S4E4 - Right Job. Wrong Life Stage: A Teach, Lead or Leave Episode

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You've been good at your job for years. You've been happy in it. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, it just stops fitting - even though nothing about the role has actually changed. Sound familiar?

In this episode of Positively Leading, Jenny explores a career conversation that rarely gets the airtime it deserves: life stage. Drawing on stories from her coaching practice - a deputy principal drowning under the weight of leadership and young children, a head of department grieving the loss of predictability, a teacher navigating chronic illness and the identity she built around her classroom - Jenny unpacks why the role that energised you at 25 might quietly deplete you at 45.

This isn't about burnout or a bad school. It's about evolution, not revolution - and giving yourself permission to want something different at different points in your career, without guilt.

Did you know there is more? You can access every episode, show notes, links and more via my website Positively Beaming.

Transcript

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[00:01:03]

Hello, and welcome back to Positively Leading. I'm Jenny Cole, coach, consultant, and author through my business Positively Beaming. I'm currently doing a special collection of episodes focusing on the themes in my new book, Teach, Lead or Leave. I'm someone who knows intimately what it feels like to be overwhelmed and burnt out in a job that you actually love.

Today we're talking about something that doesn't get nearly enough airtime when we're talking about career conversations, and that is life stage.

Here's something that I see all the time in my coaching clients. Someone who's been in a role for years, and they've been good at it, and they've been happy in it, and then one day, without any obvious trigger, it just doesn't fit anymore. The job might [00:02:03] not have changed, and the school might not have changed, but something fundamental has shifted, and suddenly what used to work just doesn't.

And then the person in that job feels confused because if the job is objectively fine, nothing's actually gone wrong, why does everything just feel a little out of sync and misaligned? Often what I find is that while the role hasn't changed and the job hasn't changed much, what has changed is the person's life stage.

Their needs have changed, their values might have shifted, and their capacity to do the work has changed, but the job has stayed fundamentally the same. We act like finding the right career or the right role makes you set for life, and I, and I think there was a [00:03:03] time where this may have been true, but it is certainly not true anymore.

That the, the job that is best fit for you at 25 is not necessarily best fit for you at 45 or 55. What felt perfect for you at one stage in your life might be completely wrong for you at another. So today we're gonna talk about life stages and how and why our relationship with work shifts as we move through those different phases.

Um, and we're talking more about evolution, not revolution. So let's dive in. Let's start with an early career teacher. Maybe you're in your 20s, you're new to teaching or relatively new, the world is full of possibilities. And at this stage, what do you typically want from work? You want to learn, you want to build new skills.

You might wanna prove [00:04:03] yourself. You might want to explore and experiment and figure out the kind of educator you want to be, or even if you want to be in education. You probably have pretty high energy and pretty high idealism, and you believe that you can make a difference, and you're willing to work, decent hours because you're building something.

Your capacity is generally pretty high at this stage. You've got all of the enthusiasm of youth. You probably don't have young children yet, and you're probably not caring for aging parents. And apart from a pretty healthy social life, you might have fewer obligations outside of work. So you say yes to things.

You volunteer for things. Things are new and exciting, and you might stay late planning elaborate lessons or designing beautiful classrooms. And you might spend Saturdays on the floor cutting out, laminating, or designing units of [00:05:03] work. And this is encouraged, and you're quite happy to do it. And if you're in a really good school environment where you feel supported, this stage is incredible.

Many of us look back at our early teaching careers with great fondness. But this is also where we start to establish some patterns which become unsustainable at later points in our career. We are the person who says yes to everything because we've got capacity. That doesn't always do well as we go through our career.

We get used to working long hours. We get used to creating, achieving, and sustaining really high standards for ourselves in the kind of quality of our planning and our delivery. We get pretty used to perhaps bringing work home because, you know, when you're new, it's just gonna take you longer to do things, and so you know that [00:06:03] reports are gonna take you longer and marking's gonna take you longer.

And so you might get used to taking things home. And we want to be available, and so we say yes to things. And because it's working for us at this stage and because we have capacity and energy, we don't think critically necessarily about these practices. I do believe young teachers are much better at not setting themselves up for failure, but I'm happy to be corrected on that.

You just think this is what teaching is or this is just what it takes to be good at this job.

