Unpopular Decisions: Real Stories of Bold Career & Life Decisions for People Who Were Taught to Play It Safe

You spent your whole life checking the boxes—earning prestigious degrees, landing responsible titles, and keeping everyone in your family and community comfortable. But beneath the achievements and polished resumes lies...

Six months ago, after 20 years of building spreadsheets, sitting in boardrooms, and navigating corporate marketing, Jameelah Calhoun launched Unpopular Decisions. The problem? You can take the girl out of corporate...

Note: This is a special summer solo dispatch from host Jameelah Calhoun, diving into the core themes of Belle Burden's bestselling memoir, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage. Sometimes losing your autonomy doesn't feel...

Note: This episode is part of our Summer Replay Series, re-anchored around cultural expectations and belonging. How do you handle loving something when it distances you from your own identity? And what happens when you...

Note: This episode is part of our Summer Replay Series, featuring deleted scenes and updated insights for mid-career transitions. Why do the most successful, high-performing professionals freeze when it comes time to...

Note: This episode is part of our Summer Rewind Series, featuring unreleased scenes and deleted clips from our episode in Season 1. Working 12-hour days, taking pay cuts for startup equity that ends up worth zero, and...

Sometimes the hardest part of leaving isn't the other person. It's admitting you got something out of staying. In this season finale of Unpopular Decisions, Jameelah Calhoun explores a type of shame we rarely talk...

Note: This episode discusses pregnancy loss, severe medical complications, and second-trimester abortion care. Two second-trimester abortions, a high-control religious upbringing, and a public decision to stop telling...

This episode discusses abortion, pregnancy loss, and reproductive healthcare. Please listen with care if any of these topics are tender for you. One in four women in the United States will have an abortion by age 45...

Dion Dawson came back from the Navy with nothing. He served six years, despite knowing on day two that it was not for him. He returned to no journalism career despite being one of the highest-rated military journalists...

Some people tell you to build in public. Others tell you to move in silence. Jovonne Cameron did the latter. She told her friends and family she was going back to school for a degree in English. She was not. She was...

Everyone is talking about reinventing themselves and identity shifting… As if the person you need to become is a stranger. Someone you have to manufacture out of thin air. But, it is not an identity shift. It is an...

Everyone told Temika Cage to be realistic. She was the golden child in a religious household, who was now 15 and pregnant. She had just shattered every expectation her family had for her. Her community assumed she would...

Troy Anthony's own choir petitioned to remove him as minister of music. Not strangers. The people who raised him. The woman he called Auntie. His grandfather sitting right next to him as the votes were cast four to...

<p>She was the eldest daughter of six children in a family that could not afford nannies.</p> <p>So she became one.</p> <p>Molly Gazay spent her childhood as Militant Molly, the one in charge, the one who kept everyone...