Hi, and welcome to Teachers in Transition—the podcast for educators who are thinking about leaving the classroom, actively trying to figure out what comes next, or maybe just wondering whether there’s a version of their life where Sunday afternoon doesn’t come with a sense of impending doom.
I’m Vanessa Jackson, and I help teachers recognize the value of everything they already know how to do—and figure out where those skills can take them next.
We’ve got a lot to talk about today.
We’re kicking off a new three-part Perspective Pivot on teacher health—and we’re starting by taking a hard look at what teaching actually demands from your brain, your body, and the rest of your life.
We’re also introducing a new occasional segment called Networking Works and it’s a bout How Connections Actually Work in the Wild, because networking is a whole lot more interesting - and useful - than asking random people if they know somebody who can get you a job.
And in Career Transition and Job Search, we’re going to do a different kind of personal inventory. We’ll look at what you want in your next career, absolutely, but we’re also going to examine what you absolutely do not want to do anymore.
Let’s dive in.
Perspective Pivot (2:17)
For the next three episodes, I want to spend some time talking about something that I don’t think we talk about nearly enough when we talk about teachers leaving education: teacher health.
Today, we’re going to talk about the demand: What does teaching actually ask of a human brain and body, day after day? Next week, we’ll talk about the cost: What can happen when we operate under those demands for years without enough opportunity to recover? And then in part three, we’ll talk about the response: What would it look like if we stopped treating teacher health as an individual self-care problem and started looking at the conditions surrounding the work?
But before we can talk about what teaching may be doing to us, we have to acknowledge what teaching asks us to do. You may have heard that teachers make something like 1,500 decisions every day. That’s one of those statistics that has been repeated for years and years, and tracking down good research behind the exact number is difficult. But I also taught for 25 years, and if somebody told me that number was an underestimate, I wouldn’t have any trouble believing them.
Think about what happens during a single class period. You’re delivering instruction. You’re watching the clock. You’re checking for understanding. You’re deciding whether to keep going or explain something again. You’re noticing the kid in the third row who suddenly isn’t participating. Somebody needs the bathroom. Somebody’s Chromebook isn’t working. Somebody finished early. Somebody hasn’t started.
And while you’re handling all of that, you’re also thinking about what comes next. Did I answer that parent email? Who needs an accommodation? Who was absent yesterday? Are we going to finish before the bell? And, depending on where and when you’ve taught, part of your brain may also be constantly monitoring something much more fundamental: Is everybody safe?
That’s an extraordinary amount of information to process while simultaneously doing the thing we supposedly hired you to do: teach.
Over the years, we’ve tried to make teaching more standardized. I’ve ranted against this frequently. Scripted curricula. Pacing guides. Benchmark testing. Data meetings. Required interventions. Prescribed materials. And you might think that would reduce the number of decisions a teacher has to make. Eh. Maybe sometimes it does.
But sometimes standardization doesn’t remove responsibility. It just removes authority. You’re still responsible for whether students learn, how they behave, and what happens when something isn’t working, but you may have less freedom to decide what you’re going to do about it. At some point, you can begin to feel like a substitute teacher in your own classroom: all of the responsibility without necessarily having all of the authority. And frankly, that’s exhausting.
Because the demand of teaching isn’t simply that teachers work hard. It’s that teachers spend hours every day responding to eleventy-thousand things, often while regulating their own reactions. Whatever is happening in front of you, you’re still the adult in the room. And sometimes we wish there were an adultier adult somewhere, because it’s a LOT for one person to handle—psh, it’s a lot for three people to handle!
But you have to keep teaching. So we learn to wait to use the bathroom. We keep going with a headache. I’ve taught band with migraines. Fun fact: I’ve had zero migraines since leaving teaching. We teach while tired. And let me remind you it’s just as dangerous to drive while tired as it to drive drunk. We pull ourselves together after a disastrous class and smile at the next group as though nothing happened. And then we come back tomorrow and do it all again .
But so far, most of what I’ve talked about is what teaching demands from your brain. Let’s talk about what it asks of your body.
Depending on what and whom you teach, you may spend most of your day on your feet—standing, walking, hauling equipment, moving things around, setting things up and taking them down. And for some educators, the physical demands go much further. You may work with children who run off, who need physical assistance, or who sometimes require intervention to keep themselves or someone else safe.
The physical demands of teaching aren’t the same for everyone, but teaching is not generally a profession where your body gets to say, “You know what? I think I need a little break right now.”