And then life changes, and those habits that worked for you at 25 don't necessarily work for you anymore at 35 or 45. But you've built them into pretty hard habits by now. Look, we've all seen teachers who are in their late 20s who are already burning out. They've been teaching for five to eight years, and they're exhausted at the relentlessness of [00:07:03] often their own high standards.

And this is the trap of early careers, building habits and expectations that just aren't sustainable long term, and then feeling stuck when you've reached the limits of your capacity. And at this point, we have people saying, "I don't think teaching is for me. I can't see myself holding myself to these standards and working these hours forever."

Now, mid-career, whatever that means for you, your 30s, 40s, and maybe into your 50s, you may have been in education for a while, you may have transitioned into it as a late entry teacher, but whatever happens, you've been in this for a little while, and this is when things start to feel a little complicated because typically things get a little bit more demanding outside of work.

You might, have started to have a family and have young children. Maybe if you're a little older, you [00:08:03] might be caring for aging parents or, in fact, dealing with your own health issues. And possibly by this point in our career, we have a partner who also has a career, and we're trying to balance, two hardworking people in one place.

And our capacity changes. The time and energy we used to be able to pour into our work is often needed elsewhere. Again, the job hasn't changed, but the expectations on your time have changed. And, we can see this in our life stages, but we also know that over the years, the expectations might ramp up.

But also, you think about the technology that we have that we didn't have 20 years ago. That means that we can literally check our emails while we're watching our kids play sport. This is both a strength but also a real challenge when we're trying to get balance. So you're looking at all your [00:09:03] younger colleagues who are putting up their hands saying, "Yes, I'll do that," or, "Yes, I'll do that."

And you've already got those jobs. You're already the literacy coordinator. You're already the expert on whatever it is in your school. And, they're staying late, and they're being given opportunities, and they're still looking like they've got energy, and you're feeling resentful. It's all right for them.

They can work late, whereas you've got kids to pick up and extra responsibilities. And so this is one of the first stages where I see teachers and educators starting to feel that restlessness or misalignment. Sometimes this is where they'll perhaps wanna drop back to part-time or leave the classroom because they have this misapprehension, misunderstanding that a leadership role is easier.

 I've coached many people in this position. One springs to mind, a deputy. She'd been in leadership for six years, and she'd been brilliant at it. Principal loved her. Staff loved her. She was on track to [00:10:03] becoming a principal herself. And then she had two children in that time, and her husband was FIFO.

And look, she was just drowning. She was trying to do the same level of job she had done before children, but with half the time and half the energy. Now, we all know the old trope of you want something done, ask a busy woman, and you will get more out of, a busy mother than out of anybody else.

That may be true, but that doesn't mean that's how we should be living and working. This deputy I'm thinking of was constantly exhausted, constantly feeling guilty that she should have been at school or she should have been home, or that she wasn't working hard enough. And she couldn't see a solution, so she actually stepped down from leadership and felt like a complete failure.

But she knew that if she stayed in that role she was going to break. And so we had some honest conversations about life stage. About the fact that the role that [00:11:03] worked for her before children was just not working for her now, and that wasn't a failure, that was just life, and there were options. And, she did choose to return to the classroom part-time, three days a week instead of five, and we worked on setting really clear boundaries and, stopping being a people pleaser.

She still worked really hard, and she still felt she was never in the right place at the right time. But to be honest, I reckon her family was happier and her marriage was happier. And so that's the mid-career trap, feeling like you should do everything you were always able to do when you were younger and when your life circumstances were completely different.

There's another thing that happens as we move through our life stages, and that is that our values often shift. What mattered most to you at 25 might not matter at 45. Look, at 25 you might be [00:12:03]really valuing achievement and status and pay and progression, and you are full on proving yourself. At 45, you might value time with your family and work-life balance and having energy left at the end of the day.

And you might value being able to spend time with your year 11, year 12 because they've got exams, or teaching your kids how to drive, or just being there at school and family events. At 25, you might be valuing learning. You might be soaking up every growth and learning opportunity and every novel new idea.

Whereas at 45, your values may have shifted to stability and security and not proving yourself. Neither set of values is better. They are just different, and this is completely normal. And when your values shift but your job doesn't shift with them, [00:13:03] you can sometimes feel that same misalignment, that same disconnect.

