Why Leaving Teaching Makes Career Change Feel So Hard

Why do capable teachers often feel anxious about leaving the classroom?
 It may have less to do with confidence and more to do with cognitive overload.

In this episode of Teachers in Transition, Vanessa explores the connection between confidence, anxiety, and cognitive overload, and why teachers often carry an impossible amount of mental tracking in their daily work.

You’ll also learn a simple weekly framework that can reduce anxiety, build trust with your future self, and make your week run more smoothly.

In the career transition segment, Vanessa shares three practical ways teachers can begin exploring careers outside education today — without needing to have their entire career plan figured out first. 

Key takeaway:
Career transitions become manageable when you stop trying to solve everything at once and start running small, intentional experiments.

In This Episode

Confidence vs. Anxiety

• Why confidence often depends on trusting past-you
• How cognitive overload impacts teachers
• Why capable professionals can start doubting themselves

Teacher Hack: Create a Weekly Framework

• How simple routines reduce anxiety and decision fatigue
• Why keeping small agreements with yourself builds confidence
• Examples of weekly systems that make life easier

Career Transition & Job Search

• Why trying to solve your entire career keeps people stuck
• How to run small career experiments instead
• Practical ways teachers can start exploring new careers today

Career Exploration Tools Mentioned

O*NET Online: A career research database from the U.S. Department of Labor that breaks down occupations by skills, tasks, and work activities.

Explore careers here:
https://www.onetonline.org

Teachers often find this tool especially useful because it reveals the transferable skills that connect teaching to many other professions.

Thinking About Leaving Teaching?

If you're a teacher experiencing burnout or wondering what comes next, Vanessa offers free Discovery Sessions to help you explore your options and get your bearings.

📧 Email: Vanessa@TeachersinTransition.com
 📱 Text or voicemail: 512-640-9099
 📅 Schedule a conversation: https://teachersintransition.com/calendar

 Support the Podcast  😊 

Teachers in Transition is an independently produced podcast created to support educators navigating burnout and career change.

If this podcast has helped you feel less alone or given you clarity about your next step, you now have the option to support the show directly.

Support starts at $3 per month and helps cover production costs so this resource can remain available to teachers who need it.

Support the podcast here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/277608/support

Keywords 

teacher burnout, leaving teaching, career change for teachers, teacher career transition, careers outside education, teacher transferable skills, teacher job search, career exploration for teachers

The transcript to this podcast is found on the episode’s homepage at Buzzsprout 

Transcript

Hi! Welcome back to Teachers in Transition!   I’m Vanessa.  I worked as a middle school teacher in the performing arts for 25 years before I left education and worked with a Fortune 500 company in the staffing industry helping find people to fill positions for other companies and also helping those same people stay in those positions successfully.  So, I know what it’s like on BOTH sides of the hiring table!  Now, I take that knowledge and I work with teachers considering leaving teaching. Today, We are going to talk about the relationship between confidence and anxiety, a hack to help make your week smoother and reduce anxiety, and in our career transition and job search segment, we’ll talk about exactly how to explore careers outside of education..

I want to start by talking about something that most of us feel but don’t always stop to examine very closely: the relationship between confidence and anxiety.

We tend to think of those two things as opposites. If you’re confident, you’re calm and capable. If you’re anxious, you’re uncertain and worried. But lately I’ve been wondering if the relationship is a little more complicated than that.

I’ve started to think that confidence and anxiety have a lot to do with how much we trust a past version of ourselves.

When you feel confident stepping into something - whether it’s a presentation, a meeting, a rehearsal, or even just the start of a busy day - part of that confidence comes from believing that the version of you who came before today handled things well enough that you can move forward without constantly checking over your shoulder.

You trust that past-you prepared. Past-you filled the tank. Past-you packed what you needed.

And speaking of filling the tank, I realized something recently that made me laugh a little. Did you know you don’t actually have to wait until your gas tank is empty to fill it up? You can just decide that Friday afternoon or Sunday evening is “fill the tank time.” You don’t have to let the warning light dictate the moment.

That’s a system. Systems create trust between past-you and future-you.

But when that trust breaks down, anxiety starts creeping in. Your brain starts wondering if something got missed. If a detail slipped through the cracks. If there was something you should have done that you forgot.

And once that doubt gets going, your brain starts trying to check everything. Over and over again. What’s interesting is that this doesn’t always happen because we’re careless or disorganized. Sometimes it happens because we are operating under an enormous amount of cognitive load.

In other words, there’s simply too much to track.  It reminds me of an old elephant joke: 
 Q: Why does an elephant have such a great memory?  
 A:  What does an elephant have to remember?  Where he left his keys?  All the birthdays’ of his family?  All the deadlines for the project? 

If you’ve ever worked in education, you know exactly what that feels like. Teachers are expected to remember an incredible number of moving pieces at once. Lesson plans, grading, emails from parents, administrative requests, student needs, schedules, meetings, Special Education deadlines, and the constant stream of unexpected situations that appear throughout the day.

