Thinking of leaving education? These are the struggles I didn’t expect
I left my career in education last year to work full-time on my coaching business. I thought it would be plain-sailing but there were plenty of struggles that took me by surprise. A year in, and I’m still working through some of them.
1. What do I talk about now? Suddenly, I wasn’t that person with all the crazy stories about working in a challenging school. I gave up trying to explain to people that I wasn’t a teacher anymore when I went into pastoral…but when I left altogether I realised how much of myself I anchored around the job.
2. I had no idea how to create a work routine. Erm…I mean, how do people structure their day when there’s no school bell? It took me ages to get used to scheduling based on hours of the day, not lesson start and finish times. And when January hit, I realised I was no longer basing my years on the academic calendar. What.
3. The guilt I feel for being tired. This one I really underestimated. I thought I’d be able to go head-long into building my business, but I crashed pretty quickly. I’d also feel guilty that I hadn’t ‘earned’ the right to be tired. I realised I had this residual exhaustion from over a decade in schools, and I’m still learning that I don’t need to feel guilty for going at a slower pace. My working days and weeks are shorter. But that’s okay. (Really.)
4. My body’s hyper-vigilance for overwhelm. If my calendar starts to fill up, my body screams at me to disappear to a remote place for a week. I reckon this is a result of the lesson it learnt that busyness = stress. So even if my calendar is full of lovely stuff, I still feel anxiety around it.
5. The imposter syndrome I had whilst teaching has returned. Yay. When I was teaching, I used to be plagued by the thought that one day someone senior would see me teach and immediately march me off the premises. That feeling went when I moved into pastoral, but it’s reared it’s head again in my coaching. Except now I’m the one observing and assessing myself – and I’m often super critical.
6. Giving myself an hour’s lunch break. Oh, and a 30-minute afternoon break. I don’t need to say much more about that, do I? I mean. Come on.
7. Accepting that a piece of me lives in education. When I first starting coaching, I wanted to get as far away from education as possible. But it took me nearly a year to come full-circle and realise that I can’t deny how much my time as a teacher and in pastoral has shaped me.
If you’re a woman working in a tough school who’s wondering whether you can sustain it, why not book a virtual coffee to find out how I can support you.