Even eating became something we have to accomplish rather than something we actually stop and do. Lunch may technically be 30 minutes. We all know there is approximately a .001% chance that you actually get all 30 minutes. Teachers become remarkably talented at inhaling food.
I am absolutely convinced that if somebody ever invents a nutritionally complete meal pill that can be swallowed in 30 seconds, there will be a school district somewhere saying, “Fantastic! That gives us another 24.5 minutes for data meetings. Stick a PLC meeting there!”
But there’s another category of demand that I don’t think we talk about enough. It’s not what happens during the school day. It’s what teaching forces into whatever is left of the day.
Because whether districts want to admit it or not (and judging from the evidence, they do not) teachers still have bodies that require maintenance. You still need doctors and dentists and eye exams. Maybe physical therapy or lab work. And inconveniently, most of those people work during the exact same hours you do.
So we delay things. We cram them into holidays or summer. Or we decide they can wait. And you know what happens when we delay those things? Spoiler alert: they don’t magically improve on their own.
And the rest of life doesn’t stop either. Groceries. Laundry. The house. The car. Pets. Kids. Partners. Aging parents. Y’all, that’s basically been my life for the last two weeks—and I’m not even trying to fit all of that around a 55- to 60-hour teaching work week anymore.
And then there are three things that are very easy to steal time from: nutrition, exercise, and sleep. It takes time to shop for and prepare nutritious food. It takes time to exercise. And when you’re already leaving early, getting home tired, and staring at everything that has to happen before tomorrow, those things become awfully easy to sacrifice.
And sleep? Well, there are only 24 hours. If the work has to get done, and life has to get done, and tomorrow morning is coming whether you’re ready or not, sometimes the only place left to borrow an hour is from sleep. And tomorrow you get up and do it again.
None of these things are particularly terrible by themselves. One long day on your feet. One rushed lunch. One missed workout. One late night. One postponed dentist appointment. One terrible class period. You survive all of those.
It’s the accumulation.
The mental demands. The emotional demands. The physical demands. And all of the things your body and your life require that have to be squeezed into whatever space remains.
Teachers get remarkably good at adapting to all of this. So good, in fact, that eventually it can stop looking like the Very Big Deal it is. It just looks like …Wednesday.
And there’s a word we often use admiringly for people who can keep functioning under difficult circumstances: resilient. And that’s a trap, too. Because once someone is talking admiringly about you, you hate to let them down by NOT living up to it. Right?
Remember: we can’t run at 110%, our very best, all the time. Because if we do, eventually it isn’t an extraordinary effort anymore. It’s the New Normal. And do you really want 110% to become your baseline?
That’s the question I want you to sit with this week. Next week, we’re going to take the next step. We’re going to ask: What does that accumulation cost?
Networking Works (11:27)
I want to introduce a new occasional segment here on Teachers in Transition called Networking Works: How connections actually work in the wild. Because we know the ROI on Networking is WAY higher than just applying blindly to jobs all over the place. And I want to highlight it by making it its own segment,
Because we talk about networking a lot when we're looking for a new job, but I think sometimes we have the wrong idea about what networking is supposed to accomplish.
A lot of times when we think about networking, we think:
Who do I know who can help me get a job?
And if nobody immediately comes to mind, we decide we don't have a network.
But that's not really how networks work. Let's say we have Person A. Person A is trying to transition into a completely new field.
Person A knows Person B.
Person B doesn't work in that field. Person B doesn't have a job for Person A. Person B can't get Person A an interview.
But Person B says: “You know who you should talk to? Person C.” So Person A calls Person C.
Maybe Person C works in that field and can answer some questions. Maybe Person C can tell Person A what the work is actually like, what employers are looking for, or what skills Person A should be emphasizing.
And maybe that's where it ends. That's still successful networking. Something might come up later.
BUT Person C might also say: “You know, there are a couple of people I think you should meet.”
And suddenly Person A is being introduced to Persons D, E, and F.
None of this started because Person A knew someone who could hand them a job. It started because Person A knew one person who knew another person. And that, my friends, is networking.
Your network isn't just the people you know.
It's the connections those people can help you make, and eventually, the connections those people can help you make.
So when you're thinking about your network, don't ask only:
“Who do I know who can get me a job?” That's an awfully small question.
Try asking: “Who do I know who might know someone I should talk to?”
You may be a lot closer to the right person than you think.
