Teacher Burnout: Why You Can't Operate at 110% Forever

Have you ever felt like teaching has become one long marathon...where everyone expects you to sprint?

In this episode of Teachers in Transition, Vanessa shares an unexpected lesson from a 3,000-mile solo road trip. She planned to write, record podcasts, and make progress on her business. Instead, she spent most of the trip managing recovery, sleep, hydration, and a very opinionated knee.

That experience led to a realization that many educators desperately need to hear:

You can't always be at your best. Otherwise, it wouldn't be your best—it would be your normal.

This episode explores why experienced teachers are sometimes unfairly labeled "bitter” and why learning to adapt is more sustainable than simply enduring.

Whether you're planning to remain in education or considering a career transition, this episode offers practical strategies for protecting your energy, building career capacity, and preparing for your future one step at a time.

In This Episode

• Why sprinting is a terrible strategy for a marathon
• The hidden cost of expecting teachers to operate at 110% every day
• Why experienced teachers aren't "bitter"—they've become efficient
• How schools unintentionally prevent veteran teachers from benefiting from experience
• The difference between activity and impact
• Why experience is supposed to pay dividends
• The importance of recovery as part of professional excellence
• The Teacher Hack: Budget Bumper Time
• Career Transition Strategy: Build capacity before you need it
• Why you shouldn't "buy new running shoes on marathon day"
• Practical ways to prepare for a career transition without overwhelming yourself
• How strategic upskilling can help you prepare for your next career before you need it

Resources Mentioned

• Teachers in Transition: https://teachersintransition.com

• Schedule a free Discovery Call:
https://teachersintransition.com/calendar

• Find Your Bearings (career direction program):
https://teachersintransition.com

• LinkedIn Learning:
https://www.linkedin.com/learning/

• Coursera:
https://www.coursera.org

• Udemy:
https://www.udemy.com

Have a question or an idea for a future episode?

Email Vanessa:
Vanessa@TeachersInTransition.com

If this episode encouraged you...

Please follow the podcast, leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, and share it with a teacher who needs the reminder that sustainable excellence isn't about sprinting every day.

Sometimes the bravest thing we can do isn't push harder.

Sometimes it's learning to pace ourselves wisely.

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• sharing the episode with a teacher friend
• leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
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Connect with Vanessa Jackson

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

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

Transcript

Hi! Welcome back to Teachers in Transition!

I've been home from a ten-day road trip for a few days now. The laundry is finally caught up, the car is unpacked, I've mostly remembered what day of the week it is, and I've had a little time to think about everything that happened. What's funny is that the biggest lesson I brought home wasn't from the conference I attended. It wasn't from a conversation with another teacher. It wasn't even from driving nearly three thousand miles by myself. The biggest lesson came from what didn't happen.

Before I left, I had this wonderful picture in my head of what those evenings in the hotel were going to look like. I packed my laptop. I packed my microphone. I had books to read. I thought I'd have time to do some research for the book, revise a couple of chapters, work on my business, maybe even get ahead on a few things. In my mind, this trip was going to be one of those magical combinations where I attended a great conference during the day and came home having made significant progress on my own business.

Reality had other plans.

Instead of spending my evenings revising chapters, I spent a surprising amount of time managing...me. 

Managing a knee that apparently had opinions about long road trips. Managing the desert heat. Managing hydration. Managing fuel stops. Managing sleep. Managing recovery. Managing the simple logistics of driving nearly three thousand miles by myself. 

Nothing dramatic happened. There wasn't some medical emergency, and I wasn't stranded on the side of the road. But every single day required just a little more from my body than I expected.

Because of that, the book wasn't getting revised. The outreach wasn't happening. I couldn't even get the podcast I'd planned to record...recorded—let alone edited. In fact, as I'm recording this episode, that one is still waiting. Every night I'd tell myself, "Tomorrow. Tomorrow will be the productive day." Then tomorrow would show up, and I'd realize I needed to take care of myself first.

What's funny is that if you had asked me halfway through the trip whether I was accomplishing anything, I probably would have said, "Not nearly enough." Looking back now, I think I was asking the wrong question. I was measuring success by everything that stayed on my to-do list instead of everything that actually got accomplished.

A few days after I got home, I was scrolling through TikTok when I came across a therapist who said something that absolutely stopped me in my tracks. She said, "You can't always be at your best. Otherwise, it wouldn't be your best. It would just be your normal." I actually replayed the video because I realized she had just challenged something I don't think I'd ever questioned before.

