuck means in your career right now
Why collecting more career advice may be keeping you from moving forward
How analysis paralysis becomes socially acceptable procrastination
Why mid-career professionals often delay important career decisions
The difference between career clarity and complete certainty
How to take action when you are concerned about your reputation, identity, or paycheck
A repeatable framework for turning insight into career momentum
How to run a seven-day career experiment that produces useful feedback
Why visibility matters when you want a promotion or greater leadership influence
How to help decision-makers recognize your value and readiness for advancement
If you are unhappy at work, feeling overlooked for promotions, navigating a difficult job market, or questioning what you want from the next chapter of your career, this episode will help you stop waiting for perfect clarity and begin creating meaningful progress.
Take the Next Step
If you are ready to increase your visibility, strengthen your influence, and create more career momentum, register for my free webinar, Stop Waiting to Be Noticed. Visit johnneral.com/webinar to learn more and reserve your spot.
Applications are now open for The SHOW UP Accelerator, a 90-day group coaching and private coaching program for mid-career professionals who want to take action on one thing in their career. Visit https://johnneral.com/accelerator for more information.
If this episode helps you, subscribe to The Mid-Career GPS Podcast and share it with a colleague who feels stuck or overlooked. You can also leave a rating and review to help more mid-career professionals 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 how you make clear decisions, build influence, and take control of your career. Let's get started.
Let's talk about what it means to be stuck. You hear it in the intro to this podcast all the time, and it is such a core principle of how I help my clients move from that position of being stuck to unstuck. But I want you to get really clear in this episode with me about what being stuck means to you. Have you been wanting a particular promotion inside of your organization, but you're told it's just not the right time? Or there's really no place for you to move up on the org chart because no one's retiring. Or maybe you're feeling stuck because you know you need to leverage your talents and expertise elsewhere, but you're overwhelmed by all of the things you think you need to do in this job market while at the same time raising your family and perhaps taking care of your aging parents. What I want you to think about in this episode is that you do not need more career advice. You need action. And the real bottleneck that often happens, and I see this happens so much with the mid-career clients I work with, is they feel this need to get more information. The more information you get, the more insight you think you'll have. And then when you have that insight, you'll go ahead and take some action because you'll be more prepared. And then when you take that action, you'll get some feedback or some data from it. And then you can make an adjustment. What I want to offer you today is that creates a loop that is actually keeping you stuck. See, you probably already know what to do. You probably already know there is at least one thing you should be doing differently in your career. Maybe it's having a much-needed conversation with your supervisor, or it's updating your network, or it's about asking for more responsibility on an upcoming project. Maybe it's about speaking up differently, or finally making that decision you've been postponing for a while because there's been something holding you back from doing it. So let me ask you, why haven't you done it? This is what I want to explore with you today. Because I truly
believe mid-career professionals do not have an information problem. What you have is an action problem. So here's what I mean by this. Right now, we have so much information at our disposal. If a professional is looking to make a change, let's say in their career, they can ask AI how to update their resume, optimize their LinkedIn profile, interview better, negotiate for a promotion. You can hop on LinkedIn and search for being better at networking. You can listen to podcasts such as mine about career and leadership information and guidance. There is tons, or there are tons of articles that are out there that you can simply search for or use AI about career growth. You can take assessments, you can watch courses, you can watch webinars, you can buy programs that range from a few dollars to tens of thousands of dollars, and yet you still feel stuck. Why? Because the more information you collect does not automatically create more movement. At some point, you will encompass a paralysis by analysis that will get you stuck because you're like, oh, if I just have one more piece of information, that's going to be the thing. Researching what to do is actually one of the best forms of procrastination. In fact, I will offer you it's a socially acceptable form of procrastination. I'm working on it, I'm taking time to figure it out. Oh, I'm I'm reading a lot of books and articles and blogs right now. Um, I'm putting it all together. And what you're looking for is some validation from the people you're telling this to that they'll go, oh, they're working really hard at this. So what you're telling yourself is if I just listen to one more podcast episode, if I just read another book, if I take time to think about it over the weekend, if I wait until after this project is over, or I'll talk to my boss when they're in a better spot. None of those things sound unreasonable. But when you get yourself into that loop, what happens is six months later, nothing has changed. In fact, if anything has changed, it's your frustration that you're simply stuck in the same spot and haven't done a damn thing about it. I'm gonna give you three reasons why smart people delay action.