It’s not just a lot of work. It’s a lot of mental tracking.  And much of it lives in the brain because so many things change so quickly on the fly

When you live in that environment long enough, your brain starts to feel like it can’t rely on itself anymore. Not because you’re incapable, but because the system is overwhelming.

So that leads me to my hack for this week,  The teacher hack is something designed to save to time, money or stress.  In this case, it will save s LOT of stress and a chunk of time.
 
 Create a Weekly Framework Your Future Self Can Trust

One of the simplest ways to reduce anxiety is to make small agreements with your future self—and then keep them.

I mentioned earlier that confidence often comes from trusting that a past version of you handled something already. That’s where small systems can make a huge difference.

For example, I realized recently that you don’t actually have to wait until your gas tank is empty before you fill it up. You can just decide that every Friday on the way home from work, you stop for gas.

Then it’s done.

You don’t have to wonder about it. You don’t have to think about it on Tuesday when the gauge drops below half. You don’t have to panic on the highway when construction closes the exit and suddenly you’re worried about how far the next gas station is.

Friday gas stop. Problem solved.

That’s the power of a weekly framework.

Instead of reacting to everything as it pops up, you assign certain tasks to predictable moments in the week. Once the system exists, your brain can relax because it knows the task will be handled.

And this can work for all kinds of things. The exact framework doesn’t matter as much as the consistency because every time you keep one of those agreements with yourself, you build a little more trust between past-you and future-you keeping the anxiety off of Present-You’s plate.

And over time, that trust is what creates confidence. Not perfection. Just a system that works well enough that you don’t have to carry everything in your head all the time.

If you want a few extra examples to choose from, here are some Additional Weekly Framework Ideas 

Sunday – Navigation Night

• review calendar
• plan the week
• prep clothes / meals
• quick life admin
   
   

Monday – Momentum Block

• tackle one meaningful task early
• set tone for week
   
   

Tuesday – Career Exploration

• networking message
• job research
• skill building
   
   

Thursday – Skill Growth

• course module
• article reading
• professional development in the direction of your dreams 
   
   

Friday – Reset

• clear inbox
• gas tank fill
• wrap loose ends

The goal isn’t to control everything.

The goal is to build just enough structure that future-you knows you’ve got their back.

And moving on to our Career Transition and Job Search segment, I want to focus on something practical you can actually do if you’re starting to think about leaving teaching but you’re not sure what comes next: career experimentation and exploration.

One of the biggest reasons people get stuck when they begin exploring a career transition is that they feel like they need to figure out the entire plan before they take the first step. They start asking questions like: What job should I pursue? What industry should I enter? Do I need another degree? Will anyone hire me? And those are such large questions that they can stop people in their tracks before they even get started.

So instead of trying to solve your entire career in one sitting, I recommend running small career experiments. The goal at this stage isn’t to make a permanent decision. The goal is to gather information. When you treat the process as exploration rather than a life-defining choice, it becomes much easier to move forward.

One simple experiment is job description exploration. Spend a little time browsing job postings for roles that sound even slightly interesting to you. Don’t worry yet about whether you meet every qualification. Instead, read the descriptions carefully and look for patterns. Ask yourself two questions as you read. First, what parts of this job already sound familiar to me? Teachers often discover that many of the responsibilities listed in corporate roles mirror things they have already done—project coordination, training and development, event planning, documentation, communication with stakeholders, and managing complex schedules. Second, pay attention to which skills show up repeatedly across different job postings. When certain skills appear again and again, that’s a clue about what employers in that field value.

Another very useful research tool is a website called O*NET Online, which is available at onetonline.org. O*NET is a comprehensive career database maintained by the U.S. Department of Labor. It contains detailed profiles of hundreds of occupations and breaks them down into the skills, knowledge areas, tasks, and work activities associated with each job. If you type a job title into the search bar—something like “training specialist,” “project coordinator,” or “instructional designer”—O*NET will show you what people in that role actually do, what skills they use most often, and what kinds of education or experience employers typically expect.

What makes O*NET particularly helpful for teachers is that it allows you to see the underlying skills that connect different professions. When teachers look at these profiles, they often realize that many of the competencies listed—communication, planning, problem-solving, training others, coordinating activities—are things they have been doing every day in the classroom. The job title might be different, but the skill set often overlaps far more than people expect.

A second experiment you can run is translation practice. Take a task you perform regularly as a teacher and practice describing it.  Describe it in language that someone outside of education would understand. For example, instead of saying you created lesson plans, you might describe that work as designing structured learning experiences aligned with specific objectives. Instead of saying you ran a classroom, you might describe managing a dynamic group environment while maintaining engagement and performance across diverse participants. You are not changing what you did; you are simply translating your experience into language that other industries recognize.

The third experiment is to have one professional conversation. Reach out to someone who works in a role that interests you and ask if they would be willing to spend fifteen minutes answering a few questions about their work. This is not a job request. It’s simply an informational conversation or information interview. Ask them what their typical day looks like, what skills are most important in their role, and what advice they would give someone who is curious about entering that field. Most people are surprisingly open to these kinds of conversations, and they can provide insights you won’t find in job descriptions alone.