Somewhere along the way, many of us—especially those of us in education—started believing that our best wasn't something we brought to special moments. It became the expectation. 

Our best every Monday. 
 Our best every Tuesday. 
 Our best for every lesson, every parent email, every committee meeting, every professional development day. 

And somewhere along the way, I think we stopped noticing how strange that expectation really is.

Let me ask you something. Have you ever worked at one of those schools where there seemed to be this unspoken competition to see whose car was the last one left in the parking lot? No one ever announced the contest, and no one handed out trophies. But somehow, the teacher whose classroom lights were still on at 6:30 always seemed just a little more dedicated than the teacher who packed up and left at 4:15. We never admitted we were keeping score, but I think we all knew the scoreboard was there.

And I wonder if we've been keeping score all wrong. What if excellence doesn't mean operating at one hundred and ten percent every single day? What if the real goal isn't learning how to endure more, but learning how to pace ourselves well enough that we can keep going?

Because here's the thing I've come to believe.

We've built a profession that quietly rewards sprinting. We celebrate the teacher who stays the latest, answers one more email, volunteers for one more committee, and somehow always finds a way to give just a little bit more. Then, years later, we look at experienced teachers who are exhausted and wonder what happened to them.

Maybe the better question isn't, "Why can't they keep sprinting?"

Maybe the better question is, "Why did we ever expect them to sprint through a marathon?"

That's the journey we’re on today. 

That thought brought back a scene from one of my favorite old movies, Heartbreak Ridge. Clint Eastwood plays an aging Marine gunnery sergeant who's trying to whip an undisciplined recon platoon into shape, and there's a scene where he takes them out for a run.  All these young Marines decide they're going to show up the old guy. They take off sprinting down the road, convinced they're leaving him behind.

Meanwhile, Clint Eastwood just keeps jogging.
 He doesn't speed up.
 He doesn't compete.
 He doesn't even seem particularly concerned.

One by one, those young Marines start running out of gas. They slow down. and they are bent over trying to catch their breath. And eventually, this older gunnery sergeant just jogs right past them at exactly the same steady pace he'd been running all along.

I used to think that skill personified the expression, "Old age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill." I thought it was just about experience beating youth.

Now I think it was about something else. The young Marines thought the goal was to run the fastest. The gunnery sergeant knew the goal wasn't speed. The goal was endurance and stamina. Those are two completely different strategies, and I wonder how often we confuse them in our own lives.

We've become so accustomed to celebrating the sprint that we forget to ask whether anyone can sustain it. We admire the person who says yes to everything. We applaud the person who works late every night. We celebrate the person who's always willing to do just one more thing, and we call it dedication.

And if you're a teacher, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Somewhere along that way, many schools began celebrating the teachers who always gave 110 percent. The teacher who stayed the latest. The teacher who never says no. The teacher who somehow found time for an extra committee, a club, a student. We didn't just admire that person—we quietly turned them into the standard everyone else was supposed to meet.

But sprinting is a terrible strategy for a marathon.

In fact, if you've ever watched experienced marathon runners, something almost seems wrong at the beginning of the race. They aren't the fastest people off the starting line. Sometimes they're almost boring. They're paying attention to their breathing, their cadence, and their effort. They're constantly asking themselves a different question than the sprinter.

The sprinter asks, "How fast can I go?"
 The marathon runner asks, "How fast can I go and still be running twenty miles from now?"

That's a completely different mindset, and maybe that's the question we ought to be asking ourselves more often.  Not, "How much more can I squeeze into today?"  But, "What pace allows me to do meaningful work today...and still have something left for tomorrow?"

Because I don't think sustainable excellence comes from learning to push harder.

I think sustainable excellence comes from learning to pace ourselves wisely, and I think this is where education gets itself into trouble.

Before we go any farther, let me say something important. I don't want to take this opportunity to blame all the administrators. I don't actually think that administrators are the villains here. Many of them are trapped in exactly the same culture teachers are. They inherited many of these expectations just like we did. If there's a villain in this story, it's the expectation itself: the idea that someone with twenty-five years of experience should somehow perform exactly the way they did twenty-five years earlier.

Doesn't it always seem like that in teaching?

Just about the time you hit your stride...somebody changes the race.

You've finally figured out your classroom management. You know the curriculum inside and out. You can anticipate where students are going to struggle before they even get there. You finally feel like you've found your rhythm.