And reason number one is that when we take action, it creates uncertainty. See, gathering information feels safe. When we take action, it creates consequences. So let's say, for example, you want to elevate within your current organization and you really want that promotion, be it to manager, senior manager, director. Once you ask a decision maker inside of the organization, what do I need to demonstrate in order to be considered for the next level? And you take that action by asking that question, you may hear something you don't want to hear. Albeit you don't like the answer that's gonna come back to you. Because once you ask, once you make yourself vulnerable, once you put yourself out there, someone can say no to you. Or if you think I need to leave my organization, I need to go find a job elsewhere, I need to find someone that's gonna value who I am and pay me what I am worth. You take that action and you may discover that the market is far more difficult or different than what you initially thought. See, gathering information doesn't threaten us, it actually keeps us safe. Taking the action is what makes us vulnerable. And that's the scary part because once we take that action step, then we have the unknown. Then we're standing at the proverbial fork in the road, trying to figure out which side of the road am I going to travel on? Which path am I going to go down? Reason number two, we hear so much about having clarity. And I've talked about clarity before. I think clarity is a great thing. But we cannot confuse clarity with certainty. When people reach out to me and they want to inquire about coaching or joining one of my programs, the biggest objection that I will get from them, and it's interestingly, it's not about the money. The objection that comes is I think I need more time to think about it. If I just get clear about what I want, I'll know what to do. They're wagering their bet, if you will, on getting something that they will never get until they take an action. The clarity is the thing that they think they want. But what they really need is they need the certainty and the decisiveness to take the action that will then create that clarity. If you're thinking about leaving your company, you don't have to decide whether leaving your company is the right thing to do before you talk to another company. In fact, more than likely, you are a little comfortable in the fact and grateful that you have a job and you have the flexibility to look elsewhere, but you'll go have that conversation, and admittedly, in some cases, probably should have that conversation, and then go, oh, now what am I going to do? They just made me a job offer. You don't need to have absolute certainty before asking for that promotion at work before learning what the role actually requires. You know you want to be promoted. You don't need to put together a five-year plan about the conversation about what you want to do next year. All this is is busy work. That's all it is. And our brains are programmed to keep us safe. But I want you to start looking at where are you playing it too safe in your leadership and career journey right now that is holding you back from taking decisive action. Here's reason number three. And this one is distinctly and quintessentially mid-career. The more experience we get, the more cautious we are likely to be. When we're younger and we're trying to move our career as quickly as possible, we often experiment with different things. Let me try this, let me do this, let me put myself out there at work for this. But at mid-career, we have more to protect. You have a reputation, you have a compensation package that is allowing you to meet your bills and responsibilities. You have a professional identity that is attached to who you are and what you do. So for some mid-career professionals, they become risk adverse because if they intentionally experiment, is that really going to help them? Is taking that risk, albeit a calculated risk, going to actually move your career forward? Now, the other thing I hear often is I just need to get more feedback. I need more, I need more data. And and yes, feedback can be extremely helpful. But if you think you're ready for an advancement, and that could be either internally or externally to your organization, here's the feedback loop I want to offer you.
Insight leads to action, which leads to feedback, which leads to an adjustment, which then leads to another action. Let's break this down. Instead of vacillating on this for six months, what if we changed the model a little bit? So let's say that you have a particular insight that you believe at work, you are ready for more responsibility. You have demonstrated the knowledge, skills, and abilities, the core competencies of your current role and the role above you. And so you're telling yourself, I believe I'm ready. The action you may choose to take from that is to have a conversation with your supervisor. Once you do that conversation, you're going to get some feedback. And the feedback may be something like this your supervisor says that your execution is excellent, but you haven't demonstrated enough strategic leadership. Now, in receiving that feedback, I want you to consider getting very clear about how your supervisor is defining what your strategic leadership should look like. Once you have that and you have much better information, now you make the adjustment. You seek opportunities to lead cross-functional work or work with a different team, and you begin communicating your thinking and thought processes differently. Then the following action that you take is you volunteer or advocate for yourself to be on that next project or that next initiative, and you begin deliberately demonstrating that strategic leadership that your supervisor is expecting to see from you. Insight to action, to feedback, to adjustment to action. When you do those things, now you've learned something. That is a far different approach than you sitting there or listening to this podcast and saying, I haven't been promoted in years, I deserve a promotion, and nobody sees it. My friend, you are not entitled to anything. Because you may be sitting there and thinking, I deserve the promotion. And you're watching other people inside of your organization get promoted quicker than you are, and you're sitting back going, What am I not doing right? More than likely, you are not having the intentional conversation by showing up to having it to get the feedback you need in order to make the adjustment and take the action to help you get promoted. When we sit back and we say to ourselves, I deserve to be promoted. Why isn't it happening? All that does is increase our frustration. Career acceleration isn't necessarily about moving faster. It's about learning faster. The people who are accelerating their career quicker than you are are getting a different level of information. They're getting more robust feedback than you are to figure out exactly what they need to do to get themselves to the next level. Because that might be the churn or the environment that you're in. But when you think about how you are playing this game, this game about how we move our career, how we build our mid-career GPS to what's next, we have to be willing to take an action. So let's do a little experiment.