Each of these small experiments accomplishes something important. They move you from speculation to information. Instead of sitting in your head wondering what might be possible, you begin collecting real data about the world of work outside the classroom.

And when that starts happening, the transition stops feeling like an impossible leap and starts feeling more like a path you can actually navigate.

I want to add one more practical thought to the career exploration conversation we were just having.

One of the biggest reasons career transitions feel so overwhelming—especially for teachers—is because we try to hold the entire process in our heads all at once.

We start thinking about resumes, job titles, certifications, networking, LinkedIn, applications, interviews… and suddenly it feels like we’re trying to solve our entire future in one sitting. That’s a massive cognitive load.

And when the brain is carrying too much information at once, it tends to do one of two things. It either spins endlessly trying to analyze every possibility, or it freezes completely because the problem feels too big to start.

That’s why one of the most helpful things you can do early in the transition process is to externalize the exploration instead of trying to track everything mentally.

Create a simple place where you collect information.

It could be a notebook. It could be a Google Doc. It could be a spreadsheet. It could even be the notes app on your phone. The format doesn’t matter. The goal is simply to move the information out of your head and onto something visible. *I* Love a good spreadsheet – not everybody does.  Remember what works best for you IS what’s best for you!

When you see a job that looks interesting, drop the link into that document.

When you hear about a job title you’ve never encountered before - project coordinator, learning and development specialist, instructional designer - write it down. When you notice a skill that appears repeatedly in job descriptions, add that to your list too.  You can also drop these things into AI and let it collate the similarities for you saving oodles of time!
 
 (Oodles IS an official time measurement, by the way)

The goal is for you to build a small personal database of information about the world of work outside education, and once that information exists somewhere external, your brain can relax a little bit because it no longer has to remember everything on top of everything else.

You’re not trying to solve the entire transition. You’re just collecting little clues. You might even organize your exploration document into a few simple sections.

One section could be job titles that sound interesting.

Another section could be skills that appear frequently in job descriptions.

Another could be companies or industries that seem appealing.

And another could be people you might want to talk to if you decide to schedule informational conversations or interviews.

When teachers do this for a few weeks, something really interesting starts to happen.

Patterns begin to appear.

Certain job titles show up again and again. Certain skills appear across multiple industries. Certain kinds of work start to feel more interesting than others, and that’s when exploration starts turning into direction. You start realizing that the leap from teaching into another career may not be as mysterious as it first seemed.

Because you’re no longer staring at a blank map. You’re slowly filling in the terrain. And that shift—from trying to solve everything immediately to simply gathering information—is often what allows confidence to start replacing anxiety.

You don’t need the whole answer today. You just need to start collecting enough information that future-you can see the path a little more clearly.

Before we wrap up today, I want to speak directly to the teachers listening who might be sitting with that question.

If you’re starting to realize that the terrain you’re standing on isn’t sustainable anymore, it can feel very disorienting and overwhelming. When you’ve spent years in the classroom, teaching becomes a huge part of how you understand your identity and your purpose. So when the system stops working for you, it can feel like you’ve lost your compass.

Helping educators navigate that moment is exactly the work I do inside Teachers in Transition.

I work with teachers who know something needs to change but aren’t quite sure which direction to go next. Together we slow down long enough to get our bearings, look at the landscape of possibilities outside the classroom, and start charting a path that actually aligns with your skills, your life, and your long-term goals so that you can go in the direction of your dreams.

If you’d like help figuring out what your next step might be, you’re welcome to schedule a free Discovery Session with me. It’s simply a conversation where we look at where you are right now and explore what your options might be.

You can reach me in a few ways. You can email me at Vanessa@TeachersinTransition.com, text or leave a voicemail at 512-640-9099, or schedule a time directly at teachersintransition.com/calendar.

And before we close out today, I want to mention one more way you can be part of this work.

Teachers in Transition is an independently produced podcast. Every episode is researched, recorded, edited, and published by yours truly because I believe teachers deserve support while they’re navigating burnout and career change.

If this podcast has helped you feel a little less alone, or helped you think about your career in a new way, you now have the option to support the show directly.

Support is completely voluntary and starts at three dollars a month, which helps cover the production costs that keep the podcast running. You can find the support page at the link in the show notes or by visiting:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/277608/support

And whether you support the podcast financially, share the episode with another teacher, or simply keep listening while you figure out your next move, I’m grateful you’re here.

Because no one should have to navigate this journey alone.

👋 CONNECT WITH VANESSA

• 💌 Email: Vanessa@teachersintransition.com
• 📱 Call or Text: 512-640-9099
• 📅 Book a Free Discovery Call: teachersintransition.com/calendar
• 🔗 Bluesky: @beyondteaching.bsky.social
• 📸 Instagram & Threads: @teachers.in.transition
• 👍 Facebook: Teachers in Transition
• 🐦 X (Twitter): @EduExitStrategy

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!