Surprise!  Congratulations!

You're teaching a new grade level.
 Here's a new curriculum.
 Here are new state standards.
 We've changed the evaluation system.
 We'd like everyone to integrate a new technology platform.
 Oh...and don't forget the dance routine during morning announcements because apparently that's where we are this year.

It's like every time your professional aerobic system finally catches up and you find your pace, somebody says, "Great! Now we're going uphill...in the snow...barefoot...OVER LEGOS!"

We laugh because we've lived it.  And because crying invites questions we aren't prepared to answer. 

And here's the thing. Change isn't the problem. Education has to evolve. Society changes. Students change. Technology changes. Good teachers adapt. That's part of the profession.

The challenge is that experienced teachers rarely get to enjoy the efficiencies of their experience that they should have earned by now. Experience is supposed to pay dividends. Instead, every time experience begins making them more efficient...the system finds another way to spend the energy they just saved.

I remember being a young teacher and making myself a promise. I was never going to become one of those old, grumpy, bitter veteran teachers. You know the ones I'm talking about. They always seemed frustrated about something, and I remember thinking, When I've been teaching that long, I'm going to do better than that.

Then something funny happened.  I became that veteran teacher.

Somewhere around the twenty-year mark, I found myself getting frustrated by things that never used to bother me. Those of you who've listened to the podcast for a while already know how I feel about scripted lesson plans. So, I won't climb back up on that soapbox today...okay, maybe just one foot.

The problem wasn't really the scripted lesson plans. The problem was that they no longer served a purpose. They weren't my rehearsal plans. Nobody ever opened the folder to see if I'd done them. Parents certainly weren't sitting around the dinner table saying, "Honey, I wonder what Mrs. Jackson's scripted rehearsal looks like for third-period orchestra tomorrow."

Spoiler alert: They did not.

And that's when it hit me: Maybe I hadn't become bitter. Maybe I had become efficient.

I wasn't trying to get out of doing good work. I was trying to stop wasting energy on work that no longer made me better at my job. I wanted to conserve my effort for the places where my students actually needed me. That's not laziness. It's just not.

I think that's one of the greatest gifts experience gives us. Experienced teachers become remarkably good at separating activity from impact.

A first-year teacher sees twenty things that all seem equally urgent.
 A veteran teacher knows that maybe three of them actually move the needle.

That's judgment and wisdom NOT CYNICISM.

That's twenty-five years of learning where your effort actually changes outcomes.

And let's just acknowledge the obvious for a second. I hate to be the one to break this to everyone...but I'm not twenty-five anymore. I especially hate being the one to break that news to myself. I don't have the same energy at fifty that I had at twenty-five, and honestly, I shouldn't have to pretend that I do.  Also - WHAT is up with this KNEE??!!??

The goal of twenty-five years of experience isn't to become a fifty-year-old who can still work like a twenty-five-year-old.

The goal is to become a fifty-year-old who knows how to use twenty-five years of experience wisely.

Maybe that's why so many veteran teachers sound frustrated sometimes.  Not because they've stopped caring.  Not because they've lost their passion.  But because they can finally see the difference between activity and impact...and they're tired of being asked to spend precious energy on things that don't make students more successful.

Again, That's not bitterness.  That's experience.

The tragedy is that too many teachers mistake that wisdom for failure, when in reality it's one of the most valuable professional skills they've ever developed.

It’s a marathon and it ought to be OK to jog the journey.
 And now it's time for our Teacher Hack segment.

If you're new to the podcast, welcome! Every week I try to leave you with one practical idea that saves you in one of the three currencies we all spend every day: time, money, or stress. If I can help you save a little of one of those, you'll have more capacity for the things that matter most—whether that's your family, your health, your classroom, or preparing for a career transition.

Today's Teacher Hack is this:

Budget bumper time.

Now, I chose that phrase very intentionally. I didn't call it buffer time. I called it bumper time.

Think about the bumper on your car. Its entire job is to absorb and transfer energy so that a small impact doesn't become a much bigger problem. It doesn't prevent every collision, but it helps keep the collision from causing more damage than it has to.

I think we need bumper time in our schedules for exactly the same reason.

When you finish a grading period...
 When you get home from a conference...
 When summer starts...
 When you come back from vacation...
 When you finish the school play, the concert, the testing season, or parent conferences...

Don't schedule yourself to hit the ground running the very next morning: Budget bumper time.

