Julia Toothacre hands new coaching clients an assessment before she takes them through anything else.
The instrument she uses is the MBTI Step II, a more detailed version than the four-letter personality code many professionals already know from early-career workshops. Where the standard Myers-Briggs assigns someone to four broad personality dimensions, Step II breaks each dimension further into specific facets. An introverted type, for instance, might score as reserved rather than intimate, quiet rather than contained. Each distinction provides language for patterns that can otherwise feel opaque, including the moments when someone’s behavior contradicts what their type would seem to predict.
By Toothacre’s account, she has been using the MBTI with clients since 2011 and has been certified to administer it since 2017. That background underpins the Clarity of Self program at Ride The Tide Collective: a 90-minute coaching session built around Step II results, examining how personality shapes career decisions and workplace behavior. Clients arrive knowing something about themselves. Toothacre’s objective is precision.
The reasoning behind starting there runs through the whole practice. Career coaching tends to move quickly toward tactical advice, refreshing the resume or rethinking the LinkedIn profile. Those steps matter. But Toothacre, who holds a counseling-focused master’s degree and spent eight years working in university career offices, observed that the tactical layer rarely holds when the foundation beneath it is uncertain. A professional who cannot articulate their values is poorly positioned to evaluate whether an opportunity fits them. A person who does not understand their own decision-making tendencies will apply advice designed for someone else and find the results puzzling.
Self-assessment comes first. Strategy follows.
Closely related to that identity work is a second distinction Toothacre draws early in the coaching process: what a professional can control, what they can only influence, and what they may need to accept or work around entirely. Stalled careers often involve sustained effort aimed at the wrong category. Someone might spend months trying to shift a manager who will not shift, or waiting on an organizational change that depends on factors well beyond their reach. Sorting those categories out does not produce resignation. It redirects effort toward where it can actually move something.
Both threads run through the first two stages of the Control Your Career process Toothacre developed: Realistic Reality, which asks clients to assess their current situation honestly before any planning begins, and Identity Analysis, the structured self-examination work that the Clarity of Self program is built from. The full five-stage framework continues through Purpose-Driven Plan, Initiate Action, and High-Impact Habits. The flagship Control Your Career program delivers the complete sequence across 12 one-on-one sessions available in three-month, six-month, or nine-month formats, including a validated assessment set and a custom career growth plan.
The methodology grew from Toothacre’s eight years in university career offices at Azusa Pacific University and the Drucker School of Management, where she served as Career Strategist and ran the career office, working with students and alumni across every level of education and career stage. She currently teaches an undergraduate career course at the University of Southern California.
Toothacre is also Chief Career Strategist at ResumeTemplates.com and has, by her own account, been covered as a career and workplace expert by outlets including Fast Company and CNBC. Her LinkedIn Learning course, “Taking Ownership in Your Career,” draws on the same methodology she uses with coaching clients.
The Control Your Career podcast at Ride The Tide Collective runs solo episodes on career strategy alongside conversations with guests from hiring and workplace fields.
Her first book, also titled Control Your Career, is scheduled for release in December 2026. The aim, Toothacre says, is a resource people can return to at different points across their careers rather than advice calibrated to a particular hiring environment. The career, as her practice has long held, is longer than any single search.