I want you to consider this question. What is one experiment I can run over the next seven days that will give me useful information about my career? Let me say the question again. What is one experiment I can run over the next seven days that will give me useful information about my career? Maybe you finally have that conversation. Maybe you reach out to that person you've been wanting to network with. Maybe you ask someone at work whom you trust for some very specific feedback. Maybe you volunteer for a new project or initiative. Maybe you have the intentional conversation and ask specifically what's required of you in order to be promoted. Maybe you're sitting in a meeting and you share an idea that you would normally have kept for yourself, but you're willing to speak up and share it with the group. And then once you complete that experiment, ask yourself, What did I learn? These are the kind of actions that we can take that have a tremendous amount of safety in some ways, but they do make us vulnerable. We we take an action to see how people are going to respond to it or react. The idea of turning an insight that you receive into action, of getting information you have been scared to get or afraid to learn, and then taking that and moving that into a specific action step is directly something that I've been teaching this month around visibility.
Now, I've been running a webinar called Stop Waiting to Be Noticed. I've run it two times already this month. I'm going to run it a third time on Wednesday, September 23rd. And if you're listening to this after Wednesday, September 23rd, you can always go to my website, johnnarrell.com forward slash webinar, to see what free webinars I'm I'm hosting in a particular month. But the visibility I'm inviting people to entertain here is not about simply getting noticed. It's about creating a specific action that helps the decision makers inside of your organization know what you contribute, what your talents are, what your professional goals are, and how ready you are for that next step. That's what I'm teaching in this final live session of stop waiting to be noticed. So you should attend if you're a mid-career professional, mid-level leader, somewhere between manager, senior director, or you're looking to step out of your comfort zone and get noticed by the powers that be within your organization, and you want to show up differently than what you are. If you're doing strong work, if you're known for being someone who consistently delivers and executes, but you are frustrated that that work isn't translating into the visibility, influence, and career career momentum you want, you gotta come to the webinar. You gotta join me. So go to johnnarrell.com forward slash webinar. So J-O-H-N-N-E-R-A-L dot com forward slash webinar. It'll be in the show notes as well. I'm delivering it live on Wednesday. If you can attend live on Wednesday at noon Eastern, I want you to register anyway because I will be offering a replay through Sunday. That would be Sunday the 27th. I don't leave my webinars out there for a whole period of time because you're either going to take action or you're not. It's a 30 to 45 minute webinar, somewhere in that. If it's important to you, you'll watch it. Simple as that. Okay. Obviously, if you come. Live, you get the benefit of being able to ask questions. There's there's a live QA session. Obviously, it's a tremendous value in terms of talking about the content that's there. But I want I'd love for you to come. Okay. Now what happens after you know? What happens after you gain some insight and start taking some action? The webinar that I'm running can give you an idea. This podcast and all the other episodes of this podcast I have can give you ideas. LinkedIn, scroll on LinkedIn, it'll give you ideas. AI is gonna give you ideas. But at some point, you have to do something with those ideas.
And that is why I've created the show up accelerator. The show up accelerator is designed to help mid-career professionals like you decide, act, get feedback, adjust, keep moving forward. The reason why this is an accelerator is very intentional. I'm not promising that you're going to accelerate your promotion. What I am promising you is you will accelerate your learning and action cycle. You will learn how to take action about your career to take greater command of the narrative you're telling people and how you're building your network and how you're being more visible, that will ultimately lead to whatever goal it is that you want in your career. So if you're tired, my friends, if you are tired of thinking about what you should do and you're ready to spend the next 90 days with me and a small group of mid-career professionals to actually do something about it, applications are open. Go to johnner.com forward slash accelerator and apply. See if the show up accelerator is right for you. You fill out the application. If you're a great fit for the accelerator, I'm gonna reach out to you with my calendar. You're gonna schedule a 15-minute call. We're gonna talk about some specific goals. I'm gonna invite you into the accelerator. If at the end of that call, we feel it's a great fit. Now, for this founding round of it, because I'm not gonna hide anything from you. Yeah, there's a cost to this. For the three months, it's $1,500. Or you can do a payment plan of $525 a month for three months, makes it $1,575. You don't need more information, you need an opportunity to take action. So with that in mind, what is one thing you already know you should be doing in your career that you haven't done yet? And once you identify that one thing, what would happen if instead of thinking about it through the end of the year, you took an action to start working on it and got the support you need to get the career momentum you've been looking for to move yourself forward. You got the webinar, johnnarrell.com forward slash webinar live Wednesday, September 23rd, and the show up accelerator, johnnarrell.com forward slash accelerator apply would love to have you come
in. So until next time, my friends. Thanks for spending time with me. I invite you to take one action, and that's 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 your day. 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, johnnarrell.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.