I've worked with a head of a department who'd been in the same role for 12 years early on, and he loved it, and he loved the challenge of it, and he loved solving problems, and building systems, and seeing improvement, and managing his staff. But at 50, he had elderly parents who all of a sudden had health issues and needed a great deal of support.

He also had children at home. And so what he really valued now was predictability, and he valued having energy for his life outside work, and he valued not being on call all the time. So as the head of department, in a school where there was high staff turnover, where there was lots of student challenges, he was really on call a lot of the time, and he just wasn't able to do that anymore.[00:14:03]

There was nothing wrong with the role and there was nothing wrong with him, but his values and his role were just no longer aligned, and he needed to make a choice. He could stay in the role and accept that it didn't match his current values, and that is an okay choice. He could adjust the role somehow to make it aligned, or he could move to a different role that better matched where he was now.

And so eventually he did choose option three because, he stuck it out in option one and just tolerated it for as long as he possibly could. And he moved on to a curriculum development role that was more predictable and less crisis driven so that his hours were more predictable, and so that he could take time off to take his parents to, appointments without, needing to find relief teachers and without feeling like he was letting his, team down.

[00:15:03] And for a long time, he felt really guilty about that change, and he felt like he was being sort of less ambitious and less committed 'cause he was on a pathway to promotion. So he was a head of a department, but he was heading towards deputy. Been around in the system for long enough to have earned his stripes, but life just changed and so he changed track.

I suspect that, if and when life settles down, he will head back into schools.

Now let's talk about late career. So, it feels really wrong to be saying 50s is late career. However, you could have 30 years of education experience under your belt by the time you're in your 50s, and in your early 60s you still might feel the energy for your job and your role. And look, essentially, you've got the runs on the board.

But this [00:16:03] stage brings its own challenges.

For some people, this is when they're at their peak. You've accumulated wisdom, you've got experience, you know what works, you've got confidence, you've made a few mistakes and you know how to fix them. You may be in a senior position with influence and impact. Awesome. All credit to you. But for others, this is when the exhaustion really hits.

You've been doing this for decades, you've seen reform after reform, you've survived restructure after restructure, you've adapted and pivoted countless times, and you are tired. Not just physically tired, mentally and existentially tired.

Tired of the politics, tired of the bureaucracy, tired of fighting the same battles over and over, tired of seeing good ideas being [00:17:03] crushed. And you're a little pissed off, and you're not that loyal employee anymore. And if you're at this stage, you've got a choice to make. Do I just keep pushing through to retirement, however many years away that is?

Do I find a way to make this, wherever I am, more meaningful and more sustainable? Do I pivot and do something different in my final years in education? Or do I leave earlier than I'd planned to? Do I go and set up a coffee shop or a kayaking business down south? Look, there is no right answer. But I'm sure many of you listening to this podcast will be at a stage where you're thinking, "Is there something else?[00:18:03]

And should I even be thinking this? You know, there's a bit of guilt around that.

And then there's the financial considerations. And it really doesn't matter which of these stages you're at. You know, when you're at the kids stage, you're probably paying off a mortgage. You're educating children, even if they're going to government schools. That stuff costs money. But when you're into this later stage in your career, you're trying to make sure that you've got enough for retirement.

You're, paying off the last bit of your house, if you're lucky, and you're putting money into investments or retirement so that you can live your post-work life as well as possible. And so that can make you feel very trapped. You know, I should feel grateful that I'm in this job that gives me holidays and a regular income and all of those things, but I just actually feel trapped.

And look, [00:19:03] there are pathways for late career educators that might look slightly different to those of their younger counterparts, and it might not be what you'd envisioned for your career. If you are already in your late 50s and early 60s, you are probably of the generation where you just plowed through.

You had a job and you had it for life, and you got on with it and did it, and your work ethic was amazing. And so you had this kind of vision for what you were gonna be doing, and it was probably gonna be a version of the same thing. But what if that is different now?

So here's something that doesn't get talked about enough, which is the grief that comes with outgrowing a role that you used [00:20:03] to love. 'Cause a job is not just a job. Deciding what we wanna do is not just about logistics and practicalities. It's about emotions. if you've had a job that you used to love, that used to energize you, that felt good, and now it doesn't anymore, we're grieving the loss of something that we used to have or that we anticipated that we would have.