And that's how Networking Works: These will pop up from time to time and we’ll add in some real world examples as they pop up.
Career Transition And Job Search – Negative Space (14:04)
But now it’s time to moveinto our career transition and job search segment. Let’s revisit that age-old question:
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
We start asking kids that question when they’re tiny. And notice the word we use: be.
Not: What kind of problems do you want to solve? What kind of environment do you want to work in? What are you really good at? What do you want your days to look like?
Nope.
What do you want to BE?
And we’re expected to answer with a job title. Teacher. Doctor. Firefighter. Astronaut. For a fair amount of time in middle school, I wanted to be a veterinarian. I love animals. Being a veterinarian sounded wonderful to Middle School Vanessa.
And then one day we went to our vet. When we got there, the veterinarian was shoulder-deep in a horse.
Nope.
Nopity, nope, nope. Nope!
And just like that, I had acquired some extremely useful career information. I hadn’t discovered that I didn’t like animals anymore. I hadn’t even necessarily discovered that there was nothing about veterinary medicine that interested me.
I had discovered something I did not want my working life to include: dealing with the insides of animals like that.
And that’s Career Clarity, too.
We’ve talked before about doing a personal inventory when you’re trying to figure out what comes after teaching. Usually when we think about an inventory, though, we concentrate on what we want.
What am I good at? What do I enjoy? What matters to me?
Those are important questions. They’re useful. But they’re incomplete.
If I’m being candid, no one ever sat me down and asked those questions when I was in high school, which may have been how I graduated with a degree as a concert pianist.
I mean, sure. It’s a great conversation starter. I’m great at parties. And I still play piano almost every day, but it might have been nice if someone had walked me through this as a teen. But I digress.
Today I want you to look at the negative space. That’s an art term When you’re drawing an object, you don’t only look at the object itself. You can also look at the shapes created by the empty space around it. Sometimes looking at what’s not there helps you see the shape of what is there more clearly.
There’s that old story about a sculptor who was asked how he created such beautiful work. Supposedly, he said it was easy: he just chipped away everything that wasn’t part of the sculpture. Let’s do the same thing with career transition
Sometimes “I never want to do that again” gives you just as much useful information as “I love doing this.”
So let’s build a personal inventory around five areas.
First: Environment
Environment is exactly what it sounds like: Where and under what conditions do you do your best work?
Some people need quiet and privacy to concentrate. Other people need energy and activity around them. Some people love working from home. Other people discover very quickly that they need to leave the house and interact with actual human beings.
I’m quite happy working from home. I don’t mind the solitude. I really like the pet policy!! I need a window - all those schools that I taught at (15 of them!) and no windows. When I started working from home, I realized how much I enjoyed seeing the day and the weather go by.
And Awkwardly for someone who lives in Texas and hides from the sun five months a year, I do my best outside.
And this is where we start looking at the negative space, too.
Maybe you don’t know exactly what your ideal workplace looks like. But perhaps after years in a classroom, you know that you never again want to work somewhere you can be interrupted every 45 seconds.
That’s useful information. So for Environment, take a moment and ask yourself:
What conditions help me do my best work?
And:
What environmental conditions do I already know I don’t want in my next job?
Second: Work Style
Environment is about the conditions around you. Work style is about how you actually like to get things done.
Maybe you love having a big project that you can sink your teeth into for several hours. Maybe you’d rather have lots of smaller things happening. Maybe you love collaboration. Maybe you need significant stretches of independent work. I needed the independent work.
And here’s an important piece of info on the negative space aspect of this for teachers:
You may be extremely good at juggling fifteen things simultaneously because teaching trained you to be extremely good at that.
It does not mean you want to spend the rest of your working life doing it.
There’s a difference between something you’re capable of doing and something you want your next career to require you to do.
So ask yourself:
When I’m doing my best work, how am I working?
And:
What am I good at doing that I just don’t want to do anymore?
Third: The Work Itself
Now we get to the actual activities.
This is where I want you to resist answers like, “I like teaching.”
Break teaching apart. Teaching is such a complex thing – I need you to dropped thT Death Star and can see the 10,000 Legos of which itwas comprised
Maybe what you actually love is presenting. Or writing. Or designing. Or explaining. Maybe you love coaching, organizing, researching, troubleshooting, building systems, analyzing information, or helping somebody solve a problem.
Those activities exist in a lot of places that are not classrooms.
And again, look at the negative space in that panorama.