Give yourself a day—or even half a day—where the expectation isn't peak productivity.

It's transition.
 Do the laundry.
 Unpack the suitcase.
 Get groceries.
 Take a nap if your body is asking for one.
 Sit on the porch.
 Read a chapter of a book.
 Go for a walk.
 Let your body and your brain absorb the impact of one season before launching into the next one.

Because recovery isn't the reward for good work. Recovery is part of good work.

And if you don't intentionally build bumper time into your schedule, life has a funny way of creating it for you anyway. Usually it shows up as illness, exhaustion, resentment, or simply having nothing left in the tank.

Turns out, if you don't schedule recovery...your body is perfectly willing to do it for you. And trust me, the Department of Consequences doesn't check your calendar before it comes a-knockin'.

And now it's time for our Career Transition and Job Search segment, where we try to give you practical advice to help you in your career transition and job search.

Today's advice is simple: Build capacity before you need it.

I think sometimes teachers imagine that their career transition starts the day they decide to leave. I don't think that's true.  In fact, I think if that's when you're starting, you're getting a late start.

I think your career transition begins at the start of every school year, when you begin collecting evidence of the amazing work you're doing. It begins when you keep a "ta-da!" list instead of focusing only on the next thing on your to-do list. It begins when you save that email from a grateful parent because it demonstrates your communication skills. It begins when you sketch out the projects you've led, document the processes you've improved, or spend a few minutes updating your LinkedIn profile.

None of those things means you're leaving. They simply mean you're paying attention. You're preserving evidence of the value you create every day.

And here's the beautiful part. All of those things can happen long before you ever make the decision to leave the classroom. By the time you're ready to explore something new, you won't be trying to remember five years' worth of accomplishments all at once. You'll already have them.

That's what I mean by building capacity before you need it.

You're preserving your capacity because you're doing the work in small, manageable pieces instead of trying to do everything in one overwhelming weekend.

But capacity building isn't just about documenting where you've been. It's also about preparing for where you're going.

Once you have a sense of the direction you'd like to head (and if you're not sure yet, that's exactly why I created my Find Your Bearings short program) you can begin preparing strategically instead of reactively.

Start looking at the kinds of jobs that interest you. What skills do they ask for? What software keeps showing up? Are there certifications that employers seem to value? Is there a technical skill you've never needed as a teacher but would be helpful in your next career?

Here's the encouraging part.

Most of those gaps don't require another degree.

Many of them can be closed with a few hours on Udemy, Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, YouTube, or another reputable learning platform. If you spread that learning over several months, it becomes part of your normal routine instead of one more crisis to solve.

That's capacity building.

You're preparing calmly and strategically instead of frantically discovering two weeks before an interview that every job you're excited about asks for a skill you've never had the chance to learn.

Think about everything we've talked about today. You wouldn't buy brand-new running shoes on marathon day. You break them in ahead of time.  

Career transitions work the same way.  You don't wait until you've decided to leave before you start building your network, documenting your accomplishments, exploring career paths, updating LinkedIn, translating your teaching experience into employer language, or filling small skill gaps.

You do those things gradually.  One small step at a time, and then one day, when the right opportunity comes along, you're not lacing up brand-new shoes while everyone else is already standing at the starting line.

You're ready.  That's what building capacity before you need it really means.

Before we wrap up, let me leave you with one question.

What are you running toward? Not what you're trying to escape.  Not what you're tired of.

What kind of work are you actually hoping to build?

If you know the answer to that question, fantastic! Start building capacity. Start preparing strategically. Start putting on those running shoes long before race day.

But if you don't know the answer yet...

Don't guess. Don't spend money on random certifications. Don't sign up for courses just because someone on the internet told you they were "in demand."

Figure out your direction first.

That's exactly why I offer free discovery calls. Sometimes all it takes is one conversation to help you stop running away from something and start running toward something that actually fits your strengths, your values, and the life you're trying to build.

If that sounds like the conversation you need, I'd love to help.

Head over to TeachersInTransition.com/calendar, schedule a call, and let's figure out what race you're really training for.

I see this podcast as a resource for teachers who are stressed out, burned out, overwhelmed and seeking something better.  I want to make sure this is valuable to you so if you have areas that you’d like me to cover on future epsidoes of the show, just let me know what you want.  Drop an email to Vanessa@TeachersinTransition.com and let me know.  

Until next time...Sprint the moment. Jog that journey.

👋 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!