And the grief is real and it needs to be acknowledged. I worked with a teacher who was grieving deeply. She had been a very passionate, creative, energetic classroom teacher for some time. She loved it. It was her calling. And then she had a chronic illness develop. Nothing life-threatening, but something that significantly impacted her energy levels and her ability to be, an energetic, full-on classroom teacher.

She could still teach, but not in the way she used to, and she couldn't do the [00:21:03] elaborate projects that she was known for, and she couldn't stay late. She couldn't do any of the extracurricular programs. She was in arts and music. And she was grieving not just her illness, not just the loss of capacity, but her identity as that teacher who ran all of those end of year performances and did the rehearsals and all the things, and that's what she got her joy from.

And when she wasn't able to do that anymore, it was desperately sad, and she was sad. And once she processed some of that grief, we could start exploring what teaching could look like now and how she could adapt, what parts of her teaching lit her up and what didn't require that energy. And also considering what might she be able to do and achieve if teaching actually became no longer physically possible for her.

But we didn't get to any of those [00:22:03] solutions until we had acknowledged what she was leaving behind and the grief. What I'd like you to take away from this episode is the following, and that is you're allowed to change. Not only are you allowed to, you will change. You're allowed to evolve. You're allowed to have different needs and different values at your different life stages.

And in fact, while you can plan for some of those, some of those things will just never be planned for. The job that was perfect for you at 25 doesn't have to be perfect for you at 45. And we need to have regular audits of our energy and our impact so that we know whether we're still being lit up and whether we're still making a difference.

The role that energized you before children is quite possibly gonna deplete you once you have a family to care for. A career path that made perfect sense when you were single with no [00:23:03] dependents may be different now. This is evolution, and acknowledging your needs have changed isn't a weakness. In fact, I reckon it's a strength.

It's self-awareness. It's maturity. It's self-leadership. You don't have to stay in a role that no longer fits you. You don't have to keep trying to be the person you were 10 years ago. Honestly, I'd still be in special ed if my knees would allow me to. No, that's not true. I wouldn't. But I am a different person now with a different level of energy, and I could not do what I did in my 20s. In my work in Teach, Lead or Leave, I outline six pathways that you can take if you feel like you're out of alignment with your job and your current role.

I also outline an energy and impact audit that allows you to work out [00:24:03] what's actually going on for you, and then a series of ways that you can dive into your strengths, your passions, your styles, and get some kind of compass alignment with your purpose so that you're clearer about what's lighting you up where you are, what needs to change, and then you can make some intentional decisions about where to next.

So if you're listening to this and realizing that you're a little bit out of alignment because of life stage, what do you do? First of all, acknowledge it. Stop beating yourself up for not being able to do what you used to be able to do. You're not supposed to be the same person with the same capacity forever.

Second, get honest about your current life stage and what it actually requires from you, and what you want it to require. Where do you wanna put your purpose and energy? Some people are perfectly happy in the life [00:25:03] stage where there are children, to devote a lot of energy and intention to their work.

And others wanna put all of their energy and intention into their family. No right or wrong. We are different people. However, we all do have a limited kind of energy level and capacity. So, we need to be able to work out what we can put into our day and week and month that is not gonna burn us out.

Third, think about what would need to shift for your work to align better with your current life. Not what you wish could be different about your life stage. You know, we can't make kids grow up any faster. There's not a lot we can do about elderly parents except to be there. So instead, what can we change about our work to make it fit our life a bit better?

And fourth, give yourself permission to want something different to what you wanted 10 years ago. That is evolution. [00:26:03] It's not regression. It's not giving up. It's not changing your mind. It's just different. In later episodes, we're gonna talk about how to diagnose what you're actually experiencing, because burnout and boredom and misalignment can all feel like something's wrong, but they actually require completely different solutions.

Thank you for being here. If this episode resonated, I'd love for you to share it with another educator who might be navigating life stage transitions and feeling guilty or confused or stuck. You're allowed to need different things at different stages, and you're allowed to make choices that honor where you are now, not where you used to be, not where you think you should be.

Thanks for listening. I'm Jenny Cole, and I'll see you in the next episode.