There are probably activities that are part of your current job that you’re perfectly capable of doing (and perhaps even very good at) but would be delighted never to do again.
So ask yourself:
Which activities make me feel engaged enough that I can lose track of time?
And:
Which parts of my current work would I happily never do again?
I will very happily never step foot in a school cafeteria ever again. I promise.
Fourth: People and Purpose
This is about who you want your work to involve and what you need that work to mean.
Maybe you love working directly with people. Maybe you’d rather support people behind the scenes. Maybe you enjoyed working with children but have discovered that you really enjoy working with adults. Maybe you want a close-knit team, or maybe you’re perfectly happy working fairly independently.
And then there’s purpose.
Teachers are often accustomed to having work that carries an enormous sense of mission. That can make the idea of leaving education complicated.
So I want to give you permission to consider something:
It is okay to have a perfectly nice job that you do well, that pays you appropriately, and that allows you to have a life you care about when you are not working.
Your job does not necessarily have to be your calling.
Or - as you ca you can still do work with great purpose. I believe so deeply in what I do. It isn’t just that I help teachers find higher paying/more fulfilling jobs outside of education. I help build agency so that these same amazing people have the confidence and ability to see themselves as incredibly talented and skilled professionals.
So your turn! Ask yourself:
Who do I enjoy helping, working with, or solving problems for?
And:
How much of my identity and sense of purpose do I actually want my next job to carry?
And finally, we get practical with the Fifth one: Life and Logistics
Because your career has to fit inside your actual life. Not the other way around.
Salary matters. Benefits matter. Hours matter. Commute matters. Travel matters. Flexibility matters. Physical demands matter. Your evenings and weekends matter.
And those things aren’t shallow. They aren’t afterthoughts. They are part of the inventory.
A job can sound fascinating and use every one of your favorite skills—and still be completely wrong for your life.
So ask yourself:
What does my job need to provide for the life I actually have?
And perhaps the most important negative-space question of all:
What am I no longer willing to sacrifice for work?
If I’d done this exercise when I was 17, I don’t know that it would have told me exactly what career I should choose.
But it might have told me a few things about myself that would have been useful before I got a degree as a concert pianist.
Because notice what this inventory has not given us:
A job title.
It wasn’t supposed to.
It gave us the specifications.
If you are going to add something so enormous that it takes up over a third of your life, you should check those specs and measurements to make sure it fits
Now you can look at a job posting and ask:
Does this give me more of the things I want?
Does it require a lot of the things I don’t want?
What am I willing to compromise on?
And what has become non-negotiable
So, yeah, we need to retire that old question:
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Maybe the better questions are:
How do I want to live? And How do I want to work.
And
How does that work support the life I want to live.
And don’t forget to examine the negative space:
What do I know I don’t want anymore?
Because sometimes figuring out what’s next begins with being able to say:
Nope. Nope, nope, nope. I don’t want any part of that. Not anymore.
CTA (25:15)
Before we wrap up, if today’s conversation about personal inventory got you thinking a little differently about what might come next, I want you to stay tuned. I have a free opportunity for you!
I’m putting together a workshop for October focused on career clarity.
And we’re going to start where I think career clarity actually begins: Not with job titles. With you.
Learning more about yourself. What you want. What you don’t want. What matters to you now, and maybe what doesn’t matter as much as it used to.
Because before you can figure out where you want to go next, it helps to understand what you actually want next to look like.
I’ll have more information about the workshop soon, so make sure you’re following Teachers in Transition and that you’re on my email list so you don’t miss it. You can sign up for the email list at Teachersintransition.com
But if you’re already past that point - if you know you’re ready to leave education and you’re ready to start figuring out what comes next - you don’t have to wait until October.
You can sign up for a discovery call with me TODAY! The link is in the show notes, and we can talk about where you are, where you want to go, and whether working together makes sense for you.
And until next time, remember: it’s not starting over.
You’re taking everything you’ve learned, everything you’ve built, and everything you now know about yourself…and deciding where you want to take it next.
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That’s the podcast for today! If you liked this podcast, tell a friend, and don’t forget to rate and review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Tune in weekly to Teachers in Transition where we discuss Job Search strategies as well as stress management techniques. And I want to hear from you! Please reach out and leave me a message at Vanessa@Teachersintransition.com You can also leave a voicemail or text at 512-640-9099.
I’ll see you here again next week and remember – YOU are amazing!
